[Peace-discuss] Holbrooke’s legacy: a gangster regime in Kosovo

[C. G. Estabrook]

Holbrooke’s Legacy
A gangster regime in Kosovo
by Justin Raimondo <http://original.antiwar.com/author/justin/>, December 15, 2010

As the panegyrics to Richard Holbrooke 
<http://abcnews.go.com/Health/inside-aortic-dissection-heart-problem-killed-richard-holbrooke/story?id=12393928> 
spread over the internet like a thickening fog, the real legacy of this State 
Department apparatchik came across the news wires 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss> 
a few hours after his death:

/“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./

/“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./

/“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.”/

It was Holbrooke, one of the chief architects of the Kosovo war, who midwifed 
the KLA regime <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_Liberation_Army> in Kosovo, 
and created a gangster state. When Strobe Talbott 
<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,976015,00.html>, then acting 
Secretary of State, called him for his recommendation on the Kosovo “crisis,” 
Holbrooke replied <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/>:

/“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 vividly recall Rep. Nancy Pelosi answering critics of her support 
<http://pelosi.house.gov/pressarchives/releases/prkosovo.htm> for the war by 
uttering a single word as her bug eyes 
<http://i876.photobucket.com/albums/ab322/norseman143/nancy_pelosi.jpg> popped 
out of her head: “Genocide!”

It was all a lie, of course. There was no “genocide,” 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/biglie.html> 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? Nowhere to be found 
<http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=4136>. Where is the evidence 
of a Kosovar “holocaust”? There isn’t any, because no such event ever took place.

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 “Give War a Chance 
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/>,” which tells the 
story of Holbrooke’s career juxtaposed to that of Admiral Leighton “Snuffy” 
Smith <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leighton_W._Smith,_Jr.>, 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:

/“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?”/

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.

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.”

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.

Flash forward to 2010 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss>: 


/“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./

/“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.”/

This ghoulish regime is the legacy of Richard Holbrooke, and, indeed, of the 
bloody “humanitarian 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss>” 
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” Thaci 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashim_Tha%C3%A7i> is the “boss” at the center of 
Europe’s vast heroin smuggling trade. Critics of the Balkan intervention long 
ago 
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGLL_enUS400US400&q=kla+site%3Aantiwar.com&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=> 
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 prevented 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carla_Del_Ponte#Organ_smuggling_accusations> from 
investigating the crimes of Thaci and the KLA: the Council of Europe’s inquiry 
was commissioned when she threw in the towel.

Reacting 
<http://dailyme.com/story/2010121400002864/kosovar-leader-people-lost-a-friend.html> 
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.”

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.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/12/14/holbrookes-legacy/

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