I have been watching the NATO press conferences the past few days and I it has been dêjâ vu. David Wilby and Jamie Shea replace Conroy (BATF) and Ricks (FBI), but the scenario, contradictions and deception haven’t changed a bit. Let’s look at how these charades unfold.

The press conferences begin with monologues by both Shea and Wilby. Basically, they attempt to explain away questions before they are asked. Shea, for example, mentioned the "forced expulsion" of the Albanians from Kosovo. Later, "We are also concerned by reports we have heard today that the Serb forces have tried to force people back in to Kosovo, as it were, by preventing them from departing. Now, we don’t have much evidence of this. We are still checking it out. But, if it were to be true, it would be very alarming, indeed! Because, it is one thing to force refugees over borders when the international community is now increasingly ready to deal with them in an humane way. But, it’s quite another thing to push them back into a wasteland where there is no food, very little water, no medical supplies..." I wonder why the supplies, food and water cannot be gotten to Kosovo. Perhaps, the destruction of the transportation infrastructure has something to do with it, but more about that, later.

Wilby, while discussing the "surgical precision" of the attacks, concludes with, "We will continue to maintain this unremitting campaign using the same ruthless [merciless, cruel, savage, pitiless, ferocious, barbarous, hard-hearted, harsh, uncompassionate] efficiency." Well, he said it – I didn’t!

Wilby was discussing the effectiveness of the campaign against military forces. A little background -–Wilby, on numerous past occasions, had indicated that evidence and intelligence reports provide proof that the morale of the Siberian soldiers is down. Now, "I have said, on several occasions, that we are up against a cunning opponent with a very comprehensive intelligence gathering network. Well, we, too, have very sophisticated ways of gathering our intelligence. I have also, this week, said that if I was on the Serbian side now, when I saw the sort of targets ... being struck, being hit, being degraded, being destructed [sic] with relative impunity, then I would be very disheartened [demoralized]." It does make you wonder who has the more sophisticated intelligence gathering network, doesn’t it?

Now, Shea, who has maintained that the three Americans that were ‘arrested’ by the Serbs, are not prisoners of war. In discussing the possibility of their release, "I don’t think that there is anything in international humanitarian law, er, international law, ahh, particularly not in the Geneva Conventions, on conditionality [sic] when it comes to releasing soldiers who are taken from a foreign territory, who were involved in a peacekeeping operation [But, wasn’t their mission over three weeks prior to their being captured?] and who were not, in any way, guilty of any crimes."

Back to the refugee situation. Shea, again, "Those refugees will go back [to Kosovo], and they will go back quickly. But, this measure [the sealing of the border] has helped, or is helping, take enormous pressure off of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia."

So, we go from chastising Milosevic for blocking the border – to just short of praising him for relieving Macedonia of the problems created by the influx of refugees.

Speaking of the refugees, it seems that the NATO forces, with monitors at all of the checkpoints, have misplaced some, or all of 30,000 refugees. Nobody seems quite sure where they are. There have, however, been some interviews of both observers and refugees who have gotten caught up in this "startling event". One of the refugees told of how they were herded on to buses, without an opportunity to retrieve their possessions. Some were separated from family that they had spent days bringing back together. They weren’t told where they were going, and were given NO choice of destination, or even whether they wanted to go, or not. This was pretty much confirmed by the observer. The observer went on to state that people were told to board buses, in no uncertain terms, and then transported to airfields and forced on to planes to be removed to ‘receiving countries’. Many protested leaving, probably knowing they would never see home, friends and, perhaps, family, again. Boy, how humanitarian can you get?

Back to the infrastructure destruction. The infrastructure destruction, says Shea, is not to pressure Milosevic, rather to remove the means of transporting military supplies, such as fuel. The Novi Sad bridge was destroyed, apparently, with this purpose in mind. But, by the time the bridge was destroyed, the storage facilities and oil refinery had already been "precisely’ destroyed. This leaves an obvious, but un-admitted conclusion.