Another Kosovo lie exposed: NATO used doctored video to justify bombing of passenger train

In the Frankfurter Rundschau of January 6 reporter Arnd Festerling documented how NATO used falsified video recordings to justify its conduct of the war in Kosovo.

At least 14 people died on April 12, 1999 when a US Airforce bomber fired on a railway bridge near the Serbian village of Grdenicka just as a passenger train was crossing the bridge. Following the initial strike of the train, the pilot returned to make a second sweep of the burning bridge and dropped a bomb on a carriage that had not been hit by the first assault.

At the time NATO described the bombing of the commuter train as a tragic accident. NATO's presentation of events, it now emerges, was based on doctored video recordings and misleading descriptions of what took place aboard the fighter plane.

One day after the strike, in an effort to demonstrate that the attack was a case of inadvertent “collateral damage”, General Wesley Clark, the Supreme Commander of NATO forces, called a press conference and showed two video films taken by cameras located in the noses of the remote control-guided bombs. According to Clark, the films made clear that the passenger train was approaching too fast for the pilot, who was concentrating on the difficult business of guiding the bombs, to react. The pilot had “less than a second” to abort the strike, Clark asserted.

Of course, this version of events did not explain why the plane turned round and dropped a second bomb. But the official NATO account given by Clark was misleading in two further respects.

First, the video film sped up the actual sequence by a factor of at least three. Second, the fighter plane used in the attack—type F15E—had a crew of two, a pilot and a weapons systems officer. The pilot played no role in directing the bombs and could not have been diverted by that task. In this type of plane the bombs find their own way to the target as soon as the target co-ordinates have been set by the weapons systems officer, who can, however, intervene to stop or divert them. More