Monday, April 14, 2003
-U.S. Stages Fall of Statue?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm
April 6th: Iraqi National Congress founder, Ahmed Chalabi is flown into the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah by the Pentagon. Chalabi, along with 700 fighters of his “Free Iraqi Forces” are airlifted aboard four massive C17 military transport planes. Chalabi and the INC are Washington favorites to head the new Iraqi government. A photograph is taken of Chalabi and members of his Free Iraqi Forces militia as they arrive in Nasiriyah.
April 9th: One of the “most memorable images of the war” is created when U.S. troops pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square. Oddly enough… a photograph is taken of a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to one of Chalabi’s militia members… he is near Fardus Square to greet the Marines. How many members of the pro-American Free Iraqi Forces were in and around Fardus Square as the statue of Saddam came tumbling down?
The up close action video of the statue being destroyed is broadcast around the world as proof of a massive uprising. Still photos grabbed off of Reuters show a long-shot view of Fardus Square… it’s empty save for the U.S. Marines, the International Press, and a small handful of Iraqis. There are no more than 200 people in the square at best. The Marines have the square sealed off and guarded by tanks. A U.S. mechanized vehicle is used to pull the statue of Saddam from it’s base. The entire event is being hailed as an equivalent of the Berlin Wall falling… but even a quick glance of the long-shot photo shows something more akin to a carefully constructed media event tailored for the television cameras.
Source: NYC IndyMedia
-ACTION ALERT: Conscientious objector sent to Iraqi War Zone
US13224-110403 11 April 2003
War Resisters’ International learned today that an US soldier requesting conscientious objector status was sent to the Iraqi war zone on 7 April 2003. Gabriel I. Johnson, 27 of Killeen, Texas, is assigned to the 104th Military Intelligence Btln (http://www.hood.army.mil/4id_104thmi/) of the 4th Infantry Division at Ft Hood, Texas. He was shipped to the Iraqi war zone early in the morning on 7 April, despite his request to be discharged as a conscientious objector.
US Army regulations provide that soldiers who claim to be conscientious objectors are to be assigned to military duties which “minimally conflict with their stated beliefs”. They are to be kept in this status until the review of their claims is completed. Tod Ensign, Johnson’s attorney, commented: “The Army is violating its own rules by sending Gabe into a war zone. His CO claim can’t be judged fairly by commanders in the heat of battle.” Rachel Pundsac, Johnson’s sister, of Madison, Wisconsin reports that when her brother sought information from his commanders about filing a CO claim he was given inaccurate information and restricted to his barracks as a way of isolating him.
War Resisters’ International calls for letters of protest to Johnson’s commander, asking him why Gabriel I. Johnson was sent to Iraq, in violation of US Army regulations, and demanding that he is immediately returned to the USA. Lt Gen. Thomas F. Metz Commanding General, III Corps Ft Hood, TX 76544 USA phone +1-254-287 7206 fax +1-254-287 8386
You can also send a protest email at http://www.wri-irg.org/co/alerts/20030411a.html
Andreas Speck War Resisters’ International
War Resisters’ International Conscientious Objection and Conscription Documentation Centre 5 Caledonian Road * London N1 9DY * Britain Tel.: +44 20 7278 4040 * Fax: +44 20 7278 0444 Email: * http://wri-irg.org
Help WRI to support consientious objectors! Send your donation: - by cheque, money order or bankers draft in £ Sterling, payable to “WRI”. Cheques must be drawn on a bank with a branch in Britain; - by giro transfer to War Resisters’ International, Girobank, Merseyside, Britain, GIR 0AA, account number 585 20 4004, sort code 72-00-00 - by credit card (please contact the WRI office for details)
Post your co-alert information online at http://www.wri-irg.org/co/pfpform.htm or send an email to:
Archives of co-alerts can be found on WRI’s website at http://www.wri-irg.org/cgi/news.cgi
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-The Battle of Baghdad: ticket for more aggression/Parenting During War-Time
ZNet Commentary by Stephen Shalom
Support Znet Sustain programme
http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm
The fall of Baghdad has been proclaimed, though there is still fighting in various parts of the city. At this point, one can’t tell how long resistance will continue. Historically there have often been cases of foreign occupiers defeating large scale enemy forces, only to face years of low-level combat. The Israelis were at first welcomed in southern Lebanon for eliminating an overbearing Palestinian presence. But for nearly two decades, until Israel chose to withdraw its troops, resistance and casualties continued.
The relative ease of the US victory military confirms how little threat Saddam Hussein’s regime posed beyond its borders. Where in 1990 Iraq had substantial armed forces, it was clear well before the start of this war that the Iraqi military was no longer a formidable force, even by Middle Eastern standards. The Bush administration claim that Saddam in 2003 was a danger to his neighbors was not taken seriously in the region, and has now been shown to have been baseless.
Despite Bush’s constant repetition that there was no doubt that Iraq had massive supplies of chemical and biological weapons, no such weapons, or even prohibited missiles, were used by the Iraqi forces. Indeed, it seems the only time US-UK troops needed to wear their chemical warfare suits was when recovering a body from a friendly fire incident to protect themselves from the radiation given off by US depleted uranium ordnance[1]—which, of course, the Pentagon claims is absolutely harmless.
Nor, despite many fevered media reports, have any hidden stores of Iraqi proscribed weapons come to light. Since Iraq’s alleged possession of banned weapons was the official explanation for the war, their absence is rather embarrassing for the administration. But even if such weapons are later found (and confirmed not just by the Pentagon, but by independent experts), this will not vindicate the war. The issue has never been whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but whether any such weapons constituted a significant and undeterrable military threat to other nations, which threat could not be neutralized by the inspections process.
The TV screens are full of celebrations in Baghdad at Saddam’s fall. Saddam was a brutal tyrant and his fall is welcome. But it would be wrong to read too much into the televised cheering. There is no way to know how representative the cheering crowds are of the Iraqi population as a whole. Several thousands of celebrants in a city of millions is hardly decisive, and we can assume that no one is going to organize counter-demonstrations, whatever their views.
Pro-war columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times on April 9 that “even here in the anti-Saddam Shia heartland of southern Iraq, no one is giving U.S. troops a standing ovation. Applause? When I asked Lt. Col. Richard Murphy, part of the U.S. relief operation, how Iraqis were greeting his men, he answered bluntly and honestly: ‘I have not detected any overt hostility.’
“Overt hostility? We’ve gone from expecting applause to being relieved that there is no overt hostility. And we’ve been here only 20 days."[2]
Nor does the cheering tell us to what extent people who are glad to see Saddam gone supported the war. Friedman asked Dr. Safaa Khalaf at Umm Qasr Hospital why the reception for U.S. forces had been so muted; Khalaf answered: “Many people here have sons who were soldiers. They were forced to join the army. Many people lost their sons. They are angry from the war. Since the war, no water, no food, no electricity. . . . We have not had water for washing or drinking for five days. . . .”
Compared to the area bombing of World War II or the free drop zones of Vietnam, this war has been extremely sparing of civilians. But it has been far from a humanitarian endeavor. The weapons used in this war that have been condemned by international human rights groups are not Saddam’s, but the cluster bombs used by US and UK forces, which leave unexploded bomblets as potential landmines targeting the civilian population for months to come.[3] Food shortages, lack of water, under-supplied and under-staffed hospitals are everywhere, with disease spreading in a population already weakened from 12 years of US-UK sanctions.[4] A US sergeant killed a civilian woman near an Iraqi soldier. “I’m sorry,” the sergeant said. “But the chick was in the way."[5]
Such killings cannot be chalked up to a few over-zealous soldiers. Indifference is a policy approved at the highest levels. When a US tank fired a shell into the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, killing two foreign journalists, Pentagon officials were asked:
“There are reports that a tank took small arms and perhaps RPG fire from the direction of the hotel, although journalists say that they saw no sign of it. Do you think that’s reason enough for a tank to fire a round at the hotel, where you know there are unarmed journalists?”
Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal replied that when troops receive fire, “regardless of how specific they can be of where it came from,” they “have the inherent right of self-defense.”
And Assistant Secretary of Defense Victoria Clarke added that “a war zone is a dangerous place. Baghdad in particular.... And we were saying it is not a safe place, you should not be there."[6] But of course five million residents of Baghdad did not have a choice as to whether to be there. One can only hope that as mopping up operations continue in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country, not too many other civilians find themselves in “a dangerous place.”
There is reason to hope that the people of Baghdad have been spared the consequences of door-to-door fighting. With the US military getting pointers on urban combat from the Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp[7], we can only imagine what this would have entailed. Indeed, the fact that the city may have avoided this grim fate is reason enough for jubilation in Baghdad, and reason for us to be glad as well.
At the same time, however, it must be acknowledged that the good fortune of Iraqis has an unfortunate upshot. The relative ease of the US victory will no doubt embolden the fanatics in the Bush administration on to further acts of aggression around the world.
“Iraq is not just about Iraq,” explained one senior administration official. And Assistant Secretary of State John Bolton has declared on several occasions that the war against Iraq should be an object lesson for other nations with weapons of mass destruction programs.[8] Bolton is correct, but the lesson that will be learned is likely to be that only weapons of mass destruction offer any prospect of deterring a US “preventive” attack.
One can’t be certain that military deterrence by the target states alone will be able to prevent endless wars initiated by Washington. Some of the responsibility will have to be taken up by the global anti-war movement.
That movement has grown to unprecedented size and strength, though that still wasn’t enough to stop the war on Iraq. But just as the Bush administration sees the Iraq war as simply one battle in its effort to extend US global hegemony, we in the antiwar movement need to see our unsuccessful efforts to prevent the Iraq war as just one battle in a larger struggle to change US foreign policy. Victory will require a movement that is even larger and stronger than it is now. So instead of despairing at our inability to win this early contest, let us redouble our efforts to prevail in the long-term struggle.
[1] Audrey Gillian, “‘I never want to hear that sound again’: Five British soldiers have died under ‘friendly fire’” Guardian, 3/31/03, p. 3.
[2] “Hold Your Applause,” NYT, 4/9/03, p. A19.
[3] See Amnesty International, “Iraq: Use of cluster bombs—Civilians pay the price,” 4/2/03, http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde140652003
[4] Patrick Jackson, “Iraqi civilians face crisis,” BBC News Online, 4/7/03.
[5] Dexter Filkins, “Either Take a Shot Or Take a Chance,” NYT, 3/29/03, p. A1.
[6] DoD News Briefing, 04/08/03.
[7] James Bennet, “U.S. Military Studied Israel’s Experience in Close-Quarter Fighting in Refugee Camps,” NYT, 4/1/03, p. B10. One Israeli analyst suggests that the lesson of Jenin is not to be so solicitous of civilian casualties. (Yagil Henkin, “The Best Way Into Baghdad,” NYT, 4/3/03, p. A21.) For what actually occurred, see Amnesty International’s report, Israel and the Occupied Territories: Shielded from scrutiny: IDF violations in Jenin and Nablus, Nov. 4, 2002, http://web.amnesty.org/library/print/ENGMDE151432002
[8] David E. Sanger, “ Viewing the War as a Lesson to the World,” NYT, 4/6/03, p. B1.
ZNet Commentary
Parenting During War-Time
by Cynthia Peters
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-04/12peters.cfm
“You’re right to be concerned” about having your 9-month old in the room with you when you watch the news, reports Barbara Meltz in a Boston Globe “Child Caring” column. “If watching the news makes you tense and anxious, your baby will pick up on it and that, in turn, could make her irritable.”
The advice is so sincere, so child-centered and affirming of our precious children’s right not to be irritable that you could almost miss the deep cynicism of this forced introspection. The advice implies that the world unfolds in your living room, that your arms are the key purveyors of anxiety, and that preventing infant irritability is your private job—perhaps even a measure of your effectiveness as a parent.
The advice implies that as a parent, the most you can do to decrease anxiety is to turn off the TV and protect your child from “overstimulation.”
We need to pause a moment and try to take in how deeply dis-empowering this advice is, how thoroughly it channels all our adult abilities into stunted expressions directed at our own tiny little offspring.
Does this mean I think it is not valuable for parents to consider ways to have less irritable 9-month-olds? No. I support whatever sanity can be derived from being the parent of a peaceful baby. Do I have something against being a soothing, loving parent who takes the time to figure out what works best for the little ones? Of course not. Showing care, creating connection, making a safe and comfortable home—this is the stuff of life.
Or at least part of it anyway. We should all do it if we can, in the best way we can, but we should keep some perspective about what it amounts to.
Unfortunately, with a consumer culture that virtually defines childhood these days, no wonder parents get absorbed in strategies to protect their own. The alternative to insulation, it appears, is submersion in a plastic world of miniaturized “Operation Obliterate the Enemy” (batteries not included).
With the nation at war this holiday season, toy marketers are pushing Easter baskets loaded with toy knives and grenades, artfully arranged on top of plastic Easter grass and interspersed with chocolate bunnies. On the shelves at Kmart and other major retailers (according to an article in the Village Voice), these holiday baskets show just how far we are willing to go to use our children to help us rationalize our adult exploits. If the kids look cute tossing pretend grenades on Easter morning, does that somehow put the soldiers in Iraq tossing the real ones somewhere along the same continuum?
Do the pretend grenades help divorce us from the brutal consequences of the real ones?
The Easter baskets stocked with war toys are not just an egregious blip on the otherwise non-violent screen that makes up the panorama of childhood.
The $20.3 billion toy industry and the $10.3 billion video game industry are “closely watching the Iraq war with an eye toward new product introductions for Christmas.” One company has already rushed to manufacture a series of “Special Forces: Showdown with Iraq” figures that duplicated as accurately as possible the uniforms and gear being used by soldiers during the buildup in Kuwait, according to the NYT (March 30, 2003). Doing its part to acclimate kids to the new era of escalated state terrorism abroad and reduced civil liberties at home, another toy manufacturer has introduced “Josh Simon”—a Desert NBC (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical) Trooper—alongside “Homeland Security Amy.”
Although sales of many of these products are brisk, not everyone is pleased.
Consumer protests have lead to some of the toys being pulled from the shelves. But too often the logic of the protest is: “I don’t want my child playing with this stuff.”
Well, nor do I. But, more importantly, I don’t want Tommy Franks and his men playing with the real versions of these things. These things kill and maim.
They mean real anxiety for children—not from the sound of bombs exploding on TV, but from the sound of bombs exploding immediately overhead. They translate into a parent never being able to soothe a child again. Because the child is dead, or the parent is, or they both are. They equal an absence of anxiety because there are no arms there to transmit it anymore.
I am haunted by a picture that has been circulating by email recently. It is of a child with the top of his head blown off. His face is calm, and his features are so perfect. He looks like he could be sleeping. He makes me think of my children who regularly get soothed to sleep, who will not have grenades in their Easter baskets, and who are not at risk of having their heads blown off. This is my children’s extreme privilege, but it is also their right, as it is the right of every child.
A brutal empire is on the loose, and if you read the mass media, you’d think that parents can choose to relate to it in one of two possible ways—buy toys that imitate it or insulate yourself from it. There’s almost no mention of an obvious third choice—turning outward—facing the world and relating to it.
True, this could very well mean introducing a certain type of anxiety into your home—not via the television, but through heated conversations, meetings taking place at your kitchen table, all-night banner-making sessions on your living room floor. The anxiety might come because you are tired from all the anti-war work, from the fact that you have not been around much lately to make the kids dinner or tuck them in, from the fact that you are genuinely sick at heart about what your government is doing in your name.
But isn’t this an appropriate anxiety? Isn’t this less confusing than turning off the TV and replacing it with a white noise machine or some soothing parental equivalent? If our children are so sensitive, then surely they are picking up on the fact that a public emergency is at hand. What contributes more to their long-term feeling of well-being? Watching their parents block it out or watching them take it on?
Is it even the right question—to be always wondering what is right for my kid?
I do not think it is the most important question for parents, but even if it were, kids need to see parents do not only what is best for their own offspring, but what is best for all children everywhere. When kids sense that the whole world is on edge, they are taking careful notes about what their parents are doing about it.
When greedy corporations work with defense contractors to normalize brutality through play, and when liberal child-caring columns advise us to fortify our nests against the evil outside world, parents might end up thinking that those are the only two choices: Raise your kid in a war culture, or shun all that by barring certain toys from the house and sanitizing our hugs by making them anxiety-free.
But there is a third way: Don’t imagine that being a good enough parent means that you are a good enough public citizen. Attending to private relationships is not enough when your government has gone ballistic. Those of us with children need to find ways to be loving and attentive parents at the same time that we take on the tasks at hand. Take your children to meetings. Help them feel welcome there. Set up childcare at political events. Help kids create their own parallel structures. Talk to your kids about talking to other kids. Let them design banners and anti-war posters.
Let them see you give steady attention to the serious problems we face.
Value your work (and your children!) enough to include them. They will inherit the results of our efforts, after all.
-Streets of Tokyo Erupt in Antiwar Fervor
As the U.S. began its bombing of Iraq, hundreds of thousands protested around the world and in the U.S. Former Baltimore activist John Cassidy reports on anti-war activism in and around Tokyo, Japan.
More
http://baltimore.indymedia.org/feature/display/3443/index.php
-History scholars fight present war
Growing numbers of professors cite patterns of the past to rally public opinion against the conflict.
By James M. O’Neill Inquirer Staff Writer
Growing numbers of American historians are so worried that the Bush administration is ignoring the lessons of the 20th century, and even the last 2,000 years, that they are signing petitions, marching against the war in Iraq, and holding teach-ins across the country.
The Bush administration is “ignoring the established pattern of what destroys great empires - the eventual reliance on military power over economic and cultural dominance,” said Van Gosse, one of the activist historians and a professor at Franklin & Marshall College. “This happened to the Romans, to the British.”
Those who view historians as irrelevantly stuck in the musty past might be doing a double-take these days.
These academics have mobilized into a national organization called Historians Against the War. They wrote a petition decrying the recent “egregious curtailment” of civil liberties, and organized teach-ins on college campuses across the country this week.
“Our job is to better understand the past, and what’s the point of doing that if you’re not going to link it to the present?” said Lee Formwalt, executive director of the Organization of American Historians and a professor at Indiana University. “We can provide a deeper understanding of how we got to the present situation.”
That logically leads historians to the next step - sharing their conclusions, in an activist way, with the public. “The idea that we just sit in an ivory tower is myth,” Formwalt said.
Last night, a teach-in at Temple University sponsored by Historians Against the War included lectures on presidential leadership in wartime, the mass media’s coverage of the war, the history of modern Iraq, and “colonialism discredited.”
Similar teach-ins sponsored by the group were held at Rutgers, Rowan, Pennsylvania State University, and Franklin & Marshall this week.
Gosse, who helped organize the Franklin & Marshall teach-in, said “there’s a hubris in the administration that they can control events.”
Gosse said Vietnam still hangs heavy over American foreign policy. He said the Bush administration might believe the current conflict reverses the “Vietnam syndrome,” but it really reinforces it, because the United States is showing it will act only against a less-than-challenging adversary, using overwhelming force, and “bullying the public through a cowed and craven mass media.”
Gosse said he had received e-mails and calls from non-academics outraged that historians would take a public position on a current event.
Gosse has no patience for such criticism. He said that unlike conservative historians of the 1950s and early 1960s, who saw the norm as supporting and even advising the government, today’s liberal historians “are critical intellectuals providing a vital democratic function. It’s not a partisan thing.”
The more aggressive use of history to question current American foreign policy, a “new left revisionist” look at events, developed in the late 1950s, headed by University of Wisconsin professor William Appleman Williams and his book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.
“He engaged scholars by arguing that if we feel what we do has value, we should carry that beyond the classroom,” said David Applebaum, a history professor at Rowan who organized a teach-in there. “Balance is not what historians are after,” Applebaum said. “We’re after an authentic and verifiable understanding of events.”
The focus on dissent as a central element in American history strikes a chord with Temple professor Ralph Young, who helped organize last night’s teach-in and who teaches on dissent in American history.
Last semester, after his class ended, students lingered afterward, continuing the discussion for an hour - and on a Friday afternoon.
Every Friday since, Young has held an open-ended teach-in. The group continued this semester, and now as many as 70 students attend. Many develop their own presentations, on everything from the background of top Bush advisers to the role of the United Nations.
“Because we dig into the past, we’re constantly dealing with the root causes of things,” said Young, explaining historians’ relevance to debates about current geopolitical events.
“When you understand how things happen, you don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to events,” he said. “We’re not just spouting our opinions - it’s an argument based on facts. We examine the past and interpret.”
Young called it myth to think that historians are only interested in the “cold facts of the past. We’re concerned with how everything is connected. History is concerned with the future.”
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/education/5597832.htm
-Israeli army sniper leaves British peace activist brain-dead
By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem (from Portside)
http://www.cofc.org
A British peace activist was pronounced brain-dead yesterday after being shot in the head by an Israeli army sniper.
Tom Hurndall, 21, from London, was shot while trying to rescue Palestinian children from a street where they were pinned down by Israeli gunfire.
He is the third peace activist to be killed or seriously injured in the occupied territories in the past month.
His fellow activists were beginning to wonder aloud last night if they are a target of the Israeli army. Mr Hurndall was declared brain-dead on arrival at a Palestinian hospital in Rafah but there were some reports last night that his condition might be improving.
Mr Hurndall came to the occupied territories after leaving Baghdad, where he had travelled as a human shield before the start of the war in Iraq. His group of activists was in a refugee camp in Rafah near the Egyptian border, where Israeli soldiers often demolish Palestinian homes because they say militants use them as cover from which to fire.
The civilian occupants of the houses are left homeless.
Mr Hurndall’s group intended to stay the night in a tent in a street where an Israeli tank frequently fires into civilian houses, according to Raphael Cohen, another British activist who was there when Mr Hurndall was shot. The Independent has witnessed Israeli tanks firing on civilian houses in Rafah when there were no militants in the area.
When the activists reached the street, Mr Cohen said, they found it already under fire and too dangerous to enter.
The gunfire was coming from one of the Israeli army watchtowers on the Egyptian border, which surround much of Rafah. A group of about 20 Palestinian children �Ethe oldest was about 10, according to Mr Cohen, the rest younger �Ewere trapped by gunfire in the street. Mr Hurndall decided to go into the street with two other activists to bring the children out of the line of fire, believing they were less likely to be fired on because they were foreigners.
“Tom went and brought one boy back with him,” said Mr Cohen by telephone from Rafah. “But he saw two girls were still stuck there. He went back out for them and immediately he was hit in the head.” Like other peace campaigners, Mr Hurndall was wearing brightly coloured overalls so that he could be easily identified as an activist.
“The Israeli army was very aware of our presence in the area,’’ said Mr Cohen.
He said the activists, who have been sleeping in Palestinian houses that have been coming under fire, had hung banners around the area saying they were there. Mr Cohen said Israeli soldiers had “shot the banners to shreds”. The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), of which Mr Hurndall was a member, has been heavily criticised in Israel as one-sided.
It is pro-Palestinian but the members are unarmed non- combatants.
The shooting of Mr Hurndall comes after Rachel Corrie, an American, became the first ISM activist to be killed when she was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Rafah last month. The Israeli army claimed that it was an accident and said that the driver of the bulldozer did not see her.
Brian Avery, another American activist, was seriously wounded last week when he was hit in the face by machine-gun fire from an Israeli armoured personnel carrier in the West Bank city of Jenin.
The Israeli army claimed its soldiers were firing at militants - the activists who were with Mr Avery said there were no militants in the area - and that the soldiers did not see Mr Avery. Also in Middle East A city in flames. A nation in chaos Marines discover ‘cache of suicide vests’ in Baghdad school Kurds avenge a generation of oppression with the bloodless capture of oil-rich Mosul America issues decks of cards showing Iraq’s ‘most wanted’ Why drive to Baghdad was a textbook campaign, flaws and all
-"USA Encouraged Ransacking”
from http://www.cofc.org/ (Portside)
See also
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm
Moderator’s Note: It is impossible to testify to the
veracity of this report. However, similar articles
are appearing in publications in various parts of
the world and, in considering the many blank
spaces in the major media reporting on the still
murkey sittuation in Iraq, I’m passing it on.
You might also want to check out:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.ht
“USA encouraged ransacking”
This is a translation of an article from April 11 from
Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest newspaper, based in
Stockholm. The article was written by Ole Rothenborg
and translated by Joe Valasek. Khaled Bayomi, has
taught and researched on Middle Eastern conflicts for
ten years at the University of Lund where he is also
working on his doctorate.
Khaled Bayomi looks surprised when the American officer
on TV complains that they don’t have the resources to
stop the plundering in Baghdad. “I happened to be right
there just as the American troops encouraged people to
begin the plundering.”
Khaled Bayomi traveled from Europe to Baghdad to be a
human shield and arrived on the same day that the war
began. About this he can tell many stories but the most
interesting is certainly his eyewitness account of the
wave of plundering.
“I had gone to see some friends who live near a
dilapidated area just past Haifa Avenue on the west
bank of the Tigris. It was the 8th of April and the
fighting was so intense that I was unable to return to
the other side of the river. In the afternoon it became
perfectly quiet and four American tanks took places on
the edge of the slum area. The soldiers shot two
Sudanese guards who stood at their posts outside a
local administration building on the other side of
Haifa Avenue. Then they blasted apart the doors to the
building and from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic
encouraging people to come close to them. “
“The entire morning, everyone who had tried to cross
the road had been shot. But in the strange silence
after all the shooting, people gradually became
curious. After 45 minutes, the first Baghdad citizens
dared to come out. Arab interpreters in the tanks told
the people to go and take what they wanted in the
building.”
“The word spread quickly and the building was
ransacked. I was standing only 300 yards from there
when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank
crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which
was in a neighboring building, and the plundering
continued there”.
“I stood in a large crowd and watched this together
with them. They did not partake in the plundering but
dared not to interfere. Many had tears of shame in
their eyes. The next morning the plundering spread to
the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther
north. There were also two crowds there, one that
plundered and one with watched with disgust.”
“Are you saying that it was US troops who initiated the
plundering?”
“Absolutely. The lack of jubilant scenes meant that the
American troops needed pictures of Iraqis who in
different ways demonstrated hatred for Saddam’s
regime.”
“The people pulled down a large statue of Saddam?”
“Did they? It was an American tank that did that, right
beside the hotel where all the journalists stay. Until
lunchtime on April 9, I did not see one destroyed
Saddam portrait. If people had wanted to pull down
statues they could have taken down some of the small
ones without any help from American tanks. If it had
been a political upheaval, the people would have pulled
down statues first and then plundered.”
“Isn’t it good that Saddam is gone?”
“He’s not gone. He has broken his army down into very
small groups. That’s why there hasn’t been a large
battle. About the official state, you could say that
Saddam dissolved that already in 1992 and he’s built a
parallel tribal structure that is totally decisive in
Iraq. When the US began the war, Saddam abandoned the
state completely and now depends on the tribal
structure. That was why he abandoned the large cities
without a fight.”
“Now the US is compelled to do everything themselves
because there’s no political body within the country
which will challenge the existing structure. The two
who came in from outside the country were annihilated
at once. (The reference here is to General Nazar al-
Khazraji, who returned from Denmark and the Shiite
Muslim leader, Abdul Majid al-Khoei.) They were cut to
pieces with swords and knives by a furious crowd in
Najaf because they were thought to be American puppets.
According to the Danish newspaper BT, al-Khazraji was
brought from Denmark to Iraq by the CIA.”
“Now we have an occupying power in place in Iraq that
has not said how long it intends to remain, has not
given any plan for civilian rule and no date for
general elections. Enormous chaos is now to be
expected.”
-Voices in the Wilderness April 10 report from Bagdhad
From http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/
It was with great relief that we received an update from Kathy today. Only
through unreliable satellite connection have we received sporadic word
from our team still in Baghdad. We think Kathy’s letter which follows, speaks
volumes to the current tragedy playing itself out on the streets of Baghdad
and undoubtedly, throughout Iraq.
Please bear with us as we discern next steps, not just with our team in Iraq
but here at home as well. As government and media pundits alike insist that
this war is “ending,” we urge the doubling of efforts to call attention to the fact
that war doesn’t end for those who have lost limbs, loved ones, homes, and
precious sense of security to blind greed.
Hello Friends, April 10, 2003
Early this morning, Umm Zainab sat quietly in the Al Fanar lobby staring at
the parade of tanks, APCs and Humvees that slowly rolled into position
along Abu Nuwas Street. Tears streamed down her face. “I am very sad,”
she told me. “Never I thought this would happen to my country. Now, I think,
my sadness will never go away.”
Wanting to give Umm Zainab some quiet time, I took her two toddlers,
Zainab and Miladh, outside to enjoy the sunshine and fresh air. Several
soldiers stood guard not far from me and the children. I wanted to bring the
children over to them, to let them behold these tiny beauties. But, no, too
much of a risk-what if it would add to Umm Zaineb’s pain?
Eun Ha Yoo, our Korean Peace Team friend, unrolled a huge artwork
created by a Korean artist, Chae Pyong Doh, and sweetly laid it out in the
intersection just outside the Al Fanar. As I write, Neville Watson and Cathy
Breen are taking their turns sitting in the middle of it.
A map of the world covers the top third; grieving victims of war fill the middle
third; piles of ugly weapons with various flags scattered over them bulge out
of the bottom third. Neville has set up his prayer stool and a small wooden
cross where he sits. Cathy is wearing her “War Is Not The Answer” t-shirt.
At least a dozen soldiers have stopped to talk with us since we began the
vigil at 3 this afternoon. “OK, can you tell us your side of the story?” asked
one young man. “Can I sit there with you for awhile?” asked another. Each
of them has assured us that they didn’t want to kill anyone. One young man
said he was desperate for financial aid to care for his wife and child while
struggling to complete college studies and work full time. He felt he could
gain some respect in this world and also help his family by joining the
Marines. He’s relieved that he was stationed at the rear of a line coming up
from the south. His role was to guard prisoners. He didn’t shoot anyone.
But he saw US soldiers shoot at a civilian car with three passengers as it
approached. The child in the car survived - both of his parents were
immediately killed. “They could have shot the tires,” said the soldier.
“Some just want to kill.”
One soldier offered earnest concern for us, saying “You’re sitting in a
dangerous place.” We smiled. “Thanks,” I said, “But we’ve been in a
dangerous place for the past three weeks.” He was puzzled. “What do
they mean,” said a soldier standing next to him, “is that they’ve been here all
through three weeks of bombing.”
“Do you try to put yourselves in our shoes?” asked one soldier after he’d
respectfully listened to me explain major contradictions between US rhetoric
and practice regarding Iraq. “Well, yes,” I said, “We try. We’re taking the
same risk as you by being here, and perhaps an even greater risk since
we’re unarmed and unprotected. Actually, just now we’re lucky not to be
burdened by all that heavy gear.”
“Yeah,” said the soldier, “It’s really hot. I don’t have much of an appetite. I
just give away most of my rations, - give ‘em to these people.”
Hassan, one of the shoeshine boys, came over to join us, carrying a ration
packet. He opened it, came across processed apple spread, and a few
other curious items, then decided to donate it to us. Now the flies have
discovered it.
It looks like we’re on “lock-down” for a while longer. Iraqi minders are gone,
--US soldiers are here. They’re uncoiling barbed wire at the intersection.
Anyone wanting to walk across the street is stopped, questioned and
searched. Since I began this letter, there have been four huge explosions
nearby. Looting and burning continue, here in Baghdad. I’m sick of
war-disgusted to the point of nausea. I think all of us at this intersection,
residents of the Al Fanar, journalists in the Palestine Hotel next door, and
soldiers on patrol, share the same queasy ill feeling. The line, “War is the
health of the state” makes no sense whatsoever here.
With love,
Kathy Kelly
We hope Kathy’s words have moved you as much as they have us. There is
not a single person who partakes in or experiences this war, these acts of
violence, who is not profoundly effected, be they a soldier or a civilian. War,
and all the misery that it brings, is truly our common enemy.
Peace and hope,
Stephanie Schaudel, for Voices in the Wilderness
Thursday, April 10, 2003
-Alternative Resources on the U.S.- Iraq Conflict
The International Task Force of the American Library Association’s Social Responsibilities Round Table has complied a comprehensive list of alternative resources and information on the War in Iraq, posted at http://www.pitt.edu/~ttwiss/irtf/iraq.html
http://www.pitt.edu/~ttwiss/irtf/iraq.html
-MEDIA ALERT: HORROR, CRUELTY AND MISERY - THE REAL MEANING OF “LIBERATION”
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
April 9, 2003
The priorities are clear, the perspective of power unthinkingly adopted. And so mainstream news headlines declaim that “coalition forces have penetrated deep into the centre of the Iraqi capital”. Troops “storm central Baghdad”. Pentagon briefings that itemise the number of armoured vehicles, “tank-busting” A-10 Warthog planes and B-1 bombers are breathlessly forwarded by mainstream media channels to the public. The Anglo-American “show of force” is intended to “send a powerful message to the Iraqi regime”, the BBC faithfully relays to us.
If you can stomach all this Boys’ Own war pornography, and if you can wade past page after dull page of war strategy, complete with fancy graphics of troop movements, you might just might encounter the horrendous reality of this illegal and immoral Anglo-American invasion of a devastated Third World country.
‘It Could Be My Kid’
Of course, media reporting is not uniformly gung-ho, uncritical or wholly confined to a distorted framework that meekly accepts ‘coalition’ propaganda about Iraq being ‘liberated’; welcome exceptions to the norm +do+ occur. Recent examples in the liberal press include front-page reporting by The Independent’s Robert Fisk and today’s Guardian cover story by Suzanne Goldenberg (’A picture of killing inflicted on a sprawling city - and it grew more unbearable by the minute’, the Guardian, 9 April, 2003). Goldenberg quotes Osama Salah, a director of medical services in one Baghdad hospital:
“This is severely traumatic. It is very difficult to see a child lying in front of you and I have seen three children. I keep seeing the faces of my own children in these children. It could be my kid. It could be my cousin, and still the Americans continue, and they don’t stop.”
Three weeks into the US-UK onslaught on Iraq, horror, cruelty and misery have become its defining features. Do not fall for the political rhetoric about “minimising casualties” and “precision targeting”: the now familiar, and shameful, twin refrain of US-UK military misadventures dating back to the first Gulf War, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and now Iraq once again. Tucked away in the inside pages of the press a few days ago, Patrick Nicholson of aid agency Cafod observed:
“I have recently returned from Angola where I witnessed haunting scenes of poverty but I never expected to see the same levels of misery in Iraq, a country floating on oil.” (’The cans and buckets are empty and people are desperate’, Patrick Nicholson, The Independent, 5 April, 2003)
Red Cross doctors who visited southern Iraq last week saw “incredible” levels of civilian casualties including a truckload of dismembered women and children. Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi capital, said doctors were horrified by the casualties they had found in a hospital in Hilla, about 160 kilometres south of Baghdad. “There has been an incredible number of casualties”, reported Huguenin, “with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla. We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening. Everybody had very serious wounds and many, many of them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of age who had lost their legs, their arms.” (’Red Cross Horrified by Number of Dead Civilians’, Thursday 3 April 2003,
http://truthout.org/docs_03/040603A.shtml)
According to Independent reporter Robert Fisk:
“Terrifying film of women and children later emerged after Reuters and the Associated Press were permitted by the Iraqi authorities to take their cameras into the town. Their pictures - the first by Western news agencies from the Iraqi side of the battlefront - showed babies cut in half and children with amputation wounds, apparently caused by American shellfire and cluster bombs.” (’Children killed and maimed in bomb attack on town’, Robert Fisk and Justin Huggler, the Independent, 2 April 2003)
Fisk added that: “Much of the videotape was too terrible to show on television and the agencies’ Baghdad editors felt able to send only a few minutes of a 21-minute tape that included a father holding out pieces of his baby and screaming ‘cowards, cowards’ into the camera. One of the film editors, a European, was asked why he would not send the full videotape to London. He wound the pictures on to two mutilated corpses of babies. “How could we ever send this?’” he said.
Humanitarian Nightmare - An Inconvenient Distraction
Denis Halliday, the former UN humanitarian coordinator in Baghdad, who resigned in protest at UN sanctions in 1998, has expressed his deep concern at the humanitarian crisis, particularly in the south of Iraq where safe drinking water is in desperately short supply, and where twenty-five per cent or more of children under five years of age are already malnourished. In an interview with the non-mainstream source Between the Lines, Halliday warned:
“When you’re malnourished at that age and you get unclean water, just simple diarrhoea is enough to take your life. And of course, dysentery or other more serious problems, waterborne disease, is an absolute killer. So that I think is the absolute immediate crisis that several millions obviously are facing in Um Qaser, Nasiriyah, Basra, Najaf or Karbala to the south of Baghdad.” (Interview With Denis Halliday by Scott Harris, Between the Lines, 7 April, 2003,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3408)
Barring a tiny number of honourable exceptions, +none+ of the above is leading headline news, and certainly not on major news bulletins. Such horrors threaten to “take the shine off” the “Shock and Awe” blitz, as Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark noted (21 March, 2003), as do subsequent “penetrations” and “stormings” by US-UK troops into densely populated civilian areas. Meanwhile, alleged Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” are now all but forgotten by mainstream news managers, except for periodic scare stories about “smoking guns”, flashed up dutifully with prominence before fading quietly away.
How convenient all of this is for Bush and Blair who are, the BBC’s political editor Andrew Marr, tells us, “two men whose determination should not be questioned.” (BBC news online, 28 March, 2003) Their determination may well match that of earlier superpowers who have waded through blood in the name of “humanitarian intervention”; there is indeed little question of that. But the possibility that Bush and Blair’s mendacity, without which an invasion of Iraq would have been all but impossible, is an unmentionable for Marr, now that it’s time to support our troops.
The hideous truth of this invasion is not necessarily excised; it is often simply tucked away, buried under acres of newsprint, or under generous airtime devoted to troop movements, gung-ho commander briefings and vacuous, if brave, accounts from “embedded” reporters. Iraqi doctor, Osama Saleh al-Duleimi, a witness to two previous wars, describes what we only glimpse:
“I’ve been a doctor for 25 years and this is the worst I’ve seen in terms of casualty numbers and fatal wounds.” (’Doctors overwhelmed by arrival of 100 patients an hour’, Paul Peachey, The Independent, 7 April 2003)
The Inversion Of News Priorities, Shaped By ‘British Interests’
Why, then, this consistent ordering of news priority? Top of the bill: the progress of the invasion from the perspective of the invaders, acting outside international law and against the will of the majority of the world’s population. Bottom of the bill or, at least, far down the rankings: a broadbrush accounting of the humanitarian disaster that is unfolding, of the immense human suffering that the invasion is generating. Why +is+ the news agenda upside down?
A partial answer was perhaps provided by Richard Sambrook, BBC’s director of news, when he told online Guardian readers last week that the BBC’s priority is to reflect “British interests”. Just what those interests are, and who or what shapes them, is left unsaid. Also left unsaid is whether reflecting “British interests” may be a problem for one’s conscience. But then, as the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker once observed:
“It is certainly dangerous for a state when its citizens have a conscience; what it needs is men without conscience, or, better still, men whose conscience is quite in conformity with reasons of state, men in whom the feeling of personal responsibility has been replaced by the automatic impulse to act in the interests of the state.” (Rudolf Rocker, Culture and Nationalism, Michael E. Coughlan, 1978, p.197)
The unspoken truth, in fact, is that “British interests” are determined by state-corporate power that dictates that the leaders of what was once a +labour-based+ party pursue an agenda promoting private interests over the public good; that terrorises Third World people sitting on top of natural resources that, by “might is right”, belong to “us” in the rich north; that facilitates the imperial ambitions of a right-wing clique in Washington; and that erodes the civil rights of citizens at home in the UK. These are the great achievements of the Blair government, cloaked in the rhetoric of the ‘universal values’ of democracy, freedom and human rights. The cloak is provided by an almost uniformly compliant corps of well-paid news editors, journalists, commentators and hired guns from academia.
Liberation By Cluster Bomb
And so, while the UK government has been allowed to lie, deceive and trample over British public opinion, and to send its troops to “liberate” a terrified nation, an editorial in the ‘anti-war’ Independent can still declare with a straight face:
“Mr Blair is an evangelist for a transcendentally optimistic world view: that no disagreement on earth cannot be resolved by the application of goodwill and clever wording.” (’A visit to Belfast will give George Bush timely lessons in geography, politics and nation-building’, The Independent, 7 April 2003)
Such surreal pronouncements from an editorial office tenuously connected to the real world reveal the skewed value system that unites leading politicians, corporate chiefs and mainstream media personnel alike. As Canadian philosopher John McMurtry shrewdly observes:
“Tony Blair exemplifies the character structure of the global market order. Packaged in the corporate culture of youthful image, he is constructed as sincere, energetic and moral. Like other ruling-party leaders, he has worked hard to be selected by the financial and media axes of power as ‘the man to do the job’. He is a moral metaphor of the system.” (’Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy, Pluto Press, London, 2002, page 22)
The brutal nature of this system is rarely so radically exposed to public view as when the BBC Radio 4 Today programme suggested to UK Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, that the Iraqi mothers of children killed by cluster bombs would not thank British forces for their actions. Mr Hoon replied: “One day they might.?E
This unbelievable remark was followed by a grim attempt at face-saving, one that relied heavily on the convenient myth of “liberation”:
“I accept that in the short term the consequences are terrible”, said Hoon. “No one minimises those and I’m not seeking to do so,” he said. “But what I am saying is that this is a country that has been brutalised for decades by this appalling regime and that the restoration of that country to its own people, the possibility of their deciding for themselves their future ... and indeed the way in which they go about their lives, ultimately, yes, that will be a better place for people in Iraq.”
Alice Mahon, Labour MP for Halifax, described Mr Hoon’s remarks as “cruel and unfeeling”. She added: “It was an outrageous thing to say. It was a typical quote from a conqueror, not a liberator.” (’Hoon is “cruel” for claims on cluster bombs’, Paul Waugh and Ben Russell, The Independent, 5 April, 2003)
This is the kind of arrogance upon which state-corporate power is built. But there is hope, of course. “Such a regime”, McMurtry reminds us, “depends throughout on keeping knowledge silenced and repressed. This is its Achilles’ heel. As soon as people see through it and flag it to the surrounding community, the collective trance on which it depends begins to lose its power.” (McMurtry, ibid, page 84)
For the moment, at least, this country’s mainstream media - the BBC, The Guardian, The Observer, Channel 4 news, ITN, The Independent, and all the rest - are dutifully performing their role of maintaining this collective trance. But the trance is being challenged, and people are waking up.
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