Will we ever know?  Could AI have been deliberately fed false
information? Certainly there was more than adequate incentive to do so.
I don't profess to know the answer, but the relative absence of bodies
is puzzling, isn't it, especially with all of the amazing odor
detection, heat and chemical sensing, etc. high tech of the U.S., both
on the ground and from the sky.  Dismiss Cockburn, if you like, but
Spain is a member of NATO isn't it?  What is Spain's incentive for
questioning the alleged body count?

By the way, did anyone notice a huge anti-U.S. media coverage of the
U.S. acknowledgment that the Sudan pharmaceutical factory was, in fact,
er, a pharmaceutical factory and not a chemical weapons factory even in
part?  Strange, it didn't get anywhere nearly the play that the
justification for destroying the source of drugs and fertilizers for a
large area of the impoverished world received.  An anti-U.S. mass
media?  Come on now.  Did you watch any CNN (at least when Christiane
Amanpour (sp) was not sharing pillow talk with hubby Rubin?)  If you
think that the U.S. press was anti-NATO, you should read non-U.S. press
a bit more often.

The (London) Sunday Times                                       October
31, 1999

COOK ACCUSED OF MISLEADING PUBLIC ON KOSOVO MASSACRES

        By Nicholas Rufford

        Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, is under pressure to answer
claims that
ministers misled the public over the scale of deaths among civilians in
Kosovo
to justify the NATO bombing of Belgrade.
        The all-party Balkans committee of MPs will ask the Foreign
Office this
week to comment on reports that the number of bodies of victims of
Serbian
ethnic cleansing is lower than the figures of dead issued during the
conflict.
        At the height of the war, western officials spoke of a death
toll as high as
100,000. President Bill Clinton said the NATO campaign had prevented
“deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide”. Geoff
Hoon,
then a Foreign Office minister and now the defence secretary, later
scaled
down the estimates. “It appears that about 10,000 people have been
killed in
more than 100 massacres,” he said.
        The most outspoken challenge to these figures has come from
Emilio Perez
Pujol, a pathologist who led the Spanish team looking for bodies in the
aftermath of the fighting. He said: “I calculate that the final figure
of
dead in
Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most. This includes lots of strange deaths
that
can’t be blamed on anyone in particular.”
        Perez Pujol said the numbers of dead were far lower than the
44,000 he
had been warned of, and few were in mass graves. He said his team had
arrived in Kosovo expecting to perform 2,000 post-mortem examinations
and
to work to the end of November. “On September 12 I called my people
together and said: ‘We have finished here.’ I informed my government and
told
them of the real situation. We had found a total of 187 bodies. Four out
of
five
had died from natural causes.”
        United Nations officials have begun taking stock of the death
toll this
weekend after the exhumation of corpses stopped for the winter. The UN
is
expected to report next month that the total number of victims so far
uncovered
is fewer than 2,000. Many were executed, but some died during fighting
and
others died in allied bombing.
        There is still no clear picture, however. Some of the forensic
teams sent by
15 different countries say they have discovered fewer bodies than they
anticipated. Others say there is more work to do and believe the death
toll
will
rise.
        The US State Department said this weekend that about 1,400
bodies have
been recovered from about 20% of suspected massacre sites. There are
about
500 suspected sites and priority has been given to those that were
believed
to
contain the most bodies. The International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former
Yugoslavia reported earlier this month that the notorious Trepca mines
in
Kosovo, where 700 ethnic Albanian bodies were reportedly hidden,
contained
none.
        The largest number of bodies has been recovered by British teams
of
police officers, pathologists and forensic scientists in the area where
the
worst
mass killings reportedly occurred. They found 505 bodies, some in mass
graves
and many of them women and children.
        Detective Chief Superintendent John Bunn, who led the British
investigation group, said his teams had completed work at most of the
sites
around Prizren and Velakrusa, where some of the worst atrocities were
said to
have occurred. He said he had found graves containing as many as 77
bodies
together of people executed at close range.
        Alice Mahon, the Labour MP who chairs the Balkans committee,
said
yesterday that the deaths were tragic but did not justify the military
action
taken by NATO. “When you consider that 1,500 civilians or more were
killed
during NATO bombing, you have to ask whether the intervention was
justified,” she said.