>On Behalf Of Max Sawicky
> If I've been paying sufficient close attention, none
> of the parties in question except the witness were at
> the other camp. What does that say about whether the
> camp ITN visited was or was not a detention camp, and
> whether ITN presented false information to the efffect
> that the camp visited was a detention camp?
Here is what the original allegedly libelous article said:
"The fact is that Fikret Alic and his fellow Bosnian Muslims were not imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence. There was no barbed wire fence surrounding Trnopolje camp. It was not a prison, and certainly not a 'concentration camp', but a collection centre for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished."
Penny Marshall and Ian Williams were accused not of faking a picture with camera angles to get heightened impact (a pretty common journalist sin), but of faking the very existence of a prison camp at all.
And here is the evidence ITN presented in refutation about Trnopolji: as
Reuters reported yesterday:
>
> "Among the strongest evidence in ITN's favour was the testimony
> of a Bosnian
> Moslem doctor who told of atrocities at a Serb-run camp at Trnopolji in
> northern Bosnia.
> "They took wooden legs from tables and beat people with
> them," Dr Idriz
> Merdzanic told the court. "We heard the screams and the beatings.
> Then they
> would bring some of those they beat up to us to help them, to dress their
> wounds."
> "He said some prisoners were taken away and never seen again."
LM said Tronpolji was not a prison camp, ITN's witnesses (along with the Hague) say it was.
I don't think LM should be fined for being Serbian apologists. But this case was not about camera angles, however much LM may claim otherwise; it was about LM's denial of Serbian oppression at a prison camp.
-- Nathan Newman