Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...seem like something out of 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...
There may also be a more cynical motivation behind all this news management: it allows the Pentagon and NATO to shield potentially embarrassing details about the war. Despite video footage showing pinpoint allied missile attacks, the military acknowledges that only a small percentage of NATO planes have dropped ordnance on their targets so far. And though the Pentagon declined to say last week what portion of the total NATO sorties had been flown by U.S. aircraft, most military observers believe Americans are doing as much as 80% of the dirty work...
...tell the full story of a war. But the conditions on the ground are even worse. Milosevic's 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...