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Wednesday, June 21, 2006

TRNOPOLJE & OMARSKA - 2 EXAMPLES OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP LIE

There has been a certain amount of comment on my previous item REPORTING ON PALESTINIAN DEATHS as to whether the fact that all our media have claimed the existence of concentration camps in Bosnia as in itself proof that it is true & that those who dispute the our media such as" The articles published in The Emperors Clothes...which deny this... 'are mendacious trash" (to quote an Anonymous who declines to deny being Mr Norman Fraser*)

TRNOPOLJE
This is the photo used by the Guardian, ITN etc etc to prove that the Trnopolje camp was a concentration camp. Penny Marshall & other journalists gave evidence in the ITN-LM libel case in connection with LM Magazines' article showing it was faked. As a result the judge said that LM's claims were "essentially true" but advised the jury to find against them because they had not put sufficient emphasis to the possibility that ITN had done this faking "accidentally".

The manner in which this faking was done was firstly by filming not OF people within barbed wire but FROM within a barbed wire enclosure & secondly by concentrating the filming on Fikret Alic with out mentioning that his starved look was not in any way because of starvation but because he was suffering from TB.

Whether or not this was accidental I couldn't say however if it was this produces greater problems for ITN. This film turned out to be the most important story ever broken by ITN. ITN sold it round the world & never noticed it was being used to "prove" the existence of a concentration camp.For many years up until the present it has been presented by ITN as true, even the court's finding of accidental fakery, was accidentally not noticed by them. Penny Marshall's ITN career, still at ITN, has not been harmed by this accident. The difference between accident & intentional act is that you can never, by definition, say it won't happen again. This means that, since 1992, ITN have never been honestly been able to claim that any news item has not been faked accidentally. When they claim Bliar "honestly" believed the WMD lie they may accidentally lying. When the news ends with the funny animal story about an amorous hamster we do not know whether ITN staff have accidentally been using a vibrator on it.

However it is not merely that these liars have faked these pictures to create one concentration camp.

OMARSKA This, on the other hand is a photo of the Omarska concentration camp, an entirely different place, if you believe in the integrity of the Guardian, ITN & the western media generally.

Finally, while it is undoubtedly the case that the claims that these photos represent separate places & were not faked concentration camps, is an example of the very highest pinnacle of honesty of which these "news" institutions are capable, then or now The claims by Emperor's Clothes that no concentration camps existed (that these were refugee camps - an entirely different thing) is of an entirely different order of accuracy.

Also, accidentally, censored by our media. This article by Counterpunch which goes into some detail about the real & undenied but censored Srebrenica Massacre of thousands of Serb civilians also mentions what The Moslem Nazi leader said about the concentration camp story.
On his death bed, he readily admitted as much to his ardent admirer Bernard Kouchner, in the presence of U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Kouchner reminded Izetbegovic of a conversation he had had with French President Mitterrand in which he "spoke of the existence of 'extermination camps' in Bosnia."

You repeated that in front of the journalists. That provoked considerable emotion throughout the world. [...] They were horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated. Did you know that?

Yes. I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings. I saw the reaction of the French and the others-I was mistaken. [...] Yes, I tried, but the assertion was false. There were no extermination camps whatever the horror of those places. (2)
..........
2. Bernard Kouchner, "Les Guerriers de la Paix", Grasset, Paris, 2004, pp. 372-375.

Bernard Kouchner whose history as a pro-Nazi apparatchik closely parallels that of Paddy Ashdown & is thus not going to be lying against the Nazi cause.

So there it is - yet again the very highest standard of honesty of our media is proven to be noting but racist genocidal, allegedly accidental Nazi lies.

PS *Norman Fraser, longtime readers will know, is the guy who produced a lying document about how I had written letters to newspapers, using the party's, name to put forward "illiberal" policies like wealth creation, freedom & opposing genocide which lead to my expulsion from the party. He is still actively undermining liberalism in the name of liberalism

PPS The BBC have given no reply to my reply to their request that I be more specific in my accusation that they bbc-wont-deny-being-genocidal-nazi-liars I replied citing the Dragodan Massacre, carried out under UK government authority, of at least 210 civilians. Just to remind them that I am srill here.

Comments:
The One Big Lie: The Denial Of Ethnic Cleansing

The really big lie is to try to pass these Serbian camps off as ‘refugee camps’. There is far too much evidence for that.

The camps we are discussing were in the Opstina (district) of Prijedor, a strategically important area in north-western Bosnia, forming a corridor between Serb-held lands in Croatia and Serbia itself. From late April to mid-July 1992 this area was ‘ethnically cleansed’, a Serb term, of its non-Serb population. The towns and villages of the region were systematically swept by the Yugoslav Army (JNA) and Serb paramilitaries. Non-Serb houses and villages were destroyed. Some inhabitants were killed on the spot but most were forced to flee. The camps of Trnopolje, Omarska and Keraterm were set up to house the refugees.

Conditions in all the camps were poor but the camps had different and complementary functions. The camp at Trnopolje was primarily a detention camp for women, children and old men. Most of its inmates would simply be expelled from the area. However, when the ITN crew visited it in August 1992 it had just been sent a consignment of detainees from Keraterm, including Fikret Alic whose condition spoke of a starvation diet and a series of beatings, not childhood illness. Beatings, killings and rapes took place in Trnopolje but it was in Keraterm and Omarska that a really brutal regime prevailed. It appears that ‘eliticide’ was practiced at Omarska where non-Serbs prominent in political, business or intellectual circles were imprisoned and systematically degraded, beaten and murdered. Omarska has the most complete records and it has been estimated that from 4,000 to 5,000 prisoners were killed there. The camps acted as a mechanism to eliminate some and terrorise the remainder into leaving the region. In that they were successful. The non-Serb population of the Prijedor district went from 50,000 in 1992 to 3,000 in 1995.

The strategy and practice of ethnic cleansing is examined in Ch 5 of James Gow, The Serbian Project and Its Adversaries, London, 2003. For witness evidence of ethnic cleansing see Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide, London and Brisbane, 1993, especially pages 90 to 101 for Omarska. Finally, for net references on ethnic cleansing and the operation of the camps see the ICTY summary of the judgement on Dr Momir Stakic at

http://www.un.org/icty/stakic/trialc/judgement/sta-sum030731e.htm

and for more detail and references, the judgement at

http://www.un.org/icty/stakic/trialc/judgement/index.htm .
 
Once again assertion but no actual evidence. Even the assertions are self-contradictory.

That refugees were created on both sides is not denied & while people who have seen friends murdered by Moslems undoubtedly mistreated Moslems this is not the same as an organised "ethnic cleansing" (an English language term). In fact Miloseveic found & produced in court a document carelessly presented by the Izetbegovic's Nazi regime written before the start of the war declaring their determination to explel non-Moslems thus it was not the Serbs, not even non-governemnt Serbs who started this but your Bosnian nazi friends. Obviously had the authorities desired to permanently remove Moslems they would not have set up refugee camps nearby but encouraged them to leave either for Nazi territory or indeed for Serbia proper, the controller of ethnic cleansing in your warped view, as nearly 100,000 did.

While accepting that your claim that to call these camps "refugee camps" is a "Lie" represents your normal standard of honesty Norman the fact that you also say they were "were set up to house the refugees" shows not only that you are a liar but a stupid liar.

To describe Fikret's condition as a "childhood disease" is rubbish. TB is not always a childhood disease & obviously not in his case.

You then say that his emaciated condition is due to "a series of beatings". In this particular case you have amply demonstrated the capacity for bureaucratic obedience in the face of facts which has earned you a minor place in the SLD & would berhaps have earned you a slightly higher one in Orwell's 1984 or Nazi Germany. One of the characteristics of ""serial beating is bruising, Since Fikret is not wearing a shirt it is obvious he isn't bruised. That you can write this while looking at 2 pictures (admitedly only one of which is officialy the other being, in your Orwellian universe of somebody completely different at another camp) shows how deep your authoritarian racism goes.

Finally relying on Gutman as a winess to anything is unwise. Journalist Joan Philips (LM May 1993) has proven that Gutman had not been to the camps when he wrote those lurid & emotive tales. He deliberately fabricated the story & for this naturaly got a Pullitzer. Perhaps you could apply for one also.
 
Re Fikret Alic. He was hit and kicked in the mouth thus:

COUNT:

30.3. a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY, torture, recognised by Article 5(f) of the Statute.

31. Between 14 June and 5 August 1992, Zoran ZIGIC took out Fikret ALIC and several other detainees. ZIGIC then beat Fikret ALIC by hitting him with a pistol and by kicking him in the mouth, knocking out four of his teeth. Zoran ZIGIC thereby committed:

at http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/sik-ii950721e.htm
 
You may be aware that in the case of the very first person, Dusan Tadic, "tried" for murder by the ICTY the alleged victim walked into court to testify for the defence. It turned out the witness who alleged Tadic had murdered his father had been coached by the Bosnian Nazi government. For his innocence he was sentenced to 20 years.

This proves that the "court" is irredemably corrupt & willingly accepts evidence from sources known to be engaged in fabrication.

If you have some actual "evidence" from some impartial source of the "severe beatings" you maintain are so invisibly obvious then present it. If not either apolgise or you are clearly a Nazi liar whose preseence brings the Scot Lib Dems into disrepute.

PS I note that you have neither disputed that the document Milosevic presented proves it was your Molslem Nazi allies who started the ethnic cleansing nor suggested that there was anything wrong with them doing so. After all to racists like you Serbs are merely Untermensch.
 
Well, you are a pair of charmers indeed. So, one at a time…

Mr Craig Apart from having a very restricted understanding of what counts as ‘fact and ‘evidence’ (you seem to rule out anything you don’t like), you would appear to have censored much of my last post which in part read thus:

’Plenty of evidence Mr Craig, properly referenced, as understood by any properly trained scholar. I suspect you have not read the Gow book, rather a tall order overnight at 322 pages. As to a refutation of Gutman, you clearly have not read him either because 'A Witness to Genocide' is a series of interviews with refugees. At no point does he say he has been to the camps…

So we are back with your failure to read the material raised, never mind evaluate the argument. But, of course, this is your stock in trade: blather, faith and denial’.


Now why did you censor that I wonder? Was it because it makes it clear that you are not a master of your own material? You are surely not worried about a little ad hominem argument since you are so keen on them yourself?

Anyway, back to Tagic. You really should give a reference to your quotes because that allows me to check your sources. I’ve made mine clear to you but maybe you’re a wee bit worried about yours. A little rooting around produces the press release of the Tajic judgement which makes it clear at

http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/p190-e.htm

that Tajic was originally found guilty on only 9 out of 31 counts and, at paragraph 3, that the statement of one witness was withdrawn and the charges he made were consequently dropped. Was this your man? It seems to demonstrate the fairness of the trial if it is.

I find this evidence so much more compelling than yours because it has gone through a judicial process which permits cross-examination and produces an official record which can be checked and evaluated. So many of your assertions are not referenced and so cannot be checked easily. Then I’ve got to scour around to find your original source that usually permits me to prove that the information is propaganda or quoted out of context (like virtually every bit of ‘evidence’ in the Emperor’s Clothes articles).

As to your reference above, ‘ 2. Bernard Kouchner, "Les Guerriers de la Paix", Grasset, Paris, 2004, pp. 372-375.’, you haven’t read this book. The higher standard of typing clearly indicates that you have lifted the quote from a website. I would like to know which one without having to Google search it please.

Incidentally, the weight of evidence heard at the Tajic trial gives considerable authority to the overview of ethnic cleansing in the judgement at:

http://www.un.org/icty/tadic/trialc2/judgement/index.htm

and gives a good account of the camps in the Prijedor district at paragraphs 154 to 179.

Mr North One again I cross swords with the Father Jack of genocide denial...

I did not follow up previous threads for two reasons. Firstly, because I wanted to do some research and it took me longer than expected. Secondly, once I had done that research, I was reluctant to spend the considerable time I thought was required to write it up. My reluctance stems from the fact that both you boys will not believe anything that does not come off a pro-Serbian website and secondly because of Mr Craig’s habit of editing or completely censoring my posts. I thought I was wasting my time.

Indeed I still do…

Anyway, Mr C, we will see if this post appears.
 
Norman you ar a liar.

1) The paragraph you say I censored was not in your original post. This is a direct & deliberate lie. Another piece of Orwellian rewriting, on a par with the photographs you still support.

2) the fact that the "judicial process" summarised itself by describing a witness claiming Tadic had murdered his father, the "judge" informing the defence counsel they should not investigate, the defence council nonetheless visiting the locus, finding tha allegedly murdered father, bringing him into court to testify as to his being alive, the prosecution witness admitting to having lied because the Bosnian Nazi secret police had threatened him, the "judge" refusing to investigate this allegation, reprimanding the defence counsel for doing their job & then sentencing Tadic to the 20 years the prosecution had originaly asked for anyway as "a witness withdrew his testimony" indicates your idea of judicial impartiality.

In any honest court threatening a witness would have been investigated & any future witness living under the control of theBosnian Nazis would treated as completely unreliable & someone on whose evidence alone it would be improper to convict.

3) Gutman first wrote for publications such as Newsday in which he stated that he had seen atrocities in these camps. The book only came later after he had been proved a liar.

4) I note that despite your claims you belatedly hadn't run away you didn't follow up your lie that I had never written anything favourable about Moslems by apologising for it.

Norman you are a disgusting racist totally dishonest Nazi & despite calling us boys, which I appreciate at my age, I claim an abject apology from you.
 
I’m glad I’ve kept your attention. Several points come to mind:

Mr Craig Your points in order:

1) I posted twice on 29 June: only one post appeared. I’m no more a liar than you’re a young George Washington.

2) Sounds bad for my case but also sounds like Andy Wilcoxon, in which case it’s pish. No reference given usually equals pish on your blog.

3) Nothing in the secondary sources supports this assertion about Gutman, so I think you’re flannelling. Show me the reference!

4) Hmm.. Let me think now. You once said something nice about Fikret Abdic. He’s rather a special case isn’t he? I don’t think that merits an apology.

Mr North

My goodness, aren’t you angry. So angry that you’re trying your cyber bully act of dumping your favourites list onto the net and asserting that the result constitutes an argument. I have of course sampled some of these tasty morsels of Serbophilia and they appear to be simple propaganda. Thank you, however, for introducing me more extensively to the works of Dr. Francisco Gil-White. He’s really nuts but funny too. I laughed out loud several times. He can be Yosemite Sam to your Father Jack.

Regarding the Emperor’s Clothes, I would have thought that proving that the camps were places where people were brutalised and murdered might have demonstrated the essential absurdity of Jared Israel’ articles. However, you are clearly not a man easily trapped into clarity of thought, so see my next post...
 
The Emperor’s Clothes: Fur Coat and Nae Knickers

The Emperor’s Clothes articles quoted above are based on three main sources: an article by Thomas Deichmann in Living Marxism, the film Judgement and statements with concerning the Living Marxism libel trial. The specific allegations are that:

1) ITN represented Trnopolje camp as a concentration camp when in fact the camp was for refugees who were free to come and go as they pleased.

2) That the inmates were well treated.

3) Living Marxism lost their libel case on a legal technicality and that their allegations were in fact true.

The following source summarises the counter arguments: David Campbell, Atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia – the case of ITN versus Living Marxism, Part 1 in Journal Of Human Rights, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 2002), 1–33.

Which is available on the web here:

http://www.virtual-security.net/attrocity/atroindex.htm

Not only can the text also be downloaded as a pdf but, by using the appropriate plug-in, one can view the original ITN broadcasts.

1 Was Trnopolje a Prison Camp

Campbell notes that In Deichmann’s original article, it was argued that Alic´ and others were not imprisoned behind barbed wire, there was no barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp, and the barbed wire that was evident in the ITN reports surrounded the journalists rather than Alic´ and his compatriots. Deichmann contended that, although it appeared Alic´ was penned in, it was actually the journalists who were fenced in; in a compound or enclosure, the wire of which they filmed through to get the images of Alic´.65 “It was not a prison, and certainly not a ‘concentration camp’, but a collection centre for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished.41”

Campbell then notes that, surprisingly, by the time it came to the trial Living Marxism was not disputing that Trnopolje was a prison camp. Thus:

When asked by the barrister for ITN whether it was his contention that Alic and the other detainees could leave Trnopolje on 5 August 1992, Hume [the editor of LM] answered: ‘No, it is not my case. He is in a field surrounded on two sides by low wire fencing, outside of which there are armed guards (Figure 10), the north side of which abuts the community building and the south side of which abuts a barbed wire compound within which the ITN crews were filming and within which there are other armed guards. I think that’s abundantly obvious.’90 Hume also testified that conditions at Trnopolje were harsh, while Deichmann described Trnopolje as ‘an awful place’.91

The terrible conditions at Trnopolje were established in the libel trial by the evidence of Dr MerdzÏanic´, a Bosnian medic who was detained at Trnopolje and acted as one of the camp doctors. MerdzÏanic´ was interviewed by ITN in 1992, and it was he who secretly supplied the photos of badly beaten inmates to Penny Marshall, which were used in the original broadcast (Figures 11, 12, 13). In his testimony, MerdzÏanic´ made it plain that he was taken against his will from his home in Prijedor to the camp at Trnopolje and that he was not free to leave the camp. Moreover, he testified that he heard the screams of inmates being beaten by the guards, that he treated those inmates after they were abused (some of whom he secretly photographed), and that he also treated women who were raped by the guards.92


It is, of course, the testimony of Dr Merdzlanic which Jared Israel mocks in The Emperor’s Clothes.

Campbell continues:

None of MerdzÏanic´’s testimony was challenged in court by the LM legal team. Hume maintained that the fact they did not cross-examine MerdzÏanic´ was because ‘there has never been any question in my opinion or in the article that I published that this camp was anything other than a grim place at which there were beatings, there were killings and there were rapes. There has never been any question of that. We have never argued contrary to that.’93

Deichmann argued … it was not his case that Alic´ and the others pictured in the ITN reports were in fact free to go:‘I do not say that they at the time were able to leave and there – you know, there were fences, there were guards, which we have seen here, armed guards.’94

Most important of all is the fact that, during the libel trial, Deichmann and Hume conceded that the central point of their case against ITN – the nature of the fence at Trnopolje – had nothing to do with the issue of whether Alic´ and others were imprisoned in a camp.


Campbell also discusses the famous fence at length and concludes:

Even in their own terms – in which the material specifics of a particular fence at one camp are the focus of attention – the claims of Deichmann and LM are erroneous and their arguments flawed. The major reason for this is the partial, selective and partisan manner in which they developed and presented their case. The journalists they criticized were not interviewed, and the inmates who survived the camps in the Prijedor region were ignored. Positive interpretations were given to isolated statements by prisoners, while the overwhelming number of countervailing views that emphasized the negative were overlooked. The statements of those Deichmann did rely upon were selectively quoted, the map of the camp showing the fence that Deichmann constructed was misleadingly presented, and the summaries of supporting evidence (such as the LM account of the Tadic´ trial) were reported in a partial manner.

So, in short, Fikret Alic and his companions were prisoners and the camp at Trnopolje was a brutal place. The film that ITN took of the camp did not misrepresent what went on there.

2 Were The Inmates of Trnopolje Well Treated?

It is the contention of the film Judgement that no-one at Trnopolje was a prisoner, that the ‘refugees’ were well treated and that ITN faked their evidence by ignoring what they saw and editing their footage to fit their own agenda. Judgement is a production of The Emperor’s Clothes and in associated web articles Jared Israel gives a commentary of the film which seeks to prove the ITN footage faked by pointing out incidents such as Fikret Alic is smiling and his companion Mehmet says Trnopolje is a refugee camp and he is well treated.

Campbell’s rebuttal to this comes at note 35 on page 29 of the pdf.

35. As Fikret Alic´ has observed: ‘I would like to say that behind the cameramen there were Serb soldiers and they shouted to write everybody’s names who said something in front of the camera’. See ‘Bosnian Prisoner Praises ITN Crew’. Ian Williams noted the severe restrictions on their capacity to report freely – including the fact the ‘guards stood over everybody we spoke to’ – in a live interview following the broadcast of his report. See Ian Williams: Live 2-Way (interview with Dermot Murnaghan), 6 August 1992, videocassette (London: ITN Archive, reference: t06089201.htm). In addition, there was also a Bosnian Serb military film crew taping the ITN crew at work. This is apparent from the RTS video at Trnopolje, where the RTS crew captures a uniformed cameraman filming the ITN journalists. See Judgment at 25:20. The existence of two Serbian crews – one from RTS and one from the military – was noted in the libel trial. See Discussion re Video, ITN and Informinc Ltd, Day 3 PM, 73. These circumstances need to be taken into account when evaluating the central premise of Judgment, which involves an exchange with one of the prisoners at the wire fence. This exchange was also highlighted by Deichmann (1997a). Penny Marshall is shown asking questions of the prisoners, when Mehmet steps forward to say that Trnopolje is a refugee camp not a prison and that conditions are fine. ITN did not use any of this particular exchange in their broadcast report, which the makers of Judgment insist proves the charge of fabrication. However, in addition to the intimidating circumstances in which these exchanges took place, such a conclusion overlooks the way Mehmet, even in the exchange highlighted by RTS, confirms that he was taken from his home involuntarily, and that he cannot now leave the camp (at 22:20). Moreover, Marshall’s report (at 3:32) does include a statement from Mehmet – which is absent from the RTS video – in which he says he is afraid. Furthermore, the RTS film fails to include any other prisoner interviews, whereas ITN’s diverse range of sources demonstrates the widespread fear. This tactic of extracting one allegedly positive assessment of the camp of Trnopolje – regardless of the context in which the statements are made – and ignoring all other negative assessments, was a consistent theme in the campaign against ITN.

It should be noted that much of the ITN footage quoted above can be viewed on the site.

3 Did Living Marxism Lose their Case on a Legal Technicality?

Campbell notes at page 7

Despite their legal loss, LM magazine and like-minded supporters throughout the world have not let the issue rest. Hume denounced the court verdict in an unapologetic statement that restated his faith in Deichmann’s claims, the key element of which he maintained was never seriously challenged in court.17 Nick Higham, the BBC’s media correspondent, who had told various journalists after the publication of Deichmann’s article he believed ITN’s pictures were misleading, reported the trial’s outcome for the Six O’Clock News on BBC1.18 In his report, Higham noted that ‘the judge, Mr Justice Morland, told the jury LM’s facts might have been right, but he asked, did that matter?’. This summary was subsequently deemed by the Broadcasting Standards Commission to be misleading and thus unfair to ITN and its journalists.19

and Campbell’s notes 17 and 19 clarify the situation further thus:

17 Hume’s reaction to the verdict in the trial should be contrasted with LM’s legal documents made publicly available on their website. (This site had to close in the wake of the libel trial, but all documents quoted here were downloaded prior to the trial and are in my possession.) In the judge’s summing up at the trial, he posed the question: ‘have the defendants established that Penny Marshall and Ian Willliams had compiled television footage which deliberately misrepresented an emaciated Bosnian Muslim, Fikret Alic´, as being caged behind a barbed-wire fence at the Serbian-run Trnopolje camp on 5 August 1992 by the selective use of videotapes of him?’, and repeatedly emphasized the word ‘deliberately’. Quoting this, Hume protested that ‘we were being asked to prove what was going on inside the journalists’ heads eight years ago. The jury was only likely to come to one verdict’. In Hume’s view, ‘we could not win because the law demanded that we prove the unprovable’. Yet all the judge was doing was reciting LM’s own legal defence as a question for the jury. It was Deichmann’s article, and LM’s legal defence, that charged ITN with ‘deliberate misrepresentation’ and required the question of past intention to be addressed.

And

19 Not surprisingly, Higham’s statement was embraced by LM after the verdict; see Hume (2000). ITN, Marshall and Williams lodged a formal complaint with the Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC) about Higham’s report. In upholding the ITN complaint, the BSC concluded that ‘the BBC’s paraphrase of the judge’s summing up could have left viewers with the false impression that ITN had got its facts wrong and won its case on a technicality’. See BSC, ‘Complaint about unjust or unfair treatment by ITN on its own behalf and on behalf of MS Penny Marshall and Mr Ian Williams submitted on 25 April 2000 about the Six O’Clock News on BBC1, broadcast on 14 March 2000’, 3 October 2000. The adjudication is summarized in BSC, Bulletin, No. 36 (26 October 2000), 1.


Conclusion

In total, all the allegations of Living Marxism, Judgement and the Emperor’s Clothes are incorrect thus:

1) Whilst it started life as a transit camp, at the time of the ITN visit Trnopolje housed prisoners who were subject to a brutal regime. Condition at Omarska were far worse and, even though ITN were unable to film freely there (as The Emperor’s Clothes asserted they were), it is clear from the footage taken that the Omarska prisoners were poorly treated and in a state of fear.

2) The inmates of Trnopolje and Omarska were not well treated. The Judgement video and the associated Emperor’s clothes articles are highly misleading in that respect and are designed to be so.

3) LM did not lose their case on a legal technicality. ITN proved that Trnopolje held prisoners subject to a brutal regime and LM could not prove that the ITN footage was filmed in a way which overstated that fact.

The video footage available on the site also shows a number of things that text cannot convey. At Omarska the ITN crew was only allowed to film the canteen but even here the emaciated condition of the prisoners and their evident state of fear shows that there is something very wrong going on. At Trnopolje the prisoners are still afraid to speak openly. The small proportion of screen time given to Fikret Alic is also notable, as is the number of other emaciated men who appear in the footage. Alic and others are wearing trousers several sizes too large, indicating a significant weight loss in captivity and corroborating later testimony of a starvation diet. The still photographs of beaten prisoners are shocking.

All this amply substantiates my opinion that the Emperor’s Clothes articles are mendacious trash.
 
So you are still refusing to withdraw your lies you obscenity.

1) You have been proven a liar repeatedly both here & in your "evidence" to the Lib Dem Executive. You have now changed your story, again, but it is clear that the piece which you now claim to have sent as a separate email makes no sense as a separate email. Liar.

2) And the same to you. You can't dispute facts so you are just rude about them.

3) You show complete ignorance of your case not even knowing that Gutman had published articles in newspapers during the Bosnian war. That is the whole point. That is what Ms Philips proved he had lied about his being there. We had discussed the fact that he had received a pullitzer for these articlesm, thus proving that he had reached the height of US journalism while remaining a faker, which should have given you a clue. Pullitzers are for newspaper stories. <"I SAW 10 young men lying in a trench" To Kill a Nation, Michael Parenti, p86 indictes he was claiming to have seen it.>

4) Lying again. You know that I also pointed out said "something nice" about the entire 1300 year history of Islam. So if the only "non-special case" is saying something nice about Islamic terrorists please prove where & when you have said "something nice" about those fine upstanding al Quaeda folk & how they so nicely helped us commit genocide. If you can't then you are, by your somewhat quiant definition, an anti-Moslem racist.

Now s regards your long copying abot the LM trial. Before taking the rest of your case apart lets be absolutly clear about what we are discussing. The claim that these people were prisoners held behind barbed wire, maintained at least on air, by ITN for 14 years, undeniably represents the absolute pinnacle of hinesty of which ITN & any of their employees is capable.

Despite this the court did find that it was untrue, ITN refuse to discuss it & the apologist article, despite acres of flannel doesn't actually say it is true either.

Thus are you & you pretty much alone, Norman, claiming that the barbed wire claims are true.

Answer yes or no.
 
I think you have completely lost the place Neil. Bye.
 
I'll take that as "Yes I wll still claim that (both?) ITN's photos aren't faked even though I know it is quite obvious this is a total lie cos that is the sort of person I am" then Norman. That OK?
 
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