The Morrock News Service

The Duping of America
By John David Powell
TMNS Correspondent
May 10, 1999

The United States of America is a young and incredible country. We are a land 
of great people who are passionate in our beliefs. Americans are moved to 
tears and action by scenes of suffering and despair. And, we are a country 
easily duped by those who prey on the naiveté of the young and the trusting.

Our country is like a big kid who commands respect because of his size, but 
who lacks the maturity that comes with age and experience. As a terrible 
consequence, our people put our trust in a government that uses deceit as its 
policy of choice, and in media who have become smug and lazy and who have 
forgotten their role as watchdogs that question and probe.

Truth, though, is like an animal that crawls under your porch to die; it may 
be hidden for a time, but you eventually have to deal with it.

Last week, the stench of truth became too great for the American media to 
ignore and still maintain credibility. Until a few days ago, NATO had been 
given a free ride regarding its murder of civilians who were too old or too 
young or too slow to avoid missiles and shrapnel. Then cluster bombs 
destroyed a bus full of children, women and old people of all nationalities, 
according to Yugoslavia's state-controlled Tanjug news agency. Reports said 
20 civilians died and at least 43 were wounded in the May 3 attack near 
Savine Vode on the Pec-Kula-Rozaje road.

A few days later, NATO cluster bombs devastated a shopping district and a 
hospital in Nis. National Public Radio described the bodies of a woman who 
was selling eggs and of her two customers, and of a man who lay dead in the 
garden he was tending until he was cut to shreds by shrapnel.

Such tales of wanton carnage among civilians may be new to Americans, but 
such reporting is daily fare for media from Canada to Australia. I know 
because I receive and distribute via e-mail as many as 10 to 20 such stories 
a day. Most cover the destruction of Yugoslavia's economy, the suffering of  
"collateral" population, the crimes of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and NATO 
attacks on Christian churches and monasteries.

When people talk to me about hunger in America, I tell them to look around. 
There is hunger, but it is not caused by a food shortage. Public schools 
throw away hundreds of tons of untouched food every day; supermarkets set out 
snacks for customers to sample as they shop. There is not a food shortage, 
only a distribution breakdown. The food doesn't get to the people who are 
starving.

The same is true for information. There is not an information shortage in 
America, only a distribution breakdown. To borrow from the television series 
The X-Files: the truth is out there.

The International Strategic Studies Association is out of Alexandria, 
Virginia. The non-governmental organization for senior national security 
officials from 165 countries issued a news release May 4 that has been 
ignored by the mainstream American media. According to ISSA (www.issa.org), 
NATO and US forces have "suffered significant loss of life" among ground 
troops.

ISSA's monthly journal "Strategic Policy" reports that as of April 20, "as 
many as 50 NATO ground troops - officially not acknowledged even to be in the 
conflict." It also reports NATO may have lost as many as 38 fixed-wing 
aircraft and six helicopters.

The recently released POWs may not have been the only prisoners. ISSA reports 
an African-American air force major is being held after his F-15 Eagle 
fighter was shot down. "At least one German pilot (some sources say two men, 
implying perhaps a Luftwaffe crew from a Tornado) has been captured," the 
report also says.

ISSA adds it has information a female US pilot has been killed.

In addition, ISSA reports 12 American and eight British special forces were 
killed in an ambush south of Pristina within days of the start of the bombing 
campaign. "At least 30 bodies of US servicemen have been processed through 
Athens, after being transported from the combat zone," according to the 
report.

"At least two of the helicopters downed by the Yugoslavs were carrying 
troops, and in these two a total of 50 men were believed to have been killed, 
most of them (but not all) of US origin."

ISSA organized a fact-finding mission to Yugoslavia on April 18 - 21. On the 
team was Congressman Jim Saxton (R-NJ), a life member of the organization and 
Chairman of the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. 

The team determined as many as one-third of the refugees out of Kosovo 
"appear, in fact, to be fleeing further into Serbia," to avoid the KLA. These 
refugees of various ethnicities are joining the nearly one million refugees 
displaced since 1992 from Bosnian and Croatian Serb areas and Croatians and 
Muslims from what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.

Team members report seeing extensive destruction by NATO of civilian targets, 
which has resulted in the loss of income for nearly 20 percent of the entire 
Yugoslavian population. NATO says relatives of President Slobodan Milosevic 
owned some civilian targets. The ISSA team learned, however, that "the vast 
majority of these factories were either State-owned, privately owned by 
non-Milosevic family members or, for the greater part, owned jointly by the 
State and by the workforces of the various factories. As a result, this has 
directly contributed to an attack on the average Yugoslav family."

"Insight Magazine" (www.insightmag.com) reports in its upcoming issue that as 
many as 15,000 US troops will be killed in a ground war. That figure came 
from a CIA report to the House Armed Services Committee on the eve of last 
month's NATO summit. The CIA estimate is based on a 10-percent casualty rate.

The Washington Times, on May 4, reported that KLA troops are training with 
terrorists. According to the report, some members of the KLA, which is 
financing the war through the sale of heroin, were trained in camps run by 
Osama bin Laden who is wanted for the 1998 bombing of two US embassies that 
resulted in the deaths of 224 persons, including 12 Americans.

Last year, State Department officials called the KLA a terrorist organization 
and charged it was using terrorist tactics against Serbian and ethnic 
Albanian citizens, according to the paper. And France's Geopolitical 
Observatory of Drugs said the KLA helped transport $2 billion in drugs a year 
into Western Europe.

To borrow from a saying: You can lead the American public to information, but 
you can't make it think.

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