Harry, it’s a
poor response from you to suggest that people complaining about deaths in Iraq
are solely interested in the political outcome of the upcoming election. Sounds more like something Rush
Limbaugh would say to get better ratings. That line of counterattack only promotes more divisiveness
and disrespect. We need
constructive debate, listening to each other’s arguments, and seeking a common purpose. These problems are too big and too
critical to be tackled with half the country divided as it is. I am
anti-Bush, but would enjoy meeting the man, and his better half, certain we
could find something pleasant to talk about besides the four daughters we have
between us (and the trouble they can be).
If I couldn’t persuade him on some policy disagreements, I would try a
few bbq recipes. I hear the
personal approach softens him up more than anything else, and I can still ‘talk
southern’. But I would be happy to
‘free the Bush twins’ by sending Daddy back home to Crawford. - KWC By the way, is
the voice recognition software you are trying out called Dragon (7)? Harry
wrote: Karen, I
like reading Robert Fisk and do often (though the English paper that prints him
now demands a subscription fee - so I haven't read much of him lately. He does
have a web site though. I cannot recall an item in all his columns
that I've read that shows Americans in a favorable light. Maybe there is nothing favorable
about us that can be written about. If there were, I'm sure you wouldn't find
it in a Fisk column. Which
is all right, for he writes to his constituency, among whom is our good friend
Keith. So,
that's my background to the present column. Perhaps
everything he said is true about the 130,000 or so American soldiers in Iraq.
Perhaps there are a score of good things happening for every bad thing recounted
by Fisk. But,
as we've said, a story about children going to school or adults going to the
races don't sell newspapers to anti-Americans. So, you are unlikely to get them
from a Fisk column. I fear
that anti-Bush political types (I
except you) see in the present attacks, not a
danger to US soldiers, but a good way to beat him in 2004. It would
be good for Americans if the attacks can be stopped - or at least
squelched. Perhaps the best thing about them is they will light a fire under
the bureaucrats charged with recruiting Iraqis to fight the Saddamites and
the foreign intruders. Harry One of the unfortunate
similarities, perhaps, between Vietnam and the current conditions in Iraq is
that troop morale and incidences of increasing hostile acts are leading to
atrocities. For all concerned, let
us hope this does not continue.
Even if just half of these stories trickling out are true, it is very
sobering and sad to see any reports of this already. Yes, there are good stories
also emerging, of school boards and courts operating, of poor families with
less than they had before who no longer fear the secret police. But that does not excuse the
deteriorating situation or incidences of unnecessary violence. Don’t tell me to “never mind, it
happens.” Now I know Harry and maybe
others will object to Robert Fisk, the Brit journalist and the more ‘argumentative’
style of Brit journalism, so they say, but read this and pause to think about
all the men and women – and children - who are victims here, civilians,
combatants and soldiers. This did not have to
be. - KWC One, Two, Three, What Are They Fighting For? Robert
Fisk | 10.27.2003, Tikkun @ http://www.tikkun.org/index.cfm/action/current/article/193.html I was in the
police station in the town of Fallujah when I realised the extent of the schizophrenia.
Captain Christopher Cirino of the 82nd Airborne was trying to explain to me the
nature of the attacks so regularly carried out against American forces in the
Sunni Muslim Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a former presidential rest
home down the road—"Dreamland", the Americans call it—but this was
not the extent of his soldiers' disorientation. "The men we are being
attacked by," he said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local
freedom fighters." Come again? "Freedom fighters." But that's
what Captain Cirino called them—and rightly so. Here's the
reason. All American soldiers are supposed to believe—indeed have to believe,
along with their President and his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld—that
Osama bin Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring over Iraq's borders
from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (note how those close allies and neighbours of
Iraq, Kuwait and Turkey are always left out of the equation), are assaulting
United States forces as part of the "war on terror". Special forces
soldiers are now being told by their officers that the "war on
terror" has been transferred from America to Iraq, as if in some
miraculous way, 11 September 2001 is now Iraq 2003. Note too how the Americans
always leave the Iraqis out of the culpability bracket—unless they can be
described as "Baath party remnants", "diehards" or
"deadenders" by the US proconsul, Paul Bremer. Captain
Cirino's problem, of course, is that he knows part of the truth. Ordinary
Iraqis—many of them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein—are attacking the
American occupation army 35 times a day in the Baghdad area alone. And Captain
Cirino works in Fallujah's local police station, where America's newly hired
Iraqi policemen are the brothers and uncles and—no doubt—fathers of some of
those now waging guerrilla war against American soldiers in Fallujah. Some of
them, I suspect, are indeed themselves the "terrorists". So if he
calls the bad guys "terrorists", the local cops—his first line of
defence—would be very angry indeed. No wonder
morale is low. No wonder the American soldiers I meet on the streets of Baghdad
and other Iraqi cities don't mince their words about their own government. US
troops have been given orders not to bad-mouth their President or Secretary of
Defence in front of Iraqis or reporters (who have about the same status in the
eyes of the occupation authorities). But when I suggested to a group of US
military police near Abu Ghurayb they would be voting Republican at the next
election, they fell about laughing. "We shouldn't be here and we should
never have been sent here," one of them told me with astonishing candour.
"And maybe you can tell me: why were we sent here?" Little
wonder, then, that Stars and Stripes, the American military's own newspaper,
reported this month that one third of the soldiers in Iraq suffered from low
morale. And is it any wonder, that being the case, that US forces in Iraq are
shooting down the innocent, kicking and brutalising prisoners, trashing homes
and—eyewitness testimony is coming from hundreds of Iraqis—stealing money from
houses they are raiding? No, this is not Vietnam—where the Americans sometimes
lost 3,000 men in a month—nor is the US army in Iraq turning into a rabble. Not
yet. And they remain light years away from the butchery of Saddam's henchmen.
But human-rights monitors, civilian occupation officials and journalists—not to
mention Iraqis themselves—are increasingly appalled at the behaviour of the
American military occupiers. Iraqis who
fail to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys under attack—or who
merely pass the scene of an American raid—are being gunned down with abandon.
US official "inquiries" into these killings routinely result in
either silence or claims that the soldiers "obeyed their rules of engagement"—rules
that the Americans will not disclose to the public. The rot
comes from the top. Even during the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, US forces
declined to take responsibility for the innocents they killed. "We do not
do body counts," General Tommy Franks announced. So there was no apology
for the 16 civilians killed at Mansur when the "Allies"—note how we
Brits get caught up in this misleading title—bombed a residential suburb in the
vain hope of killing Saddam. When US special forces raided a house in the very
same area four months later—hunting for the very same Iraqi leader—they killed
six civilians, including a 14-year-old boy and a middle-aged woman, and only
announced, four days later, that they would hold an "inquiry". Not an
investigation, you understand, nothing that would suggest there was anything
wrong in gunning down six Iraqi civilians; and in due course the
"inquiry" was forgotten—as it was no doubt meant to be—and nothing
has been heard of it again. Again,
during the invasion, the Americans dropped hundreds of cluster bombs on
villages outside the town of Hillah. They left behind a butcher's shop of
chopped-up corpses. Film of babies cut in half during the raid was not even
transmitted by the Reuters crew in Baghdad. The Pentagon then said there were
"no indications" cluster bombs had been dropped at Hillah—even though
Sky TV found some unexploded and brought them back to Baghdad. I first came
across this absence of remorse—or rather absence of responsibility—in a slum
suburb of Baghdad called Hayy al-Gailani. Two men had run a new American
checkpoint—a roll of barbed wire tossed across a road before dawn one morning
in July—and US troops had opened fire at the car. Indeed, they fired so many
bullets that the vehicle burst into flames. And while the dead or dying men
were burned inside, the Americans who had set up the checkpoint simply boarded
their armoured vehicles and left the scene. They never even bothered to visit
the hospital mortuary to find out the identities of the men they killed—an
obvious step if they believed they had killed "terrorists"—and inform
their relatives. Scenes like this are being repeated across Iraq daily. Which is why
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and other humanitarian organisations are
protesting ever more vigorously about the failure of the US army even to count
the numbers of Iraqi dead, let alone account for their own role in killing
civilians. "It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed so many civilians
in Baghdad," Human Rights Watch's Joe Stork said. "But it is really
incredible that the US military does not even count these deaths." Human
Rights Watch has counted 94 Iraqi civilians killed by Americans in the capital.
The organisation also criticised American forces for humiliating prisoners, not
least by their habit of placing their feet on the heads of prisoners. Some
American soldiers are now being trained in Jordan—by Jordanians—in the
"respect" that should be accorded to Iraqi civilians and about the
culture of Islam. About time. But on the
ground in Iraq, Americans have a licence to kill. Not a single soldier has been
disciplined for shooting civilians—even when the fatality involves an Iraqi
working for the occupation authorities. No action has been taken, for instance,
over the soldier who fired a single shot through the window of an Italian
diplomat's car, killing his translator, in northern Iraq. Nor against the
soldiers of the 82nd Airborne who gunned down 14 Sunni Muslim protesters in
Fallujah in April. (Captain Cirino was not involved.) Nor against the troops
who shot dead 11 more protesters in Mosul. Sometimes, the evidence of low
morale mounts over a long period. In one Iraqi city, for example, the
"Coalition Provisional Authority"—which is what the occupation
authorities call themselves—have instructed local money changers not to give
dollars for Iraqi dinars to occupation soldiers: too many Iraqi dinars had been
stolen by troops during house raids. Repeatedly, in Baghdad, Hillah, Tikrit,
Mosul and Fallujah Iraqis have told me that they were robbed by American troops
during raids and at checkpoints. Unless there is a monumental conspiracy on a
nationwide scale by Iraqis, some of these reports must bear the stamp of truth. Then there
was the case of the Bengal tiger. A group of US troops entered the Baghdad zoo
one evening for a party of sandwiches and beer. During the party, one of the
soldiers decided to pet the tiger who—being a Bengal tiger—sank his teeth into
the soldier. The Americans then shot the tiger dead. The Americans promised an
"inquiry"—of which nothing has been heard since. Ironically, the one
incident where US forces faced disciplinary action followed an incident in
which a US helicopter crew took a black religious flag from a communications
tower in Sadr City in Baghdad. The violence that followed cost the life of an
Iraqi civilian. Suicides
among US troops in Iraq have risen in recent months—up to three times the usual
rate among American servicemen. At least 23 soldiers are believed to have taken
their lives since the Anglo-American invasion and others have been wounded in
attempting suicide. As usual, the US army only revealed this statistic
following constant questioning. The daily attacks on Americans outside
Baghdad—up to 50 in a night—go, like the civilian Iraqi dead, unrecorded.
Travelling back from Fallujah to Baghdad after dark last month, I saw mortar
explosions and tracer fire around 13 American bases—not a word of which was
later revealed by the occupation authorities. At Baghdad airport last month,
five mortar shells fell near the runway as a Jordanian airliner was boarding
passengers for Amman. I saw this attack with my own eyes. That same afternoon,
General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US officer in Iraq, claimed he knew nothing
about the attack, which—unless his junior officers are slovenly—he must have
been well aware of. But can we
expect anything else of an army that can wilfully mislead soldiers into writing
"letters" to their home town papers in the US about improvements in
Iraqi daily life. "The
quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely restored, and we
are a large part of why it has happened," Sergeant Christopher Shelton of
the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment bragged in a letter from Kirkuk to the
Snohomish County Tribune. "The majority of the city has welcomed our
presence with open arms." Only it hasn't. And Sergeant Shelton didn't
write the letter. Nor did Sergeant Shawn Grueser of West Virginia. Nor did
Private Nick Deaconson. Nor eight other soldiers who supposedly wrote identical
letters to their local papers. The "letters" were distributed among
soldiers, who were asked to sign if they agreed with its contents. But is this,
perhaps, not part of the fantasy world inspired by the right-wing ideologues in
Washington who sought this war—even though most of them have never served their
country in uniform. They dreamed up the "weapons of mass destruction"
and the adulation of American troops who would "liberate" the Iraqi
people. Unable to provide fact to fiction, they now merely acknowledge that the
soldiers they have sent into the biggest rat's nest in the Middle East have
"a lot of work to do", that they are—this was not revealed before or
during the invasion—"fighting the front line in the war on terror". What
influence, one might ask, have the Christian fundamentalists had on the
American army in Iraq? For even if we ignore the Rev Franklin Graham, who has
described Islam as "a very evil and wicked religion" before he went
to lecture Pentagon officials—what is one to make of the officer responsible
for tracking down Osama bin Laden, Lieutenant-General William "Jerry"
Boykin, who told an audience in Oregon that Islamists hate the US "because
we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian
and the enemy is a guy called Satan". Recently promoted to deputy
under-secretary of defence for intelligence, Boykin went on to say of the war
against Mohammed Farrah Aidid in Somalia—in which he participated—that "I
knew my God was bigger than his—I knew that my God was a real God and his was
an idol". Secretary of
Defence Donald Rumsfeld said of these extraordinary remarks that "it
doesn't look like any rules were broken". We are now told that an
"inquiry" into Boykin's comments is underway—an "inquiry"
about as thorough, no doubt, as those held into the killing of civilians in
Baghdad. Weaned on
this kind of nonsense, however, is it any surprise that American troops in Iraq
understand neither their war nor the people whose country they are occupying?
Terrorists or freedom fighters? What's the difference? (c) 2003 Independent Digital Ltd. |
- RE: Re: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the Pres... Karen Watters Cole
- Robert Fisk (was : Re: [Futurework] No similaritie... Keith Hudson
- RE: Re: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the... Harry Pollard
- RE: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the Pre... Karen Watters Cole
- RE: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the Pre... Karen Watters Cole
- RE: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the... Harry Pollard
- RE: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the Pre... Cordell . Arthur