The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
escaped normal human detection as there were many UN personnel in
Bosnia throughout the autumn and winter of 1995 - 1996.
In evidence given to the ICTY, Dean Paul Manning (a former Australian
policeman, working for the Office of the Prosecutor as an investigator)
sought to explain the cover-up theory, which has become a
core element of the official version of events at Srebrenica. He referred
at length to aerial photographs provided to the ICTY by the U.S. government.
These photographs were shown as exhibits in the court, but
have not otherwise been made public. These images, claimed to have
been taken by satellites and other forms of electronic surveillance during
October 1995, were alleged to indicate a cover-up operation and
they guided much of the subsequent investigation work carried out on
behalf of the ICTY. However, as noted by Wiebes in his summary of the
imagery evidence, it seems that these photographs showed only gatherings
of men and the presence of equipment, such as trucks and bulldozers,
that might be used for mass burials. 71 Such photographic
information might be related to cover-up operations—but might
equally show nothing more than normal wartime military activities.
Trucks and bulldozers are nowadays fairly routine equipment.
There are a number of fundamental problems with this section of
Manning’s evidence. First, the U.S. government has been inconsistent
in its use of surveillance data. As noted earlier, Madeleine Albright inflamed
feelings at the UN on August 10, 1995 by brandishing photographs
which, she claimed, proved that there had been massacres at
Srebrenica. Date and time-code information had been removed from
the photographs, and they were not released to the media, were subsequently
classified, and, when requested by the ICTY investigation team,
were not provided to them. Although it is perhaps understandable that
a government might be cautious about revealing its intelligence-gathering
techniques and sources, such reluctance can also serve as an excuse
for covering-up intelligence-claims that have been doctored and even
fabricated for political purposes, as the monumental deceptions by U.S.
and U.K. “intelligence” agencies prior to their 2003 invasion of Iraq attest.
72 As George Pumphrey asked back in 1998: “By what right does the
U.S. classify, as a ‘national security secret’, evidence that it claims to
possess, concerning what is often referred to as ‘the worst war crime
committed in Europe since World War II’?...Is the U.S. administration
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