No, THIS is what meddling in elections looks like

What began as isolated cases of Putin Derangement Syndrome years ago morphed into full-blown hysteria in 2016, when the Clinton campaign and its media enablers latched onto the accusations of "Russian hacking" to explain the humiliating disclosure of their plots and operations via internal emails from the DNC and John Podesta's private Gmail account.

On Friday, January 6, the Director of National Intelligence published a "report" basically asserting the Clintonites were right, and that Putin Himself ordered "interference" in US elections through, um... RT? The lion's share of this amateurish collection of "we assess" and "we believe" was devoted to RT, inexplicably relying on a primer produced in 2012 (so, there goes the argument the current conflict is due to 2014 "Russian aggression" in Ukraine...). The report, however, does say that "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries"  - meaning that the Clintonites lied when they said the purloined emails were being tampered with.

My assessment is that talk of "Russian hacking" is a desperate ploy to argue that Trump's victory was somehow the fault of malicious external forces, rather than Clintonite detachment from reality, logic and the American people. To borrow the Bard's description: A tale told by snarky idiots, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.

Now if you want to hear a story of how a country's democracy was actually meddled with... stay awhile and listen.

"Vote or Suffer"

I have already written about some incongruities in the campaign preceding the Bosnian general elections, scheduled for next weekend, but there is one thing I left out, as it deserved a post of its own.

Local TV stations aired two ads in the third and fourth week of September, produced by USAID - the Empire's "Agency for International Development." Both had the punchline "Vote or Suffer" (Glasaj ili trpi). 

Still from the USAID propaganda video - "Vote or Suffer"

The first ad (watch on YouTube) blames the Bosnian authorities for failing to help the victims of May and August floods (!). On the same day it aired, the Imperial embassy website published a blog post co-authored by the military attache and the USAID head of mission, which accused the Bosnian authorities of embezzling the flood aid funds!

Both the Serb Republic and Federation authorities responded right away that the Empire was flat-out lying: they couldn't have embezzled anything, as not a penny of the promised flood aid from the US and the EU had actually arrived. But the Imperial officials refused to retract their claims. A few days later, another ad appeared, this time criticizing the economic situation (watch on YouTube).

There is no question that Bosnia is in a dire economic predicament, but a great deal of blame for that lies in the absurd legislation the locals outright copied from the US and the EU, under constant pressure from Washington and Brussels. One example is a 2009 law on "animal rights" which turned the Sarajevo Canton into a free range for feral dogs.

Let's also remember that US and EU officials supported the "demonstrators" with supposedly economic and democratic grievances, who earlier this year torched government offices in Sarajevo, Zenica and Tuzla, Maidan-style.

Lest you think this is someone impersonating USAID on YouTube, you can see both videos featured on the agency's official website. The claim by the agency head and Embassy officials that this is purely a "get out the vote" campaign is absurd. The ads very specifically urge the voters to elect a different government - presumably one more willing to obey orders from Washington. More to the point, USAID is engaging in behavior that would be blatantly illegal in America itself. Imagine a foreign agency running TV ads urging Americans to "vote or suffer"!

This is but the latest in a series of attempts by the Empire to influence the outcome of Bosnian elections. Imperial officials have turned a blind eye to jihadist activity (even when directed against the US!) in Bosnia for years, backed the rioters who torched government offices in February, sent in additional troops as a way of signaling support to those they back and threaten those they oppose, and outright "midwifed" the opposition coalition in the Serb Republic, recycling a name of a previous creation in the process. Thanks to genuine activists on the ground, their interference has been documented and brought to light.

Keep that in mind when Empire's stooges begin crying foul, after they lose at the polls.

Trains to Nowhere

From AP:

They were seen as a shining example of Bosnia's rebirth from war: a fleet of high-speed trains built-to-order in the West. Eight years later, they haven't made a single ride.

The reason: They're just too fast for Bosnia's 60-year-old rails.

"It's as if you bought nine Ferraris and ... no roads to drive them on," said Samir Kadric, an official with the publicly-owned railway company that bought the trains.

Predictably, AP's Aida Cerkez prefers to insinuate the problem lies with Bosnia's division between the Serb ("dominated") Republic and the Muslim-Croat ("shared") Federation. And the article blames the "Bosnian-Croat railway company" (presumably Željeznice Herceg-Bosne, ŽHB) for the $90 million train flop.

Here's the thing, though: the train deal was supposedly made in 2005 (see "eight years later" above), but if Wikipedia is to be believed, ŽHB had merged with the Muslim-run BHŽ into the ŽFBH (i.e. Federation Railways) in 2001 - four years prior to the boondoggle.

I, for one, don't believe for a second that this was a product of simple stupidity. Remember, "Bosnia’s politicians have taken rent-seeking to the level of a dark art, systematically siphoning profits from public utilities and corporations to line party and personal pockets." (from Reality Bites Back) Someone made out like a bandit on this "deal", and - judging by the know-nothing attitude of people interviewed by AP - with impunity.

Perhaps the fact that the railroad execs intend to recoup the money by leasing the trains to Turkey might give us a clue as to who.

Character Assassination, Part 2

Back in 2009, I first took notice of the "Srebrenica Genocide Blog," and later outed it as the outfit behind the propaganda project called "Palluxo." They responded with a vicious campaign of character assassination, using link farms and fake feeds to Google-bomb my name.

Their favorite "official academic", Marko Attilla Hoare chimed in, mocking me as a "romantic nationalist" (thank you for the compliment! - and no, I won't link to his blog, either). On his own blog, Hoare says that "some or all" of the labels used to describe him: "neoconservative, Trotskyite and Croat nationalist and a supporter of Islamism and Western imperialism", depending on definition, "may be accurate."
[edited for clarity: the labels are invoked by Hoare to describe himself, not me]

In March 2010, they tried again, declaring an essay I had written here to be an incendiary comment I'd left on SGB (as if!). I documented the lie.

Last year, the Congress of North American Bosniaks and something calling itself "Institute for Genocide Research" lobbied in Ottawa to get a Canadian parliamentary resolution recognizing the "Srebrenica genocide." I wrote against such a foolish decision, but it ended up passing on the sly in September. In December, the "Institute" re-published a libelous attack against Major-General (ret.) Lewis MacKenzie, accusing him of raping Muslim women during the war in Bosnia. And just last week, they launched an effort to prevent Srdja Trifkovic from speaking at UBC in Vancouver (British Columbia). For more about that sordid affair, I recommend the essay by Ambassador James Bissett, over at the Lord Byron Foundation.

Today, I got word that TV1, a TV station in Bosnia, ran a "news report" about my alleged "genocide denial" right after the headline news on the crisis in Libya. They used my clips from RT interviews, and images of my articles, but their accusations against me were taken straight from Hoare and the SGB. That leaves no doubt in my mind who was behind this character assassination. (TV1 is a relatively new station; set up last year by "Sanela Diane Jenkins" of the Ganic affair fame.)

Now, if it were just another attempt to libel and slander me, I'd be perfectly happy to denounce it here and expose its authors as liars and scoundrels. America still legally guarantees freedom of speech, and we're on equal footing here. However, the attackers were merely using me to get at my family, which still lives in Bosnia. My mother is an official of the Social Democratic Party, and currently chairs the parliament of Canton Sarajevo. It is the SDP, and my mother, that are the real targets of this smearbund.

Let me repeat here: They went after my family.

Think about this for a second. Even if my mother and I share the same politics (which we do not), how would she be responsible in the slightest for what I think or do, having lived nearly half my life halfway across the world? What sort of Dark Age values motivate TV1, that they impugn my mother's politics because of what a grown son of hers thinks or does?

They went after my family.

They didn't go after me, on the (still, relatively) level and fair playing field of the USA, where free speech is still in the Constitution and there are still certain rules of conduct and debate. They ran a hit piece on me on a TV channel in Bosnia, without ever calling for comment, without offering me any recourse or opportunity for rebuttal. If they take issue with things I've said or done, they ought to take that up with me. Instead, they went after my family.

Particularly disgusting is the fact that this is part of an intra-Muslim political conflict, between the SDP (whose membership is mostly Muslim) and former governing Muslim parties, or those that aspire to govern but - unlike the SDP - never got enough of those pesky votes in those pesky democratic elections. Yet who is the target of the anti-SDP campaign? An ethnic Serb.

Well, my American readers, this is the kind of Bosnia your government created and has nurtured for the past 15 years. This is the kind of "freedom of speech" that exists there, the kind of "tolerance" and "multiethnicity" and "democracy." I hope you're proud of it.

As for the smearbund, I have a simple message:

You went after my family. I will end you.

Kosovo Death Toll: Grossly Inflated

Many times over the past eight years have I been asked about the actual number of people killed in Kosovo during the NATO campaign of helping the terrorist KLA's separatist agenda. Back in 1999, U.S. officials bandied about numbers exceeding 100,000 and when pressed to provide evidence gleefully repeated rumors of Serb crematoria and corpse-choked mines.

After NATO occupation forces entered the province in June, however, the alleged genocide proved ephemeral. Just over 2,000 bodies were found, belonging to Albanians as well as Serbs, Roma, and others who lived in Kosovo, killed by NATO bombs, KLA terrorism, and yes, Yugoslav police and military. The total number of bodies found was 2,788, including both Serbs and Albanians (several mass graves were in fact those of Serbs massacred by the KLA). The International Red Cross is listing another 2,047 persons as still missing, "including approximately 500 Serbs, 1,300 Albanians and 200 members of other ethnic groups."

This is a far cry from "an estimated 10,000 people, mostly ethnic Albanians," which is used in every report about the occupied province, including and especially those dealing with the constant KLA terror against the remaining Serbs and other non-Albanians. The repetition is meant to provide a justification for NATO intervention, but it also tends to bolster the bogus case for independence claimed by the Albanian separatists. Little wonder, then, that all the mainstream media keep repeating the 10,000 mantra.

Last week, however, a U.S.-based intelligence publication Defense & Foreign Affairs, analyzed the Kosovo death toll fraud, and showed conclusively that the figure of 10,000 Albanians has been a fabrication all along.

Every man, woman and child the U.S. forces kill in Iraq is transformed into an "insurgent" by the magic of propaganda. That same propaganda turned every KLA terrorist the Yugoslav forces killed - in battles raging for a year before NATO bombers took the KLA side - into an innocent civilian, then multiplied that number by three, five, ten, a hundred. The same thing was done in Bosnia.

In both cases, numbers are meant to override reality. Iraqi body counts are supposed to provide a metric of "progress", covering up the reality of failure. In Bosnia, and later in Kosovo, numbers were meant to provoke outrage, anger and shock, blocking out rational thought and providing cover for aggression, occupation, and support of unsavory client regimes. The greater the deception, the bigger lie it required. Under the umbrella of those lies, the "democratic" authorities in Croatia accomplished what their Nazi predecessors could not, ethnically cleansing most Serbs; Alija Izetbegovic achieved his dream of forcing the Muslims of Bosnia back into Islam, this time of the Saudi variety; and the Albanians of Kosovo have at least temporarily restored the "Greater Albania"of WW2, and set upon eradicating every trace of Serb presence in the land.

Trouble is, what would have been possible a century or half a century ago - because who could find out the truth, safely locked away in classified archives? - is not so possible now. The lies are getting exposed after a few short years. Sure, a lot of the damage has already been done, and not all of it can be reversed. But the time between the lie and its exposure has shortened exponentially. And once exposed, it is just a matter of time and willpower before the edifice built on the lies is torn down. And maybe next time - for, given the human worship of violence, there will be a next time - lies won't be so easily believed in the first place.

Tom Friedman and Imperial Hypocrisy

I've considered Thomas Friedman scum since way back in the spring of 1999, when he was baying for Serbian blood as NATO bombers pounded Belgrade and KLA set Kosovo on fire. Nothing he has written since has made me change my mind.

But after the relentless repetition of the "NATO took control of Kosovo to stop evil Serbs from slaughtering innocent Albanians" lie by just about every print and broadcast medium in the US for the past six years, I thought no one remembered Friedman's bloodlust anymore. Turns out I was mistaken. Someone named Drew Hamre wrote an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune this Saturday, attacking Friedman for demonizing the Sunnis of Iraq (see text here); to underline the sheer hypocrisy of Friedman calling the Sunnis terrorists and murderers, Hamre used the following examples:

"Friedman has urged terror bombing to force regime change in Serbia ("Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does," April 6, 1999)... Friedman has advocated bombing electrical grids, knowing full well the mortal damage that results when refrigerators and filtration pumps die ("It should be lights out in Belgrade," April 23, 1999)... Friedman has previously argued for war on a people, not just its government ("Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation").

All of this is in the context of Friedman's comments on Iraq, which have run in the same vein. "He appears intent on caricaturing a people, and then demonizing them," Hamre says, describing 9perhaps unwittingly) the US media coverage of the Balkans - and Iraq - over the past 15 years.

Of course, the advocates of Empire - be they social-democratic "liberals" or national-socialist "conservatives" - will at this point argue that there is nothing hypocritical about Friedman's rants against either Serbs or Sunnis. They are, after all, evil, and Americans who bomb them are good; "everyone knows" that. But what makes one good or evil, if not their deeds? If something is considered a heinous crime when attributed to Serbs, should it not be considered a crime when perpetrated by Americans? Quod liced Iovi non licet bovi is such a Roman sentiment. If the Imperialists are saying they are to the rest of the world as gods unto cattle, then we are indeed cattle for not shoving that opinion down their arrogant gullets, so they may choke on it.

Someone has already done something like that for Friedman; earlier this year, Matt Taibbi penned a superb takedown of the pompous blowhard, worth referencing every time some ignorant idiot in your environs mentions that columnist as worthy of anything but contempt:

"Friedman is... a genius of literary incompetence... It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of writer the Imperialists consider a "sage." Says a lot about them, doesn't it?