On May 16th, the CBS News 60 Minutes program aired a story that seemed deliberately designed to bolster flagging public support for NATO’s war on Yugoslavia. Introducing the story, Mike Wallace said, “If you wonder why bombers continue to reign destruction on Belgrade, the pictures that you are about to see—difficult as they are to look at—explain it better than any words can.” In other words, if you’re one of many who are doubting the wisdom of this war, hopefully some graphic film footage of alleged victims of the Serbs will convince you that President Clinton and the other NATO leaders know what they’re doing.

As we’ve noted in a previous Media Monitor, this is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Atrocity stories are used to generate support for the war effort and hatred for the enemy. This story was narrated by correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who usually appears on CNN but has a contract to do regular features for 60 Minutes. She is married to State Department spokesman James Rubin, who also appears regularly on CNN to defend the Clinton Administration war policy.

If there was any thought given to this blatant conflict of interest causing Amanpour to be more careful and objective in her report, it was not evident in the finished product. Using some home video shot by a refugee, she claimed “these graphic images are some of the strongest evidence of the terror” faced by the refugees.

But the images consisted of corpses laid out neatly in blankets and on pillows. Some of the victims appeared to have been shot in the head, but there was no evidence of who did it. It is believed that Kosovo Liberation Army terrorists sometimes shoot some of their own dead comrades in the heads and dress them up as civilians to make firefights with Serb forces look like massacres.

Amanpour asked the film maker if the dead were KLA and he replied certainly not. This was the extent of her attempt to independently investigate the circumstances surrounding the shooting. She did claim to have tracked down a “critical witness” to the alleged massacre, who said he had seen 156 people executed and that he had helped bury their bodies after Serb police had left the area. But there was no way to verify his claims. Interestingly, however, his testimony undermined some of NATO’s previous claims. NATO had been insisting that these graves were the work of the Serbs forcing Albanians into “grave-digging chain gangs.”

Amanpour then turned to a State Department official, David Scheffer, who produced a surveillance photo of the alleged graves. But this was an old photo. It surfaced a month ago when NATO claimed evidence of graves near a village in Kosovo. It produced a “before” and “after” photo, showing how the earth had been disturbed. At that time, Serb TV interviewed a farmer who said the photos showed his field after he had been working the soil. Also at that time, NATO claimed there was evidence of 43 grave sites. Now, Amanpour’s “witness” was claiming 156 dead. he story is getting bigger and bigger. And we’ll have more on this in our next broadcast.

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