UN begins CYA in Slobodan's death

We never thought Slobodan Milosevic was an angel. We have also had serious reservations as to whether he was anywhere close to the personification of evil that he was painted during the years of the Bill Clinton's Great War in the Balkans.

Now that he has died in prison, in what has been years of confinement while supposedly being tried for his many war crimes, the "We Hate Milosevic" crowd says it feels cheated out of justice.

What excrement.

The most punishment the International War Crimes Tribunal could impose was life imprisonment. That's exactly what Milosevic wound up with.

More likely the IWCT is worried that people are going to suspect that someone knowingly did Milosevic in. In fact, there were worries about this as far back as three years ago, according to the BBC, at the time:

Legal affairs analyst Jon Silverman say that, from the court's point of view, the worst thing that could happen would be for Mr Milosevic to die, as it would then face accusations that it killed him. jan 13 2003 BBC

As a matter of fact, there are some questions that could use answering.

A day or so ago, Milosevic wrote that he feared he was being poisoned. A week earlier he had learned that a foreign medication had turned up in his lab work. It turned out to be a powerful antibiotic that would interfere with his high blood pressure meds, and may have led to his heart attack.

So what are our dear friends in the U.N. saying this evening?

Expert says Milosevic Died in a Drug Ploy

THE HAGUE , March 13 — A top toxicologist in the Netherlands said Monday that he believed that Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader, had been manipulating medication to fake a medical condition, a ploy that contributed to his ill heath and may have played a role in the heart attack that caused his death.

That theory was advanced by Dr. Donald Uges, professor of clinical and forensic toxicology at the University of Groningen, who suggested that Mr. Milosevic had been seeking to demonstrate that Dutch doctors could not cure him and that he should therefore be allowed to seek treatment, and freedom, in Moscow.

Or as we've heard it said back home, Milosevic died "of the most determined case of suicide."

Of course the NY Times, which gushed over the Bill Clinton/Wesley Clark "war for peace" in Kosovo, is lending its experienced hand at spinning the former Serbian president's death into something that would exculpate the United Nations. (The very fact that part of the damaging testimony against Milosevic came from Wesley the Weasel was partly what caused us to begin to question the prevailing wisdom.)

The logic used by the doctor in the Times story is specious beyond belief ... for those who want to take the time to actually analyze what he's saying. At a couple of points the doctor simply invents new "facts" - such as he first assumes that Milosevic is medicating himself -- and then he uses that to justify the next step in his logic:

He said Mr. Milosevic was getting sophisticated advice.

"The provider had to know what the effect of rifampicin was on other drugs, that it is not normally detected in toxic screenings, unless you look for it," he said. "He had to know what dose to give, sufficient for it to be effective, but not too high because you get a so-called red sweat: your saliva becomes red."

And you have to know how to get it to the patient, he continued, " because you have to take a capsule of it every day to keep your blood pressure high."

"It's like a James Bond story," Dr. Uges said.

Yeah, James Bond all right. Total fiction. In fact, if Dr. Uges were playing himself in the Bond movie, you'd have to suspect right then and there that he knows too much. If anyone could have been supplying the rifampicin at just the right dosage, and had access, he would qualify.

Now we're not suggesting that. But what we are suggesting is that so many people had painted Milosevic as a monster that there probably is no getting at the real truth of the matter anymore. And maybe that's why someone decided to end the matter, the prolongation which was becoming an embarrassment.

Perhaps Milosevic was as evil as they say. If that is true, then he will have to deal with God's justice, and there is nothing that humanity can do to Slobodan that is any fairer, or more final, than God can.

There's the slightest possibility, we believe, that Milosevic was the fall guy for a foreign policy in the Balkans that failed to intervene in a brutal conflict soon enough, and then very possibly picked the wrong side, perhaps for reasons of political correctness. (Muslims versus Christians, NATO and the West back the Muslims, and it got us what?)

If Milosevic was not as evil as depicted, then God in His mercy will right the wrong.

We're satisfied with that. Too bad the NYT and the Milosevic haters aren't.