Accuracy in Media Monitors On Kosovo
Date: Sent: Sunday, May 09, 1999 2:43 AM
From: Ron Ates
Jim Lehrer of the public television show the Newshour with Jim Lehrer said
that, in a 213-213 tie vote, the House had "declined to endorse" the bombing
of Yugoslavia. That is technically true. But it also meant that the Clinton
Administration started violating the law when it continued the bombing. The
vote in the House made it official under the War Powers Resolution: the
bombing of Yugoslavia is illegal and has to stop.
If this is news to you, then you are a victim of sloppy and erroneous media
coverage. Simply put, journalists are not doing their homework. The recent
votes in the House were prompted by Congressman Tom Campbell under
consideration of the War Powers Resolution, which sets forth the conditions
under which the president can deploy the Armed Forces of the United States.
When the House failed to endorse the NATO bombing campaign and the president
continued the bombing, the president came into violation of the law.
In an age of the Internet, when journalists and ordinary citizens can easily
obtain access to the U.S. Code, there is no excuse for not telling the
American people what is really going on. The War Powers Resolution can be
found at Title 50 of the U.S. Code, sections 1541 through 1548. It says the
president can deploy the armed forces when one of three conditions is met: a
declaration of war, statutory authorization, or a national emergency created
when there is an attack on the U.S., its possessions or the armed forces. He
is ordered to withdraw those troops after 60 days without Congressional
approval.
None of those conditions was met when the president deployed our troops to
Yugoslavia. But when the House rejected a bill, by a tie vote, to authorize
the bombing campaign, that meant the president was in violation of the law
when the bombing continued. By failing to get House support for his policy,
the president was in a position where he couldn't get Congressional approval
of the bombing. His only legal recourse was to withdraw those troops.
This is why, after that Congressional vote, 17 members of the House filed
suit against Clinton to have the law enforced. The 17 members include 15
Republicans and two Democrats. The suit was filed by two lawyers, including
Jules Lobel of the University of Pittsburgh, who issued a statement saying,
"In a remarkable vote against the war in Yugoslavia, the House of
Representatives, by a vote of 213 to 213, failed to give the president the
constitutionally required authorization he needed to carry on the air war
against Yugoslavia. The Constitution grants Congress the sole power to
declare war. It must give its affirmative assent. It did not do so.
They continued with their statement, "Contrary to the president's statement
that he will continue this war, he has no authority to do so. It would be a
remarkable act of executive hubris and illegal as well to continue the
bombing. It is a serious subversion of or constitutional structure (and is
impeachable). His only option is to end the aerial bombardment and negotiate
a peaceful solution." So will the Congress and the media let the president
violate yet another law?
Asked recently why the Clinton Administration had intervened in a civil war
in Yugoslavia and had ignored a genocide in Rwanda back in 1994, National
Security Advisor Sandy Berger said the slaughter in Rwanda had happened "very
swiftly"- in a "two week period." In any event, he said there was no alliance
like NATO in Africa which could have intervened. He said the administration
was underwriting the creation of an African peacekeeping force to help avert
future Rwandas.
Most of that is untrue. The Rwanda genocide happened during a three-month
period, giving the Administration enough time to do something about the
slaughter -- even if the only course of action was to publicly highlight and
condemn what was taking place. Instead, the Administration covered it up, and
they even stonewalled a request for grappling hooks to fish dead bodies out
of rivers once the genocide was over.
The phony claims of Berger help demonstrate the lack of justification, on a
moral or any other basis, for the U.S. war on Yugoslavia. Journalists have
asked the question of why the Clinton Administration is intervening in
Yugoslavia and ignoring more serious human rights problems in other parts of
the world, but there has not been a coordinated focus on one country in
particular - Turkey, which just happens to be a member of the NATO alliance.
By any objective measure, Turkey's human rights record is much worse than
Yugoslavia's. Yet Turkey is taking part in the war on Yugoslavia.
The Clinton State Department human rights report on Turkey says that
political detainees have been subjected to the following: "high-pressure cold
water hoses; electric shocks; systematic beatings, including on the soles of
the feet and genitalia; blindfolding; hanging by the arms; sleep deprivation;
vaginal and anal rape with truncheons and in some instances, gun barrels; and
other forms of sexual abuse." The report even says that a two-year old boy
was kicked and burned with cigarettes in an effort to make his mother confess
to being a terrorist.
Turkey's effort is being directed against the Kurds, who were promised a
country of their own after World War II. They never got it. Today, the
Kurdish people are scattered in many different countries, but most of them
are in Turkey. In the same way that Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic
has been accused of suppressing the rights of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo,
Kani Xulam of the American-Kurdish Information Network says Turkey banned them
from asserting their rights. Today, he says there are 11,000 Kurdish
political prisoners in Turkey. Yet President Clinton calls Turkey a friend
and ally of the United States.
While 2000 died on both sides in Kosovo in 1998, Xulam says, 37,000 people
have been killed over the last fifteen years in Kurdistan, the name given by
the Kurds to the region where they live in Turkey. At the same time, over 3
million Kurds have become homeless. "And not a murmur was heard in
Washington," he says, adding that the contradiction between the reaction to
the treatment of the Kurds and the ethnic Albanians "cries out to be heard."
We agree. It's time for the media to listen.
In a column about former anti-Vietnam war protesters backing the war on
Yugoslavia, Mona Charen commented, "Vitriolic haters of the war in Vietnam
who cut their teeth chanting, 'Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill
today?' [have been] transformed into hard-liners on Kosovo." Referring to
Clinton and his allies in Congress, Charen commented, "the new
internationalist Democrats argue explicitly that because the United States
has no conceivable national interest at stake in Kosovo, our intervention is
moral and right."
If this is disturbing to you, it gets worse. Commentator Michael Valerio has
said Kosovo represents "The chickens of the '60s [turning] into the hawks of
the '90s." He adds, "The heads of state of the current U.S. and NATO
countries are all relics of the Old Left who led the Peace Movement and
demanded that the U.S. disarm unilaterally."
That may be an overstatement, but the New York Times itself covered the
turnaround in a story headlined, "The Doves of Yesteryear Fly Off to a
Different War." The story included a photo of Bill Clinton when he was a
Rhodes scholar at Oxford; a photo of Tony Blair, now Britain's Prime
Minister, when he was 21 and a college student and wearing hair down past his
shoulders; and the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, when he was a 36
year-old Young Socialist leader speaking in an anti-nuclear rally. Reporter
Craig R. Whitney said Kosovo "is a liberal's kind of war" because of some of
the reasons that Mona Charen described. The most important reason is that it
has nothing to do with America's national interest.
The Times noted that the Italian Prime Minister, Massimo d'Alema, "who
protested Italy's support for the Persian Gulf War in 1991, has made the
entire country into one giant aircraft carrier for the daily blitz across the
Adriatic." The Washington Times said he was "raised on the precepts of
Marxism, became a Communist Party youth leader and rose through the party..."
Whitney of the New York Times also highlighted the British Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook, who was a left-wing pacifist in the 1980s and is now a big backer
of the war on Yugoslavia.
The Washington Post has noted that the foreign minister of the government of
Germany, which is an ally of Clinton in this war, "spent his youth as a
radical Marxist..." Joschka Fischer, the German Federal Minister of Foreign
Affairs, has been a member of the far-left German Green Party since 1982. The
Greens have been considered pacifists except under certain circumstances,
such as the former Yugoslavia, when interventions can be justified by
multinational coalitions such as NATO.
The fact that Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic is a communist only
confuses this picture. He is being opposed not because he is a communist but
because he is a nationalist. If communism were the problem, Clinton, Blair
and many of the others we have mentioned would have supported the war against
communism in Vietnam. It is also interesting that many of those supporting
the war on Yugoslavia opposed NATO's alliance against Soviet communism during
the Cold War. That includes the NATO Secretary General, Javier Solana.
The Washington media and officials of the Clinton Administration, including
the president and First Lady, were having a good time recently at the White
House correspondents dinner. It's easy to see why somebody like White House
press secretary Joe Lockhart was having such a good time: he's had the White
House press corps eating out of his hand. And when the press asks too many
questions or wants answers that are too specific, he simply changes the
subject and the journalists follow along.
A good example is an exchange that took place on April 28th, with the House
on the verge of voting not to authorize Clinton's bombing of Yugoslavia. One
reporter asked Lockhart if Clinton would ask for Congressional permission to
send them into a "non-permissive environment" but that if ground troops were
required, he would "seek their support." Did this mean the approval of
Congress? Lockhart responded, "It means that if we get down the road in some
hypothetical... situation... he would seek their support." Would he go ahead
with the military action if he did not have the support of Congress? At that
point, Lockhart said that was a hypothetical on top of a hypothetical, and he
wasn't going to answer it.
But it is not hypothetical that a law exists which regulates the president's
ability and authority to deploy our forces. Clinton came into violation of
the War Powers Resolution when the House voted not to authorize the bombing
campaign. A suit has now been filed by 17 members of Congress seeking to have
the law enforced. But the major media have carefully obscured the role of
this law in the war in Yugoslavia.
The Washington Post, for example, mentioned the law and the lawsuit in an
article on page 12 that was devoted to analyzing what action would be taken
in the U.S. Senate about the conduct of the war. But the House action had
made the Senate action largely irrelevant. Even if the Senate had voted for
Clinton's conduct of the war, and had voted to expand his authority, it would
not have canceled out the House refusal to support it.
The major media have failed to alert the American people to how Clinton is
blatantly disregarding the will of Congress. Just two days after the House
vote, the Post reported in a matter-of-fact manner that Clinton had issued an
executive order imposing a U.S. trade embargo on Yugoslavia. This, too, is an
act of war that the president cannot unilaterally impose. But this is not the
first time Clinton had used an executive order to wage this war. Back on
April 13th, he issued an executive order declaring Yugoslavia and the
surrounding area a "combat zone." He also used an executive order to call up
the reserves.
Lawlessness by this president isn't new. But in this case, we're not just
talking about his personal conduct. In fact, some legal experts say that
violating the law and the Constitution in this case may constitute another
impeachable offense.