Mr Karganovic's arguments are so preposterous that it is difficult to know where to begin, other than to say that he provides a perfect illustration for why it is necessary to continue focusing attention on the Srebrenica massacres, sixteen years after the event.  If "researchers" like Karganovic are going to devote so much energy to twisting historical truth, it is necessary for the rest of us to remain vigilant in keeping the record straight.  

 To reply to just a few or your points:

1. You raise the question why the Americans, and ICTY, failed to produce all this evidence earlier, if it is true (as I said) that they recorded the crime and the cover-up.  The answer lies in the way the intelligence was gathered and analyzed. It was gathered in real time, but it was analyzed long after the event. The CIA scoops up vast amounts of information (intercepts, reconnaissance imagery etc) that it cannot possibly analyze in real time.  To make sense of the information, it needs to be triangulated with other information that frequently only becomes available much later. Remember 9/11 and the failure to connect the dots.  Something similar happened with Srebrenica, but on a much larger scale, because preventing war crimes in distant countries was not the primary goal of the u.s. intelligence gathering effort.

 (2) You ask why the perpetrators left behind evidence even as they attempted to cover it up.  The answer is simple, and applies to crime scenes the world over.  The criminals were incompetent, and not particularly adept at covering up their tracks.

(3) You say that these aerial photos will remain under seal for the next couple of decades. Not sure what you mean by this as the photos are available for download from the ICTY court records website (admittedly a little difficult to find.) I have published many of them, and will publish more.

 (4) Finally a point of agreement.  It is true, as Ruez said, that the photographs by themselves do not mean very much.  In order to interpret them, you need "Cross comparisons" and "ground-based investigations".  That is precisely what organizations like ICTY and ICMP have been doing for the last 16 years in a huge effort to establish the truth that has involved hundreds of crime scene investigators, forensic archeologists, demographers etc.   To understand the crime, everything has to be set and understood in context.  It is like a vast jigsaw puzzle that eventually fits together.  Contrast this with the technique of the genocide deniers, led by Mr Karganovic, who seize on a single piece of evidence, e.g. an aerial photo, and raise whatever questions they can about it.  Like many of his colleagues on the Republika Srpska payroll, Mr Karganovic excels at the art of picking and choosing pieces of evidence while ignoring the larger picture.

Mr Dobbs,

You made an interesting remark that I want to respond to. You said, "Remember 9/11 and the failure to connect the dots. Something similar happened with Srebrenica, but on a much larger scale, because preventing war crimes in distant countries was not the primary goal of the u.s. intelligence gathering effort."

The Srebrenica massacre isn't a case of the CIA failing to connect the dots. Everybody knew, long before the event, that there was a high probability that a massacre would occour if the enclave fell.

The Bosnian Government certainly knew. Two years before the massacre, Bosnian vice-premiere Zlatko Lagumdjija told reporters from the London Times that "We shall be witnesses of a big massacre if Srebrenica falls." (See: Tim Judah, "UN plans evacuation of 15,000 Bosnia Muslims", The (London) Times, April 6, 1993)

General Morillon knew there was a high probability that a massacre would occour too. When he testified in the Milosevic trial, on February 12, 2004, he said, "I personally feared that the worst would happen if the Serbs of Bosnia managed to enter the enclaves and Srebrenica." He said, "I saw, a degree of absolute misery with a real risk of tens of thousands being killed."

He knew what the state of mind of the Bosnian Serbs was. He said, "I feared that the Serbs, the local Serbs, the Serbs of Bratunac, these militiamen, they wanted to take their revenge for everything that they attributed to Naser Oric. It wasn't just Naser Oric that they wanted to revenge, take their revenge on, they wanted to revenge their dead on Orthodox Christmas. They were in this hellish circle of revenge. Not only the men. The women, the entire population was imbued with this. It wasn't the sickness of fear that had infected the entire population of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the fear of being dominated, of being eliminated, it was pure hatred."

He was so afraid of what would happen to the inhabitants of Srebrenica that he tried to organize an evacuation for all of the refugees who wanted to leave, but his efforts were blocked by the Bosnian-Muslim Authorities. (See: Reuters/New York Times wire service, "Srebrenica evacuation plans stymied; Town officials declare civilians must stay; UN trucks turn back," The Ottawa Citizen, April 19, 1993, Pg. A1)

During his testimony he said, "Had I been able to evacuate all those who had wanted me to do so at the time that I intervened in Srebrenica, we could certainly have saved a number of human lives." He said, "the Bosniaks used the presence of their population to keep the attention of the world focused on their situation, they prevented the evacuation from Srebrenica ... the authorities of Izetbegovic were the ones who stood up against the evacuation of those towards Tuzla for all those who wanted to, and there were many of them who wanted to."

The UN and the Bosnian government both knew that a massacre was a very real probability. Yet when the attack on Srebrenica began both the Bosnian-Government and the UN made a concious decision to abandon the inhabitants of Srebrenica.

Sefer Halilovic himself testified in the Krstic Trial on April 5 2001 and said, "the command of the 2nd Corps and the General Staff knew when the operation on Srebrenica started, but from a series of testimonies, the people who were in Srebrenica, both from military and political structures, we can clearly see that they asked for help, both of the command of the 2nd Corps and the command of the General Staff and President Izetbegovic, but that they did not receive that assistance. To answer your question whether they had the power and materiel to help, to come to the help of Srebrenica, I think that they did."

Dutchbat was abandoned by the UN too. Their report dated 4 October 1995 says, "The battalion was counting on massive air support ... air support was requested around 10.30 hrs. [on July 11, 1995] Then, despite all of its promises, the U.N. still failed to release air power ... Both the battalion staff and the rest of Dutchbat are convinced that the fall of the enclave can be attributed to a distinct lack of support from the air; the limited close air support did not arrive until the battle was actually over."

I don't think there were any dots for the CIA to connect because I don't think Mladic in his wildest dreams ever thought he would take Srebrenica. I don't think he had any plan. His forces were allowed to walk into Srebrenica unopposed, which stunned some of the UNMO's.

The UNMO Sector NE report on the fall of Srebrenica dated 26 July 95 says, "The ABiH had the force ratios to defend the enclave particularly considering its hilly, wooded nature." They went on to write, "The advantages militarily seem to have been with the [Muslim] defenders to at least hold out for longer and have inflicted greater losses on the Bosnian-Serb Army than believed. However, the ABiH leadership seems to have actually acted against their own interests to carryout a successful defense."

What explains this behavior are statements that guys like Hakija Meholjic (Srebrenica's war-time police chief) have made suggesting that Izetbegovic and Clinton wanted a massacre of at least 5,000 Muslims in Srebrenica so that NATO would have a pretext to intervene in the war on the side of the Muslims. He's not the only one who said it either, According to the UN Report on Srebrenica dated 15 November 1999: "Representatives of the Bosniac community gathered in Sarajevo on 28 and 29 September [1993] to vote on the [Invincible] peace package. A delegation of Bosniacs from Srebrenica was transported to Sarajevo by UNPROFOR helicopter to participate in the debate. Prior to the meeting, the delegation met in private with President Izetbegovic, who told them that there were Serb proposals to exchange Srebrenica and Zepa for territories around Sarajevo. The delegation opposed the idea, and the subject was not discussed further. Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people. President Izetbegovic has flatly denied making such a statement."

The fact that the bodies had to be reburried suggests to me that the massacre wasn't a planned event. There is no way that Mladic could have anticipated that Srebrenica would fall without a fight and that his men would capture so many prisoners. If the massacre had been planned in advance, there would have been a plan to dispose of the corpses right the first time and then they wouldn't have needed to go back and re-burry them.

Mr Dobbs either cut class or dozed through the lecture of the day when his fellow cub reporters were sworn "do not editorialize". For Dobbs to call X "preposterous" is not to demonstrate that X is preposterous. Just tell readers the facts if you have any. Let them judge as to verisimilitude. And do tell us why CNN didn't flash the photos of the days-long shooting required to dispatch 8000 "Muslim men and boys" on the evening news. There must have been a traffic jam of trucks and bulldozers, besides those two buses, on the roads to the burial & re-burial... The evening news was johhny-on-the-spot for the IED blasts at the Sarajevo Bread Queue (May 1992) massacre and at the turnip stalls of the Markale market (Feb 1994) etc. It was "the chance presence of Sarajevo TV cameras " (Strangelove prototype Wohlstetter) that captured the atrocity. By chance, too, Peter Jennings was in town for the Markale massacre, and Mark Danner, too. He coincidentally was passing by the market in a small armored car (his words) and lived to write that in the 20 minutes beween blast and destruction of the crime scene, he bumped into a great big guy with a TV camera on his shoulder. At the vegetable market. Danner was checking out the price of potatoes when the "Serb mortar" that didn't whistle and dropped perpendicularly went off. News-hen Dufka of a Soros-backed NGO was coincidentally shopping for radishes, too, camer in hand. Her pics for Reuters were published by TIME & NEWSWEEK. --Now I'm off to the library (I go there often) to look up "preposterosus" and to check who the latest Pulitzeree is.

Is Mr Dobbs an investigative journalist? No, he is indistinguishable from an "advocacy journalist". An oxymoron, that. His modus oprandi is AgitProp. His "beat" is "Srebrenica"with a cast of thousands of unfound bodies. Hoaxes are a characteristic of the jihad aka Kampf against Serbs. Dubrovnik's Old City never burnt. It's stone. O'Kane, Kinzer et al. published the facts. In September 1991 Peter Northall's "iconic" image against the backdrop of the Old City, of columns of smoke rising above the old boat harbor gave a powerful stimulus to the "do something" brigade, but the black smoke was diesel fuel of a little boat in the harbor. My limited experience of harbors of medieval cities is that they tend to be outside the walls. The masts and sails and oars, you know, were hard to squeeze across moats and through portcullises. When I showed Northall's photo to a Chicago fireman, his Calvin Coolidge-ish remark was "petroleum based." The martyrs of Vukovar, beatified by ITCY, were 200 goons from Herzegovina, not Vukovar "defenders". Like John Jacob Astor taking to the lifeboat in drag when the Titanic sank (women and children first), the Martyrs took to hospital wards of the very hospital where they had transfused the blood of Serb prisoners to Ustasha wounded. They had swapped hospital gowns for their black SS style uniforms. They had ritualistically murdered 1000 of Vukovar's citizens. On 19 November 1991, President and ex communist general Franjo Tudjman went on the radio and intoned "This is Croatia's Stalingrad." Now, just who were the Russians in the re-run, and who the Germans? -- Whose payroll is Dobbs on?

Whose pay roll is Mr Dobbs on?

JP
Love you comments !
Truthful, educated, well informed and to the point.
Let's see what spin doctors have to say on this.

another Denialist? Must be-- (s)he doubts Dobbs... Now, "What drove the Bosnian Serb military commander to order Europe's deadliest massacre since World War II? " -- And when did he stop beating his wife?

I think this excerpt from a BBC interview with Cees Wiebes is pertinent. He was lead author of the Dutch report on Srebrenica that is studiously ignored despite its impressive scholarship by Holland's National Dept on War Documentation:

Dr Cees Wiebes: For the whole demise of the Former Yugoslavia I think Mr Milosevic bears big responsibility, but also the other leaders like Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Izetbegovic, I mean, all bear a certain sense of responsibility, I think Mr Milosevic bears the biggest responsibility, However to portray the Bosnian Muslims as lily-white and the Serbs as the evils [sic] is simply not true. It’s not a simple black and white picture as regards the Bosnian war. I’ve never seen in my research so much grey. Of course the killings and the subsequent murder of 7,000 people is a huge atrocity but other elements are very much in grey tones. The tribunal in The Hague flies in experts from all over the world to testify: well, there are ten people in Amsterdam who did the most extensive research on Srebrenica and the Bosnian war.
We were never invited in The Hague - we’re just living around the corner - and why?
What I heard from good sources at the tribunal is that Ms Del Ponte thinks we are too “nuanced” we are not seeing things in black and white, and good military experts in our team were never consulted.

For the sake of argument, let's say the photos are not photoshopped. Where, tehen, is any photo of a group or groups amounting to 8K?-- With how many guards? How many Serb Armt soldiers were at the front or running down 6-12k Muslim men and boys in double file slogging through the woods tp Tuzla, and thence to Bihac? Did they eat K-rations? "
-Ipse Dobbs dixit, o ye of little faith: "ICTY investigators" their names, number, duty stations?
-"suspect a cover-up" -- when did they , whoever they many be, tell you? -- cover-up of what by whom, how?
-"involving transfer" when?" -- of bodies" how many bodies, by whom, with what equipment, under guard of ? -- how many security men? --
= "to secondary graves": dug when, by whom, how many of them?
"They..." Who? " ask the CIA to examine imagery from this period to find evidence of secondary grave sites --assuming there is any.--
What's your source, Mr D: "The CIA goes through all relevant" to witZ? -- "imagery (hundreds of thousands of images)" where are they?" "and finds sites that look suspicious because of evidence of isturbed earth". -- When you tell your little kids "don't talk to strangers', they don't have a clude as to what a 'stranger' is. --
3. ICTY investigators (name, rank, serial number, competence? ---"go to the suspect sites" -- to wit?... "and find evidence' to wit -- " "of reburied remains, which they can trace back (through bullet markings, items of clothing, DNA evidence etc) to primary gravesites, 10, 20, 30 miles away." on the map draw us a circle with a radius of 30 miles, an pinpoint the locales."
-- This all makes me want to goc and read the Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik.

Dobbs bobs and weaves: "Well, we know that labels have been added, first by the CIA and then by ICTY, so to that extent they are 'photoshopped.' ... what use fraudulent "- 'photoshopped' imagery would have been to the investigation?" --The Dobbs-spin omits rhe big fat fact that the genuine dates that are always automatically imprinted on photo-recon images were removed and the fake labels on your rigged pics added later. --What use then? To falsify evidence.

Now come on Pete, I think we can trust the U.S. Government not to affix bogus captions to aerial photographs ... well I guess there was that one time with the slideshow that Colin Powell did at the UN before the Iraq war.

You know those Srebrenica pics were taken by U2 aircraft -- the same aircraft that NASA has been using to take aerial photographs of the United States since the 1960s.

If anybody wants to see what an undoctored photograph taken by a U2 aircraft looks like they can go to http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ and take a look at the pictures. If you live in the United States, you can see what your neighborhood looked like 50 years ago.

Then compare those pics, to the pics taken over Srebrenica. Any fool can see that the Srebrenica pictures have been cropped, and cropped significantly. And like you pointed out, the original date and time stamp on the film has been cropped out of every last Srebrenica aerial photograph -- and a date has been photoshopped onto the picture instead.

And for the record, if you look at Jean-Rene Ruez's testimony in the Popovic trial (transcript page 1654 line 22 through page 1655 line 8) you learn that all of the black and white captions and markings came from the US Government, and all of the color captions and writing were put there by the tribunal.

God knows what you would see if the complete, untouched rolls of film were made available. The camera on a U2 can hold a 129mm by 129mm roll of film that's more than a mile long.

If we could look at the complete rolls of film and the untouched pictures it might turn out that some of the dates in the captions were wrong, or you might see exculpatory evidence showing where battles were taking place.

All we're getting now is a peep show. We're only getting to see what the US Government allows us to see.