In a major foreign policy address U.S. President Bill Clinton has again defended NATO's air attacks on Yugoslavia. Clinton said the aerial bombardment was "morally right."

Clinton said NATO's actions are being fuelled by the continued atrocities being carried out against the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

"Nine of every 10 Kosovar Albanians now has been driven from their home; thousands murdered; at least 100,000 missing; many young men led away in front of their families; over 500 cities, towns and villages torched. All this has been carried out . . . according to a plan carefully designed months earlier in Belgrade," said the U.S. President.

"It is not only the morally right thing for America, it is the right thing for our security interests over the long run."

He laid the blame for the situation in Yugoslavia directly at the feet of President Slobodan Milosevic. And he called up the imagery of the Holocaust to drive home his point. "Though his ethnic cleansing is not the same as the ethnic extermination of the Holocaust, the two are related -- both vicious, premeditated, systematic oppression fuelled by religious and ethnic hatred," he said.

Clinton's speech was made in front of an audience of military officers and retired combat veterans. He repeated NATO's demands that the Yugoslav military withdraw from Kosovo, and that Milosevic allow the Kosovars to return home and accept both the Rambouillet peace deal and the stationing of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

"Until Serbia accepts these conditions, we will continue to grind down its war machine. NATO actions will not stop until the conditions .... for peace are met."

NATO continued its attacks on Friday morning. Wide areas of Yugoslavia's three biggest cities were blacked out when alliance warplanes went after power stations.

Serbian state television broke into its programmes to announce that special short-circuiting graphite bombs had been dropped in and around Belgrade and in Novi Sad and Nis.