HEADLINES

Belgrade                 1. Three People Killed, Many Injured, in NATO's

                                   Attack on Belgrade Hospital

London                   2. NATO Commits Murder; Up to 38 Aircraft Lost

Brussels                  3. NATO Rift Now Out in the Open As Germany

                                   Publicly Breaks Ranks

Athens                    4. Top Greek Judges Condemn NATO

Buenos Aires         5. Argentineans Oppose NATO's Bombing;

                                  Rebuff Their President

Washington           6. Clinton Calls in PR Reinforcements Instead of

                                 Calling Off War

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1. Three People Killed, Many Injured, in NATO's Attack on Belgrade Hospital

PHOENIX, May 19 - Three people were killed and many more wounded in NATO's overnight attack on a Belgrade hospital. Two women giving birth and a new born baby were among the injured. The deaths occurred in the cardiovascular section of the "Dragisa Misovic" hospital in the posh Belgrade suburb of Dedinje.

Dedinje is the suburb where Slobodan Milosevic used to live before the war, and where most of ambassadors to Yugoslavia have their official residences. One of them, the residence of the Swedish ambassador, was also reportedly slightly damaged in a blast which blew out almost all of the hospital's windows.

Swedish Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh, said today (May 20) that NATO bombings in Belgrade were "unacceptable," and that she would seek an explanation from the alliance.

"It is unacceptable that right in the center of a large city these kinds of large explosives are used causing this kind of damages and injuries,'' Lindh told the Swedish news agency TT. "The strike on the hospital underscores the need for a political solution."

The U.S. embassy telephoned the Swedish foreign ministry to apologize for the damage to the ambassador's residence, a spokesperson for Lindh said today.

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TiM Ed.: The U.S. government apologizes to Sweden for a few broken windows, yet unapologetically continues to kill and maim scores of Serb civilians every day, including babies. What sort of monsters have taken over our government?

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The supposedly errant strike, at least according to the NATO spokesperson, was a part of the first aerial attack on central Belgrade since the May 7 bombing of the Chinese embassy. The strikes against the Dedinje hospital and other targets in and around Belgrade followed seven hours of talks between Viktor Chernomyrdin and the Yugoslav president Milosevic.

As a Belgrade resident remarked indignantly after last night's bombing, "every time a Russian comes calling, some NATO shit follows."

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TiM Ed.: In other words, the NATO attack on Dedinje was most likely intended to be the punch line to a "tough" message which the New World Order lapdog, Chernomyrdin, was asked to deliver to Belgrade. Instead, the bombs merely punched a few more tickets for a war crimes trial of the NATO murderers and baby killers.

See some photos of the strike against the hospital, and listen to the sound of the bomb which hit it .

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2. NATO Commits Murder; Up to 38 Aircraft Lost

LONDON, May 18 - Even before the latest NATO crime against humanity, some voices were being heard in the western media which tried to call attention to the murders being committed by the alliance. One of them was the voice of John Pilger, a London Guardian reporter. Here are some excerpts from his May 18 piece, "Acts of Murder," with a cynical sub-title: "Up to 38 aircraft have been shot down or crashed. This is suppressed, of course."

"The room is filled with the bodies of children killed by Nato in Surdulica in Serbia. Several are recognisable only by their sneakers. A dead infant is cradled in the arms of his father. These pictures and many others have not been shown in Britain; it will be said they are too horrific. But minimising the culpability of the British state when it is engaged in criminal action is normal; censorship is by omission and misuse of language. The media impression of a series of Nato 'blunders' is false. Anyone scrutinising the unpublished list of targets hit by Nato is left in little doubt that a deliberate terror campaign is being waged against the civilian population of Yugoslavia.

Eighteen hospitals and clinics and at least 200 nurseries, schools, colleges and students' dormitories have been destroyed or damaged, together with housing estates, hotels, libraries, youth centres, theatres, museums, churches and 14th-century monasteries on the World Heritage list. Farms have been bombed, their crops set on fire. As Friday's bombing of the Kosovo town of Korisa shows, there is no discrimination between Serbs and those being 'saved'. Every day, three times more civilians are killed by Nato than the daily estimate of deaths of Kosovans in the months prior to the bombing.

The British people are not being told about a policy designed largely by their government to cause such criminal carnage. The dissembling of politicians and the lies of 'spokesmen' set much of the news agenda. There is no sense of the revulsion felt throughout most of the world for this wholly illegal action, for the punishment of Milosevic's crime with a greater crime and for the bellicose antics of Blair, Cook and Robertson, who have made themselves into international caricatures. [...]

Nato is suffering significant losses. Reliable alternative sources in Washington have counted up to 38 aircraft crashed or shot down, and an undisclosed number of American and British special forces killed. This is suppressed, of course.

Anti-bombing protests reverberate around the world: 100,000 people in the streets of Rome (including 182 members of the Italian parliament), thousands in Greece and Germany, protests taking place every night in colleges and town halls across Britain. Almost none of it is reported. Is it not extraordinary that no national opinion poll on the war has been published since April 30?[...]

This week, the unthinkable will again be normalised when Nato triples the bombing raids to 700 a day. This includes blanket bombing by B-52s. Blair and Clinton and the opaque-eyed General Clark, apologist for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, are killing and maiming hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people in the Balkans. No contortion of intellect and morality, nor silence, will diminish the truth that these are acts of murder. And until there is a revolt by journalists and broadcasters, they will continue to get away with it. That is the news."

For the full Pilger column, check out the Guardian Web site, and do a search by the author's name at: http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/

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3. NATO Rift Now Out in the Open As Germany Publicly Breaks Ranks

BRUSSELS, May 19 - We've been saying for weeks that deep fissures were developing beneath the surface of apparent unity, painted by the NATO public leaders (see S99-66, Day 43, Update 1, Item 1, May 5, S99-77, Day 51, Update 2, Item 1, May 13, and Day 30 Update 1, Item 4, Apr. 22). Well, now the rift is out in the open as the German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, publicly declared in Brussels yesterday (May 19) that his country has no intention of participating in any ground attack on Yugoslavia.

"Sending in ground troops is unthinkable," Schroeder said. "That is our position and it won't change in the future."

The Italian prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, after meeting with Schroeder in Bari called for a 48-hour pause in NATO's bombing "to give the diplomacy a chance" to work (meaning the Russian and Finnish initiative).

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TiM Ed.: Actually, to the extent that the will of Congress and the U.S. laws still apply to the run-amok Clinton administration, the legal deadline for the U.S. participation in an illegal and undeclared NATO war on Yugoslavia is only two days away.

On Apr. 28, the House of Representatives has refused to endorse Clinton's air war with a 213-213 tie vote, and has soundly defeated the proposed declaration of war on Yugoslavia by a 427-2 vote (see S99-62, Day 40, Update 1, Item 4, May 2). Which means that Clinton has until May 24, 60 days after the start of hostilities, either to get a new authority from Congress, end the bombing, or continue it while breaking the law and defying Congress. Which could cause the courts to order him to stop the war, especially as 17 Congressmen have already filed a law suit against the Clinton administration (see S99-62, Day 40, Update 1, Item 3,May 2)

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4. Top Greek Judges Condemn NATO

ATHENS, May 19 - Twenty members of the Council of State (Greece's supreme administrative court) have issued a statement deploring the international crimes against Yugoslavia, which inaugurate a "period of lawlessness" and bring us back to the "eras of the Holy Alliance and the Axis".

NATO was found guilty of an unprecedented and barbaric attack against Yugoslavia in a statement signed by 20 high-ranking judges of the Greek Council of State, headed by its most senior vice-president Michalis Dekleris.

In their statement, the Greek judges condemn the NATO bombardments, denounce the international crimes being committed by the NATO countries through this armed attack, and warn that any law passed deciding to involve Greece in this war will constitute a gross violation of the Constitution.

In addition to Mr. Dekleris, this statement was signed by the following Council of State members: St. Sarivalasis, Ioanna Mari, Dim. Kostopoulos, Evdoxia Galanou, Sot. Rizos, Pan. Pikrammenos, Nik. Sakellariou, Th. Papaevangellou, Nik. Rozos, Dion. Marinakis, St. Haralambos and associate judges Maria Karamanov, Ekaterini Christoforidou, I. Kapelousos, Dim. Alexandris, Eleni Anagnostopoulou, Euth. Antonopoulos, Varvara Kapitsi, Theo. Aravanis.

You can see the full statement issued by the judges at: http://www.zmag.org/judges.htm

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5. Argentineans Oppose NATO's Bombing; Rebuff Their President

BUENOS AIRES, May 18 - "It's thousands of miles from Belgrade, and there's not a Serb in sight. But Gonzalo Etcheberry is passing a wall on a busy street here spray-painted with the words, "Yankee, out of the Balkans." He didn't write the slogan, but he couldn't agree more," the Washington Post reported on May 18 from Argentina's capital.

"Your bombs in Yugoslavia are from the side of America that I can't stand," said Etcheberry, a 21-year-old medical student wearing a black Pearl Jam T-shirt. "I hate it when the U.S. plays judge and God."

Such feelings are common in Argentina., the Post notes. And in many other parts of the world far from the conflict over Kosovo.

Here in Argentina, one of Washington's closest Latin American allies, a poll last week showed that 64 percent of the public opposed the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia. More respondents had a negative opinion of NATO than of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

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TiM Ed.: Which only goes to show us why the NWO birds of feather flock together. None of them represent the will of the people whose money and lives they are wasting. Only two days ago, we reported about the call by Argentina's president, an NWO lapdog, for NATO to launch a ground attack on Yugoslavia (see S99-82, Day 56, Item 2, May 18). The Post's article puts his call in perspective - an anti-Argentinean perspective.

For the full Post article, check it out at the Washington Post Web site.

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6. Clinton Calls in PR Reinforcements Instead of Calling Off War

WASHINGTON, May 18 - The Cato Institute, one of Washington's foreign policy think tanks, held a conference on Tuesday (May 18) about "NATO's Balkan War: Finding an Honorable Exit." One of the conference attendees told TiM that it was an excellent event. But our source lamented that the session received no coverage in the major Washington media.

Well, one of the speakers at the conference was Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who also happens to be a nationally syndicated columnist. The message in Bandow's latest (May 19) column, that Bill Clinton is calling in PR reinforcements instead of calling off an illegal war, is basically what he had also told the Cato conference, our source said. Here are some excerpts:

"Bill Clinton's war has proved to be one of America's greatest foreign policy debacles. What does the president do? Hire Leslie Dash, vice chairman of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, to advise the administration on Kosovo. President Clinton should end the war instead. [...]

The president launched an unprovoked war of aggression against a small, distant state. He cynically wrapped his campaign in humanitarianism while ignoring worse slaughters elsewhere. [...] Once it became clear the administration intended to effectively strip Yugoslavia of Kosovo, however, Belgrade unsurprisingly lashed out. Indeed, allied bombing turned all Kosovars - whose leaders publicly lobbied for NATO intervention - into enemies of the Serbs.

Yugoslavia wasn't gentle before being bombed. It certainly wasn't going to be gentle afterward. The number of refugees in Albania and Macedonia jumped from 45,000 to 640,000.

At the same time, the allied war quickly turned into a war on Serb civilians, with strikes on everything from bridges to electrical plants to television stations. The only way NATO can continually intensify the bombing is to widen its target list. And that means more dead civilians.

Accidents may be unavoidable, but they are least justifiable in a supposedly humanitarian war. How many Yugoslavs deserve to die to enable Kosovar refugees to go home? Ethnic cleansing is ugly; premeditated murder is worse. [...]

The United States should stop bombing. Today. [...]

It should be tragically obvious by now that Washington cannot impose peace. The president does have a PR problem with his war. But the problem is the war. The solution is not to hire another media flack. It is to end the war."

Also, check out... Truth in Media Statement on Kosovo Crisis, "Wither Dayton, Sprout New War?", "On the Brink of Madness", "Tragic Deja Vu's," "Seven U.S. Senators Suggest Ouster of Milosevic", "Biting the Hand That Feeds You", "A Balkan Affairs Potpourri", "Put the U.N. Justice on Trial", "International Justice 'Progresses' from Kidnapping to Murder", "Milosevic: 'A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery'...", "Kosovo Lie Allowed to Stand", "New World Order's Inquisition in Bosnia", "Kosovo Heating Up", "Decani Monastery Under Siege?", "Murder on Wall Street",  "Kosovo: 'Bosnia II', Serbia's Aztlan",  "What If the Shoe Were on the Other Foot?", "Green Interstate - Not Worth American Lives", "An American Hero or Actor of the Year?" (A June '95 TiM story) and/or "Clinton arme secrètement les musulmans bosniaques"

Or Djurdjevic's WASHINGTON TIMES columns: "Chinese Dragon Wagging Macedonian Tail,"  "An Ugly Double Standard in Kosovo Conflict?", "NATO's Bullyboys", "Kosovo: Why Are We Involved?", and "Ginning Up Another Crisis"

Or Djurdjevic's NEW DAWN magazine columns: "Washington's Crisis Factory,"  and "A New Iron Curtain Over Europe"