As Terry at Nitpicker reveals, Robert Novak and Matt Drudge are stepping up to the plate to smear Wesley Clark on factually untrue grounds. This is really awful.
Clark was a three-star lieutenant general who directed strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On Aug. 26, 1994, in the northern Bosnian city of Banja Luka, he met and exchanged gifts with the notorious Bosnian Serb commander and indicted war criminal, Gen. Ratko Mladic. The meeting took place against the State Department’s wishes, and may have contributed to Clark’s failure to be promoted until political pressure intervened. The shocking photo of Mladic and Clark wearing each other’s military caps was distributed throughout Europe.
Matt Drudge has this photo front and center at his page right now, with the caption “GENERAL CLARK WORE BOSNIAN WAR CRIMINAL’S MILITARY CAP”.
How could Wesley Clark smile for a photo and exchange gifts with an indicted war criminal? Well, he didn’t. Here’s the chronology:
Aug. 26, 1994: Clark and Mladic meet, and the photo (sorry, the “shocking” photo) is taken.
July 6- July 21, 1995: Bosnian Serbs under the command of Mladic begin their assault on the safe area of Srebrenica, killing or expelling 15,000 Bosnian Muslims. Many surrender, after being falsely promised prisoner of war status, and are slaughtered in mass graves.
November 14, 1995: For the Srebrenica massacre, Mladic is indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity.
Novak is seriously distorting the facts to make his claim. To say that Clark took this photo and exchanged gifts with an indicted war criminal is just not true. It’s like blasting the producers of the “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out” Nintendo game for using a convicted rapist as their spokesperson. When they made the game, he wasn’t a convicted rapist.
Then there’s this, from Novak’s column:
Clark attributed one comment to a Middle East “think tank” in Canada, although there appears to be no such organization.
Novak is wrong. A quick Google search reveals the appearance of such organizations, such as the B’Nai Brith Canada Institute for International Affairs, the Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, the Canadian-Arab Federation, the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
This is a shameful column, and it’s only going to get worse. I know this is an old point, but it’s worth making again: Al Gore is not the President because no one fought hard enough against garbage like this. No one else is going to do it but us.
Robert Novak’s email is: novakevans@aol.com
Matt Drudge’s email is: drudge@drudgereport.com
The letter to the editor at the Sun-Times address is: letters@suntimes.com