At another point, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea added: If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATOs five conditions and we will stop this campaign. 19

After the April NATO bombing of a Belgrade office build-ing-which housed political parties, TV and radio stations, 100 private companies and more-the Washington Post reported:

Over the past few days, U.S. officials have been quoted as expressing the hope that members of Serbias economic elite will begin to turn against Milosevic once they understand how much they are likely to lose by continuing to resist NATO demands. 20

Before missiles were fired into this building, NATO planners spelled out the risks: Casualty Estimate 50-100 Government/Party employees. Unintended Civ Casualty Est: 250-Apts in expected blast radius. 21 The planners were saying that about 250 civilians living in nearby apartment buildings might be killed in the bombing. What do we have here? We have grown men telling each other: Well do A, and we think that B may well be the result. But even if B does in fact result, were saying beforehand-as well insist afterward-that it was unintended.

Following World War II there was an urgent need for a permanent international criminal court to prosecute those accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, but the Cold War intervened. Finally, in 1998 in Rome, the nations of the world drafted the charter of the International Criminal Court. American negotiators, however, insisted on provisions in the charter that would, in essence, give the United States veto power over any prosecution through its seat on the Security Council. The American request was rejected, and primarily for this reason the US refused to join 120 other nations who supported the charter. The ICC is an instrument Washington cant control sufficiently to keep it from prosecuting American military and government officials. Senior US officials have explicitly admitted that this danger is the reason for their aversion to the proposed new court.22 But this is clearly not the case with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Its Washingtons kind of international court, a court for the New World Order.

Washington journalist Sam Smith observed in 1999: It seems that the international war crimes tribunal has been taking selective enforcement lessons from the New Jersey State Police. The only war criminals it indicted this week were those with hard-to-spell foreign names. No one with a simple Anglican name-say like Clinton or Blair-was charged.

During its destructive military operations in Yugoslavia, the United States was supremely unconcerned about the possibility that anyone would even consider filing charges against NATO at the Hague, yet we now know that: Midway through the war with Yugoslavia, the Defense Departments top legal office issued guidelines warning that misuse of cyber attacks could subject U.S. authorities to war crimes charges. This was a reference to the fact that the Pentagons was considering hacking into Serbian computer networks to disrupt military operations and basic civilian services.23

CHAPTER 9 : Haven for Terrorists

I n 1998, the State Department issued its annual human-rights report, listing Cuba amongst those nations alleged to sponsor terrorism . Curious about this, I called up the State Department and was connected to what they called The Terrorism Desk , where a gentleman named Joe Reap told me that Cuba was included because They harbor terrorists.

So does the United States, I replied. The Cuban exiles in Miami have committed hundreds of terrorist acts, in the US and abroad.

Mr. Reap exploded. Sir, he cried in a rising voice, that is a fatuous remark and I will not listen to such nonsense! And he hung up.

Unrepentant trouble-maker that I am, the following year, May 4, 1999 to be exact, when the new human-rights report was issued (does the word self-righteous ring a bell with the folks at the State Department?), I again called 202-647-8682, and again twas Joe Reap who answered. I doubt he knew that I was the same caller as the year before but, in any event, we went through the same dance steps. When I repeated my comment about the Cuban terrorists being harbored in Miami, he became instantly indignant and said that they were not terrorists.

But the FBI has labeled some of them just that, I said.

Then take it up with the FBI, said Joe.

But were discussing a State Department report, I pointed out.

His voice rose... I will not listen to people call this government a terrorist sponsor! Phone slammed down. The intervening year had not mellowed ol Joe any more than it had me.

Its always fascinating to observe how a True Believer reacts to a sudden, unexpected and unanswerable threat to his fundamental ideological underpinnings.

The Cuban exiles are in fact one of the longest-lasting and most prolific terrorist groups in the world, and theyre still at it. During 1997 they carried out a spate of hotel bombings in Havana, directed from Miami.1

Hijacking is generally regarded as a grave international crime, but although there have been numerous air and boat hijackings over the years from Cuba to the US, at gunpoint, knifepoint and/or with the use of physical force, including at least one murder, its difficult to find more than a single instance where the United States brought criminal

charges against the hijackers. In August 1996, three Cubans who hijacked a plane to Florida at knifepoint were indicted and brought to trial. In Florida. This is like trying someone for gambling in a Nevada court. Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from Cuba to testify against the men, the defense simply told the jurors that the man was lying, and the jury deliberated less than an hour before acquitting the defendants.2

Cubans are not the only foreign terrorists or serious human-rights violators who have enjoyed safe haven in the United States in recent years. Like the Cubans, the others listed below are fervent anti-communists, or in some other way are compatible with past or present US foreign-policy objectives. (For sources not indicated, see this note. 3)

Theres former Guatemalan Defense Minister Hector Gramajo Morales. In 1995, a US court ordered Gramajo to pay $47.5 million in damages to eight Guatemalans and a US citizen for his responsibility in the torture of the American (Sister Dianna Ortiz-see Torture chapter) and the massacre of family members of the Guatemalans (among thousands of other Indians whose death he was responsible for). Gramajo had been served a court summons in 1991 as he gradu-ated from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he had studied on a scholarship provided by the US government. The judge stated that The evidence suggests that Gramajo devised and directed the implementation of an indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians. It was only following the court judgment that the Defense Department withdrew Gramajos invitation to speak at a military seminar.4 Gramajo subsequently returned to Guatemala, without having paid any of the court judgment. In speaking of his previous residence in Guatemala, he said that he had carried out what he described as a more humanitarian means of dealing with perceived dissenters. We instituted civil affairs [in 1982] which provides development for 70 percent of the population, while we kill 30 percent. Before, the strategy was to kill 100 percent. 5

Florida is the retirement home of choice for serious human-rights violators seeking to depart from the scene of their crimes. Former general Jose Guillermo Garcia, head of El Salvadors armed forces in the 1980s, when military-linked death squads killed thousands of people suspected of being subversives , has lived in Florida since the early 1990s.

Garcias successor, Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who also served as the head of the much-feared national guard, is now a resident of the sunshine state too. According to the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador, Vides covered up for and protected those who raped and murdered three American nuns and a lay worker in 1980. He was physically present on at least two occasions when Dr. Juan Romagoza Arce was tortured; in the end, the injuries inflicted on Arce left him unable to perform surgery. (Interviewed in 1999, Vides was moved to declare: I ask myself over and over if there is anything I have done wrong, and I cant find anything. )

During the time that Garcia and Vides have lived in the United States, US Immigration has been denying asylum status to many refugees from El Salvador even though theyve claimed they were in fear of being tortured or losing their lives if sent back.