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Captives face trial WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Clinton said Thursday he holds Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic responsible for the capture of three Army soldiers near the Macedonian-Yugoslav border, warning him to "make no mistake" and release them immediately. The United States initially branded the capture an illegal abduction on the assumption that Serbian forces had crossed into Macedonia. But later Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon called the soldiers "prisoners of war," raising the specter that they could be held until the end of hostilities. The Pentagon was investigating the possibility that the soldiers had blundered across the Macedonian border into Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia said the soldiers were invaders and would face criminal trial before a military court Friday. "We're outraged by that," Bacon said. "They are covered by the Geneva Convention. Prisoners of war should not be tried." The Yugoslav announcement added a new and unsettling element to an expanding Balkan conflict that the Clinton administration struggled Thursday to explain. Mixed with images of Kosovar Albanian refugees fleeing from apparent Yugoslav "ethnic cleansing" operations were television pictures apparently from Pristina, the Kosovar provincial capital, showing the three American soldiers in captivity. They bore facial cuts and bruises. The Pentagon released a transcript of the soldiers' final, frantic radio dispatches. "We're in contact. We're taking direct fire," one of the three soldiers shouted into his radio, the sound of gunfire in the background. "You better not be bullshitting me," a soldier in another Humvee some distance away replied. "We're not. We're taking direct fire ... We're trapped ... They're all around us ... We can't get out." That was the final transmission. The nearby Army soldiers mounted an immediate search but found no trace of the men or their Humvee. NATO airstrikes, meanwhile, continued across a broad spectrum of targets Thursday, including a major bridge across the Danube River, a Yugoslav army unit in central Kosovo, an ammunition dump and fuel storage facility. Bacon said there were signs Yugoslav forces were low on fuel. Clinton, who met with families of service members, pledged to stay the course in Yugoslavia. "This is something we are doing to try to avoid in the 21st century the kind of widespread war, large American casualties and heartbreak that we saw too much of in the century we are about to leave," he said. But a key Clinton ally in the Senate, Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., was sharply critical, saying the U.S. military gave the Serbs "a virtual invitation" to capture the soldiers. "It is incomprehensible to me that the U.S. military would send a three-man patrol near the borders of Serbia," Torricelli said in a telephone interview. Bacon said he did know why the lightly armed patrol was operating near the border, and said that was under investigation. The Pentagon, meanwhile, announced that Defense Secretary William Cohen had ordered 13 F-117A stealth fighter-bombers to the region this weekend to join 11 of the radar-evading planes already operating over Yugoslavia. One is a replacement for the F-117A that was apparently shot down Saturday near Belgrade. "The Serb air defenses are robust and remain so," Bacon said, thus the need for more stealth planes. The new fighters bring the total of U.S. aircraft to 220 out of 400 NATO warplanes. As for the captured soldiers, Bacon said the investigation was continuing to determine exactly who abducted them and from where they were taken. He asserted they were entitled to POW status "at a minimum," and could be eligible for immediate release if they were captured in Macedonia. The Army is revamping its patrol and security procedures for the roughly 400 soldiers conducting a peacekeeping and observation mission in Macedonia, Bacon said. Among other things, the Pentagon is concerned that even within Macedonia, soldiers could face hostile activity from Serbs angry over the NATO strikes. Clinton dispatched Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott to the Balkans to assess the effect of the Kosovo crisis on neighboring countries. "The United States takes care of its own," Clinton said to emotional applause from service members gathered in a hangar at Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia. "President Milosevic should make no mistake: We will hold him and his government responsible for their safety and their well-being." The Pentagon backed away from its initial assertion that the soldiers had not crossed into Yugoslav territory. Army Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that possibility was now being investigated, and he suggested that the three may have inadvertently crossed the border while fleeing from a Serb ambush. But the Clinton administration maintained that the capture of the soldiers was illegal. "There was absolutely no basis for them to be taken," Clinton said. "There is no basis for them to be held. There is certainly no basis for them to be tried." State Department spokesman James P. Rubin called the capture an "illegal abduction." Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic, a moderate in the Yugoslav government, told the Associated Press that the soldiers, who were caught Wednesday, would be treated "with the full respect of all international conventions concerning prisoners of war." The Pentagon identified the three as Staff Sgt. Andrew A. Ramirez, 24, of Los Angeles; Staff Sgt. Christopher J. Stone, 25, of Smiths Creek, Mich.; and Spc. Steven M. Gonzales, 21, of Huntsville, Texas. "We're pretty much in shock," Stone's father, Jim Stone, told the Times Herald of Port Huron, Mich. "We didn't know anything that was going on." The men had been on a routine reconnaissance mission in the Kumanov area of northern Macedonia, about three miles from the southern Yugoslav border, when they radioed frantically at about 3 p.m. (8 a.m. EST) that they were taking small-arms fire and then that they were surrounded. Nothing further was heard from the patrol. The Pentagon kept the situation secret until Wednesday evening after U.S. search-and-rescue helicopter teams had failed to find the soldiers. Draskovic said the wounds clearly visible on one soldier resulted from his "trying to fight physically before being arrested." But U.S. officials voiced concern. "We're very concerned about the safety and welfare of the three soldiers who were abducted by Serb forces," U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO commander, said at a news conference in Brussels, Belgium. "We've all seen their pictures. We don't like it. We don't like the way they're treated, and we have a long memory about these kinds of things." The carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was steaming toward the Mediterranean Sea and a possible rendezvous with other U.S. naval forces taking part in the Yugoslav strikes. The mission has been largely carried out by Air Force bombers and fighters based at Aviano Air Base, Italy, and Royal Air Force Base Fairford, England. But Clark has asked the Pentagon for use of the Roosevelt with its 70-plus combat aircraft. A defense official said three Navy ships in the Roosevelt battle group have been given permission to take part in the mission -- an attack submarine, destroyer and cruiser, all capable of firing Tomahawk cruise missiles. They are expected to arrive in the Adriatic Sea within days.
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