Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice.....

The headlines stream in over the net, one more unbelievable than another. Together they read like some well-written sci-fi novel that exceeds the horrific society of 1984. I am caught like a deer in the headlights, bewildered by all the lies I have swallowed whole my entire life.

None more so than those of the irregular warfare carried out over the years by the CIA and the fabric of lies media has fed us to convince the public that black is white. Pity we don't find out till decades later of the atrocities perpetrated in the name of 'freedom' or 'democracy': double plus good newspeak.

Case in point: the 'atrocities' of Slobodan Milosevic. Even more disturbing is the new expansion of US foreign policy of 'irregular warfare'. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Death squad leader ‘was top CIA agent’

SERBIA: Gabriel Ronay
Source
THE LATE President Milosevic's secret police chief and organiser of Serb death squads during the genocidal ethnic cleansing of disintegrating Yugoslavia was the United States' top CIA agent in Belgrade, according to the independent Belgrade Radio B92.

The claim that from 1992 until the end of the decade, Jovica Stanisic, head of Serbia's murderous DB Secret Police, was regularly informing his CIA handlers of the thinking in Milosevic's inner circle has shocked the region. Stanisic is said to have loyally served his two masters for eight years. He is facing war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. advertisement In the terrifying years of Yugoslavia's internecine wars, he acted as the willing "muscle" behind Milosevic's genocidal campaigns in Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia, including Sebrenica.

According to the charges he faces, Stanisic was "part of a joint criminal enterprise that included former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian politicians". Dermot Groome, The Hague's chief prosecutor, has specifically accused him of sending in the Serb Scorpion and Red Beret death squads into the states seeking independence from Belgrade. Stanisic has pleaded not guilty.

Like in a Cold War spy thriller, Serbia's secret police chief met his CIA handlers in safe houses, parks and boats on the river Sava to betray his master's action plans. He provided, it is claimed, information on the whereabouts of Nato hostages, aided CIA operatives in their search for Muslim mass graves and helped the US set up secret bases in Bosnia to monitor the implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace accord.

This has raised awkward questions for Washington. With Stanisic providing chapter and verse of the genocidal slaughter of Croats, Bosnians and Albanians from the early 1990s, should President Clinton have cut a deal with Milosevic at Dayton, Ohio, ending the Bosnian war on such equitable terms for the Serbs? Or, using Stanisic's evidence, should the Americans not have unmasked Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, the then head of Republika Srpska, as genocidal war criminals and demanded their surrender?

From his prison cell at The Hague, Stanisic countered the charges facing him with an aide memoir portraying himself as "a person who had sought to moderate Milosevic and had done a great deal to moderate the crisis".

In an unusual move, the CIA has submitted classified documents to the court that confirm Stanisic's "undercover operative role in helping to bring peace to the region and aiding the agency's work. He helped defuse some of the most explosive actions of the Bosnian war." In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, William Lofgren, his original CIA recruiter and handler, now retired, said: "Stanisic provided valuable information from Milosevic's inner circle. But he never took money from the CIA, worked with the agency on operations or took steps that he would have considered a blatant betrayal of his boss."

Thus the judges at The Hague are having to judge a man who allegedly sent the Scorpion death squads to Srebrenica to "deal" with men and boys fleeing the UN-protected Muslim enclave, while working with the CIA trying to end Milosevic's ethnic wars. The way the CIA apparently viewed their Belgrade "asset" is revealed in an interview with Balkan Insight, a little known south-east European publication.

The emerging picture is a quaint reflection from a hall of mirrors. Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times, writing about the links between the CIA and the Serb secret police chief, is quoted as saying: "As I said in the LAT story, the CIA do not see Stanisic as a choirboy. When you talk to people who work in espionage, this is often the case.

"Because of the nature of that job, of that assignment, they are working with people who do not have unblemished records, it would be difficult for them to be effective if they only worked with people who had unblemished records.

"People in Belgrade who have been following the career of Jovica Stanisic would say that this was a guy who was an expert in his field; he was a highly-trained and highly-effective spy. His motivation may have been that he wanted to know what the United States was up to.

"He did not believe that Milosevic was taking the country in the right direction - so he wanted to influence events. He saw himself as an important guy who could pull strings behind the scenes to make things happen in Belgrade."

Stanisic apparently did so on his own terms, while trying to remain a loyal Serb. He did not succeed. Now he is having to account for his actions as Milosevic's loyal lieutenant at The Hague.

©2009 newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved

Double good doublespeak on Iran

Obama to face Iran nuclear crisis in first year, ex US official warns
Staff Writers Washington (AFP)
Jan 8, 2009
Source
Incoming US President Barack Obama will likely face a "serious crisis" over Iran's nuclear ambitions in his first year in office, former US defense secretary William Perry predicted here Thursday. Perry told a foreign policy forum here that Obama must find a new diplomatic approach to stop Iran's suspected nuclear arms quest because Israel -- which has held out the threat of military action -- will not "sit idly by."

The star-studded event sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) was dominated by calls for Obama to check the spread of nuclear know-how and to promote peace in security in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. "If Iran and North Korea cannot be contained, we are facing a real danger of a cascade of nuclear proliferation," Perry warned said. "Indeed I believe that today we are truly on the tipping point of nuclear proliferation."

Perry said North Korea's production of plutonium and nuclear test in 2006 amounted to the "most dangerous development" since the Cold War ended nearly two decades ago, but he believed it could be contained through diplomacy. In multilateral talks pursued by President George W. Bush's administration, North Korea agreed in 2007 to dismantle its weapons-grade plutonium program in exchange for aid, although the talks are stalled amid a row over verification.

But Perry was "less confident" about diplomatic efforts involving the United States -- under the outgoing administration of President George W. Bush -- Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. The multilateral talks "are going nowhere," said Perry, who was defense secretary under President Bill Clinton. "And it seems clear that Israel will not sit by idly while Iran takes defiant steps toward becoming a nuclear power," Perry said. "As a result President Obama will almost certainly face a serious crisis with Iran.

Indeed, I believe that crisis point will be reached in his first year in office," he added. He said the Iran problem needs international cooperation, which remains especially elusive as US relations with Russia are "at an all-time low" with Russian concerns over NATO expansion and US missile defense plans. However, he voiced hope that Obama could get off to a fresh start with Russia.

Perry said efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons that began after the Cold War have "stalled and even reversed," because of developments in Iran and North Korea, as well as in China, Russia, India and Pakistan. He supports Obama's stated push to abolish nuclear weapons, but said the United States needs to bolster its deterrent force over the short term. "I'm motivated ... by a strong belief that the gravest danger facing our nation today is a terror group detonating a nuclear bomb in one of our cities," Perry said.

James Schlesinger, another former US defense secretary, told a separate audience that Iran may regard the threat of a US nuclear attack as "much more likely" in light of Hillary Clinton's warning during the US presidential campaign that Washington can obliterate Tehran. Schlesinger made the remark at a Pentagon news conference after presenting a blue-ribbon panel report finding that US nuclear deterrence has slipped due to neglect in past years at high levels of the Pentagon.

Schlesinger, who served under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, said North Korea probably has come to believe it is "reasonably safe from a nuclear response" because of the US response to its development of nuclear weapons.

But asked whether Iran feared a US nuclear attack, Schlesinger said: "I think they would regard that as a much more likely development." "As you may recall in the recent democratic primaries, Mrs Clinton observed, 'We can obliterate you','" he said, Noting that Obama has chosen Clinton to be his secretary of state, he added "I don't think that remark will be forgotten in Tehran, even if it is forgotten in this country."

At the USIP forum, Zbigniew Brzezinksi, the national security adviser under president Jimmy Carter, warned against any US war with Iran because it would inflame an already troubled region from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan. "It is an issue which I would prefer not to confront, for such a war would involve the United States in a conflict that would then spanning in different degrees of intensity these four countries with a total population of approximately 300 million people," he said.