marxism/resistance mp3's, part I
robin hood, judy cook (1993): judy cook tries to distinguish between three robin hood narratives: the ruling-class'/hollywood attempt to co-opt robin hood as a disenchanted noble who only wants a better king, the other attempt to portray him as a lawless and aimless bandit, and the third--the one she advocates--which is to put him in the context of the horribly oppressive world in which he matured (roughly by the 1200s you see the first references to robin hood in various literature)--a world in which armed banditry was a terribly attractive form of social entrepreneurship, if you like (freedom from serfdom, etc.). she makes the important, if somewhat stale point, that we couldn't have expected a lenin, insofar as there was no class ready to take over the administration of society (but that's all a bit formulaic, even if also obviously true).
bolivia, andy brown (2008): brown details the revolutionary insurrection from 2003-2005, which came on the back end of two decades of solidly neo-liberal policy ("bolivia as lab-rat for neo-liberalism"). it marked the decisive defeat of national and transnational elite. he asked the question of how to characterize the movement, whether indigenous or national-popular; settled on a developed conception of the former, i think, in the sense that the movement would have been impossible without the contribution of the indigenous campesinos--they were decisive (here some instructive history about how the traditional left in bolivia, in the 50s and 60s, neglected the indigenous movements; this created an opening for their co-option by the military, and thus the downfall of the first revolution). brown is relatively dismissive of what evo morales had accomplished thus far, identifying three key policy areas in which he has not been nearly as radical as the insurrection which took him to power (hydrocarbons--better terms, but not nationalization, land reform--only unused land, which does hurt elite interested in keeping land for speculative purposes, and the constituent assembly--quite insufficient, failing to transcend liberal logic of representation). in sum: the "first revolution of the 21st century," perhaps, but all that energy is, as of now, being only uneasily represented by evo morales in power.
simon bolivar, andy brown (2007): interesting observations about the man's thoroughly liberal commitments (which he "picked up" in Europe). some discussion over how representative he was of the elites' desires around him, which was torn between staying tied to the bourbon monarchy in spain and emulating revolutions on the mainland/to the north. bolivar's liberalism, brown argues, co-existed uneasily with his belief in the paramount importance of a highly centralized state (perhaps this was pragmatic, though), and the danger that he would be caught up in the military, almost bonapartist logic of his own rebellion. nonetheless, he was a believer in racial equality, though the new republics did not emancipate the slaves immediately. all in all, the way in which the contemporary bolivarian republics lay claim to his legacy is, of course, strategic, in the sense that he can only ever represent the bourgeois liberal in his revolutionary role.
who really ended slavery, robin blackburn and weymann bennet (2007): excellent antidote to the official propagandizing around the 200th anniversary of abolition, which celebrates the role of william wilberforce without ever theorizing the context in which this legislation occurred. primarily, blackburn and bennet emphasize that the oligarchical elite in britain were assailed by the revolutionary specter of (a) slave rebellion and resistance in british colonies in the Caribbean, given the fact that in the 1790s slaves in haiti had successfully launched their rebellion; (b) the general rebellions in europe (french revolution, of course) and the american colonies, where a "social contract" was being pursued that exposed the british oligarchy for the reactionary form of government it was (excessively limited franchise, etc.); (c) the explicit anti-slavery agitation of quakers and even working-classes at home, who had launched one of the first mass campaigns against the slave trade. in sum, their hand was forced--they needed to stave off the specter that was haunting their lands (and then, don't forget, they re-wrote this history and deployed it in the civilizing mission--cue leopold and that rubbish).
a people's history of the british empire, john newsinger (2006): the thesis of the talk was simple--"brutality" was a central part of the civilizing mission, throughout. john insisted on the importance of understanding Empire not on the basis of the pretext it provides for its invasions and occupations, but on the objective basis of actual material causes that explain this intervention, the simple barbarity that has always ensued. there are a few examples of this, that are memorable in the worst way: prisoners in the revolting jamaican colonies in 1865 being used as target practice for the new enfield rifle, the obliteration of canton in the second opium war (the fallujah of that war), britain announcing its imminent withdrawal from its seventy-year occupation in egypt on some sixty occasions, the horrors of the suppression of the mau mau rebellion in kenya where some 130 people were hung from the same tree (this is the 1950s, remember).
Showing posts with label fallujah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fallujah. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Friday, November 9, 2007
get out now:
"The task to which we have set our minds," declared the governor of Kenya in 1955, "is to civilize a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state." The slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were never called nationalists, was British government policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that the Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic white settlers. In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32 Europeans, compared with the estimated 10,000 Kenyans killed by the British, who ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace.
(...) It was the same in Vietnam. In 1969, the discovery of the American massacre in the village of My Lai was described on the cover of Newsweek as "An American tragedy", not a Viet- namese one. In fact, there were many massacres like My Lai, and almost none of them was reported at the time.
(...) The real tragedy of soldiers policing a colonial occupation is also suppressed. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same number, according to a veterans' study, killed themselves on their return home. Dr Doug Rokke, director of the US army depleted uranium project following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates that more than 10,000 American troops have since died as a result, many from contamination illness. When I asked him how many Iraqis had died, he raised his eyes and shook his head. "Solid uranium was used on shells," he said. "Tens of
thousands of Iraqis - men, women and children - were contaminated. Right through the 1990s, at international symposiums, I watched Iraqi officials approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense and ask, plead, for help with decontamination.
"The task to which we have set our minds," declared the governor of Kenya in 1955, "is to civilize a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state." The slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were never called nationalists, was British government policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that the Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic white settlers. In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32 Europeans, compared with the estimated 10,000 Kenyans killed by the British, who ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace.
(...) It was the same in Vietnam. In 1969, the discovery of the American massacre in the village of My Lai was described on the cover of Newsweek as "An American tragedy", not a Viet- namese one. In fact, there were many massacres like My Lai, and almost none of them was reported at the time.
(...) The real tragedy of soldiers policing a colonial occupation is also suppressed. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same number, according to a veterans' study, killed themselves on their return home. Dr Doug Rokke, director of the US army depleted uranium project following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates that more than 10,000 American troops have since died as a result, many from contamination illness. When I asked him how many Iraqis had died, he raised his eyes and shook his head. "Solid uranium was used on shells," he said. "Tens of
thousands of Iraqis - men, women and children - were contaminated. Right through the 1990s, at international symposiums, I watched Iraqi officials approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense and ask, plead, for help with decontamination.
fallujah
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7246
[first siege of fallujah, april; firing on ambulances, etc. - 60% dead civilians]
On March 31st, a US vehicle traveling through Fallujah was ambushed and its four passengers killed. Who were the passengers? According to US national media, they were “consultants” or “contractors” or “security contractors.”
(...) “townspeople went on a rampage”;[14] in the Washington Times, “cheering crowds reveled in a barbaric orgy.”[15] As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, what occurred was “an act of savagery shocking even by the blood-stained standards of Iraq’s worst trouble spot”—“sheer bestial violence” that doubled as “a town fete.”[16] These were “just random killings of any westerner” with “no rhyme or reason to [them] whatsoever.” An eyewitness account that circulated nationally recorded that “‘The people of Fallujah hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep,’ resident Abdul Aziz Mohammed said gleefully.” Though in the context that was provided it was hardly necessary, a Fallujan taxidriver assured readers of the New York Times that “everyone here is happy with this. There is no question.”[17]
(...) It went on to state that “it is critical that the US commanders respond forcefully to Fallujah and step up the counteroffensive against the Sunni insurgency.”[21] We should remember, then, that beside the lives of four American soldiers of fortune killed last April—or, in the language of the time—slaughtered sheep, were the residents of Fallujah, not quite citizens, not quite sheep for slaughter; they, a city’s mothers, fathers, babies, and grandmothers were but “jubilant locals” who, beasts that they had shown themselves to be, would “need to be defanged.”[22] As one newspaper put it, in response to a Fallujan’s words that “‘we wish that they would try to enter Fallujah so we’d let hell break loose’”: “The man will get his wish...only the when and how had yet to be decided.”[23]
(...) e New York Times reported an April 9th a US pause in fighting “to allow residents to bury scores of dead, and to open routes into the beleaguered city for food and urgently needed medical equipment,” in fact only three of the sixty trucks with relief supplies that arrived at Falluja were permitted entry into the city; probably not worth mentioning is that several of these trucks were fired upon before being denied entry and dispatched.
(...) The targeting of ambulances by the US military was practiced with enough vigilance in Fallujah that the Iraqi Minister of Health on April 17 publicly pressed Paul Bremer to account for it. Bremer explained that the US authorities believed ambulances to have been used by fighters—offering, as a response, the very definition of collective punishment.[33]
(...) "The Americans shot out the lights in the front of our hospital, they prevented doctors from reaching the emergency unit at the hospital, and we quickly began to run out of supplies and much needed medications." [34]
(...) "One of my doctors in Falluja asked the Americans there if he could remove a wounded patient from the city. The soldier wouldn’t let him move the victim, and said, “We have dead soldiers here too. This is a war zone.” The doctor wasn’t allowed to remove the wounded man, and he died. So many doctors and ambulances have been turned back from checkpoints there." [35]
(...) He added: “Not less than 60% of the dead were women and children. You can go see the graves for yourself.” At Noman Hospital in Al-Adhamiya, a doctor there too said of the people who came in from Fallujah from ten days earlier, that “most…were children, women and elderly.”[38] At Yarmouk Hospital, a lead doctor reported that he saw American soldiers killing women and children, calling the situation in Fallujah “a massacre.” The New York Times preferred the designation “tremendously precise.”[39] And it was an apt one, according to one Fallujah resident, who after having escaped to Baghdad testified that US warplanes were bombing the city heavily prior to his departure, and that Marine snipers continued to secure residents of the besieged city, shot by shot. “There were so many snipers, anyone leaving their house was killed.”[40] In the New York Times, this was called “an acute willingness among insurgents to die.”[41]
(...) If you’re the New York Times, you said nothing;[43] if you’re Paul Bremer, you probably said vigilant resolve.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9147
The LA Times reported that "the US military" assaulted the city of Fallujah with the full "understanding" that "civilians…would be killed." As a result, the Christian Science Monitor reported, "The sickening odor of rotting flesh" permeated the air circulating through the smoke filled and blood drenched streets of Fallujah. Alexander Cockburn noted, "If there is anything that should fuel the outrage of the antiwar movement [in the US] it is surely the destruction of Fallujah and the war crimes…inflicted by US commanders on its civilian population." We learned this week, November, 2005 the US used naplalm and white phosphorus in Fallujah, leaving children, women and men burnt to the bone. The US Army journal "Field Artillery" reported how, during the US attack on Fallujah in November 2004, "White Phosphorous…proved to be an effective and versatile munition [and…] a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents" when high explosives were ineffective in routing people from "spider holes." White phosphorus was used "to flush them out and [high explosives] to take them out." "High explosives" included "AC-130 Specter gunship support." "Tactics, techniques and procedures" we are told "were effective and lethal."
(...) This week marks the one year anniversary of the barbarous and criminal US assault on Fallujah in which, according to "Iraqi NGO's and medical workers…between 4,000 and 6,000" mostly civilians were killed. In addition, "36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines," and up to "200,000 residents were forced to flee, creating a refugee population the size of Tacoma." Creating a wasteland is a form of "collective punishment" and is a war crime. The leadership responsible for the wasting of Fallujah has yet to be held accountable.
(...) The attack on Fallujah by 10,000 US soldiers was prepared by 8 weeks of crushing air strikes and included "deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attack, [and] the killing of injured persons." In addition, according to UN human rights investigators, the US, in breach of international law (i.e. "war crimes"), used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population."
(...)Looking back at Fallujah and the buildup we see, selecting days virtually at random, that September 13 was no exception to the rule of force. In Baghdad, US helicopter gun ships fired into a crowd of unarmed Iraqi civilians. 13 were "wasted" and dozens more injured. Blood ran in the streets. The London Guardian published a harrowing photograph of a wounded young boy, stunned, gasping and bloodied, kneeling over three brutalized, and dead, bodies - presumably his friends. They appear to be no older than 12. UNICEF's Executive Director Carol Bellamy called the death of 34 children in an earlier US bomb attack "an unconscionable slaughter of innocents." On October 16th, we read in the Washington Post, "Electricity and water were cut off to the city [of Fallujah] just as a fresh wave of [air] strikes began Thursday night, an action that U.S. forces also took at the start of assaults on Najaf and Samarra."
(...) Ralph Peters, a retired US military officer, wrote in the New York Post, "Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage [complete annihilation], reduced to shards, the price will be worth it…the world needs to see [Iraqi] corpses." The "world" does see Iraqi corpses. US citizens must see Iraqi corpses, and stop the killing.
(...) [HOSPITALS] On November 12th we learned "among the first major targets [in the assault on Fallujah] were the hospitals." A civilian hospital and a trauma clinic were destroyed in a massive air raid, the main hospital was captured by US troops, ambulances were prohibited from traveling into the besieged city and delivering patients in need of emergency care (the US also announced that any and all moving civilian vehicles were designated free-fire targets). Much of the city's water and electricity supplies were cut off making "emergency care all but impossible, in the words of Dr. Hashem Issawi, and contrary to international law, soldiers were "empowered to destroy whatever needs to be destroyed." In the razed clinic, US bombs took the lives of 15 medics, four nurses and 35 patients, according to clinic worker Dr. Sami al-Jumaili. The Los Angeles Times reported that the manager of Fallujah general hospital "had told a US general the location of the downtown makeshift medical center" before it was hit by US bombs. In a smoke-filled, corpse-strewn landscape of collapsed houses and soot-singed factories, a US captain, fresh from 13 days of "shooting holes in every building," starkly noted that the only way to proceed is to "destroy everything in your path." Indiscriminate destruction is a war crime in violation of international law as encoded in the Nuremberg Principles.
(...) In other words, the problem is policy, systematic policy. A US soldier captured the policy quite bluntly: "We had a great day today. We killed a lot of people…the Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy." A former US soldier seeking asylum in Canada candidly said "the atrocious acts that are taking place in Iraq are not anomalies or isolated incidents but part of a plan of attack." He added, "I didn't want to be implicit in a criminal enterprise and hence a war criminal…[it is] soldiers who pay the price for the policies that come from on high…"
(...) "Fallujah doctors have identified either swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries (victims of chemical warfare], or 'melted bodies,' [victims of napalm - banned by the UN in 1980, with the US the only remaining country using napalm - another US war crime]." And one year later the "wasting" or Iraq continues…
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7163
In the case of Fallujah, where the U.S. military estimated 2,000 people were killed during the recent assault on the city, at least 1,200 of the dead are believed to have been non-combatant civilians.
(...) The November assault on Fallujah did not even begin until warplanes had, on a near-daily basis, dropped 500-1000 pound bombs on suspected resistance targets in the besieged city. During that period, fighter jets ripped through the air over Baghdad for nights on end, heading out on mission after mission to drop their payloads on Fallujah.
(...) The 35 year-old merchant is now a refugee living in a tent on the campus of the University of Baghdad along with over 900 other homeless Fallujans. "If the American forces did not find a target to bomb," he said, "they used sound bombs just to terrorize the people and children. The city stayed in fear; I cannot give you a picture of how panicked everyone was." As he spoke in a strained voice, his body began to tremble with the memories, "In the morning, I found Fallujah empty, as if nobody lived in it. It felt as though Fallujah had already been bombed to the ground. As if nothing were left."
(...) Ahmed Abdulla, a gaunt 21 year-old Fallujan, accompanied most of his family on their flight from the city, navigating the perilous neighborhoods nearest the cordon the American military had thrown around their besieged city. On November 8, he made it to Baghdad with his mother, his three sisters (aged 26, 20, and 18), and two younger brothers (10 and 12). His father, however, was not permitted to leave Fallujah by the U.S. military because he was of "fighting age." Ahmed was only allowed to exit the besieged city because his mother managed to convince an American soldier that, without him, his sisters and younger brothers would be at great risk traveling alone. Fortunately, the soldier understood her plea and let him through.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7555
(...) According to the doctor, during the second week of their attack US forces "announced that all the families [had] to leave their homes and meet at an intersection in the street while carrying a white flag. They gave them 72 hours to leave and after that they would be considered an enemy. We documented this story with video - a family of 12, including a relative and his oldest child who was 7 years old. They heard this instruction, so they left with all their food and money they could carry, and white flags. When they reached the intersection where the families were accumulating, they heard someone shouting 'Now!' in English, and shooting started everywhere."
(...) A surviving eyewitness told the doctor everyone in the family was carrying white flags, as instructed. Nevertheless, the witness watched as his mother was shot in the head and his father was shot through the heart by snipers. His two aunts were also shot, and his brother was shot in the neck. The survivor stated that when he raised himself from the ground to shout for help, he too was shot in the side. The doctor continued: "After some hours he raised his arm for help and they shot his arm. So after a while he raised his hand and they shot his hand." A six year-old boy was standing over the bodies of his parents, crying, and he too was shot.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article99716.ece
But John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org, said: "You can call it something other than napalm but it is still napalm. It has been reformulated in the sense that they now use a different petroleum distillate, but that is it. The US is the only country that has used napalm for a long time. I am not aware of any other country that uses it." Marines returning from Iraq chose to call the firebombs "napalm".
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5446
on March 25, 2004, proconsul Paul Bremer, head of the isolated U.S. "Provisional Coalition Authority" in Iraq, announced that the U.S. government intended to retain its occupying army and permanent military bases in Iraq no matter what any future Iraqi government might do or request. Not since the Japanese imperial army established "suzerainty" over "Manchukuo" in 1932, and later ruled occupied China from behind the façade of other puppet governments had an imperialist power resorted to such a nakedly colonial formula. But Bremer communicated precisely that to Iraqis: Outwardly the U.S. would proclaim the existence of a new state of affairs; in practice it would continue to exercise complete dominion over Iraq and not allow it to control its armed forces, police, or foreign policy, let alone rescind his earlier orders privatizing the Iraqi economy. This legerdemain was to be displayed for all the world to see on June 30, the day something called "sovereignty," which the U.S. never legitimately possessed, was "transferred" to some other U.S.-selected entity.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9193
The Study Centre for Human Rights and Democracy based in Fallujah (SCHRD) estimates the number of people killed in the city during the U.S.-led operation in October and November 2004 at 4,000 to 6,000, most of them civilians. Mass graves were dug on the outskirts of the city for thousands of the bodies.
(...) Last week, the Pentagon confirmed that it had used white phosphorus, a chemical that bursts into flame upon contact with air, inside Fallujah as an "incendiary weapon" against insurgents. Washington denies that it is a chemical weapon, as charged by some critics, and that it was used against civilians.
(...) Deraji estimates that up to 150,000 of the 350,000 residents of Fallujah continue to live as internally displaced persons due to the lack of compensation, and therefore, lack of reconstruction.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1471011,00.html
Warnings of the onslaught prompted the vast majority of Falluja's 300,000 people to flee. The city was then declared a free-fire zone on the grounds that the only people left behind must be "terrorists".
(...) Other glimpses of life in Falluja come from Dr Hafid al-Dulaimi, head of the city's compensation commission, who reports that 36,000 homes were destroyed in the US onslaught, along with 8,400 shops. Sixty nurseries and schools were ruined, along with 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries.
(...) In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction. In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the Russians; it still lies in ruins. This decade's unforgettable monument to brutality and overkill is Falluja, a text-book case of how not to handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will always degenerate into desperation and atrocity.
[first siege of fallujah, april; firing on ambulances, etc. - 60% dead civilians]
On March 31st, a US vehicle traveling through Fallujah was ambushed and its four passengers killed. Who were the passengers? According to US national media, they were “consultants” or “contractors” or “security contractors.”
(...) “townspeople went on a rampage”;[14] in the Washington Times, “cheering crowds reveled in a barbaric orgy.”[15] As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, what occurred was “an act of savagery shocking even by the blood-stained standards of Iraq’s worst trouble spot”—“sheer bestial violence” that doubled as “a town fete.”[16] These were “just random killings of any westerner” with “no rhyme or reason to [them] whatsoever.” An eyewitness account that circulated nationally recorded that “‘The people of Fallujah hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep,’ resident Abdul Aziz Mohammed said gleefully.” Though in the context that was provided it was hardly necessary, a Fallujan taxidriver assured readers of the New York Times that “everyone here is happy with this. There is no question.”[17]
(...) It went on to state that “it is critical that the US commanders respond forcefully to Fallujah and step up the counteroffensive against the Sunni insurgency.”[21] We should remember, then, that beside the lives of four American soldiers of fortune killed last April—or, in the language of the time—slaughtered sheep, were the residents of Fallujah, not quite citizens, not quite sheep for slaughter; they, a city’s mothers, fathers, babies, and grandmothers were but “jubilant locals” who, beasts that they had shown themselves to be, would “need to be defanged.”[22] As one newspaper put it, in response to a Fallujan’s words that “‘we wish that they would try to enter Fallujah so we’d let hell break loose’”: “The man will get his wish...only the when and how had yet to be decided.”[23]
(...) e New York Times reported an April 9th a US pause in fighting “to allow residents to bury scores of dead, and to open routes into the beleaguered city for food and urgently needed medical equipment,” in fact only three of the sixty trucks with relief supplies that arrived at Falluja were permitted entry into the city; probably not worth mentioning is that several of these trucks were fired upon before being denied entry and dispatched.
(...) The targeting of ambulances by the US military was practiced with enough vigilance in Fallujah that the Iraqi Minister of Health on April 17 publicly pressed Paul Bremer to account for it. Bremer explained that the US authorities believed ambulances to have been used by fighters—offering, as a response, the very definition of collective punishment.[33]
(...) "The Americans shot out the lights in the front of our hospital, they prevented doctors from reaching the emergency unit at the hospital, and we quickly began to run out of supplies and much needed medications." [34]
(...) "One of my doctors in Falluja asked the Americans there if he could remove a wounded patient from the city. The soldier wouldn’t let him move the victim, and said, “We have dead soldiers here too. This is a war zone.” The doctor wasn’t allowed to remove the wounded man, and he died. So many doctors and ambulances have been turned back from checkpoints there." [35]
(...) He added: “Not less than 60% of the dead were women and children. You can go see the graves for yourself.” At Noman Hospital in Al-Adhamiya, a doctor there too said of the people who came in from Fallujah from ten days earlier, that “most…were children, women and elderly.”[38] At Yarmouk Hospital, a lead doctor reported that he saw American soldiers killing women and children, calling the situation in Fallujah “a massacre.” The New York Times preferred the designation “tremendously precise.”[39] And it was an apt one, according to one Fallujah resident, who after having escaped to Baghdad testified that US warplanes were bombing the city heavily prior to his departure, and that Marine snipers continued to secure residents of the besieged city, shot by shot. “There were so many snipers, anyone leaving their house was killed.”[40] In the New York Times, this was called “an acute willingness among insurgents to die.”[41]
(...) If you’re the New York Times, you said nothing;[43] if you’re Paul Bremer, you probably said vigilant resolve.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9147
The LA Times reported that "the US military" assaulted the city of Fallujah with the full "understanding" that "civilians…would be killed." As a result, the Christian Science Monitor reported, "The sickening odor of rotting flesh" permeated the air circulating through the smoke filled and blood drenched streets of Fallujah. Alexander Cockburn noted, "If there is anything that should fuel the outrage of the antiwar movement [in the US] it is surely the destruction of Fallujah and the war crimes…inflicted by US commanders on its civilian population." We learned this week, November, 2005 the US used naplalm and white phosphorus in Fallujah, leaving children, women and men burnt to the bone. The US Army journal "Field Artillery" reported how, during the US attack on Fallujah in November 2004, "White Phosphorous…proved to be an effective and versatile munition [and…] a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents" when high explosives were ineffective in routing people from "spider holes." White phosphorus was used "to flush them out and [high explosives] to take them out." "High explosives" included "AC-130 Specter gunship support." "Tactics, techniques and procedures" we are told "were effective and lethal."
(...) This week marks the one year anniversary of the barbarous and criminal US assault on Fallujah in which, according to "Iraqi NGO's and medical workers…between 4,000 and 6,000" mostly civilians were killed. In addition, "36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines," and up to "200,000 residents were forced to flee, creating a refugee population the size of Tacoma." Creating a wasteland is a form of "collective punishment" and is a war crime. The leadership responsible for the wasting of Fallujah has yet to be held accountable.
(...) The attack on Fallujah by 10,000 US soldiers was prepared by 8 weeks of crushing air strikes and included "deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attack, [and] the killing of injured persons." In addition, according to UN human rights investigators, the US, in breach of international law (i.e. "war crimes"), used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population."
(...)Looking back at Fallujah and the buildup we see, selecting days virtually at random, that September 13 was no exception to the rule of force. In Baghdad, US helicopter gun ships fired into a crowd of unarmed Iraqi civilians. 13 were "wasted" and dozens more injured. Blood ran in the streets. The London Guardian published a harrowing photograph of a wounded young boy, stunned, gasping and bloodied, kneeling over three brutalized, and dead, bodies - presumably his friends. They appear to be no older than 12. UNICEF's Executive Director Carol Bellamy called the death of 34 children in an earlier US bomb attack "an unconscionable slaughter of innocents." On October 16th, we read in the Washington Post, "Electricity and water were cut off to the city [of Fallujah] just as a fresh wave of [air] strikes began Thursday night, an action that U.S. forces also took at the start of assaults on Najaf and Samarra."
(...) Ralph Peters, a retired US military officer, wrote in the New York Post, "Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage [complete annihilation], reduced to shards, the price will be worth it…the world needs to see [Iraqi] corpses." The "world" does see Iraqi corpses. US citizens must see Iraqi corpses, and stop the killing.
(...) [HOSPITALS] On November 12th we learned "among the first major targets [in the assault on Fallujah] were the hospitals." A civilian hospital and a trauma clinic were destroyed in a massive air raid, the main hospital was captured by US troops, ambulances were prohibited from traveling into the besieged city and delivering patients in need of emergency care (the US also announced that any and all moving civilian vehicles were designated free-fire targets). Much of the city's water and electricity supplies were cut off making "emergency care all but impossible, in the words of Dr. Hashem Issawi, and contrary to international law, soldiers were "empowered to destroy whatever needs to be destroyed." In the razed clinic, US bombs took the lives of 15 medics, four nurses and 35 patients, according to clinic worker Dr. Sami al-Jumaili. The Los Angeles Times reported that the manager of Fallujah general hospital "had told a US general the location of the downtown makeshift medical center" before it was hit by US bombs. In a smoke-filled, corpse-strewn landscape of collapsed houses and soot-singed factories, a US captain, fresh from 13 days of "shooting holes in every building," starkly noted that the only way to proceed is to "destroy everything in your path." Indiscriminate destruction is a war crime in violation of international law as encoded in the Nuremberg Principles.
(...) In other words, the problem is policy, systematic policy. A US soldier captured the policy quite bluntly: "We had a great day today. We killed a lot of people…the Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy." A former US soldier seeking asylum in Canada candidly said "the atrocious acts that are taking place in Iraq are not anomalies or isolated incidents but part of a plan of attack." He added, "I didn't want to be implicit in a criminal enterprise and hence a war criminal…[it is] soldiers who pay the price for the policies that come from on high…"
(...) "Fallujah doctors have identified either swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries (victims of chemical warfare], or 'melted bodies,' [victims of napalm - banned by the UN in 1980, with the US the only remaining country using napalm - another US war crime]." And one year later the "wasting" or Iraq continues…
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7163
In the case of Fallujah, where the U.S. military estimated 2,000 people were killed during the recent assault on the city, at least 1,200 of the dead are believed to have been non-combatant civilians.
(...) The November assault on Fallujah did not even begin until warplanes had, on a near-daily basis, dropped 500-1000 pound bombs on suspected resistance targets in the besieged city. During that period, fighter jets ripped through the air over Baghdad for nights on end, heading out on mission after mission to drop their payloads on Fallujah.
(...) The 35 year-old merchant is now a refugee living in a tent on the campus of the University of Baghdad along with over 900 other homeless Fallujans. "If the American forces did not find a target to bomb," he said, "they used sound bombs just to terrorize the people and children. The city stayed in fear; I cannot give you a picture of how panicked everyone was." As he spoke in a strained voice, his body began to tremble with the memories, "In the morning, I found Fallujah empty, as if nobody lived in it. It felt as though Fallujah had already been bombed to the ground. As if nothing were left."
(...) Ahmed Abdulla, a gaunt 21 year-old Fallujan, accompanied most of his family on their flight from the city, navigating the perilous neighborhoods nearest the cordon the American military had thrown around their besieged city. On November 8, he made it to Baghdad with his mother, his three sisters (aged 26, 20, and 18), and two younger brothers (10 and 12). His father, however, was not permitted to leave Fallujah by the U.S. military because he was of "fighting age." Ahmed was only allowed to exit the besieged city because his mother managed to convince an American soldier that, without him, his sisters and younger brothers would be at great risk traveling alone. Fortunately, the soldier understood her plea and let him through.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7555
(...) According to the doctor, during the second week of their attack US forces "announced that all the families [had] to leave their homes and meet at an intersection in the street while carrying a white flag. They gave them 72 hours to leave and after that they would be considered an enemy. We documented this story with video - a family of 12, including a relative and his oldest child who was 7 years old. They heard this instruction, so they left with all their food and money they could carry, and white flags. When they reached the intersection where the families were accumulating, they heard someone shouting 'Now!' in English, and shooting started everywhere."
(...) A surviving eyewitness told the doctor everyone in the family was carrying white flags, as instructed. Nevertheless, the witness watched as his mother was shot in the head and his father was shot through the heart by snipers. His two aunts were also shot, and his brother was shot in the neck. The survivor stated that when he raised himself from the ground to shout for help, he too was shot in the side. The doctor continued: "After some hours he raised his arm for help and they shot his arm. So after a while he raised his hand and they shot his hand." A six year-old boy was standing over the bodies of his parents, crying, and he too was shot.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article99716.ece
But John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org, said: "You can call it something other than napalm but it is still napalm. It has been reformulated in the sense that they now use a different petroleum distillate, but that is it. The US is the only country that has used napalm for a long time. I am not aware of any other country that uses it." Marines returning from Iraq chose to call the firebombs "napalm".
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5446
on March 25, 2004, proconsul Paul Bremer, head of the isolated U.S. "Provisional Coalition Authority" in Iraq, announced that the U.S. government intended to retain its occupying army and permanent military bases in Iraq no matter what any future Iraqi government might do or request. Not since the Japanese imperial army established "suzerainty" over "Manchukuo" in 1932, and later ruled occupied China from behind the façade of other puppet governments had an imperialist power resorted to such a nakedly colonial formula. But Bremer communicated precisely that to Iraqis: Outwardly the U.S. would proclaim the existence of a new state of affairs; in practice it would continue to exercise complete dominion over Iraq and not allow it to control its armed forces, police, or foreign policy, let alone rescind his earlier orders privatizing the Iraqi economy. This legerdemain was to be displayed for all the world to see on June 30, the day something called "sovereignty," which the U.S. never legitimately possessed, was "transferred" to some other U.S.-selected entity.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9193
The Study Centre for Human Rights and Democracy based in Fallujah (SCHRD) estimates the number of people killed in the city during the U.S.-led operation in October and November 2004 at 4,000 to 6,000, most of them civilians. Mass graves were dug on the outskirts of the city for thousands of the bodies.
(...) Last week, the Pentagon confirmed that it had used white phosphorus, a chemical that bursts into flame upon contact with air, inside Fallujah as an "incendiary weapon" against insurgents. Washington denies that it is a chemical weapon, as charged by some critics, and that it was used against civilians.
(...) Deraji estimates that up to 150,000 of the 350,000 residents of Fallujah continue to live as internally displaced persons due to the lack of compensation, and therefore, lack of reconstruction.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1471011,00.html
Warnings of the onslaught prompted the vast majority of Falluja's 300,000 people to flee. The city was then declared a free-fire zone on the grounds that the only people left behind must be "terrorists".
(...) Other glimpses of life in Falluja come from Dr Hafid al-Dulaimi, head of the city's compensation commission, who reports that 36,000 homes were destroyed in the US onslaught, along with 8,400 shops. Sixty nurseries and schools were ruined, along with 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries.
(...) In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction. In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the Russians; it still lies in ruins. This decade's unforgettable monument to brutality and overkill is Falluja, a text-book case of how not to handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will always degenerate into desperation and atrocity.
Monday, May 21, 2007
a clown in iraq:
There, with no anaesthetic and where bags of blood were kept in a fridge and warmed up under the hot tap in a bathroom, a young boy was brought in. "He had been shot in the head. His family had been trying to get into the car to flee and they [US soldiers] shot him. I think they had just been told to shoot at anyone. Certainly they had been told that ambulances had been carrying weapons and I know from my own experience that they were shooting at ambulances." Wilding says she was in an ambulance on their way to get to a pregnant woman who had gone into labour too soon, when marines shot at the ambulance, through the windscreen. A tyre was shot out and the ambulance driver screeched back in reverse to the hospital. With the ambulance out of action, they never reached the woman.
(...) "I had read a lot about it but it can't prepare you for the reality. There were consumer goods on the street, but there were things you just couldn't get, such as medicine. You could buy fresh fruit but it was way beyond most people's income. A lot of people were completely dependent on the food ration, and they would sell part of their food ration to buy medicines or to pay for bus fares. Going into the hospitals, I knew I was going to see a lot of children who were desperately ill, but I don't think you can prepare for what it feels like when you're there. A child went into a coma in front of us. He had leukaemia and the doctor said they just didn't have enough platelet bags to treat him. His mother was pinching his cheek and slapping his face, trying to wake him up and howling with grief. There was this stick-thin nine-month-old baby and her body was just the shape of her skeleton. You could hear her rattling breathing."
(...) She decided to return there because she felt it was important that the voices of ordinary Iraqis were heard above the din of cruise missiles, cluster bombs and army and political rhetoric. "The mainstream news focused primarily on what was being said by military and political figures and not on what Iraqi people were saying, partly because it was so difficult for journalists to hear them. I was just writing about what happened day to day and putting it out on the internet." Her blog started out quite small, but soon thousands of people all over the world were reading it.
(...) I think that's important. You can't talk about democracy and 'Do you agree with the war or not, did we do the right thing?' if you don't know what we actually did and what actually happened to people. I was just in one city and I talked to a fraction of the people who were affected but still, I think I was able to hear and then tell a lot of people's stories. The number of people who read the blog and responded to it backed that up."
(...) The schools were in an appalling state, but nothing could prepare her for the squatter camps, crammed full of displaced families. They weren't classed as refugees because they were still in their own country and they did not receive aid. In one camp, 125 families were living without adequate food and water, shelter and medical care. There was no sewerage system. A two-month-old girl died because of the cold and a four-year-old boy had his legs badly burned from the open paraffin stove his family used in their shack built of breezeblocks and canvas; with no medical care, he lay there with his legs oozing pus and blood and riddled with infections. A young man had his fingers blown off because he would take bullets apart to sell the tiny bits of scrap metal.
(...) "I was angry that there was all this money - the planes, bombs, guns, the contracts that were given to Halliburton - going to people who didn't need it. There were these children dying for lack of blankets and basic medicine and shelter," says Wilding, her voice rising with fury. "They were living around open sewers, without anything. How could you not be angry? They was always so much need and so little you could do that I was never thinking, 'I'm so clever, look what I've done.' It was always, 'Is that all you did?' People were always asking me to help on a more material level, for cooling fans, money for operations, all sorts of things. A woman at the camp asked for clean knickers and sanitary towels." Even with the £10,000 Wilding had raised for the trip, she could not meet every need, although she did help pay for the installation of drains and pipes in the camp.
(...) Wilding realised she was putting herself and the people around her - drivers, translators, the groups of children that would gather round her wherever she went - in danger. She decided to come home. "There didn't seem anything more I could usefully do, let alone justify the risk that I was putting other people in."
(...) What was it like to be back? "The overwhelming thing I felt was incredibly lucky. I would cycle to university, essentially in complete safety. I would come home to my safe house, turn on the light switch and know I'd got electricity, or turn on my taps and know clean water was going to come out. "At the same time I was incredibly angry that that had been taken away from millions of people who had no control over what was happening. When I gave birth to my son [at home], I knew that an ambulance would be with me in minutes if I needed it. I should be able to take that for granted and so should women over there. I met one woman who told her daughters not to get pregnant because what happens if they went into labour at night and they couldn't get to hospital? There are refugees who are just living in this limbo where the best they can hope for is to stay alive. It's the most appalling disaster."
There, with no anaesthetic and where bags of blood were kept in a fridge and warmed up under the hot tap in a bathroom, a young boy was brought in. "He had been shot in the head. His family had been trying to get into the car to flee and they [US soldiers] shot him. I think they had just been told to shoot at anyone. Certainly they had been told that ambulances had been carrying weapons and I know from my own experience that they were shooting at ambulances." Wilding says she was in an ambulance on their way to get to a pregnant woman who had gone into labour too soon, when marines shot at the ambulance, through the windscreen. A tyre was shot out and the ambulance driver screeched back in reverse to the hospital. With the ambulance out of action, they never reached the woman.
(...) "I had read a lot about it but it can't prepare you for the reality. There were consumer goods on the street, but there were things you just couldn't get, such as medicine. You could buy fresh fruit but it was way beyond most people's income. A lot of people were completely dependent on the food ration, and they would sell part of their food ration to buy medicines or to pay for bus fares. Going into the hospitals, I knew I was going to see a lot of children who were desperately ill, but I don't think you can prepare for what it feels like when you're there. A child went into a coma in front of us. He had leukaemia and the doctor said they just didn't have enough platelet bags to treat him. His mother was pinching his cheek and slapping his face, trying to wake him up and howling with grief. There was this stick-thin nine-month-old baby and her body was just the shape of her skeleton. You could hear her rattling breathing."
(...) She decided to return there because she felt it was important that the voices of ordinary Iraqis were heard above the din of cruise missiles, cluster bombs and army and political rhetoric. "The mainstream news focused primarily on what was being said by military and political figures and not on what Iraqi people were saying, partly because it was so difficult for journalists to hear them. I was just writing about what happened day to day and putting it out on the internet." Her blog started out quite small, but soon thousands of people all over the world were reading it.
(...) I think that's important. You can't talk about democracy and 'Do you agree with the war or not, did we do the right thing?' if you don't know what we actually did and what actually happened to people. I was just in one city and I talked to a fraction of the people who were affected but still, I think I was able to hear and then tell a lot of people's stories. The number of people who read the blog and responded to it backed that up."
(...) The schools were in an appalling state, but nothing could prepare her for the squatter camps, crammed full of displaced families. They weren't classed as refugees because they were still in their own country and they did not receive aid. In one camp, 125 families were living without adequate food and water, shelter and medical care. There was no sewerage system. A two-month-old girl died because of the cold and a four-year-old boy had his legs badly burned from the open paraffin stove his family used in their shack built of breezeblocks and canvas; with no medical care, he lay there with his legs oozing pus and blood and riddled with infections. A young man had his fingers blown off because he would take bullets apart to sell the tiny bits of scrap metal.
(...) "I was angry that there was all this money - the planes, bombs, guns, the contracts that were given to Halliburton - going to people who didn't need it. There were these children dying for lack of blankets and basic medicine and shelter," says Wilding, her voice rising with fury. "They were living around open sewers, without anything. How could you not be angry? They was always so much need and so little you could do that I was never thinking, 'I'm so clever, look what I've done.' It was always, 'Is that all you did?' People were always asking me to help on a more material level, for cooling fans, money for operations, all sorts of things. A woman at the camp asked for clean knickers and sanitary towels." Even with the £10,000 Wilding had raised for the trip, she could not meet every need, although she did help pay for the installation of drains and pipes in the camp.
(...) Wilding realised she was putting herself and the people around her - drivers, translators, the groups of children that would gather round her wherever she went - in danger. She decided to come home. "There didn't seem anything more I could usefully do, let alone justify the risk that I was putting other people in."
(...) What was it like to be back? "The overwhelming thing I felt was incredibly lucky. I would cycle to university, essentially in complete safety. I would come home to my safe house, turn on the light switch and know I'd got electricity, or turn on my taps and know clean water was going to come out. "At the same time I was incredibly angry that that had been taken away from millions of people who had no control over what was happening. When I gave birth to my son [at home], I knew that an ambulance would be with me in minutes if I needed it. I should be able to take that for granted and so should women over there. I met one woman who told her daughters not to get pregnant because what happens if they went into labour at night and they couldn't get to hospital? There are refugees who are just living in this limbo where the best they can hope for is to stay alive. It's the most appalling disaster."
Friday, April 20, 2007
in fallujah:
Iraqis in the volatile al-Anbar province west of Baghdad are reporting regular killings carried out by U.S. forces that many believe are part of a 'genocidal' strategy. Since the mysterious explosion at the Shia al-Askari shrine in Samara in February last year, more than 100 Iraqis have been killed daily on average, without any forceful action by the Iraqi government and the U.S. military to stop the killings.
(...) "Seventeen young men were found executed after they were arrested by U.S. troops and Fallujah police," 40-year-old Yassen of Fallujah told IPS. "My two sons have been detained by police, and I am terrified that they will have the same fate. They are only 17 and 18 years old."
(...) Last week, U.S. military fire severely damaged the highest minaret in Fallujah after three soldiers were killed in an attack. What was seen as reprisal fire on the minaret has angered residents.
(...) [divide and conquer] "It is our people killing each other now as planned by the Americans," Abdul Sattar, a 45- year-old lawyer and human rights activist in Fallujah told IPS. "They recruited Saddam's security men to control the situation by well-known methods like hanging people by their legs and electrifying them in order to get information. Now they are executing them without trial."
(...) A U.S. military spokesperson in Baghdad told IPS that their troops "use caution and care when conducting home raids" and "in no way support Shi'ite death squads and militias." In the face of the U.S.-backed violence, most Iraqis now openly support attacks against occupation forces.
(...) "The genocidal Americans are paying for all that," a young man from Fallujah told IPS. "They seem to be in need of another lesson by the lions of Fallujah and Anbar." He was referring to the intensive resistance attacks in and around Fallujah that have killed dozens of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers this month.
Iraqis in the volatile al-Anbar province west of Baghdad are reporting regular killings carried out by U.S. forces that many believe are part of a 'genocidal' strategy. Since the mysterious explosion at the Shia al-Askari shrine in Samara in February last year, more than 100 Iraqis have been killed daily on average, without any forceful action by the Iraqi government and the U.S. military to stop the killings.
(...) "Seventeen young men were found executed after they were arrested by U.S. troops and Fallujah police," 40-year-old Yassen of Fallujah told IPS. "My two sons have been detained by police, and I am terrified that they will have the same fate. They are only 17 and 18 years old."
(...) Last week, U.S. military fire severely damaged the highest minaret in Fallujah after three soldiers were killed in an attack. What was seen as reprisal fire on the minaret has angered residents.
(...) [divide and conquer] "It is our people killing each other now as planned by the Americans," Abdul Sattar, a 45- year-old lawyer and human rights activist in Fallujah told IPS. "They recruited Saddam's security men to control the situation by well-known methods like hanging people by their legs and electrifying them in order to get information. Now they are executing them without trial."
(...) A U.S. military spokesperson in Baghdad told IPS that their troops "use caution and care when conducting home raids" and "in no way support Shi'ite death squads and militias." In the face of the U.S.-backed violence, most Iraqis now openly support attacks against occupation forces.
(...) "The genocidal Americans are paying for all that," a young man from Fallujah told IPS. "They seem to be in need of another lesson by the lions of Fallujah and Anbar." He was referring to the intensive resistance attacks in and around Fallujah that have killed dozens of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers this month.
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