One of the most damning charges against Slobodan Milosevic has long been his complete contempt for press and media freedom. Those currently prosecuting the war against him have pointed, rightly, to the repression of freedom of expression within Serbia. The recent murder of a dissident newspaper editor dramatised the vile nature of a regime that suppresses views it does not like.
But what, then, do we say about the bombing of Serbian state television in the early hours of yesterday morning?
According to the Serbs, 15 people were killed. The BBC's John Simpson saw six bodies, among them that of a make-up artist.
If assassination is the extreme form of censorship, such bombing is clearly the extreme form of assassination. NATO obviously tried - unsuccessfully as it turned out - to silence the station by killing some of its employees and destroying its equipment.
The apparent justification for such an attack is, of course, the important role that propaganda plays in Mr Milosevic's war machine. Television in Serbia is an arm of the regime.
The control and distortion of information has been critical to Mr Milosevic's ability to maintain his power.
Bombing his television station has an undeniable military logic.
But the NATO campaign against Mr Milosevic is not supposed to be a conventional military campaign. It is supposed to be something new: a war for human rights. Its sole legitimate purpose is to protect the Kosovans and to bring war criminals to justice.
If human rights are not to be universally upheld, if they can be suspended because of military necessity, then Mr Milosevic is not a criminal and NATO's war against him has no basis in justice.
If it's okay to kill innocent civilians and to suppress opposing views with extreme violence, then Mr Milosevic can legitimately claim his own war crimes as unfortunate side-effects of his conflict with the KLA.
As things now stand, NATO is in serious danger of winning the war it is not supposed to be fighting and losing the one it is supposed to be fighting.
If things go on as they are, it will end up in a conventional military trial of strength in which it has every chance of victory.
But it will have lost the struggle for human rights. In the long term, its actions will have reinforced the notion that armies can do whatever it takes to win.
It is not that there is some kind of moral equivalence between NATO and Mr Milosevic. NATO has not deliberately targeted civilians; the Serbs have made civilians their primary target.
NATO is trying to secure a long-term future for the Albanian population of Kosovo; Mr Milosevic is trying to obliterate them.
NATO's military efforts have been considerably constrained by its efforts to make war on an army, not on an entire society; the Serbs have made total war on an entire population, including non-combatant men, women and children. NATO's actions are subject to free debate and searching questions; debate and questioning are increasingly dangerous activities in Mr Milosevic's Yugoslavia.
But the problem with holding the moral high ground is that self-righteousness breeds arrogance and arrogance breeds a careless attitude to your own actions.
The notion that "our cause is just, therefore our actions must be just" takes hold all too easily.
Yet the whole point of what is happening in Kosovo is the desperate need to establish once and for all that some actions can never be justified by any cause.
It can never be right to inflict collective punishment on an entire society for the actions of its leaders. It can never be right to shrug one's shoulders at the inevitability of "collateral damage".
One of the biggest problems with a long-term bombing campaign is precisely that it tends to obscure these basic principles. If NATO ground troops stormed the Serbian state television offices and systematically murdered all the employees they found inside, no one would have any difficulty in recognising this as a war crime. But if bombers target the same building and "accidentally" kill many of the same employees, those who order such an action seem somehow distanced from its consequences.
Yet the perpetrators of the Omagh bombing could say the same thing: our aim was to destroy the town centre, and the massacre of civilians was a mere side-effect of that action.
Generals are not used to thinking in terms of human rights. Their view of the world takes in just two categories: victory and defeat.
To them, it seems desperately unfair that they should be constrained by considerations that don't apply to the opposition. Having to worry about morality is a nuisance. And as the war becomes more about military victory and less about political aims, it is the generals' logic that is taking over.
This is a foolproof formula for disaster. There is now an immense risk that NATO will end up destroying the very principles for which it is fighting.
If it continues to target Serbian civil installations and to be careless about the taking of innocent lives, it will end up doing exactly what Mr Milosevic has done: making war on an entire people.
One set of human rights abuses will merely have created another. The notion of collective punishment will have been given the full sanction of the western democracies.
It's vital, therefore, that the politicians take back control of the war. If NATO commanders have run out of legitimate military targets, they must not be allowed to embark on an ever-wider search for something to bomb.
If nothing of military substance can be done until the intervention of ground troops is possible, then the bombing must be scaled down.
To keep bombing just because NATO isn't ready to do anything else would be a travesty of the high purposes for which this war was launched.
If western leaders need to fill in the time between now and the start of a ground offensive, they could make good use of the opportunity to study the basic principles of human rights and to remind themselves that they apply to everyone, everywhere, all the time.