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*/In the suburbs of Baghdad and the Sunni cities to the north the
American military policy of 'recon-by-fire' and the breakdown of law and
order is exacting a heavy toll on a war-torn people, reports Robert Fisk
in his first major dispatch since returning to Iraq
/**Secret slaughter by night, lies and blind eyes by day
/
/14 September 2003 www.independent.co.uk
<http://www.independent.co.uk/>*In the Pentagon, they've been re-showing
Gillo Pontecorvo's terrifying 1965 film of the French war in Algeria.
The Battle of Algiers, in black and white, showed what happened to both
the guerrillas of the FLN and the French army when their war turned
dirty. Torture, assassination, booby-trap bombs, secret executions. As
the New York Times revealed, the fliers sent out to the Pentagon brass
to watch this magnificent, painful film began with the words: "How to
win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas..." But the
Americans didn't need to watch The Battle of Algiers.
They've already committed many of the French mistakes in Iraq, and the
guerrillas of Iraq are well into the blood tide of the old FLN. Sixteen
demonstrators killed in Fallujah? Forget it. Twelve gunned down by the
Americans in Mosul? Old news. Ten Iraqi policemen shot by US troops
outside Fallujah? "No information," the occupation authorities told us
last week. No information? The Jordanian embassy bombing? The bombing of
the UN headquarters? Or Najaf with its 126 dead? Forget it. Things are
improving in Iraq. There's been 24-hour electricity for three days now
and - until two US soldiers were killed on Friday - there had been five
days without an American death.
That's how the French used to report the news from Algeria. What you
don't know doesn't worry you. Which is why, in Iraq, there are thousands
of incidents of violence that never get reported; attacks on Americans
that cost civilian lives are not even recorded by the occupation
authority press officers unless they involve loss of life among
"coalition forces". Go to the mortuaries of Iraq's cities and it's clear
that a slaughter occurs each night. Occupation powers insist that
journalists obtain clearance to visit hospitals - it can take a week to
get the right papers, if at all, so goodbye to statistics - but the
figures coming from senior doctors tell their own story.
In Baghdad, up to 70 corpses - of Iraqis killed by gunfire - are brought
to the mortuaries each day. In Najaf, for example, the cemetery
authorities record the arrival of the bodies of up to 20 victims of
violence a day. Some of the dead were killed in family feuds, in
looting, or revenge killings. Others have been gunned down by US troops
at checkpoints or in the increasingly vicious "raids" carried out by
American forces in the suburbs of Baghdad and the Sunni cities to the
north. Only last week, reporters covering the killing of the Fallujah
policemen were astonished to see badly wounded children suddenly
arriving at the hospital, all shot - according to their families - by an
American tank which had opened up at a palm grove outside the town. As
usual, the occupation authorities had "no information" on the incident.
But if you count the Najaf dead as typical of just two or three other
major cities, and if you add on the daily Baghdad death toll and
multiply by seven, almost 1,000 Iraqi civilians are being killed every
week - and that may well be a conservative figure. Somewhere in the
cavernous marble halls of proconsul Paul Bremer's palace on the Tigris,
someone must be calculating these awful statistics. But of course, the
Americans are not telling us. It's like listening to Iraq's American-run
radio station. Death - unless it's on a spectacular scale like the
Jordanian or UN or Najaf bombings - simply doesn't get on the air. Even
the killing of American troops isn't reported for 24 hours. Driving the
highways of Iraq, I've been reduced to listening to the only radio
station with up-to-date news on the guerrilla war in Iraq: Iran's "Alam
Radio", broadcasting in Arabic from Tehran.
It's as if the denizens of Mr Bremer's chandeliered chambers do not
regard Iraq as a real country, a place of tragedy and despair whose
"liberated" people increasingly blame their "liberators" for their
misery. Even when US troops on a raid in Mansour six weeks ago ran amok
and gunned down up to eight civilians - including a 14-year-old boy -
the best the Americans could do was to say that they were "enquiring"
into the incident. Not, as one US colonel quickly pointed out to us,
that this meant a formal enquiry. Just a few questions here and there.
And of course the killings were soon forgotten.
What is happening inside the US occupation army is almost as much a
mystery as the nightly cull of civilians. My old friend Tom Friedman, in
a break from his role as messianic commentator for the New York Times,
put his finger on the problem when - arranging a meeting with an
occupation official -- he reported asking an American soldier at a
bridge checkpoint for his location. "The enemy side of the bridge," came
the reply.
Enemy. That's how the French came to see every native Algerian. Talk to
the soldiers in the streets here in Baghdad and they use obscene
language - in between heartfelt demands to "go home" - about the people
they were supposedly rescuing from Saddam Hussein. A Polish journalist
in Karbala saw just how easily human contact can break down. "The
American guards are greeting passers-by with a loud 'Salaam aleikum'
[peace be with you]. Some young Iraqi boys with a donkey and cart say
something in Arabic and suddenly, together, they run their fingers
across their throats.
"'Motherfucker!" shout the Marines, before their translator explains to
them that the boys are just expressing their happiness at the death of
Saddam Hussein's sons ..." Though light years from the atrocities of
Saddam's security forces, the US military here is turning out to be as
badly disciplined and brutal as the Israeli army in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip. Its "recon-by-fire", its lethal raids into civilian homes,
its shooting of demonstrators and children during fire-fights, its
destruction of houses, its imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis without
trial or contact with their families, its refusal to investigate
killings, its harassment - and killing - of journalists, its constant
refrain that it has "no information" about bloody incidents which it
must know all too much about, are sounding like an echo-chamber of the
Israeli army.
Worse still, their intelligence information is still as warped by
ideology as was the illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Having
failed to receive the welcome deserved of "liberators", the Americans
have to convince themselves that their tormentors - save for the famous
Saddam "remnants" - cannot be Iraqis at all. They must be members of
"al-Qa'ida", Islamists arriving from Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia,
Afghanistan, Pakistan ... Among its 1,000 "security" prisoners at
Baghdad airport - the total number of detainees held without trial in
Iraq is around 5,500 - about 200 are said to be "foreigners". But in
many cases, US intelligence cannot even discover their nationalities and
some may well have been in Iraq since Saddam invited Arabs to defend
Baghdad before the invasion.
In reality, no one has produced a shred of evidence al-Qa'ida men are
streaming into the country. Not a single sighting has been reported of
these mysterious men, save for the presence of armed Iranians outside
the shrines of Najaf after last month's bombing. Yet President Bush and
Donald Rumsfeld have talked up their supposed presence to the point
where the usual right-wing columnists in the US press and then reporters
in general write of them as a proven fact. With powerful irony, Osama
bin Laden's ominous 11 September tape suggests that he is as anxious to
get his men into Iraq as the Americans are to believe that they are
already there.
In practice, fantasy takes over from reality. Thus while the Americans
can claim they are being assaulted by "foreigners" - the infamous men of
evil against whom Mr Bush is fighting his "war on terror" - they can
equally suggest that the suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in
Baghdad was the work of the Iraqi security guards whom the UN had kept
on from the Saddam regime. Whatever the truth of this - and the suicidal
expertise of the UN attack might suggest a combination of both Baathists
and Islamists - the message was simple enough: Americans are attacked by
"international terrorists" but the wimps of the UN are attacked by the
same Iraqi killers they helped to protect through so many years of
sanction-busting.
There are foreign men and women aplenty in Baghdad - Americans and
Britons prominent among them - who work hard to bring about the false
promises uttered by Messrs Bush and Blair to create a decent, democratic
Iraqi society. One of them is Chris Woolford, whose account of life in
Bremer's marble palace appeared only in the internal newsletter of the
UK regulatory Office of Telecommunications, for whom he normally works.
Mr Woolford insists that there are signs of hope in Iraq - the payment
of emergency salaries to civil servants, for example, and the reopening
of schools and administrative offices.
But it's worth recording at length his revealing description of life
under Bremer. "Life in Baghdad can only be described as bizarre," he
writes. "We are based within a huge compound... in Sadam (sic) Hussein's
former Presidential Palace. The place is awash with vast marble
ballrooms, conference rooms (now used as a dining room), a chapel (with
murals of Scud missiles) and hundreds of function rooms with ornate
chandeliers which were probably great for entertaining but which
function less well as offices and dormitories ... I work in the
'Ministries' wing of the palace in the Ministry of Transport and
Communications. Within this wing, each door along the corridor
represents a separate ministry; next door to us, for example, is the
Ministry of Health and directly across the corridor is the Finance
Ministry. Behind each door military and civilian coalition members
(mainly American with the odd Brit dotted about) are beavering away
trying to sort out the economic, social and political issues currently
facing Iraq. The work is undoubtedly for a good cause but it cannot but
help feel strange as our contact with the outside world - the real Iraq
- is so limited." Mr Woolford describes how meetings with his Iraqi
counterparts are difficult to arrange and, besides, "key decisions are
still very much taken behind the closed doors of the CPA (the Coalition
Provisional Authority), or for the most significant decisions, back in
Washington DC". So much, then, for the interim council and the appointed
Iraqi "government" that supposedly represents the forthcoming
"democracy" of Iraq. As for contacting his Iraqi counterparts, Mr
Woolford admits that Iraqi officials are sometimes asked to "stand
outside in their garden between 7pm and 8pm so that we can ring them on
satellite phones" - a process that is followed by the departure of CPA
staff for their meeting with "bullet-proof vests and machine-gun mounted
Humvees (a sort of beefed-up American Jeep) both in front and behind our
own four-wheel drive..." Thus are America and Britain attempting to
"reconstruct" a broken land that is now the scene of an increasingly
cruel guerrilla war. But there is a pervading feeling - among Iraqis as
well as journalists covering this conflict - that something is wrong
with our Western response to New Iraq. Our lives are more valuable than
their lives. The "terrible toll" of the summer months - a phrase from a
New York Times news report last week - referred only to the deaths of
Western soldiers.
What is becoming apparent is that we don't really care about the Iraqis.
We may think we want to bring them democracy but, on an individual
level, we don't care very much about them or their lives. We liberated
them. They should be grateful to us. If they die now, well, no one said
democracy was easy.
Donald Rumsfeld - who raged away about weapons of mass destruction
before the invasion - now admits he didn't even discuss WMD with David
Kay, the head of the US-led team looking for these mythical weapons, on
his recent visit to Baghdad. Of course not. Because they don't exist. Mr
Rumsfeld is equally silent about the civilian death toll here. It's the
followers of his nemesis Bin Laden that now have to be publicised.
Bin Laden must be grateful. So must the Palestinians. In the refugee
camps of Lebanon last week, they were talking of the events in Iraq as a
form of encouragement. "If Israel's superpower ally can be humbled by
Arabs," a Palestinian official explained to me in one of the Beirut
camps, "why should we give up our struggle against the Israelis who
cannot be as efficient soldiers as the Americans?" That's the lesson the
Algerians drew when they saw France's mighty army reduced to surrender
at Dien Bien Phu. The French, like the Americans, had succeeded in
murdering or "liquidating" many of the Algerians who might have
negotiated a ceasefire with them. The search for an interlocuteur
valable was one of de Gaulle's most difficult tasks when he decided to
leave Algeria. But what will the Americans do? Their interlocuteur
valable might have been the United Nations. But now the UN has been
struck off as a negotiator by the suicide bombing in Baghdad. And the
Bin Ladens and the adherents of the Wahabi sect are not interested in
negotiations of any kind. Mr Bush declared "war without end". And it
looks as though Iraqis - along with ourselves -- are going to be its
principal
victims.
____________________________________________________________
*Iraq's Epic Suffering Is Made Invisible
by John Pilger
September 15, 2003*
*F*or the past few weeks, I have been watching videotapes of the attack
on Iraq, most of them not shown in this country. The tapes concentrate
on the epic suffering of ordinary Iraqis. There are photographs, too,
that were never published here. They show streets and hospitals running
with blood, as American and British forces smashed their way into Iraq
with weapons designed to incinerate and dismember human beings.
It is difficult viewing, but necessary if one is to understand fully the
words of the Nuremberg judges in 1946 when they laid down the principles
of modern international law: "To initiate a war of aggression... is not
only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself
the accumulated evil of the whole."
Guiding me through this visual evidence of a great crime is the diary of
a young law graduate, Jo Wilding, who was in Baghdad with a group of
international human rights observers. She and the others stayed with
Iraqi families as the missiles, bunker busters and cluster bombs
exploded around them. Where possible, they hurried to the scene of
civilian casualties and followed the victims to hospitals and
mortuaries, interviewing eyewitnesses and doctors. Their work received
scant media coverage.
Jo has described to me, in detail, attacks on civilian targets that were
- she is in no doubt - deliberate. In any case, the sheer ferocity of
the assault on elusive Iraqi defenders could not fail to kill and injure
large numbers of civilians. According to a recent study, up to 10,000
civilians were killed.
"One of the stunning things about the quick coalition victory," John
Bolton, George Bush's under-secretary of state for international
security, told me in Washington recently, "was how little damage was
done to Iraqi infrastructure, and how low Iraqi casualties were."
I said, "Well, it's high if it's 10,000 civilians."
He replied, "Well, I think it's quite low if you look at the size of the
military operation."
Quite low at 10,000. And multiply that many times when the figure
includes the killing of mostly teenage conscripts who, as a Marine
colonel said, "sure as hell didn't know what hit them". Keep multiplying
when the wounded are added: such as 1,000 children maimed, according to
Unicef, by the delayed blast of cluster bomblets.
What does it take for journalists with a public voice and responsibility
to acknowledge the truth of such a crime? Are those who stand in front
of cameras in Downing Street and on the White House lawn, incessantly
obfuscating the obvious (a technique they call objectivity), that
conditioned? The resistance to the illegal Anglo-American occupation of
Iraq is now propagated as part of Bush's "war on terror". The deaths of
Americans, Britons and UN people are news; Iraqis flit across the
screen: otherwise, they do not exist.
For Blair's ministers, the cover-up, like almost everything, originates
in Washington. Read the armed forces minister Adam Ingram's replies to
the tireless questioning by Llewellyn Smith MP and his message is almost
identical to Bolton's. The "regrettable" loss of life is really not too
bad, considering "a military operation of [this] size". As to numbers of
people killed, "we have no way of establishing with any certainty..."
Whoever Adam Ingram is, remember the name, for he embodies the mundane,
routine, amoral apologist for state murder.
Of course, if the great crime in Iraq was represented not by the
poignant moment of a dead squaddie's flag-draped coffin returning, but
by the unrelenting horror I have watched on unseen videotape, the cover
would crack. And the illusion presented by the Hutton inquiry would be
revealed. As it is, Hutton is the magician Blair's best trick so far,
for an inquiry into the death of one man ensures that real public
investigation into why Blair took Britain into war will not happen. It
ensures that while we are allowed to read internal e-mails in Whitehall,
we are denied scrutiny of the traffic between Blair and Bush, which
almost certainly would expose the biggest lie of all, and reveal that
the decision to invade was taken long before Washington dreamt up the
charade of weapons of mass destruction. That would sink Blair.
Instead, we have glimpses of truth. On 17 September 2001, six days after
the attacks in America, Bush signed a document, marked Top Secret, in
which he directed the Pentagon to begin planning "military options" for
an invasion of Iraq. In July last year, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's
national security adviser, told another Bush official: "That decision
has been made. Don't waste your breath" (Washington Post, 12 January
2003; New Yorker, 31 March 2003). On 2 July last, Air Marshal Sir John
Walker, the former chief of defence intelligence and deputy chair of the
Joint Intelligence Committee, wrote a confidential memo to MPs to alert
them that the "commitment to war" was made a year ago. "Thereafter," he
wrote, "the whole process of reason, other reason, yet other reason,
humanitarian, morality, regime change, terrorism, finally imminent WMD
attack... was merely covering fire."
The unfettered disclosure of this would present an uncontrollable crisis
to the clique that runs Britain: the secret service, the civil service,
Downing Street, the favoured City and the courted media. Few spooks and
mandarins have much time for the strange, Messianic Blair, but they will
strive to protect him in order to protect themselves and to ensure that
their version of Lord Curzon's "great game" (ie, imperialism), continues
unopposed.
It is a game exemplified by the arms fair that opened in London on 9
September, hosted by a government and an arms industry that are together
the world's second-biggest merchant of death, selling to the usual
tyrants and state killers. Their ruthlessness was expressed when the
same fair last convened in 2001, and 11 September happened. Public
events, such as the TUC conference, were abandoned out of respect for
the victims in New York and Washington. The arms fair was told to keep
going.
"The kaleidoscope has been shaken," Blair said in the wake of 11
September. "The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before
they do, let us re-order this world around us." Whoever wrote that
inanity might have left Downing Street now; but Blair tells us
constantly that he believes what he says, and perhaps he does. Several
of the defendants at Nuremberg offered the same plea, and so have other
state murderers at The Hague. Like them, Blair should have his day in
court.
/John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a
war correspondent, film-maker and playwright. Based in London, he has
written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's
highest award, that of 'Journalist of the Year', for his work in Vietnam
and Cambodia./
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