Word: kosovo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most entertaining sideshow of the war in Kosovo is staged almost every day at the Pentagon's press briefing room. There exasperated reporters conduct jousting sessions with uniformed military commanders in vain attempts to divine the most banal of battlefield data information. How many NATO air strikes have been aborted because of bad weather? "I'm afraid I can't get into that level of detail right off the top of my head," Vice Admiral Scott Fry said at a Pentagon briefing early in the campaign. How about an approximation? "I'd prefer not to even approximate it." A ballpark...
...Ionesco, but the Pentagon is playing by a script. For months Secretary of Defense William Cohen has fretted that Pentagon officials were leaking too much sensitive security information to the press. The top brass ordered a clampdown on the release of specifics about the NATO campaign in Kosovo, so military briefers have remained maddeningly vague. Take the oft-repeated NATO goal of "degrading" the Yugoslav military. "Degrading could mean breaking the window of a barracks," says George Wilson, a former Pentagon reporter for the Washington Post. "We don't have any specifics. It's much more restrictive than other wars...
...just as the Pentagon is experimenting with new tactics in the skies over Kosovo, it is also experimenting with new ways of handling the media. Bacon says that in the age of cell phones and the Internet, the Serbs have instant access to any military information put out to the press, meaning that even basic military info can be translated immediately into Serbian battle plans. "We've just decided to give them as little information as possible," he said on the NewsHour last week. There have been cracks in the armor: some Pentagon officials were upset when the Washington Post...
...expulsion of almost all foreign reporters from Yugoslavia and his crackdown on independent local journalists--have left Western viewers with little more than Serbian television images of towns smoldering from stray NATO bombs. The West calls it propaganda: U.S. intelligence officials say they have evidence that buildings in Kosovo that the government claims NATO destroyed were actually blown up by Yugoslav agents themselves. Sadly, the truth will likely remain buried in the rubble...
...Kosovo is not a place preparing for peace. Every day the province is filled with awful violence. NATO warplanes are slamming Serbian troops with tons of munitions, guided by tiny drones that hum overhead. Deep in the Kosovo hills, the Kosovo Liberation Army is fighting defensive battles, trying to conserve its resources. And in the middle of all this, NATO now says that up to 700,000 refugees are wandering homeless, brutalized by Serbian forces and desperately seeking a way out. Slobodan Milosevic has tried to put a lid on the province--limiting media access and stemming the outflow...