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Javier Solana, NATO Secretary slinked out to a Jamie Shea prepared podium and audience, to began his phoney apology, featuring the excuse of why three missiles blasted the heck out of the People's Republic of China embassy in Belgrade as, a " targetting mistake ". He bleated mournfully, " NATO never has or never will intentionally target civilians ". Wait a second man, the five editors and the make-up girl killed in the brutal attack on a Belgrade television studio was never claimed to have been accidental? Oh , I know what it is. This must be one of those " civilian related targets ", Javier Solana was droning on about. Why do all the photographs show whole residential neighborhoods leveled and high-rise building all blacked and with holes blasted through them? In Solana's litany, in kept beating the same old dead horse ( lie ) and the bombing being to " insure that Kosovars can return to their homes ". He finished his prepared statement with the most comment ( if it would have been Bill Clinton, he would have bitten his lip right at this moment ), " NATO will attempt to support all diplomatic measures ". Okay, okay, okay; I get it now. ' diplomatic measures ' means ' cruise missiles and smart bombs ', in Javier Solana's native language? Javier thought he was basking, but he was wrong.
Solana was cavalier enough to take a couple of questions; I guess he understands his fifteen minutes of fame are almost over. " The attacks will continue ", he ranted, " to guarantee the displaced people can return ". I would have asked, ' return to what '? Rubble? Some journalist mentioned the hotel NATO so gleefully declared gutted and Solana replied that it was actually, " the headquarters of Arkan, the tigers ", they are " murders " and " killers ". He continued to go for the media sound bite score of points by incresing the limited supply of feeling he had left to put into his voice, " He is a publically indicted war criminal ". Hey he isn't wrong about that, but it was just the shark-like way he went for the gusto, when he smelled Serbian blood in the water. He got his though, as a Chinese journalist was recognized. He offered that two of his friends were killed in the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade earlier the previous night, he asked Solana if he was aware that " the attack on the embassy is an act of war " against China? Solana was visibly now done with the question period and escaped with his tail between his legs off the stage.
Major General Walter Jertz, Luftwaffe...eh, Federal German Airforce...eh, NATO butcher-bomber spokesperson, declared with the utmost, ' I really was Werner Moelders in a past life ', German arrogance, " NATO only attacks military targets and yesterday was no exception ". Now come on man, hearing that kind of blatant lie, out of a German military officer, is like hearing a White House Cabinet member say he or she doesn't believe the latest falsehood that happened to leave Bill Clinton's lips. Okay, so the guy did finally whine in that ' Hermann Goering pass the pills and where's my dress ' kind of high pitched boot lick, " The attack on the Chinese Embassy was a mistake, a grave error ". Isn't that what von Ribbontrout ( sic ) meant to tell Molotov in 1940? Yeah, yeah, yeah ( no, not hey, hey, hey ), you could really tell that Bill Clinton had been hanging around the NATO building in Brussells lately, or what? Whaaalter Jerks used a rather well worn, old Clinton-line next. And like he really whined this one; you know the kind of whine, like he has Heidi and Helga waiting in the wings and he already took the Viagra, " We will make sure something like this never happens again ". Is it my faulty memory ( or my vivid imagination ), or didn't Clinton say that very thing; practice over and over again, how to say that thing perfectly ( or atleast to Harry Thomasson's { sic } satisfaction ), over Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewater, Campaign Finanace Abuses, Sexual Perversion in the White House and most recently over the theft and/or sale of nuclear secrets to the People's Republic of China?
So, like getting a fortune out of a fortune cookie that was printed in a language you don't understand, Jertz continued the hit parade of the latest Yugoslavian civilian targets destroyed by the highly accurate precision guided munitions of the NATO aircraft. Amidst whimpering admissions like, " NATO regrets loss of life " ( don't you just love it when foreigners speak English poorly? ), Jertz described a NATO cluster bomb intended for the airfield at Nis, hit a residential district instead. The graphics didn't do the damage justice, but use your imagination on what a bunch of bomblets designed to shred aircraft and hangars do to people, plaster buildings and parked cars.
I mean it only gets better. Jerkz was getting absolutely gleeful as he unfurled the map of destroyed Yugoslavian targets from the cowardly attacks of the previous night. I was surprised to see that ' Embassy of People's Republic of China ' didn't have a red mark and label. But the " Hotel Yugoslavia " was clearly marked as destroyed. Wait a minute folks, hasn't the Hotel Yugoslavia now become the old " Hotel California " for real? I got it, you get cruise missiles and smart bombs for continental breakfast ( gosh, I would hate to see what you get for a real meal ). He glibbly said, " All of our aircraft returned home safely ".
Now that Clinton had given him the advice to always end his presentation with a strong denial or a distracting tear-jerker; knowing that the strong denial just wouldn't cut it in this case, Jertz decided on a tear-jerker. He then showed some photographs of refugees and began a short litany of sickeningly sweet liberal blame shifting, which would have been very familiar to anyone who read the White House talking points fax from two weeks ago yesterday ( maybe that one was still in the head of Airforce One? ), mentioning " ethnic cleansing " but conceding " every mistake is unacceptable ".
The audience of journalists sensed that Jertz was beginning to become visibly transparent, as he danced to answer, yet not answer, the questions, that coincidentally were all about the embassy bombing or cluster bombing of the residential district near Nis ( and not about the spectacular paint schemes of the Luftwaffe's Phantoms ). He tried to puff out his chest, but there were too many medals for it to go too far, as he bellowed, " There was an error in our process that caused the mistake ". He pulled back a bit, adding, " So far, the whole process is under review ". Oh man, are we really sure that Clinton doesn't had telepathetic ( sic ) contact with some of his minions? Look, Jertz was just having a hard time admitting that NATO bombed the heck out of their target building in downtown Belgrade ( you know, the buildings all begin to look the same after they have been reduced to rubble ), but that building was the Red Chines embassy. Jertz called it the " Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement ", that NATO was actually going after, but a journalist pointed out there was no such building on any of the many maps he had checked. Jertz insisted that NATO was going after this Directorate that " was in this building, that is why we hit this target, not because it was the Chinese Embassy ". The journalist pressed and asked if NATO was " using an out of date map ?" Jertz replied, shifting from smug mode to a false sincerity, " We going through research on each target ", there is " no evidence of old maps or wrong maps ".
These journalists actually started giving Jertz a bad time for a change, maybe they are finally coming to their senses, with questions on the civilian casualities at Nis. He identified the munition used but little else, replying in his ' I am reading this straight out of the manual ', " we were using cluster bombs on Nis ". The German actually started bleating like a sheep, " We have to be honest and credible ". Before Jamie Shea could stop him, he replied to a question of, why was NATO targetting these seemingly purely civilian locations, with, " We bomb them because they belong to the command structure ". Great, to NATO ( or Clinton ) a Serbian house with a telephone in it, is worth killing the innocent civilian family who lives there, to sever the connection?
Seeing that the media was starting to feed off of Jertz's ineptitude, Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman, tried to rally his position with Clinton-like doublespeak. He apologized, " Yes, we did make a bad mistake ". But he quickly started to rationalize and make excuses ( don't you hate it when they try to rationalize their actions and then call it an apology? ), using phrases like " high value targets " and " Hotel Yugoslavia " in the same sentence. He repeated, I guess he thought he had to, " We are after accurately, those military targets ", and finished on his imaginary knees with, " NATO made one very bad mistake ".
Oh man, China Center Television really let Bill Clinton and NATO have it with, " The US-led NATO has wantonly bombing Yugoslavia for forty days ". Kinda' makes you hungry, doesn't it? I liked this one, " NATO's barbarian attack is a gross violation of the United Nations charter ". They showed some great footage of students protesting outside the U.S. embassy in Shanghai who " demanded a full apology and a full account ". You know, the Chinese look very different than generic arabs marching, they seem to always be in neat rows and holding their banners very straight. The pictures then switched Hong Kong, where they marched against NATO and the bombing of the Chinese embassy. People were " shocked and angry " but " sad about the deaths of three Chinese people there ".
The Chinese CPPCC summed up this illegal Clinton/Gore/NATO undeclared non-war as, " The war in the Balkans is the worst disaster since World War II ".
- Bongo ( Where's my fortune cookie? )
