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{ indy irl warblog } 31.03.03 national |
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news report
 Monday March 31, 2003 15:40 by warblogger
 Feel free to add your own links and representative portions of news stories you find on the net.... British soldier slams "cowboy" US pilot over fatal friendly fire LONDON (AFP) - A British soldier who survived a fatal friendly fire incident has launched a scathing attack on the US pilot responsible for killing his comrade. "He (the pilot) had absolutely no regard for human life. I believe he was a cowboy... He'd just gone out on a jolly," Lance Corporal Steven Gerrard told The Times of London, regarding the incident Friday.
.... "Combat is what I've been trained for. I can command my vehicle. I can keep it from being attacked. What I have not been trained to do is look over my shoulder to see whether an American is shooting at me."
- - - - - US Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge of death This was not the only family who had taken what they thought was a last chance for safety. A father, baby girl and boy lay in a shallow grave. On the bridge itself a dead Iraqi civilian lay next to the carcass of a donkey. As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin, whose third child, 'Did you see all that?' he asked, his eyes filled with tears. 'Did you see that little baby girl? I carried her body and buried it as best I could but I had no time. It really gets to me to see children being killed like this, but we had no choice.' Martin's distress was in contrast to the bitter satisfaction of some of his fellow marines as they surveyed the scene. 'The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy,' said Corporal Ryan Dupre.' I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him.' Only a few days earlier these had still been the bright-eyed small-town boys with whom I crossed the border at the start of the operation. They had rolled towards Nasiriya, a strategic city beside the Euphrates, on a mission to secure a safe supply route for troops on the way to Baghdad. They had expected a welcome, or at least a swift surrender. Instead they had found themselves lured into a bloody battle, culminating in the worst coalition losses of the war '16 dead, 12 wounded and two missing marines as well as five dead and 12 missing servicemen from an army convoy' and the humiliation of having prisoners paraded on Iraqi television. - - - - - Reporter Peter Arnett: U.S. War Plan Has Failed Journalist Peter Arnett, covering the war from Baghdad, told state-run Iraqi TV in an interview aired Sunday that the American-led coalition's first war plan had failed because of Iraq's resistance and said strategists are "trying to write another war plan." .... He said the United States is reappraising the battlefield and delaying the war, maybe for a week, "and rewriting the war plan. The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan." "Clearly, the American war plans misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces," Arnett said during the interview broadcast by Iraq's satellite television station and monitored by The Associated Press in Egypt. Arnett said it is clear that within the United States there is growing opposition to the war and a growing challenge to President Bush about the war's conduct. "Our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States," he said. "It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy to develop their arguments." - - - - - Three British soldiers in Iraq have been ordered home after objecting to the conduct of the war. It is understood they have been sent home for protesting that the war is killing innocent civilians. .... Three British soldiers sent home after protesting at civilian deaths Any refusal of soldiers to obey orders is highly embarrassing to the government, with ministers becoming increasingly worried about the way the war is developing. It is also causing concern to British military chiefs who are worried about growing evidence of civilians being killed in fighting involving American soldiers around urban areas in southern Iraq. - - - - - Report: Rumsfeld Ignored Pentagon Advice on Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly rejected advice from Pentagon planners that substantially more troops and armor would be needed to fight a war in Iraq, New Yorker Magazine reported. In an article for its April 7 edition, which goes on sale on Monday, the weekly said Rumsfeld insisted at least six times in the run-up to the conflict that the proposed number of ground troops be sharply reduced and got his way.
- - - - - OFFENSE AND DEFENSE Rumsfeld’s personal contempt for many of the senior generals and admirals who were promoted to top jobs during the Clinton Administration is widely known. He was especially critical of the Army, with its insistence on maintaining costly mechanized divisions. In his off-the-cuff memoranda, or “snowflakes,” as they’re called in the Pentagon, he chafed about generals having “the slows”—a reference to Lincoln’s characterization of General George McClellan. “In those conditions—an atmosphere of derision and challenge—the senior officers do not offer their best advice,” a high-ranking general who served for more than a year under Rumsfeld said. One witness to a meeting recalled Rumsfeld confronting General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, in front of many junior officers. “He was looking at the Chief and waving his hand,” the witness said, “saying, ‘Are you getting this yet? Are you getting this yet?’” - - - - - The 'Palestinization' of Iraq AMMAN - American tanks are now ripping at the heart of Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers" and the cradle of civilization; the US 5th Corps is already engaging the Medina division of the Republican Guards as B52s increase their bombing raids of the "red line" in the outer ring of defenses of Baghdad, over which hangs a surreal, dust-induced dark orange cloud. For 280 million Arabs, the symbolic effect of the tanks in the country is as devastating as a lethal sandstorm. But Saddam Hussein seems to be one step ahead. It doesn't matter that Iraqi TV was silenced by a showering of Tomahawks (although domestic broadcasts, as well as the international signal, have been restored). Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV will be on hand to record the ultimate image that Saddam knows is capable of igniting the Arab world into an ocean of fire: an American tank in the streets of Baghdad juxtaposed with an American tank in the streets of Gaza. To date, an estimated 5,200 Iraqis have crossed the Jordanian-Iraqi border, going back "to defend their homeland" as they invariably put it. In already one week of a war that was marketed by the Pentagon as "clean" and "quick" and which is revealing itself to be bloody and protracted, not a single Iraqi refugee has crossed the al-Karama border point into eastern Jordan. - - - - - An American Myth Rides Into the Sunset In this regard, President Bush's self-presentation culminates a progression long in the works. We've been on the way to becoming a different America for a while. A little more than a year ago, the old and vanishing American mythology of common-man virtue enjoyed an unexpected comeback — in the aftermath of 9/11. That antiquated ethic returned to infuse our romance with the sacrificial firefighters and police officers, and the average citizens martyred in our national tragedy. Its presence was palpable in the self-image of an ordinary embattled people rising to the occasion in countless ways, as if we were once more "out in some strange night caring for each other," as Ernie Pyle wrote of the G.I.'s he chronicled. Perhaps that is why so many Americans now feel even more painfully the loss of a myth that, in truth, has been on its sickbed for a generation. As the invasion of Iraq began, a lament could be heard across the political spectrum. A letter in The Times seemed typical: "The president was speaking and I realized that an old and dear friend of mine was gone." What Americans grieve for is not reality. We've carried out regime change before, whether on Chief Sitting Bull or Manuel Noriega. We've also waged elective wars, whether in the Dominican Republic or the Philippines. But to call it a myth is not to diminish its importance. Mythologies are essential to defining who we are and, more importantly, who we want to be. We caught a powerful glimpse of our myth's possibilities, just before its end. Sept. 11 gave us its final spark, like the bright flash that the sun shoots up before it sets for good. |
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Comments (2 of 2)
Jump To Comment: 1 2There has been much talk about combat in Iraq, bombings in Baghdad, the
battles for Basrah and Um Qasar, whether or not the attack is going to
plan, human rights violations on both sides, etc, etc, etc. In short, all
the stuff we've come to expect from the warmongering mainstream media.
There has even been a lot of talk about the weather.
Dust storms to be specific.
As I watched the wall-to-wall footage of vague figures in fatigues sucking
down the Southern Iraqi desert dust, as machinery and vision failed, as
confusion and a sense of scale hit the troops and their commanders, I
wondered how soon the 100,000+ military personnel from US, UK, and
Australia exposed to the dust would begin to show signs of radiation
sickness because of the massive amounts of depleted uranium they must have
been inhaling.
Not a word has been said about it, at least not to my knowledge.
Apart from committing serious violations of international law which will
undoubtedly result in war crimes charges, the governments responsible for
ordering these people to invade Iraq have also sentenced them to numerous
unsavoury futures as a result of extended and extreme exposure to depleted
uranium: slow and painful death; strange incurable cancers; and horrendous
disabilities for hundreds of thousands of children born to those who are
able to have children, or at least who manage to have children before they
are rendered unable to reproduce from the effects of the enormous amounts
of depleted uranium deposited in Southern Iraq during and since the Gulf War.
One commentator notes the effects of depleted uranium on the population of
Basrah in 2001:
"I thought I had a strong stomach - toughened by the minefields and foul
frontline hospitals of Angola, by the handiwork of the death squads in
Haiti and by the wholesale butchery of Rwanda. But I nearly lost my
breakfast last week at the Basrah Maternity and Children's Hospital in
southern Iraq.
Dr Amer, the hospital's director, had invited me into a room in which were
displayed colour photographs of what, in cold medical language, are called
"congenital anomalies", but what you and I would better understand as
horrific birth deformities. The images of these babies were head-spinningly
grotesque, and thank God they didn't bring out the real thing, pickled in
formaldehyde. At one point I had to grab hold of the back of a chair to
support my legs." http://www.rense.com/general17/south.htm
A report from the International Action Centre notes that
"[The] president of the Australian Yellow Cross International traced down
an American war crime that had been previously kept secret and made it
public internationally. He conducted extensive studies in Iraq on the
effect of DU on Iraqi population. These studies produced ample evidence to
show that contact with DU ammunition has the following consequences,
especially for children:
*A considerable increase in infectious diseases caused by most severe
immunodeficiencies in a great part of the population;
*Frequent occurrence of massive herpes and zoster afflictions, also in
children;
*AIDS-like Syndrome;
*A hitherto unknown syndrome caused by renal and hepatic dysfunctions;
*Leukemia, elaptic anemia and malignant neoplasms;
*Congenital deformities caused by genetic defects, which are also to be
found in animals.
In his book The Fire This Time, former U.S attorney-general Ramsey Clark
said there were about fifty thousand depleted-uranium missiles and rockets
fired from U.S aircraft in more than 110,000 aerial sorties over Iraq. He
said U.S aircraft had dropped over eighty-eight thousand tons of bombs on
the country, the equivalent of seven-and-one-half bombs of the size of the
atomic bomb that incinerated Hiroshima. But later research proved that
there were probably more than nine hundred thousand rounds of depleted
uranium ammunition fired on Iraq" http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/du_iraq.htm
People aware of depleted uranium use in munitions usually assume it is used
only in armour piercing shells, affectionately called "crispy critters" (a
picture at this address shows why
http://www.zianet.com/boje/peace/facts_and_myths_about_iraq_war.htm). But,
as an IDUST reporter notes:
"DU is being used in armor-piercing bullets, casing on bombs, shielding on
Today tanks, counterweights and penetrators on missiles, cluster bombs,
anti-personnel mines, and other weapons sometimes referred to as "dirty
bombs." The US government and others maintain that the only purpose for
using DU is to pierce armor. However, DU has a dual use because it is in
fact being used to poison personnel. Already in 1978 an author noted in
the periodical Strategic Review that today's most effective conventional
anti-tankweapons are designed to penetrate tank armor and produce radiation
effects which will kill or disable the tank crews."
http://www.iraqpeaceteam.org/pages/DU_Damacio_Present_UNDP.html
How much DU is there in Southern Iraq? Between 320 and 1,000 tons,
depending on who you believe and how you do the figures.
1000 pounds of the stuff is way more than enough to kill 100,000 people.
How much does it take to make a person sick? "If even one small particle
(less than five microns in diameter, 5-millionths of a meter, the size of
cigarette ash) is trapped in the lungs, surrounding tissues can be exposed
up to 272 times the maximum permitted dose for workers in the radiation
industry". http://www.iraqpeaceteam.org/pages/DU_Damacio_Present_UNDP.html.
The half life of the stuff is about 4 billion years, give or take a million
years.
In other words, the "coalition" troops have, without a doubt, collectively
sucked down enough depleted uranium dust (DUD) in the past week to kill
them hundreds of times over, along with generations of their children.
I find no mention of this anywhere. Perhaps the organisers of the invasion
just forgot the stuff was there.
Apart from any other consequences of the current invasion, the troops
invading Iraq have been sentenced by their government to a life of severe
illness, early death, and grotesque birth defects for their children.