What makes this evidence important is that NATO's assault on Yugoslavia was built on the claim that the government was engaging in ethnic cleansing before March 24, and that thereafter, according to plan, it escalated its violence to the level of genocide. NATO eventually gravitated to the number of 10,000 ethnic Albanians butchered by the Serbian army and paramilitaries. But the ICTY quickly denied having supplied such a number, and it was ICTY investigators who found the mine shaft supposedly containing 700 Albanian bodies completely empty. It seems highly likely that the 10,000 or 11,000 figure is a propaganda fabrication, and that the true number may be in the high hundreds or as many as one or two thousand. But atrocities management and the patriotic gullibility factor must be considered crucial in this process of inflating claims of enemy villainy.
Government lying on enemy atrocities is standard operating procedure in building support for war.
What is more interesting, however, is that the gullible transmission of official propaganda is standard operating procedure for the U.S. mainstream media. It becomes a journalistic postulate that while enemy sources lie, our official sources tell the truth. As this assumption about our officials is confuted by a steady stream of evidence, past and present, it reflects a clear and straightforward abandonment of honest journalism. It was a notable feature of the Persian Gulf War that Peter Arnett's on-site reporting from Baghdad about bombed civilian facilities angered much of the U.S. media as well as the Pentagon and Bush administration. Arnett was accused of gullibility in the service of Saddam Hussein, when in fact Arnett was quite aware of the constraints on him, whereas the reporters in Washington who sneered at Arnett were completely unaware of their own conduit role.