Posted on 06/19/2003 9:30:09 AM PDT by uplandgame
Remember the cover story "Madeleine's War" from a May 1999 TIME magazine edition? As you may recall, a popular opinion at the time was Madeleine Albright was the person the most responsible for the bombing of Serbia four years ago.
Well, think again. Without trying to exonerate or excuse Clinton's war-mongering secretary of state whose Serbo-phobia has been well documented and demonstrated, we want you to know that there may have been another woman who deserves at least part of the credit - Hillary Clinton.
The avalanche of publicity brought on by Hillary Clinton's new book, released this week, also washed up an old interview that has suddenly become very topical. Michael Savage, a national radio host, interviewed Gail Sheehy, author of a flattering Hillary biography, on December 18, 1999. Sheehy claimed in her book that it was Hillary, not "Madam Halfbright," who convinced Bill to bomb Serbia. So Savage took the author to task over that and the bogus "intelligence" upon which this bombing was "justified" to the American public.
Check out the following excerpt from the Savage interview if you want to see how Savage savaged this Hillary fan...
Excerpts from a Michael Savage December 18, 1999 radio interview with Gail Sheehy, author of the (flattering) book about Hillary Clinton, "Hillary's Choice:"
G. Sheehy: Hillary did persuade Bill Clinton to bomb in Kosovo, and what she said to him in phone calls over 48 hours from North Africa in March of ‘99: "You can’t let this ethnic cleansing go on at the end of the century that has seen the Holocaust."
M. Savage: But it turns out that was false because the original estimates of 100,000 were now reduced to 10,000 by the State Department, and yet the UN inspection team has only found 2,200 bodies. So this could turn out to be the greatest disaster of her, of her entire life.
G. Sheehy: Well, I don’t know about that. But we’re getting way, way far away from any...
M. Savage: Well, wait a minute, we’re not far away from the UN, which went to the ground, looked for the bodies, and found 2,200 dead bodies. This was one of the greatest war crimes of our age according to many international people who know that, including liberal democrats.
G. Sheehy: Well, I really don’t know what, whether, the facts have all come out. And I don’t think we will know for a while. It’s one of those ongoing stories...
M. Savage: No, it’s not. Here, wait a minute, before we go on, we can’t just say the facts don’t exist. The UN spent a lot of time looking for the mass graves. They said there were only about 2,200 bodies that were found. They don’t even know how many of those are Serbian bodies. And then just last week the State Department revised downward their 100,000 figure of dead Kosovar Albanians to 10,000 even though the UN only said 2,200. This is turning out... and I don’t think you, I don’t think you want to defend Hillary on this.
G. Sheehy: [Unintelligible] ... a small number. In any case,...
M. Savage: But does that, wait, does that justify bombing an entire nation into the stone age?
G. Sheehy: Wait, wait. We, they didn’t, they didn’t bomb it into the stone age...
M. Savage: There are no bridges left on the Danube River. The people have no heating oil; they have no food.
G. Sheehy: I’m not going to sit here and debate with you the rightness and the wrongness of the bombing in Kosovo. All I’m telling you is what I know. That’s all I can tell you.
M. Savage: But what you don’t know is that there is more to it than what you do know.
G. Sheehy: Well, Hillary and you and the American public did not know any of this at that time...
M. Savage: Yes, we did. I beg... Excuse, excuse me, Gail Sheehy, many Jewish people who had been sheltered by the Serbian people were on this program and were outraged that we were killing our allies who rescued our airmen in World War II. We got people on who were former prosecutors at Nuernberg against Hitler, on this program, liberal Democrats, going back to FDR, who were outraged at what the Clintons had done with our airplanes, giving them to NATO. So don’t say that we didn’t know. We knew it even then.
G. Sheehy: No, we didn’t know. They...
M. Savage: How can you tell us we didn’t know, when we debated it here?
G. Sheehy: Well, they didn’t have observers; they didn’t even have UN observers at that point...
M. Savage: So how did they make up a hundred thousand?
G. Sheehy: Conditions were so severe they couldn’t even keep... they pulled out the UN observers -- if you remember.
M. Savage: So how did they raise it to a hundred thousand if they didn’t know?
G. Sheehy: I don’t know. That’s the reporting that we had at that time.
M. Savage: In other words, it was propaganda that Hillary Clinton used. It was propaganda that Hillary Clinton used in order to justify the unjustifiable.
G. Sheehy: They didn’t know any better than you knew.
M. Savage: Oh, they didn’t know any better than I did, and they’re the president and his wife. So what does that say about them?
G. Sheehy: Well, what did they know about the Los Alamos spying?
M. Savage: What did they know about it? Aren’t they supposed to know about it? What the hell are they doing there?
G. Sheehy: There’s a lot of agencies, and they often don’t do their job, do they? Whether it’s the FBI or the CIA, they often don’t do their job very well.
M. Savage: Well, it sounds like you’re apologizing for every one of their mistakes.
G. Sheehy: I’m not apologizing for any of their mistakes. I’m saying to you that at the time, in March ‘99, this whole country was in a dilemna about what to do about what appeared to be a massive, minor holocaust in Kosovo.
M. Savage: Wait a minute. What do you mean "it appeared to be"? It was a complete fabrication of the KLA. It was propaganda pure and simple.
G. Sheehy: It wasn’t a complete fabrication. 10,000 people...
M. Savage: No, Mam. It was not 10,000. I just told you they only found 2,200 bodies...
G. Sheehy: But you said 10,000...
M. Savage: No, I said the State Department revised their figure from 100,000 down to 10,000, when the UN says there were only 2,200. The State Department is notorious for lying.
G. Sheehy: Alright, so there are two figures there, the 2,200 and the 10,000. That’s why the... I don’t know that the...
M. Savage: So wait a minute. Again, I don’t want to turn the whole show into that...
G. Sheehy: This is not about Hillary’s Choice. This is about your problem with Kosovo. So you can argue about...
M. Savage: No, No, but you’re...
G. Sheehy: I don’t know anything about Kosovo. Let me just put that right out there.
M. Savage: Alright, I know a lot about Kosovo...
G. Sheehy: ...Hillary convinced the president to bomb, and that’s my contribution.
M. Savage: OK.
G. Sheehy: Don’t you want to talk about the book?
M. Savage: Before we go on, I want to say this. In your book you say it was Hillary who pushed the president into bombing Kosovo, correct?
G. Sheehy: I said she convinced him to do it.
M. Savage: OK, but if it turns out that she was doing it based upon wrong information, what would that make of her in your mind?
G. Sheehy: Well, I don’t have any... I’m not going to speculate. I don’t know that you’ll ever find out what information she or the president had. Nobody ever comes up with those things. I’m not going to speculate on that.
M. Savage: But you’re speculating on the fact that Hillary did it based on good information.
G. Sheehy: I’m going to tell you this: Hillary Clinton, for her many flaws and foibles, which every human being has, is a person who, who is honest and who acts on her convictions. In this case, I believe that her conviction was that this was a massive ethnic-cleansing campaign that was killing innocent...
M. Savage: But what if it turns out it was all propaganda?
G. Sheehy: She, I don’t believe that she would have done it. Why would she want to risk the presidency doing something based on propaganda?
M. Savage: Well, yeah, let me ask you this. Have there been no other people in history who have done things, either mistakenly or on purpose, for other reasons than they appear to be doing them for?
G. Sheehy: Look, I’m not going to speculate on this. It’s just lunacy. We don’t know any more, you don’t know any more and...
M. Savage: Excuse me, you keep putting words in my mouth. I know an awful lot about Kosovo. You may know nothing about Kosovo.
G. Sheehy: ...You can’t get anything out of me because I don’t know anything more...
M. Savage: Alright, so you don’t know anything about Kosovo. I know a lot about Kosovo...
G. Sheehy: That’s great. Then you should lecture on Kosovo...
M. Savage: I have done many lectures on Kosovo. But I’m asking you how it is that Hillary Clinton could take a figure like 100,000 people, push the president into bombing Kosovo, and get away with it? Isn’t there some kind of connection between that and a massive government-media-complex cover-up? Why don’t they go there and investigate it like the UN has?
G. Sheehy: Look, they thought, like many people thought at the time, that this could not go on at the end of the century that had seen the Holocaust. That...
M. Savage: But there was no holocaust.
G. Sheehy: ...the rape of women and children because they were of a certain ethnic background...
M. Savage: OK, how about the Serbs being killed now? How about the Serbs being killed now by the Kosovar Albanians?
G. Sheehy: I don’t want to talk about this any more. If you want to talk about Hillary’s Choice, we can continue the conversation...
M. Savage: But what about the holocaust against the Serbs right now?
G. Sheehy: You know, you want me to be funny? Why don’t you let me tell a funny story.
M. Savage: I think you’re being very funny right now.
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Why pose a rhetorical question when the answer is readily available? The Albanians are more motivated by ethnic bonds than they are by religion, and the ties between the KLA and any Muslim terrorist group that we're worried about are dwarfed by their ties with the diaspora here in America. It's almost as if the LDK and 10 years of political oppression never occurred in these threads - Milosevic invalidated the non-violent opposition in Kosovo and played into the KLA's hands by making them the only game in town if you were a Kosovar Albanian and you were tired of European apartheid in Kosovo.
You point to our being able to see the WTC attacks as a differentiating factor, but we had also seen what had happened in the Balkans at places like Vukovar and Srebrenica, and saw the same leaders and units moving into Kosovo - once the first plane hit, was there really a doubt as to what the second would do once it came into the picture?
The Serbian Socialist party is scum, Danny - and they gain far too much traction here on FR by retooling their lies for an American audience. There's this whole weird Stockholm syndrome thing going on with some Serbs and Milosevic - don't buy into it.
Finally, yes, the actual quote is along the lines of "they may have been murdered", which again invites a discussion as to the accuracy of the information presented in the article at the head of this thread, no?
It's an old argument, btw, and ignores the forcible expulsion of over 800,000 civilians out of Kosovo and into Albania and Macedonia.
Ha! His legacy = Monica...forever)
All your accusations don't mean squat if you can't back it up with facts.
Milosevic will walk.
I think there were additional factors.
The Chinese scandal was breaking news. With their Chinese friends coming for a State Dinner that had to be removed from the papers and airwaves.
Legacy building. Yugoslavia could be portrayed as Soviet Union light.
Keep the Muslims and Vatican placated.
But, I still think the major factor was clinton's Globalist desire to show that National Sovereignty could be disregarded at will.
One of the main defence strategies Milosevic was pursuing in regards to Bosnia, being he had nothing to do with it, has been thoroughly disproven by the fact that the BSA's salaries were paid from Belgrade, and the recent disclosure of orders to Serbian MUP units who ultimately reported to Milosevic were operating around Sarajevo to move to Srebrenica prior to the massacre there.
Command responsibility has been established, and had you bothered to familiarize yourself with the indictment and the actual charges, you wouldn't be making such ignorant statements, duckln.
The only place Milosevic is going to walk will be in the exercise yard.
Those particular VRS members (the ones who had previously been JNA members) were only receiving their social insurance payments which they had legally accrued as citizens of Yugoslavia and as members of the JNA. They were simply being paid the money that they were already owed.
"As for the funds spent on weapons and ammunition and the other needs of the Bosnian Serb Republic Army and the Croatian Serb Republic Army, as these were state secrets they could not be shown in the budget, which is a public document. The same is true of the expenses for equipping the security forces and counter-terrorist forces."
That would be none other than Slobodan Milosevic - in his appeal against the charges of Abuse of Power in Serbia.
So you've got Milosevic himself stating that money from Belgrade was paying for the war in Bosnia - you can quibble about the salaries being something else with Borisav Jovic, who has already admitted that, as the Bosnian Serbs couldn't afford to pay them, Belgrade continued to do so after the soldiers took off their JNA patches and replaced them with BSA patches, which was about the only change that occurred upon the JNA's supposed withdrawal from Bosnia.
The command responsibility charge is pretty much a done deal right now, DEI.
Croatia and Germany financed the bosnian Croat army, the US and Saudi Arabia financed the bosnian muslim army. Serbia financed the Bosnian Serb Army and the Croatian Serb Army. So what? Serbia should have annexed these territories during the early 90's instead of providing covered support to them. That's about the anything Slobodan Milosevic can be charged with.
An end to the specious defences of Milosevic and his actions - you've pretty much conceded the point on the command responsibility issue, DEI.
Perhaps we can move on to other things, like figuring out how to rebuild the Serbian economy and integrating it into Europe.
That would be nice for a change, and as there's no end of opportunities for rancorous disagreement when it comes to economics, we could maintain our usual relationship while arguing about how to construct a better future rather than apportioning blame for a disasterous past.
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