Ignorance or Propoganda? Only LA Times Reports on Serbia-CIA Connection

The biggest news story in Serbia right now is the Hague's announcement that Milosevic's intelligence chief, Jovica Stanisic, was alsothe CIA's "main man in Belgade" for 8 years in the 1990s. So, he was reporting to Washington DC at the same time as he was in charge of much of the ethnic cleansing that gave Serbia her current bad reputation.

Here's the thing that's weird to me -- despite the fact that I surf Serbian news (in English) via Google and Yahoo News Alerts which gather feeds from tens of thousands pof English-language sources, not a single mention was made of this story. The only way I happened to find out about it was because my husband surfs Serbian news sites in his own language, where it was the weekend's big headline.

Next I started checking major US news sites individually -- perhaps the Google and Yahoo 'bots missed something? First I went to the Washington Post, nothing. Then I checked the New York Times, zilch. In fact, the only major paper to mention this story was the LA Times. And it wasn't a small mention. The LA Times story by their Belgrade correspondent Greg Miller, entitled 'Serbian Spy's Trial Lifts Cloak on his CIA Alliance' , is more than 2,000 words long! That's major feature-story length.

Why would the LA Times do a major feature story on a CIA revelation that no other US news outlet I can find even mentioned? Not even a brief? Or, rather, why would the other news outlets ignore the story so completely? Again, not even a brief?

It seems our national honor is to some degree at stake. The CIA's cooperation with vile people in other countries, especially smaller, war-torn ones, is well documented in the past. Apparently they claim, it's the only way to do their job. War lords beat choir boys when it comes to intelligence gathering. To understand the barnyard, you have to shovel shit now and then. Whatever....

To me as a businessperson, the CIA's choice looks mostly like HR incompetence, pure and simple. Belgrade has been a center of spies and spying since before WWII. Everyone from Russia to India to the EU and yes the US, all have had spies there forever. After the Berlin Wall fell, the streets of Belgrade must have been littered with out-of-work spies! Surely the CIA could have recruited someone who was not so willing to engage in atrocities. The CIA is famous for not having remotely enough competent spies in the Middle East, where any HR exec could have told them recruiting would be critical, so let's just assume their HR department pretty much sucks wind.

But why the media silence? Is this ignorance, propoganda, stupidity? I guess, as my husband tells me, I'm naive about things like this.