Posted on 09/17/2003 3:31:33 PM PDT by Libloather
General Ashley Wilkes Enters The Race
September 17, 2003
I cued the Dr. Strangelove music as I began Wednesday's program discussing the 10th dwarf in the Democratic presidential primaries. I quoted Richard Goldstein's Village Voice piece talking about Democrats "searching for the candidate with the right kind of masculine presentation." He writes, "If Bill Clinton was a bottom-feeding Rhett Butler, then Wesley Clark is Ashley Wilkes..."
Folks, Ashley Wilkes was a wimp - and he was on the losing side of the Civil War! Women hate him because he depended on Scarlett O'Hara to do everything! Note also that liberal Democrats hate the military, and Dwight D. Eisenhower specifically, yet they're casting Wilkes as both. Steven Hess, one of Ike's former speechwriters who's now at the Brookings Institute, told E.D. Hill on Fox and Friends, "Dwight Eisenhower was a friend of mine, and Wesley Clark ain't no Dwight Eisenhower. And I don't mean to put down Wesley Clark, obviously a distinguished military person. The difference is that Kosovo wasn't no World War II."
Remember that Ike was a five-star general, and that scuttlebutt out today says that Wesley had to beg Bill Clinton just to get his fourth star. You can read details on all these stories below, and listen to audio of my analysis. Among the Schwarzenegger-like smear of General Ashley Wilkes is a reminder that he supplied the tanks and military equipment for the Branch Davidian invasion. The same liberals who freak out over John Ashcroft's choice of breakfast heralding a dictatorship, are silent on Clark's acquiescence to breaking the 120-year-old Posse Comitatus Act baring military actions against civilians. Note too that most of this dirt is coming from Democrats, such as John Edwards - the poor Breck Girl who saw his big re-announcement stomped by Clark's buzz.
Big Rumor - British General to Clark: "I Won't Start World War III For You."
David Horowitz's website, FrontPageMag.com, carries a fantastic piece on Wesley's involvement in Waco by Lowell Ponte. Quote: "Whether General Clark himself helped direct the assault on the Davidian church using the military force at Waco has not been documented, but it certainly came from his command and with his approval. Eighty-two men, women, children and babies - including two babies fire-aborted as their mothers' bodies writhed in the flames of that Clinton holocaust - died from the attack, using military equipment from Fort Hood and General Wesley Clark's command." Is that not an incredible description?
But the mainstream media won't challenge Clark on his record, such as the 100% false claim - as he now admits - that the White House pressured him to connect Iraq and 9/11. (See story) On Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics, Wesley spewed typical Democrat bilge about Iraq, saying, "It's clear right now, Judy, that it wasn't worth going in as it was billed to the American people. There was no imminent threat to the American people. There was no imminent threat." Tell us, General Wilkes, what were the 'imminent threats' in Kosovo and Waco?
Weren't those military adventures just a chance for you to help Bill Clinton, who held that fourth star you coveted, get some military credentials after his much publicized "loathe the military" comments? The interesting theory is that Clark is being set up to be accepted by the country as Hillary's VP - not just for 2008, but possibly for 2004. This is the media anal exam that happens when you have a new guy announcing for the presidency. It's as inescapable as it is puzzling. Frankly, this is a sign of how weak this Democrat field is that somebody with zip, zero, nada political experience can be hailed as a savior! That's how bad a shape they're in out there.
The buzz is, the Academy is considering giving Bill and Hillary Clinton ... The Julius and Ethel Rosenberg --- Lifetime Achievement Award. Lets face it - who is more deserving?
Thousands of innocent Serbian Christians were massacred in Kosovo by this Arkansan animal.
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The affair could have been a PR disaster, proof of how the allies in their frustration at their failure to land a knockout blow to the Milosevic military machine were sinking to terror bombing of helpless civilians. Prevarication, or pretending the train was a legitimate military target, would have made matters even worse.
Instead, we witnessed a rare and deliberate show of honesty. It was an "unfortunate accident. We are all very sorry for it," Nato's supreme commander, General Wesley Clark, said as the press was shown a full cockpit video of the incident. The pilot, it transpired, had fired not one bomb, but two; the second after he knew he had hit a train. Quite why that second attack happened is unclear. But we basically know what happened, and few more questions need to be asked. If allied planes hit the refugee convoy near Djakovica [Kosovo], we must brace for a far more harrowing mea culpa from Nato - and, conceivably, a sea change in public attitudes to the air war...
Nato, of course, propagates its... brand of wishful thinking. Early on, we were told of Kosovo Albanian leaders who had been murdered. It transpired they had not and Nato, admittedly, retracted the claim. On Sunday, its spokesmen were claiming to detect fissures in the Yugoslav army's high command over President Milosevic's policy in Kosovo. The next day, despite every sign that the war is solidifying support for Milosevic, the Secretary of State for Defence, George Robertson, was virtually predicting a coup.
But these are small errors, set against the giant shadow cast over everything the allies say by the miscalculation with which the war started. A few days, they said, just a handful of cruise missiles, before the dictator came to his senses.
"We always knew this would be a long haul," Nato now insists. If so, then everything it implied, if not said aloud, before 24 March was nonsense. But did not World War One begin with the blithe conviction the boys would be home for Christmas?
So far, Western public opinion doubts about the air war strategy have been submerged by the flood of [fabricated] horror stories of pillage, rape and murder committed by the Serbs. But these stories, too, could in turn be submerged by the horror of what apparently happened near the Kosovo town of Djakovica.
For the Serbs, the carnage was a propaganda coup [?]: a "crime against humanity" according to the Foreign Ministry in Belgrade - exactly the language used by Nato leaders to describe Mr Milosevic's tactics.
The attack strikes at the heart of the weakness of Nato's presentation of the war - not lies over daily events, but the fog of confusion and contradictions surrounding the war's ends. Suddenly Kosovo is acquiring the reek of Vietnam.
"We will win the war," say Blair, Clinton et al, day after successive day of bombing targets that never seem to be destroyed the first time around. Ah, but the bombing is working, they insist, only to order another 300 aircraft to finish the job - and risk more disasters similar to yesterday's. Defying, if not the truth, at least elementary common sense, they cling to the Rambouillet formula that Kosovo remains part of Yugoslavia even after the war...
(End quote)
War in The Balkans -
By Robert Fisk
Excerpts:
Blood is beginning to spatter Nato's campaign in Yugoslavia. Just under two weeks ago, it was the blood of 26 Serb civilians in the town of Aleksinac. Then on Monday, it was the blood of 27 Serb passengers - the latest figure for fatalities - on a railway train bombed by a Nato jet.
Yesterday, up to 60 Kosovo Albanian refugees were reported torn to pieces by Nato bombs in Kosovo. That phrase "collateral damage" is beginning to sound ever more obscene.
Needless to say, the Serb government is happy [???] to publicise these atrocities - just as Nato is ready and willing [and happy!?] to report every atrocity committed by Serb forces in Kosovo. But Nato's new ground rules are playing into Serbian hands.
For it is becoming clearer that somewhere - in Washington, perhaps, or Brussels or the Aviano air base in Italy - someone has decided that Serb civilians must suffer for their country's [fabricated] sins. Or that their lives can now be regarded as forfeit if they live near a barracks or an airfield or happen to be on a passenger train.
The Serb authorities - who denied the stories told by thousands of Albanian refugees of "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of Serb forces - were quite specific in their description of the slaughter of as many as 75 Albanian refugees, first near the village of Medjan, at 1.30pm, then at Bistrazin at 3pm. The Kosovo Albanians were travelling in cars and tractors, "escorted" by at least three Serb policemen. The policemen were also killed.
Did Nato believe these were Serbs driving down the roads of southern Kosovo? Or did they see military traffic and decide - as they did when they bombed a barracks 50 metres from a Belgrade hospital on Tuesday - that the risk of harming civilians was worth taking? That now seems to be Nato's policy in its bombardment of Yugoslavia.
Wesley Clark, the general who thought he could fight a war without ground troops, gave a deeply unsettling performance this week when he tried to explain the train massacre.
The pilot saw the train enter his bomb frame only at the last second, he said. But then - incredibly, knowing the train was there - he returned to fire two more missiles at the railway bridge.
(End quote)
[British] Prime Minister Tony Blair has insisted that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic bears full responsibility for any casualties in the Kosovo conflict.
He said nothing emerging from the Serbian propaganda machine could be taken at face value, but even if refugees had been accidentally killed by Nato's air campaign, responsibility rested with the Serb leadership.
Mr Blair was speaking at the end of an emergency meeting of EU leaders in Brussels which, he said, had produced unanimous agreement that military attacks must carry on until all Nato's five demands are met.
The Prime Minister said the EU member states - all but four of which are also Nato members - were determined to beat Milosevic. "We are determined to defeat his policy of ethnic cleansing and determined that it should be seen to be defeated - and Milosevic along with it."
News of the air raid which reportedly killed dozens of Kosovo-Albanian refugees came in as the EU leaders were meeting to reaffirm Western unity over the military strategy.
Mr Blair commented: "We cannot take at face value any claim made by the Serb authorities, and anything they do they use for propaganda purposes.
"We go to extraordinary lengths to limit any civilian damage or casualties at all. Secondly, I would say to you that the responsibility for anything that happens to people in this conflict rests with Milosevic. He is the person who has brought this Nato action upon himself. He is the person responsible for causing this conflict by the appalling and evil policy of ethnic cleansing."
The Prime Minister emphasised: "We take every single measure we can to try to avoid civilian casualties. Unfortunately in a situation like this sometimes it happens, though as I say I wouldn't believe or take at face value anything the Serb authorities say."
Mr Blair said all EU leaders were agreed there can be no compromise on Nato's five principles, including the total withdrawal from Kosovo of all Serb forces and the unconditional return to their homeland of the refugees, under the protection of an international security force led by Nato.
"We are united behind those principles and we shall see them through," said Mr Blair.
(End quote)
Opinions:
Alice Mahon, Labour MP for Halifax and chairman of the Committee for Peace in the Balkans
Yes, I certainly think it should. It is not just this 10 who have died. There have been over 300 civilian deaths, many of them women and children. These are not the targets that Nato is supposed to be after.
The world's first "humanitarian" war has turned into a huge humanitarian disaster. What is humanitarian about the bombing of civilians on passenger trains, or car workers trying to protect their jobs by sitting-in, or by dropping cluster bombs and munitions containing radioactive depleted uranium which will ensure that thousands of the country's children Serbs and Albanians alike will suffer from disease and malnutrition long after the war is over?
I don't think that Nato can call this a successful campaign when the Kosovans have lost their country and the Serb population carries terrified children and elderly people into cellars night after night.
It is clear that Nato is intent on bombing roads, water facilities, electricity stations and factories, and a massive destruction of infrastructure. It becomes clear that a European country is being bombed into the stone age in front of our eyes.
Our only hope rests on getting some sanity into international affairs, getting the UN and the Russians involved, getting the tragic refugees home, and to stop bombing an innocent population, many of whom were marching in their thousands against Milosevic and are now behind him.
Talking, negotiation, compromise will end this madness. Not bombing.
John Pilger, war correspondent and film-maker
George Robertson claims he and Tony Blair approve every target. So who approved the bombing of a civilian railway bridge? Who approved the bombing of the Zastava car factory when Nato knew there were 10,000 protesters inside? Who approved the bombing of the centre of Pristina in Kosovo and the entirely civilian town of Novi Sad and the mining town of Aleksinac?
The children of the woman lying beneath the rubble would like to know, Secretary of State. And the parents of the Kosovan babies who will be born deformed or with leukaemia, will want to know why 'our' pilots are using depleted uranium missiles when you claim to be bombing in order to save them.
These people are expendable. They are 'collateral damage' which is a craven term invented by the Americans to disguise the slaughter in Vietnam.
What Robertson and Blair and Cook are not telling the British public is that the same US military that 'degraded' two million Vietnamese, mostly people they, too, claimed to be protecting, are about to do something similar to Serbia and Kosovo unless civilised voices are heard loud and clear and that this is the shape of wars to come.
The attack on Serbia has nothing to do with humanitarian help and everything to do with Nato demonstrating its power by disciplining an uppity tyrant who didn't obey orders. Inexcusably, that truth has been the first casualty.
(End of quoting Opinion section of [British] Guardian).
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Amid Nato military supremo Wesley Clark's onslaught on the civilians of Serbia the question arose: did Clark hone his civilian-killing skills at Waco, where the FBI oversaw the largest single spasm of slaughter of civilians by law enforcement in US history, when nearly a hundred Branch Davidians died amid an assault by tanks, flame-throwers and snipers.
The tanks were from Fort Hood, where Wesley Clark was, in early 1993, commander of the Cavalry Division of the US Army's III Corps. In our last issue we cited a congressional report commissioned in the aftermath of Waco which described how Texas governor Anne Richards had consulted with Clark's number two at Fort Hood. Then, on April 14, there was a summit at the Justice Department in Washington, where Attorney General Janet Reno, top Justice Department and FBI officials and two unnamed senior Army officers reviewed the final assault plan scheduled for April 19.
The two Army officers at the Justice Department that day were Colonel Gerald Boykin, and his superior, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the head of Special Forces at Fort Bragg. Though Clark (who had served with Schoomaker) was not directly involved in the onslaught on the Branch Davidians, the role of the US Army in that affair throws into harsh relief the way prohibitions against the use of the US military for civilian law enforcement can be swiftly by-passed.
Boykin and Schoomacher were present because the Army's Fort Bragg-based Combat Applications Group-popularly known as the Delta Force-had been enlisted as part of the assault team on the Branch Davidian Compound. It appears that President Clinton had signed a waiver of the Posse Comitatus Act, with the precedent being Ronald Reagan's revocation of the Act in 1987, allowing the Delta Force to be involved in suppressing the Atlanta prison riot.
The role of the Delta Force, the identity of the two Army officers, the revocation of Posse Comitatus all form part of the disclosures of a forthcoming documentary film, Waco: A New Revelation, put together by part of the team that produced an earlier, excellent film, Waco: Rules of Engagement. Following our questions about Wesley Clark's possible involvement at Waco, producer/researcher Mike McNulty called us with some details of his new documentary-directed by Jason van Fleet and due to be released in July.
Exactly. High class rank at West Point. Huge ego. Rises to high rank though peacetime military politics. Lousy commander in wartime, but wouldn't accept any blame for his own failures. Booted out of his command. Throws his ego into civilian politics and runs for President. Charms the media, but average voters see right through him.
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