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------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Dec. 20, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- WHAT THEY WON'T LET US SEE: THOUSANDS KILLED BY U.S. BOMBERS By Deirdre Griswold The planned and deliberate brutality of the Pentagon war in Afghanistan is a closely guarded secret. People in the United States are being told practically nothing about the war's effects on the Afghan people. What images are we allowed to see on television? Explosions that produce nothing but clouds of dust. Fuzzy objects in the crosshairs of bombers that are always identified as "military targets." Grateful refugees receiving generous handouts from the West. And the smooth-talking boys of the Pentagon who make it all sound like a heroic game that will end when the "evil enemy" has been taken. But the truth is there have been massive civilian casualties. The military no longer produce a "body count" at the end of each day as they did during the Vietnam War. However, as of Dec. 10, more than 3,500 civilians had died in the U.S. bombing, according to Prof. Marc W. Herold of the University of New Hampshire. Herold has been keeping tabs on casualty reports since the bombs began falling on Oct. 7. He has done a meticulous job of tabulating, day by day and place by place, all the reports of civilian casualties to be found in the world press. Herold released the results of his study on Dec. 10 in a discussion with Amy Goodman, producer of Democracy Now! An Excel spreadsheet containing the information can be found at http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/. "I was concerned that there would be significant civilian casualties caused by the bombing, and I was able to find some mention of casualties in the foreign press but almost nothing in the U.S. press," he said. "These were poor people to begin with," he added. "And, on top of that, they had absolutely nothing to do with the events of September 11." Herold lists the date, number of casualties, location, type of weapon used and sources of information for each incident. Here is one such listing for Oct. 11: "Two U.S. jets bombed the mountain village of Karam, comprised of 60 mud houses, during dinner and evening prayer time, killing 100-160 people. Sources: DAWN (English-language Pakistani daily newspaper), the Guardian of London, the Independent, International Herald Tribune, the Scotsman, the Observer and the BBC News." That was at the beginning of the bombing campaign, when the Taliban were still believed to be strong. But what happened after they began to flee south and eventually abandoned Kabul? BOMBING OF BIBI MAHRU The bombing continued unabated. In an article entitled "U.S. Planes Rain Death on the Innocent," Rory McCarthy wrote in the Guardian of Dec. 1 that the village of Bibi Mahru near Kabul had been hit several times by U.S. bombers, even though they destroyed the only military target in the area, a radar and anti-aircraft position on a hill above the town, on the first night. McCarthy saw the damage caused by bombs dropped 10 days after the radar position had been destroyed. "The deep craters and pieces of shrapnel indicate that America's weapon of choice in Kabul was the Mark 82 500-lb. bomb, which is designed to be guided to its target by the pilot, a nearby observation plane or a spotter on the ground. But there was nothing accurate about the 500-lb. bomb which fell on Bibi Mahru. It killed Gul Ahmad, 40, a Hazara carpet weaver, his second wife Sima, 35, their five daughters and his son by his first wife. Two children living next door were also killed. ... 'My husband was thinking before this incident that the Americans would bring peace in our country,' said Arafa, who lost eight members of her family. 'Now I am left with my five daughters and two sons and no one to look after them.'" McCarthy also visited a neighborhood in Kabul of workers' apartment buildings built by the Soviet Union during the period of the Afghan Revolution, which was overthrown in a war financed by the U.S. CIA. On Nov. 12, wrote McCarthy, the last day the Taliban spent in Kabul, "American planes targeted a military garrison close to the densely populated Soviet-built Microrayon housing district. Four 50-lb. bombs hit the area. Only one hit the garrison. "One landed at the corner of apartment block 33, where a crowd of children were playing. Nazila, six, was crushed to death by a concrete block. 'She couldn't run away in time,' said her father, Abdul Basir. 'We believed because this was a residential block they wouldn't hit it. We thought they were hitting their targets accurately.' A second landed in the road, a third landed on two houses, killing five people, including a 15-year-old girl." The Pentagon keeps denying civilian casualties in its press briefings. The corporate media here--the newspaper and television bosses who control what gets aired--accept whatever the military says. They kill any reports on civilian casualties that come their way. But reporters from other countries are sending back vivid accounts of the death and destruction. WHEN 'NOTHING HAPPENED' AT KAMA ADO The most direct rebuttal to the Pentagon line came from Richard Lloyd Parry, who went to the village of Kama Ado in eastern Afghanistan near the mountainous Tora Bora area shortly after U.S. B-52s bombed the area. In a scathing, ironic piece in the Independent of London on Dec. 4 called "A Village Is Destroyed and America Says Nothing Happened," Parry described the devastation: "[T]he village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist. Many of the homes here are just deep conical craters in the earth. The rest are cracked open, split like crushed cardboard boxes." Parry said that 115 villagers were killed in the bombing. But "nothing happened." "We know this," wrote Parry, "because the U.S. Department of Defense told us so. That evening, a Pentagon spokesman, questioned about reports of civilian casualties in eastern Afghanistan, explained that they were not true, because the U.S. is meticulous in selecting only military targets associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network. Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject have wobbled somewhat, but there has been no retraction of that initial decisive statement: 'It just didn't happen.'" Parry says that all along the road to Kama Ado he was "confronted with the wreckage and innocent victims of high- altitude, hi-tech, thousand-pound nothings." The only fear he felt while visiting the village was on seeing U.S. planes fly over. He was afraid that "nothing" might happen to him, too. Barry Stoller also wrote about Kama Ado. His account, "U.S. Bombs Wipe Out Farming Village," appeared in a Dec. 3 Associated Press dispatch that was largely ignored by newspapers here. "Children's shoes, bits of charred carpet and cooking pots litter what is left of this hamlet, along with dead cows and sheep," he wrote. "Here and there are craters, some 20 feet wide. One holds the tail fin from a Mk83 1,000-pound bomb. ... "Witnesses and survivors say U.S. warplanes dropped more than 25 bombs in four passes over the village on Saturday," Dec. 2. By Dec. 10, the Independent, another London newspaper, wrote that U.S. bombers were extending "their onslaught on the mountains in Tora Bora, south-east of Jalalabad, where the Saudi-born fugitive [Osama bin-Laden] may be making his last stand. Witnesses said heavy bombing raids were being launched every 30 minutes." This would make it the most intensive bombing campaign yet and should boost Professor Herold's casualty figures even further. ACCIDENTAL OR DELIBERATE? It is assumed in the press accounts that these attacks on civilians are due to error. Of course, accidents do happen. The pilots have even bombed a few U.S. Special Forces and Northern Alliance troops. But the broad scope of civilian casualties catalogued by Professor Herold speaks to something other than just a few accidents. "Officials say the Marines are trained to distinguish 'friend from foe' but Afghan truck and bus drivers complain that their vehicles have been hit from the air on the road from Herat to Kandahar and Kandahar to Kabul," said the Dec. 10 Independent article. Villages, cars, apartment blocks, all hit and hit again. Isn't it reasonable to assume that civilians are the targets, and that the pilots know it? If so, it wouldn't be the first time that U.S. pilots have been part of a conspiracy to keep the public from knowing what was really going on in a war. When the U.S. started the secret bombing of Cambodia in March 1969, phony flight plans were filed to conceal the pilots' true destination. (See "Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia," by William Shawcross, Simon & Schuster, 1979.) And, of course, there was the brutal bombing of civilians just two years ago in Yugoslavia. Everything about this war in Afghanistan reeks of Pentagon disinformation and the conning of the public. Its very premise is a lie. Collapsing the government of Afghanistan, reducing its cities and villages to rubble, and turning 7.5 million people into freezing, starving refugees is not going to protect people in the United States from terrorist acts. That is absurd. It can only inflame the anger at U.S. world domination that is already white-hot. During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops began to realize that those who cared the most about their welfare were the demonstrators demanding that they be brought home. This simple truth must be relearned. The anti-war movement is determined to save both U.S. and Afghan lives. It's the Pentagon, the Bush administration and the corporate billionaires behind them who are risking U.S. civilians at home and military personnel abroad in a "great game" to control the riches of Central Asia. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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