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<p class="pagesub">Holbrooke’s Legacy<br>
A gangster regime in Kosovo<br>
by <a href="http://original.antiwar.com/author/justin/"
title="Posts by Justin Raimondo">Justin Raimondo</a>, December
15, 2010 </p>
</div>
<div class="entry">
<p>As the panegyrics to <a
href="http://abcnews.go.com/Health/inside-aortic-dissection-heart-problem-killed-richard-holbrooke/story?id=12393928">Richard
Holbrooke</a> spread over the internet like a thickening fog,
the real legacy of this State Department apparatchik came <a
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss">across
the news wires</a> a few hours after his death:</p>
<p><i>“Kosovo’s prime minister is the head of a “mafia-like”
Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and
human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of
Europe inquiry report on organized crime.</i></p>
<p><i>“Hashim Thaçi is identified as “the boss” of a network that
began operating criminal rackets in the run-up to the 1999
Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country’s
government since.</i></p>
<p><i>“The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and
other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian.
It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted ‘violent
control’ over the heroin trade.”</i>
</p>
<p>It was Holbrooke, one of the chief architects of the Kosovo
war, who midwifed the <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_Liberation_Army">KLA
regime</a> in Kosovo, and created a gangster state. When <a
href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,976015,00.html">Strobe
Talbott</a>, then acting Secretary of State, called him for
his recommendation on the Kosovo “crisis,” Holbrooke <a
href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/">replied</a>:
</p>
<p><i>“You put us down as unanimously asking for bombing. Put us
down as people who want bombing for peace. Strobe, this is
very important. This is a critical moment for us personally. A
responsibility of the nation. And the right thing to do. If
the negotiations fail because of the bombing, so be it.
Bombing is the right thing to do.”</i></p>
<p>I vividly recall Rep. Nancy Pelosi answering critics of <a
href="http://pelosi.house.gov/pressarchives/releases/prkosovo.htm">her
support</a> for the war by uttering a single word as her <a
href="http://i876.photobucket.com/albums/ab322/norseman143/nancy_pelosi.jpg">bug
eyes</a> popped out of her head: “Genocide!”
</p>
<p>It was all a lie, of course. <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/biglie.html">There was no
“genocide,”</a> only a civil war in which no more than 10,000
people from both sides were killed. Hardly the sort of conflict
that conjures up visions of the Holocaust, and yet that was
precisely the imagery very effectively utilized by the War Party
to hype the need for US intervention: we were told that as many
as 50,000 Kosovar civilians were being systematically
slaughtered by the Serbs. So, what happened to the bodies? <a
href="http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=4136">Nowhere
to be found</a>. Where is the evidence of a Kosovar
“holocaust”? There isn’t any, because no such event ever took
place.</p>
<p>It was under the Clintons, and Holbrooke, that the US first
embarked on its post-cold war crusade to inflict righteousness
on the world’s peoples and export “democracy” at gunpoint. In a
PBS documentary entitled “<a
href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/">Give
War a Chance</a>,” which tells the story of Holbrooke’s career
juxtaposed to that of <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leighton_W._Smith,_Jr.">Admiral
Leighton “Snuffy” Smith</a>, who was on the ground in the
Balkans as the Clintonites rushed to war, the Admiral tells
viewers how the preening Holbrooke screamed that he and his IFOR
troops must stop the burning of Sarajevo. As the Bosnian Muslims
carried out their program of ethnically cleansing the Bosnian
capital, the Serbs set fire to their own homes before they fled,
and Holbrooke wanted it stopped. As Admiral Smith recalls:</p>
<p><i>“Holbrooke said we stood by, as they burned their houses
down. This is how they burned their houses down. They would
turn the gas on in the house, light a candle, close the
windows, and leave. Tell me how you’re gong to prevent that
from happening. How do you stop somebody from being an
arsonist in his own home? I mean, there are all kinds of way
to start a fire, and if you don’t have a way to put the fires
out, how in the living hell are you going to stop them?”</i></p>
<p>Our troops weren’t and aren’t firefighters, they’re soldiers –
and there was no IFOR fire department. After repeated requests
from IFOR, the Bosniak “fire department” was deployed, briefly,
but gave up, says Smith, as soon as “the Serbs took a couple of
shots at them.” The reality is that our Bosnian Muslim sock
puppets let the city burn: it was better for them to have the
world see Sarajevo burning, so as to evoke sympathy from the
Western community. </p>
<p>When Admiral Smith – who described the Bosnian intervention as
“the biggest damn mess in the world: absolutely, completely
unworkable” – told the Clinton administration that they had run
out of Level I targets to bomb, Holbrooke called him a liar. “If
we can’t say precisely what we think to the political people,”
said Smith to PBS, his face reddening with anger, “that give us
the orders, and say, ‘Look, this is not a good idea,’ if we
can’t tell them what it’s going to cost in terms of commitment
and time, commitment and resources, lives; if we can’t be honest
with the politicians and have them accept it as a professional
military judgment, we are in a sorry state of affairs.”</p>
<p>Holbrooke, and the Clintons, weren’t interested in anyone’s
professional military judgment: they wanted Serb blood.
Holbrooke pushed back, hard, and demanded more intrusive and
intense bombing raids. Smith told him he didn’t take orders from
either Holbrooke or his military aide, Wesley Clark, but from
NATO headquarters. Holbrooke went directly to the President, and
the rest is some pretty bloody and shameful history.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss">Flash
forward to 2010</a>: </p>
<p><i>“Figures from Thaçi’s inner circle are accused of secretly
taking captives across the border into Albania after the war,
where a few Serbs are said to have been murdered for their
kidneys, which were sold on the black market.</i>
</p>
<p><i>“Legal proceedings began in a Pristina district court today
into a case of alleged organ trafficking discovered by police
in 2008. That case – in which organs are said to have been
taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus –
is said by the report to be linked to Kosovo Liberation Army
(KLA) organ harvesting in 2000.”</i></p>
<p>This ghoulish regime is the legacy of Richard Holbrooke, and,
indeed, of the bloody “<a
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss">humanitarian</a>”
interventionists of the Clinton era, who are, today, running our
foreign policy. Kosovo is a nightmarish society in which human
vampires, aided and abetted by the US-installed-and-supported
“government,” tear out their victims’ organs and sell them on
the open market. During the US-supported war of “liberation,”
KLA units captured Serbs, spirited them across the border to
Albania, and harvested their organs, the inquiry revealed. Also
exposed: “Prime Minister” <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashim_Tha%C3%A7i">Thaci</a>
is the “boss” at the center of Europe’s vast heroin smuggling
trade. Critics of the Balkan intervention <a
href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGLL_enUS400US400&q=kla+site%3Aantiwar.com&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=">long
ago</a> identified the KLA as nothing more than a criminal
gang, yet this has never been officially acknowledged up until
now. Indeed, Carla del Ponte was <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carla_Del_Ponte#Organ_smuggling_accusations">prevented</a>
from investigating the crimes of Thaci and the KLA: the Council
of Europe’s inquiry was commissioned when she threw in the
towel. </p>
<p><a
href="http://dailyme.com/story/2010121400002864/kosovar-leader-people-lost-a-friend.html">Reacting</a>
to Holbrooke’s death, Thaci sent a telegram to the State
Department, declaring: “For citizens of Kosovo, the death of
Richard Holbrooke is a loss of a friend, of a voice that
protected the interest of the Republic of Kosovo.”
</p>
<p>If Holbrooke meets the victims of his friend Thaci in the
afterlife, he’ll have a bit of explaining to do. Where Holbrooke
is going, however, I doubt they’ll let him have many visitors.<br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/12/14/holbrookes-legacy/">http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/12/14/holbrookes-legacy/</a><br>
</p>
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