**CORRECTED**Conflicting Reports on Beheading of Franciscan Father. The Gray Lady Mum.

Catholic Online has a piece about the Al Nusra Front beheading Franciscan Father Francois Murad. This is being denied. No word as of yet in the prestige press.

No Syria news appeared in this morning's New York Times. Reuters is reporting that Chinese Communist leadership blames unrest in the western region of Xinjiang on the Syrian opposition. This wasn't mentioned in the story by Christopher Buckley that appeared in the New York Times.

Yesterday Mark Mazzetti, C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt reported on Qatari shipments of shoulder-fired Chinese FN-6 missiles to the rebels in Syria. Add this to reports of the Saudis supplying antitank guns to the rebels in Aleppo, and already it's plain to see that the heart of the Middle East is going the way of Afghanistan in the 1980s. This means constant warfare and the suffering that results -- death, dislocation, poverty.

It was a big disappointment to read Steve Coll's take on Syria in The New Yorker. It's pure sophistry. He basically comes out and calls for a no-fly zone. Coll makes his pitch based on appeals to our humanitarian better angels. Al-Assad is targeting civilians lining up to buy bread. Proof? No proof needed. And he's using poison gas on his own people. Proof? Well, our spot-on intelligence apparatus, of course. After reading Coll's "spooky" piece, from now on I'll be skeptical about anything he writes.

The best reporting -- the most consistent and trustworthy -- comes from The Independent's Patrick Cockburn. He had an excellent piece on Homs that appeared on Counterpunch's web site over the weekend; in it he directly addresses humanitarian warriors like Coll and the canard that the body count -- 90,000 to 100,000 -- constantly headlined in the Western press is entirely attributable to al-Assad:

The Syrian conflict is a civil war with all the horrors traditionally inflicted in such struggles wherever they are fought, be it Syria today or Russia, Spain, Greece, Lebanon or Iraq in the past. For the newly appointed American National Security Adviser Susan Rice, David Cameron or William Hague to pretend that this is a simple battle between a dictatorial government and an oppressed people is to misrepresent or misunderstand what is happening on the ground.

Evidence that both sides have committed supporters prepared to fight to the death is borne out by the estimate of some 100,000 dead published this week by the pro-rebel Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It concludes that fatal casualties come almost equally from the two sides in the civil war: broadly 25,000 of them government soldiers, 17,000 pro-government militia, 36,000 civilians and 14,000 rebel fighters, though the last two figures in particular are probably understated.

The massive anti-Morsi protests yesterday in Egypt are heartening. The Saudis and Qataris actively seeking to Talibanize the entire Middle East no doubt took note. There is a huge majority that wants peace, employment and tolerance. Not sharia. Not perpetual war.

Organ Trafficking in Kosovo

I made the work-week commute in the late afternoon yesterday. The occasion was a retirement party for the business manager of the local where I work.

Riding the train out to SeaTac on a Saturday -- the party was held at the local's first-floor meeting hall -- was not something to which I was particularly looking forward. But the weather was perfect and the change of pace turned out to be enjoyable. The train was chock full of weekend shoppers and sightseers. Fathers out with their families and single women carrying bags from the department stores. I used the hour trip to read the lengthy The New Yorker piece by Nicholas Schmidle on Kosovo's criminal organ-harvesting enterprise. It's a sordid tale but one that needs to be learned. Too many supposedly knowledgeable people point to Bill Clinton's NATO war on Yugoslavia as a successful example of Western military intervention. But it must be remembered that during the spring of 1999 when the United States was leading the attack, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed and Wesley Clark almost fired on Russian forces in Pristina. Both incidents could have led to a much wider and more devastating conflict. Today Kosovo is not a viable state absent United Nations assistance; it is an Albanian criminal enterprise.

Schmidle spends the first half of his story constructing a rigorous brief on the criminal nature of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Then he pisses in his own punch bowl the second half by speculating that Serbs have suborned perjury in their obsession to secure convictions of former KLA leaders at the ICTY. He concludes his essay with a sympathetic account of Hashim Thaci.

In the end, Schmidle can't break out of the official mindset: evil Serbs, innocent "Kosovars." At the time Schmidle's article appeared in April he made the following blog post, "An Organ-Trafficking Conviction in Kosovo":

In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, I investigate allegations that, around the time of the 1999 Kosovo war, the Kosovo Liberation Army trafficked prisoners across the border into Albania, killed them, and harvested their organs. Hashim Thaci, the current Prime Minister of Kosovo, is among those accused of being responsible; a 2010 report, published by the Council of Europe, accused him of being the “boss” of a “network of unlawful activity,” which included prisoner abuse and organ harvesting. Thaci strongly denies the allegations and, despite all of these nasty insinuations, not a single case of suspected organ trafficking has gone before a judge and yielded a verdict.

That changed Monday, when an international panel of judges from the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo issued multiple convictions of human trafficking and organized crime. The charges don’t relate directly to the war years, or include Thaci or his close associates; they are centered on Medicus, a transplant clinic in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. The prosecution argued that, in 2008, a urologist named Lutfi Dervishi began performing kidney transplants there for money. (The sale of organs is outlawed everywhere in the world except Iran.) In its 2010 report, the Council of Europe cited Dervishi’s clinic as evidence of an organ trade that began during the war and continued afterward, “albeit in other forms.”

The investigation continues. So expect more revelations of the true nature of the state created out of the smoke of Bill Clinton's stunning military-intervention success story.