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Lies the London Guardian told me... or, The Return of Villainy

By Jared Israel

[Posted 3 September 2004; edited 16 April 2006]

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On 6 August 1992, the international media broadcast pictures of a supposed Bosnian Serb death camp for Muslim prisoners of war. These pictures were taken from footage shot 5 August at a facility in the Bosnian town of Trnopolje (pronounced turn-OP-ul-yay). The film crew from the British news station, ITN, was led by reporter Penny Marshall, and accompanied by reporters Ian Williams and Ed Vulliamy.

Unfortunately for ITN, there is a hard record of what their film crew actually saw in Bosnia on 5 August 1992.  That's because Serbian Television (RTS) covered the visit. An RTS crew followed ITN as they inspected a detention center in the town of Omarska and a refugee center at Trnopolje (pronounced turn-OP-ul-yay.), where the supposed death camp footage was shot.  So RTS filmed the same things ITN filmed and sometimes filmed the ITN reporters as well. Based on this RTS footage, Emperor’s Clothes produced a movie which proves that ITN did not film a death camp. Rather, pictures of the refuge center at Trnopolje were doctored and misrepresented to create the illusion of a concentration camp.

The evidence in our film ('Judgment!') is cut and dry.  But because most people have not seen the film, the media can continue to use the ITN pictures to convince the public that the Bosnian Serbs are "the new Nazis."

The Guardian newspaper in the UK just published a piece on Omarska by Ed Vulliamy. Vulliamy is one of the reporters who went to Bosnia with ITN. If you have seen 'Judgment!' and you read this article by Vulliamy you will be aghast. He simply lies.  I won’t try to answer all his lies; it would be a second career. I'll just focus on two of the most striking.  When a supposedly objective reporter is caught in two grotesque lies, why should one trust anything else he says?

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Lie #1: The famous "death camp" picture

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Here’s how the Guardian article begins:

And so on.  Notice that Vulliamy uses a melodramatic fictional style to present his supposed news report. This is fitting, for he is writing fiction.

Right off the bat, this is not a picture of the detention center at Omarska.  It is from the footage famously shot at the refugee center at Trnopolje. ITN went to both locations on 5 August 1992: first to Omarska, then to Trnopolje.

Vulliamy of course knows this. Did the Guardian insert the wrong picture by mistake?  Or the wrong caption? You'd think that if the Guardian made such an obvious mistake they would have changed it on their website immediately, but two days later it was still there. [When I checked in June 2005 nine months later, it was still there - JI] 

Perhaps the Guardian/Vulliamy deliberately misidentified  the picture. Vulliamy's article is intended to convince people that the Serbs are monsters; perhaps none of ITN's Omarska footage could be properly doctored to create the impression of a death camp. So to achieve maximum impact, the Guardian used one of the famous Trnopolje pictures, which millions have seen, and which fixed in people's heads as death camp photos, and gave it a new location. Why not?  I mean, after all, a) nobody in the West knows Trnopolje or Omarska from a carrot and b) the whole death camp story is a pack of lies, so what's one more? (In for a penny, in for a pound....)

[Note regarding caption:  As noted above, until at least 12 June 2005 the Guardian website misidentified the Trnopolje picture as having been shot n Omarska. I checked again today (16 April 2006) and the caption now correctly identifies the location but claims Trnopolje was a concentration camp - falsely claims, as I shall demonstrate below.  You can view Vulliamy's article as originally published, with the Omarska caption, at http://islamicawakening.com/viewnews.php?newsID=2711&
Islamic Awakening.com likes the article very much, but if they do take it down, we've backed it up at www.tenc.net/islamicawakening-vulliamy.htm ]

Pictures like the one above have been used to demonize the Serbs for a dozen years. The basis of their emotional impact is that a) it appears these men are penned in behind barbed wire and b) one of the men, Fikret Alic, is painfully thin, thus resembling a concentration camp victim.  But if one examines the picture thoughtfully, one can see that the concentration camp claim makes no sense.

First, in the picture above, nobody besides Fikret Alic looks emaciated. For example, take the man in front on the left, or the man holding the barbed wire (his name is Mehmet; more about him in a moment). Both look perfectly healthy. Were the Serbs feeding everyone but Fikret Alic?

Second, Alic appears to be smiling.  Why would the one man being starved in a concentration camp be smiling? And another man, in the middle in back, appears to be smiling as well.

To make things clearer, let's look at another picture, posted below. This one was shot from a slightly different angle by the Serbian TV (RTS) crew that was filming in Trnopolje (and Omarska) alongside ITN.

Still shot from Judgment! Fikret Alic is in center. Mehmet is on right.

Notice the following:

* A) The fence supposedly around this supposed concentration camp is mostly made of chicken wire.  (If you look carefully you can see the chicken wire in the Guardian photo, but it's fainter.) Chicken wire is not used to concentrate anybody but chickens, because chickens don't seem to realize it lacks the barbs that make barbed wire hard to tear down or climb over. Also, chickens lack fingers. (It may be that the presence of fingers, and the ability to distinguish barbed wire from chicken wire, sometimes, is what distinguishes human beings from chickens.)

* B) The man wearing a black shirt on the left/front is looking down and scowling;

* C) Fikret (the skinny one) is definitely grinning;

* D) Mehmet (front center, holding the wire) is frowning;

* D) A short man in a blue shirt on the right is gesturing palm up towards Fikret Alic.

The RTS footage used in 'Judgment!' includes sound, so it's clear when you see the movie that a little play was indeed being enacted here; it just wasn't Vulliamy's 'Tales from a Serbian Death Camp.'  Rather, it was 'Arrogant ITN Reporter Fishes for Usable Sound Bite and Manages to Offend Everyone.'

In Judgment!, shortly before this scene, we see Penny Marshall and her film crew setting up their cameras in an area used to store building materials. This area is surrounded by a flimsy fence; there are a few strands of barbed wire on top, but mostly it's chicken wire.  

Drawn by the unusual spectacle of two film crews (ITN and RTS) setting up shop in a fenced-in storage area in a refugee center, some refugees wander over. There are no officials of any kind, i.e., no guards. 

Penny Marshall talks to the refugees. Because her crew is filming through the fence, ITN will be able to produce photos which create the illusion that the refugees are the ones enclosed by the fence.

In Judgment! you can hear Marshall talking to Mehmet, the man in overalls holding onto the fence.  She presses him with loaded questions, trying to get him to say that this is a prison camp and he is being abused.  He keeps saying no, no, it’s just a refugee center.  "They treat you badly?" asks Marshall.  Mehmet says, "No, I think they are kind. Very kind. But it is too hot."  (It’s August.)

Manifestly exasperated by her failure to get something usable from this stubborn fellow, Penny Marshall points to the man in the black shirt (front-left, looking down and scowling in the RTS picture) and asks, rather rudely, "Why is that man so thin?" This embarrasses the fellow in black, and he scowls and lowers his eyes. Mehmet frowns at Marshall's abrasive bad manners and tries to explain, "All people not the same." A good point, but Marshall isn't interested; she has a job to do.

At that moment, someone shoves Fikret Alic (the emaciated-looking man) and he staggers forward, giggling. The little guy in a blue shirt on the right motions, arm extended, palm up, a universal gesture, as if to say, "You want skinny?  There's skinny!" Fikret Alic leans amiably over the fence, chatting with Penny Marshall.

And that’s it. Of all the people that can be seen in this clip, the only one that looks skinny is Fikret Alic and he's laughing. Both he and Mehmet hang over the scraggly wire fence, relaxed. In other words, everyone is behaving precisely as they would not behave if they were inmates in a death camp. Except of course for Penny Marshall. She is  tense. She is under pressure to succeed and upset because the suckers are not behaving like...suckers.

Once again, there are no guards. Think about it.  Even without the information one can glean from Judgment!, does the concentration camp accusation make any sense?  In the summer of 1992, the US newspaper Newsday claimed that the Serbs were running death camps. The Serbs vehemently denied this charge. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic himself invited ITN to film at Trnopolje and Omarska and see for themselves. If Trnopolje were a concentration camp, would the Serbs have a) invited a TV news film crew from ITN, a British station that attacked the Serbs nightly, and b) let them wander about without supervision, chatting with whomever? Without so much as an armed guard to intimidate the prisoners? (If there were armed guards, why didn't ITN film them?  And why were the supposed inmates  relaxed and moderately cheerful?)

I have always found it amazing that people fell for the death camp line. Perhaps they did so because a) ITN edited the raw footage to create  stills that looked as if they had been filmed in a death camp; we show how this was done in 'Judgment!'; b) the pictures were broadcast alongside photos of Nazi death camps; c) the pictures were consistent with other media coverage of the Serbs; d) nobody wants to believe that the media would lie about something so important.  But the media did lie. And while most of the media publicizes criticisms of Bush and Blair over the relatively small-time lies told about Iraq, none of the media  has acknowledged the big-time lies told about the Bosnian Serbs. [2]

Throughout the article Vulliamy uses his super-melodramatic fictional style to create an emotional mood.  Arguing against this type of propaganda is like walking through mud: tedious and time consuming, and afterwards one wants a bath.  So let me focus on one important paragraph and compare it to the hard evidence in 'Judgment!'.

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Lie #2: Terrified and skeletal in Omarska

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Having lied not only about the content of the picture that the Guardian published, but even, apparently, its location, Vulliamy describes what he claims he saw on 5 August 1992 when he and the ITN film crew visited the detention center at Omarska. Here's Vulliamy:

[Excerpt from Vulliamy starts here]

"We saw little that day, but enough: terrified men emerging from a hangar, in various states of decay - some skeletal, heads shaven - and drilled across a tarmac yard, under the watchful eye of a machine-gun post, into a canteen where they wolfed down watery bean stew like famished dogs, skin folded like parchment over their bones. "I do not want to tell any lies," said one prisoner, "but I cannot tell the truth." And it is strange - traumatic, indeed - to stand again in that now empty canteen; strange to walk that tarmac killing ground."

[Excerpt from Vulliamy ends here]

This is beyond purple prose.  Aside from that, notice first of all that this description bears zero resemblance to either the ITN picture, published by the Guardian, or the RTS picture, taken from Judgment!  Other than Alic, which of these men looks even remotely "skeletal"?  Whose head is "shaven"? It is indicative of the power of media lies that the Guardian illustrates Vulliamy's lies with the falsely labeled ITN picture, even though what one sees in the picture refutes Vulliamy's lies!

RTS followed Marshall and Vulliamy and the ITN people around in Omarska, filming everything they did. Therefore we can prove that the suppposd Omarska described in Vulliamy's article is a fabrication.

We see in Judgment! that Vulliamy's visit to Omarska began with a round table discussion with Mr. Simo Drljaca  (pronounced Seemo Derlacha), in charge of the detention center. Drljaca explains that his  goal is to ferret out and release prisoners who are not hard core rebels. (The prisoners are viewed as secessionist rebels against the established Yugoslav government.)

We see inside the prison itself, which is in fact the modern administration building of a mining complex.  Prisoners are sprawled about everywhere.  None of them look "wasted," (Vulliamy's word). They are all dressed in ordinary street clothes and there is no evidence of "skin folded like parchment over the bones."

Next we go to the canteen, which looks exactly like a college cafeteria.  Contrary to Vulliamy, nobody is wolfing down anything.  

Perhaps Vulliamy’s most stunning lie is his description of how the men look as they come outside: "terrified men emerging from a hangar, in various states of decay - some skeletal, heads shaven - and drilled across a tarmac yard, under the watchful eye of a machine-gun post..." 

Perhaps Vulliamy is describing an Omarska on a different planet? If we are talking about the Omarska on planet earth, the one filmed by ITN and RTS and shown in 'Judgment!' (but not in either of the pictures, above, which are from Trnopolje) then a) there is no evidence of a machine gun post, b) nobody has a shaven head; and c) the men look perfectly calm. They stand around and chat with the ITN and RTS people; RTS filmed that. If Vulliamy is talking about Trnopolje and falsely labeling it Omarska (as the Guardian picture did) then we need not consult 'Judgment!'; we need only look at the two pictures on this page, the one from the Guardian and the one from the RTS footage.  Notice: lots of hair.  Notice: nobody but Fikret Alic is skinny; the Bosnian Serbs say he had childhood TB, but whatever the causes of his skinny appearance, it is rather hard to believe he was the sole target of a starvation campaign. Anyway, as you can see if you look carefully at both the RTS and ITN photos, above, Fikret Alic is laughing. And he's not the only one (look in the middle back part of the ITN photo.)  Do you see anybody in these pictures whom you would describe as "decayed"?  What is Vulliamy smoking?

If the Serbs had had anything to hide they of course would not have let ITN into Omarska. If they were stupid enough to let them in, they would have made sure guards were present at all times. But the RTS footage shows Penny Marshall and Vulliamy and the other ITN people wandering freely around a yard, chatting with the prisoners with no evidence of guards. The prisoners act quite casual and speak freely. 

When someone makes an accusation as serious as Vulliamy's claim that this was a concentration camp, one's tendency is to think, "Where there's smoke there's fire." But Vulliamy has manufactured an Omarska that, as proven by the footage in Judgment!, is entirely different from the Omarska ITN actually visited on August 5th.

In 1997, the ITN lies were superbly exposed by Thomas Deichmann and the now-defunct British publication, Living Marxism (LM). ITN sued LM and Deichmann for libel, and in 2000 they won. ITN claims this proves they were telling the truth.  But this is not the case.  As many people have pointed out, British libel law puts the burden of proof on the accused. And as Emperor’s Clothes has pointed out, the ITN people and Deichmann conducted their defense in a manner that virtually guaranteed they would lose. In a nutshell, they refused to challenge the ITN side's claim that Trnopolje was a house of horrors. After the trial, I spoke to Mick Hume of LM on the phone, offering to organize a campaign and mount an appeal.  He politely turned me down, saying it was time to move on. And move on he did; he was hired as a columnist at the London Times, which has been a font of misinformation about Yugoslavia.

For my analysis of the disastrous way (disastrous for the truth) that LM and Deichmann handled the ITN libel suit go to
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/missing.htm

Jared Israel
Editor, Emperor's Clothes

[Footnotes & Further Reading Follows 'Judgment!' order info]

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* Footnotes and Further Reading *

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[1] The Guardian; Wednesday September 1, 2004; 'We can't forget' by Ed Vulliamy, is posted at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1294446,00.html
It can be viewed as originally published, with a caption misidentifying the location, at http://islamicawakening.com/viewnews.php?newsID=2711& 
That page backed up at
www.tenc.net/islamicawakening-vulliamy.htm

[2] Why do I say that, compared to the lies told about Bosnia, the Iraq lies were small-time?  Because, in the case of Iraq, the media did not invent a whole new government and population. Saddam Hussein really did lead the Baath party dictatorship, and the Baath party really was modeled after the Nazis. It really did use the most vicious means to suppress democracy, and it really did foment Nazi-like hatred of Jews. See,

But in the case of Yugoslavia, the media invented a fictitious government and people.  I am quite critical of Milosevic, but not because I accept the fable that he was a war criminal, bent on conquest; rather he was an appeaser, who sabotaged the Serbian defense, both from physical attack and, especially during the fighting in Bosnia from media lies, making public attacks on Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic that played into the hands of the Guardian and other branches of the media misinformation machine. The media invented an expansionist, racist Milosevic in order to justify the NATO-led break-up of Yugoslavia.  Emperor's Clothes has published a slew of articles debunking the Media Milosevic and other misinformation about Yugoslavia.  You can see a list at
http://emperors-clothes.com/yugo.htm

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