Jack Kelley on Kosovo- Fiction or Fact?

USA Today has not yet replied to our query about whether a specific one of disgraced reporter Jack Kelley's stories should go into the dustbin of history, along with many others that he admitted making up following a long internal investigation. Maybe you, dear reader, can help solve the riddle.

One of Kelley's most famous stories, and in fact the one that fatefully aroused a colleague's suspicion, was a July 14 1999 revelation in which he claimed to have seen a notebook in which the Yugoslav army ordered the ethnic cleansing of an Albanian village in Kosovo. This was supposed to be "smoking gun" stuff against Milosevic, and ran on the paper's front page. Ironically, while this story was all a product of his imagination, the riveting story of how his editors discovered that constitutes an excellent example of investigative journalism. How very postmodern.

In a fawning June '99 piece subtitled, "Fact by Fact, detail by detail, Western journalists meticulously reconstructs the horrors of Kosovo," the American Journalism Review includes the following Kelley snippet. Suspicions are raised as it seems he doth protest too much (he states he is "150 percent sure this story is accurate," though no one appears to have challenged him), but since USA Today has not replied, and there is no other confirmation to be found in the land of Google, readers are invited to send an email to us (contact@balkanalysis.com) if they know about the verismilitude of the piece.

The excerpt runs:

"...How, for instance, did Jack Kelley of USA Today know his sources spoke the truth when they described a Serb gunman beating out the brains of a 15-year-old boy?

Following are excerpts from Kelley's page one story that ran April 12: In Shkabaj, the witnesses say, the soldiers fired several shots into the crowd and over their heads. Six were wounded and fell to the ground, including a 6-year-old girl named Naxhije. The others were herded into a large circle. After demanding money, jewelry and passports, the soldiers--using a bullhorn painted with a red star, the sign of the Yugoslav army--called out the names of nearly 100 men.... The men were forced into the back of four Yugoslav Army trucks and taken to a police station. There, police sprayed their hands with a colorless chemical. If it turned their hand orange, Serb police said it was proof the men had fired a weapon within the last 36 hours. 'There were eight men whose hands turned orange,' says Muhamed Ameti, a 62-year-old refugee at the Brazda camp. 'Two of them fought with police. They shot one in front of us. Then two police held the other man's head--he was 15 years old--flat against the registration table as a third man hit him repeatedly with the butt of a gun. His blood splattered the walls. His brains came out on the table. I saw it. They made us watch.' Kelley says he is '150 percent sure this account is accurate.' He cites the fact that refugees in different camps, several miles apart, provided identical names of the victims and precise details, such as scars and other physical attributes of the Serb soldiers who they said carried out the killings. They all mentioned the spraying of hands. Nevertheless, Kelley's story also carried a warning that the account could not be independently confirmed. This kind of reporting, he says, takes extraordinary patience. Of more than 80 interviews with refugees in four camps, Kelley used quotes from only three for an anecdote that led the story excerpted above. He bagged the rest, he says, because he couldn't corroborate details. 'Even if I believed it was true, I couldn't take the chance,' says the seasoned war reporter."