After a long day, one can always look forward to a good beer and, if truly lucky, a good laugh. Yesterday I was blessed with both.

I have finally received – yes! – the dubious honor of being mentioned by that very devious lobby interest, the Albanian-American Civil League - that is, not so much mentioned as smeared (in not so many words) as being a paid Serbian lobbyist, in a slimy article by Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, wife of the famous former congressman Joe “how can I profit by discovering that someone in my family was once descended from an Albanian?” DioGuardi.

Apparently the creation of a new Serbian lobby group, the American Council for Kosovo , is an event in itself for the AACL- shocked as they are that any PR firm would have the moral indecency to accept money from Serbs for amplifying the latter’s message. And therefore, by extension, the AACL implies that anyone who writes anything remotely critical of their shrill Kosovo Albanian independence cause simply must be working for the Serbs.

And so Sherlock Shirley delves deeper. I will let the others attacked in her article defend themselves, as I don’t know them- with the exception of Tom Gambill, whom I personally know to be a damn good man, honest, fair and principled in his opposition to terrorists and mafia groups, and a man supportive of safe, prosperous and lawful life for all ethnic groups – including Albanians – in Kosovo.

Noting the apparently suspicious content of one of my recent articles, she issues this ambivalent “smoking gun” indictment:

“On May 10, an article by Christopher Deliso, entitled ‘Botched Kosovo intervention dims hopes for peace,’ appeared in The Baltimore Sun. Whether Deliso, an American freelance journalist who runs Balkanalysis.com out of Skopje, Macedonia, is connected with the Jatras/Venable contract is not known. Nevertheless, Deliso clearly identifies with the Serbian lobby’s frenzy to undercut final status resolution in Kosova by painting Kosovar Serbs as a community under siege who ‘will flee as nationalist militants remobilize to purge Serbs and annex Albanian inhabited areas of Macedonia and Montenegro, as soon as Kosova becomes independent.”

The first thing I have to thank Shirley for is at least spelling the site URL correctly, something which even well-meaning readers sometimes don’t do. Good work. The second thing I can thank her for is directing readers to our website, which she has in a way validated by mentioning. So… thanks again. And the third thing I can thank her for is that by making such a typically slimy pseudo-accusation against me, the whole sordid tactics and thought-process of the AACL is exposed.

As for my predictions quoted above, hell, I’m willing to put money on it if Shirley is- the difference being that mine would be my own and hers would be coming from the deep-pocketed contributors paying to have her churn out such hysterical and hackish drivel as this.
What these people can simply not understand is that an individual might actually have values, and write as they do based on said values, independent of financial incentive. This concept is utterly alien to people like DioGuardi and Cloyes. Really, how much would these tools actually do for the Albanian people, if they had to finance it themselves? Would they devote their lives to it? Would they perhaps choose to live in the region (gasp!) for which they are so relentlessly lobbying? Of course not.

Indeed, it is just so indicative of the AACL’s focus on image over substance that after 5 years of very similar articles on Kosovo by myself, why is it that only when one appears in a US newspaper do they decide to acknowledge me with this clumsy smear attempt? What, were the other 200 articles automatically ‘clean’ by virtue of their appearance primarily in alternative media, and the next one automatically tainted? What this really indicates is the overwhelming arrogance of the AACL, which is tacitly implying that only the mainstream media should be stupid enough to fall for their lies. When it turns out that the mainstream media might actually not be as stupid as they think, panic sets in. The golden days are over, Shirley.

While I’m on it, we can set the record straight by discussing the provenance of the article that got Shirley to put her little detective cap on. One day, I happened to read an article in the Baltimore Sun, by the ICG’s James Lyon, which painted a rather biased and incorrect picture of the Kosovo situation. It also neglected to mention the ICG’s virulently anti-Serbian, pro-Albanian independence lobbying efforts and its board members, some of whom (such as Wesley Clark and Marti Ahtisaari) have significant relations with Clinton’s war and its sordid aftermath.

Noting these facts, I thus politely asked the paper for an opportunity to provide another side of the story, and was pleasantly surprised to received an affirmative answer. While I had submitted a sort of rebuttal, by virtue of the fact that it mentioned the Lyon article, I learned, it was not allowable. No worries. I published it here.

Then I wrote the article that did appear in the Sun, not receiving pay from the paper or from anyone else, instead sacrificing around 28 hours of productive writing time, out of the simple desire to combat what I perceived to be an injustice. No lobby ‘placement’, no secret cash-in, nada. My initiative, my labor, my moral victory. Sorry, chumps.

But of course this issue is not about me. It is about a bigger phenomenon. Looking at this recent smear propaganda, it seems that the AACL is heavily panicked to see that any sort of organized resistance from the Serbian side is finally materializing. They had been on cruise control for so long, had helped demonize the Serbs so thoroughly, that they were taken over by the hubris of overwhelming power and a victory assured in advance.

And so now, having been running on sheer offense for so long, the Albanian lobby has not stopped to think about what an intelligent defense might look like. They never thought they might need to be on defense. And so they honestly don’t know how to react, except through smear campaigns. They thought that they had this Kosovo thing in the bag and they could just coast from here on out. Whoops.

Yet now that there is some sort of opposition mounting, the lobby is horrified to see things might not go exactly as smoothly as they’d been led to believe. But having nothing to say when presented with the facts, these phonies are left with nothing to do except smear.

While I hate to sound messianic or self-aggrandizing, if these people are panicking now, then they have no idea what’s coming. And I’m not talking about from the Serbian lobby group (I am not involved with them and I have no idea what they are planning, though no doubt they will have some interesting things to say too). I’m talking strictly about my own long and painstaking investigations, which are coming to a head just as is the situation in Kosovo.

The unfortunate thing about the AACL’s clumsy attack against me is that by drawing attention to my arguments and my website, they are now going to have to refute them with facts. I can guarantee that they are going to regret in the future their unwarranted and almost libelous provocation.