Attack on Fallujah can't be justified

By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

Friday, November 12, 2004 - WASHINGTON -- Do Americans of good conscience really believe that we are making the United States more secure by bombing and killing the people of Fallujah?

That's the justification President Bush and his hawkish circle have given for their brutal offensive against the Sunni stronghold as they push ahead for the total military occupation of Iraq.

Why are we killing Iraqis in their own country? And why are our forces being killed?

Of course it was convenient and the better part of valor for the president to wait until after the election to start dropping the 500-pound bombs on Fallujah as well as raking the streets with artillery and aircraft firepower.

Bush, who has never been in war, flaunted his commander in chief status during the campaign. But clearly he did not want to put it to the test at Fallujah before Election Day.

Had he done so, the president would have had to explain why he took the United States into Iraq and why he was targeting innocent Iraqis.

From day one, the U.S. government has been hard-pressed to find legal justification for being in Iraq by force. U.S. military moves were contrary to the U.N. Charter and the laws that came from the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II.

Under the U.N. Charter, armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of another state is a violation of international law.

Does anyone believe that hand-picked interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, on the CIA payroll for years, is a free soul? Did we really make war against Iraq out of the goodness of our hearts to ensure free elections for Iraqis?

The silence of the Democrats is playing into the president's hands. As was the case with the original October 2002 congressional resolution authorizing war, Democrats are unsure of themselves and therefore unwilling to challenge the president.

Once the offensive was under way, many Americans were appalled to learn that among our first major targets were the hospitals in Fallujah.

By now everyone in this country must know that every reason Bush gave to attack Iraq has turned out to be a false. No weapons of mass destruction were found after two task forces took months and spent millions to hunt for them.

There was no imminent threat by Iraq against the United States. And virtually nothing has been found to connect al-Qaida with deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Presidential credibility used to have some meaning in this country. The president visited the soldiers wounded in Iraq at Walter Reed Hospital Army Medical Center on Tuesday for the first time since March. He told reporters that the U.S. soldiers in Fallujah were doing "the hard work necessary" for a free Iraq to emerge.

And he said the coalition forces were moving into Fallujah "to bring to justice those who are willing to kill the innocent, those who are trying to terrorize the Iraqi people and our coalition (and) those who want to stop democracy."

The Bush administration has no count on civilians who have lost their lives in the current massive assault on Fallujah, but some 900 civilians reportedly died in the fighting last April when the U.S. retreated temporarily from Fallujah.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters he knew of "no specific estimate of civilians" who may have been killed in the recent fighting.

But he added: "I know the military goes out of its way to minimize the loss of civilian life, and what we are working to achieve in Iraq is an important cause that will make America more secure."

Thousands in Fallujah fled their homes and are living in tents, knowing that the U.S. attack was about to begin.

Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers are going from house to house in urban street fighting -- something Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, wanted to avoid as a way of reducing the human cost of the first Gulf War. For that reason he resisted going on to Baghdad after the liberation of Kuwait.

To understand the Iraqi resistance, I suggest reading the Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott. He wrote: "Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself has said this is mine own my native land."

* Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com.

IRAQ: US launches mass slaughter in Fallujah

Doug Lorimer

On November 8, the US military launched its long-anticipated second attempt to recapture the rebel Iraqi city of Fallujah, located 55 kilometres west of Baghdad.

The assault — conducted by some 10,000 US troops and 500 Iraqi troops under their command, using tanks, artillery and attack helicopters — was preceded by weeks of nightly air strikes on residential buildings, restaurants and mosques. The strikes were designed to terrorise the city's population of 340,000, causing up to 200,000 of them to flee to Baghdad.

Two days before the fullscale US assault began, US warplanes reduced the Nazzal Emergency Hospital in the centre of the city to rubble. BBC News reported that witnesses said only the hospital's facade remained.

The deliberate destruction of this hospital was a clear indication that the US military wants to ensure that dead or injured Fallujah residents are not brought to the city's hospitals — so as to conceal the scale of civilian casualties.

During the US military's previous attempt to recapture Fallujah — in April — Iraqi doctors at the city's hospitals reported that hundreds of residents, most of them women, children and elderly men, were being killed by US air strikes, artillery shelling and sniper attacks.

Outrage from Iraqis at this casualty toll led to mass protests in Baghdad, including a three-day general strike. The mass protests forced Washington to call off its troops' siege of Fallujah at the end of April.

Significantly, the first operation in the new US offensive to recapture the city was the storming and seizure of the Fallujah General Hospital by US troops in the early hours of November 8. This hospital is located on the western edge of the Euphrates River, separating it from the rest of the city.

During their assault on the city in April, the US marines prevented ambulances and other vehicles from transporting dead or injured residents to what was at that time — and after the destruction of Nazzal Emergency Hospital, is once again — the city’s only trauma-capable medical facility.

The day after the US military's seizure of Fallujah General, Dr Salih al Issawi, the director of the hospital, told the South African Press Association that US marines were again preventing ambulances from delivering patients to emergency care.

Free-fire zone

That the intention of the US military is to turn Fallujah into a “free-fire” zone was indicated by the rules of engagement given to the invading US troops. On November 7, the puppet government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi declared that all Iraq except the Kurdish-run areas in the country's north was under martial law, banning all protest rallies and street demonstrations. He also announced that a 24-hour curfew applied in Fallujah, to be observed by everyone in the city except the invading US and puppet Iraqi troops, thus making any Fallujan who is not in a residential building a free-fire target.

On the eve of their offensive against Fallujah, US commanders were openly making it clear to their troops that they were expected to shoot unarmed civilians. Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that on November 7 US Marine Corps Colonel Michael Shupp told his troops to shoot any Iraqi civilian who approached them with raised hands because he or she might be a “suicide bomber”.

The homicidal mentality that US marine commanders have drummed into their soldiers was illustrated by the comments made by 20-year-old Lance Corporal Joseph Bowman on November 7. “I want to go and kill people, so we can go home” he told an Associated Press reporter. “Kill them and go home — that’s all we can do now.”

The US invasion of Fallujah began with intense air strikes and artillery attacks on civilian targets. The November 9 New York Times reported: “Just before the marines began to push south into Falluja, the American bombardment intensified, and heavy artillery could be heard pounding positions in or near the city every few minutes. An entire apartment complex was ground to rubble. A train station was obliterated in a hail of 2000-pound bombs.”

The NYT report quoted Marine Colonel Craig Tucker saying that Fallujah's defenders would “win if it's bloody; we'll win if we minimise civilian casualties”. Bombarding an “entire apartment complex” with artillery shells and reducing it to rubble is how the US military “minimises” civilian casualties!

An Agence France Presse reporter in the city told the Qatar-based Aljazeera satellite TV station on November 9 that in the northwestern Jolan district, one building in every 10 had been flattened by US air strikes.

Associated Press reported that same day that Fallujah residents said intense street clashes between US troops and armed Fallujah residents were raging in the northern sectors of the city. Witnesses reported seeing two US tanks engulfed in flames.

Iraqi journalist Abu Bakr al Dulaimi told Aljazeera on November 9 that almost half Fallujah's 120 mosques had been destroyed by US air strikes and tank attacks. “Violent clashes are now going on in the western areas of the city”, he added. “Clashes have also erupted in Jolan neighbourhood. Resistance in these areas is fierce. The city's defenders are responding to the US attacks with everything at their disposal.”

On November 10, the US Knight Ridders Newspapers chain reported that US commanders claimed they had taken control of most of Fallujah and were encountering only “light” and “unco-ordinated” resistance. However, it also reported that “insurgents showed no sign of surrendering. Rebels attacked sporadically throughout the day, using rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and mortar strikes, said a Knight Ridder reporter embedded with the [US] Army's 1st Infantry Division”.

Intense fighting

The November 10 London Evening Standard reported that, “Fresh fighting erupted today in areas of Fallujah declared ‘cleared' by US forces”, adding: “After battling to the centre of the city yesterday, American commanders had thought they controlled at least its northern third — with rebel fighters fleeing to southern districts to regroup. But at first light intense machinegun, mortar and rocket exchanges opened up in the north-western district of Jolan.”

The US military responded with air strikes “at a rate of six every 15 minutes. Explosions again rocked an area already said to have had half its buildings flattened in two days of solid shelling.”

The Reuters news agency reported on November 10 that “American tanks pushing into central Fallujah are meeting fierce resistance from well-organised insurgents who show no signs of giving up”.

Marine tank platoon commander Lieutenant Joe Cash told the Reuters reporter the city's resistance fighters were unleashing coordinated attacks on the US invaders. “They hit us from one area and then another right afterwards. There is in-depth organisation.”

“There are lots of them. We took heavy fire”, Gunnery Sergeant Ishmail Castillo told the Reuters reporter. “They don't look like they are going to cave in.”

On November 8, Time magazine reported that in a “a pep talk to US troops ahead their invasion of Fallujah on Sunday, the senior enlisted marine in Iraq, Sgt. Major Carlton Kent drew inspiration from great Marine triumphs of the past. ‘You're all in the process of making history', he told them. ‘This is another Hue city in the making.'

“Kent's analogy to the 25-day battle in 1968 to wrest control of the old Vietnamese colonial capital from guerrilla insurgents may be somewhat unfortunate, however... To be sure, the enemy the Marines are facing in the fierce fighting for Fallujah that began overnight Monday may be not dissimilar from the one they encountered at Hue. Both are fiercely determined guerrilla fighters motivated by a combination of nationalism and ideology, capable of great cruelty and dug in so deep in the urban landscape that they had to be rooted out building by building. But while Hue was an heroic triumph, at the cost of some 580 fatalities for the Marines and other US and South Vietnamese units who went in to recapture a city audaciously seized by insurgents, winning the battle did not help the American side win the war. And it's far from clear that victory in Fallujah, rendered somewhat inevitable by the massive advantage in men and firepower of the US-led operation, will prove more successful than Hue in turning the tide of the conflict.”

Political blow

US officials claim that the capture of Fallujah is necessary to establish “order” in Iraq so that they can proceed with their plans to legitimise Allawi's US-appointed government through national elections next January. However, the US invasion of Fallujah may already have dealt a fatal political blow to these plans, with prominent Sunni Muslim clerics and politicians condemning the invasion and urging Sunnis — who make up 40% of Iraq's population of 25 million — to boycott the elections.

On November 8, the Iraqi Islamic Party, described by the Western news media as “Iraq's most influential Sunni political party”, announced its withdrawal from Allawi's government. “From today, we have nothing to do with this government”, said Iyad al Samurraie, the party's deputy secretary general. “We don't want to take the responsibility of shedding Iraqi blood without any legal excuse.”

The next day, the Association of Muslim Scholars, a group of leading Sunni clerics that claims to represent 3000 mosques, called for Iraqis to boycott the January elections which they described as being held “over the corpses of those killed in Fallujah”.

“The scholars of Iraq place full legal responsibility on Iyad Allawi for the genocide Fallujah is exposed to at the hands of occupation forces and a bunch of Iraqi National Guardsmen who cooperate with them”, association director Sheik Hareth al Dhari said in a statement broadcast throughout the Arab world on satellite television. From Green Left Weekly, November 17, 2004.

Village Voice - November 24 - 30, 2004: In April 9, 2003, the day the statue of Saddam Hussein was being toppled in Baghdad, symbolizing the promised liberation of Iraq, I was embedded with a Marine unit engaged in fierce combat about 30 miles north of the city, on the outskirts of Baquba. Late that afternoon, the Humvee I was in was following about 50 feet behind a Marine Light Armored Vehicle when it pulled alongside a Toyota pickup pushed to the side of the road, its doors riddled with bullet holes. The head of at least one occupant was visible in the truck, but I couldn't determine if he was moving or not. Nor did I see any weapons. As our Humvee stopped behind the truck, a Marine in the vehicle ahead of us leapt out, pointed his rifle into the window of the pickup and sprayed it with gunfire. It was a cold-blooded execution.

As we continued forward, passing the truck, I glimpsed at least two corpses sprawled on the seats, the interior spattered with blood. During the brief moment I looked, I was unable to determine whether the dead men possessed weapons. None of the four Marines in our Humvee said anything. We had been awake for more than 30 hours, much of that time under steady mortar, rifle, machine-gun, and rocket-propelled grenade fire from enemy combatants who dressed in civilian clothes and moved around on the battlefield in Toyota pickups. (To make matters even more confusing, during the height of combat farmers were racing into the surrounding fields—where enemy soldiers were shooting at us from dug-in, concealed positions—in order to rescue sheep from the gunfire.)

In the previous few minutes we had already passed more than a dozen corpses strewn by the side of the road. Some had the tops of their heads missing, expertly hit by Marine riflemen. Others were burned—still smoking, actually—having crawled out of other vehicles set ablaze by rockets fired from Marine helicopters. The execution of one or two more men wasn't worth commenting on.

I greeted the sight of dead Iraqis in the pickup with a sense of numb relief. At least they would not be trying to kill us that day. In the preceding two-and-a-half weeks, the unit I was embedded with had come under frequent enemy attack, with three Marines wounded. There were 23 bullet holes in the Humvee I rode in—miraculously, none of the five of us inside had been hit. I had developed a strange relationship with the sight of dead Iraqis. I felt safer when I saw them.

I felt especially comforted when I saw dead men by the road still clutching weapons in their hands, a common sight. Unfortunately, of the hundreds of dead people I saw on the roads leading from the Kuwait border to Baghdad, perhaps 20 percent or more were obviously civilians. I will never forget the three or four women I saw fatally shot and partially burned, still seated in a bus on the road north of Nasiriyah. Or the little girl, about four, lying by the side of the road in a pretty dress, her legs neatly and inexplicably chopped off at the knees. Mercifully, I remember thinking at the time, she was dead like all the others.

Since my return from Iraq, I have continued to watch the horror unfold on television. It's different seeing the violence decontextualized from the battlefield, now playing out in discrete video clips that run between ads for Chevys and the Olive Garden. Videos of militants staging beheadings against dungeon-like backdrops, with the perpetrators wearing masks and the victims in colorful jumpsuits, seem almost like grotesque TV shows.

One of the great ironies of the Bush administration, obsessed as it is with Christian values and the attendant crusade to punish what it deems obscene and lewd in the media (from Janet Jackson's breast to Howard Stern's speech), is that it has given us a war in which the airing of snuff films on national TV has become routine. The conflict in Iraq, as seen through news coverage, has begun to resemble the macabre underground 1980s video series Faces of Death. Throw in the images produced by the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib, and the administration has put itself in the running to successfully compete with the BDSM side of the porn industry.

Just as I thought I was adjusting to the video carnage, NBC correspondent Kevin Sites, embedded with U.S. forces in Falluja, gave us last week's shocker: the video of a Marine standing over a wounded, apparently unarmed Arab sprawled on the floor of a mosque and executing him with a gunshot to the head.

It brought back memories of the April 9 episode and others I witnessed in Iraq. Yet, watching this on TV, I felt the same outrage many others have expressed. American soldiers, we like to believe, don't shoot unarmed people. Not only is this morally repugnant, but execution of wounded, unarmed combatants violates Article Three of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which states in part that "persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely."

Even to those unfamiliar with the Geneva Conventions, it seems obvious from the mosque video that a war crime was committed. The response from the administration and military officials has been unusually swift. Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte conveyed his regrets to Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and vowed that "the individual in question will be dealt with." The Marine in the video, whose name has been withheld, was pulled from duty, and his commanders issued a statement promising to investigate what they called "an allegation of the unlawful use of force in the death of an enemy combatant." Lieutenant General John F. Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, added in an interview, "We follow the law of armed conflict and hold ourselves to a high standard of accountability."

One thing military officials are not saying is that the behavior of the Marine in the video closely conforms to training that is fairly standard in some units. Marines call executing wounded combatants "dead-checking."

"They teach us to do dead-checking when we're clearing rooms," an enlisted Marine recently returned from Iraq told me. "You put two bullets into the guy's chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a room where guys are wounded you might not know if they're alive or dead. So they teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye with your boot, because generally a person, even if he's faking being dead, will flinch if you poke him there. If he moves, you put a bullet in the brain. You do this to keep the momentum going when you're flowing through a building. You don't want a guy popping up behind you and shooting you."

What I'd seen on that road outside of Baquba on April 9 was a dead-check. The Marine who fired into that Toyota with wounded men inside didn't want anybody shooting at us as we went past. It may have been a war crime, and had I possessed a video camera at the time and filmed it, the Marine who fired into the truck might have faced punishment. As it was, no one questioned the Marine's actions.

In fact, commanders in the Marine Corps during the period I was embedded with them in the spring of 2003 repeatedly emphasized that the men's actions would not be questioned. As one of the officers in the unit I followed used to tell his men, "You will be held accountable for the facts not as they are in hindsight but as they appeared to you at the time. If, in your mind, you fire to protect yourself or your men, you are doing the right thing. It doesn't matter if later on we find out you wiped out a family of unarmed civilians."

Commanders didn't want their men to suffer casualties because they were overly constrained by rules of engagement. At the same time, Marines were constantly drilled in refraining from shooting their weapons, even at certain times when they came under fire. On one afternoon I recall in particular, the unit I was with was ordered to hold a position on the outskirts of a hostile town. For six hours, insurgents fired at the Marines from rooftops and from behind piles of rubble they'd set up in streets as barricades. But the Marines I was with, unable to pinpoint the exact locations of the enemy shooters, refused to fire back for fear of hitting civilians. The 22-year-old radio operator of the team I was with had it within his power to call in an artillery strike on the corner of the town where most of the enemy forces seemed concentrated. At one point, while I was crouched in the dirt, taking cover behind the tire of the Humvee as enemy sniper rounds popped into the dust nearby, I asked him why he didn't call in a strike. He simply laughed at my display of fear.

There were other times when the enlisted men in the unit fell into violent quarrels with others whom they felt were too aggressive and risked civilian lives. In one instance, enlisted men nearly came to blows with an officer whom they accused of firing a weapon into a house that they believed contained civilians. Despite their concern, terrible mistakes were made. I was standing next to a 22-year-old Marine from the Humvee I rode in when he fired his machine gun prematurely at a civilian car approaching a roadblock, striking the driver, an unarmed man, in the eye. The unit was subsequently ordered to drive past the car without rendering aid. I sat next to the gunner as we crept past, listening to the dying man gasp for breath. The gunner didn't talk for the next three days. A few days earlier, the youngest Marine on the team had shot a 12-year-old boy four times in the chest with his machine gun, mistakenly thinking a stick the boy had been carrying was a weapon. When the mother and grandmother of the boy later dragged him to the Marines' lines seeking medical aid, the sergeant who led the team dropped down in front of the mother and cried.

The Marines constantly debated the morality of what they were engaged in. A sergeant in the platoon told me he had consulted with his priest about killing. The priest had told him it was all right to kill for his government so long as he didn't enjoy it. By the time the unit reached the outskirts of Baghdad, this sergeant was certain he had already killed at least four men. When his battalion commander praised the unit for "slaying dragons" on the way to Baghdad, the sergeant later told his men, "If we did half the shit back home we've done here, we'd be in prison." By then, the sergeant told me, he'd reconsidered what his priest had told him about killing. "Where the fuck did Jesus say it's OK to kill people for your government? Any priest who tells me that has got no credibility."

He and several other Marines recently returned from Iraq (many from their second tours) whom I've talked to about the Falluja shooting say they are not sure they would have dead-checked the wounded man in the mosque had they been in the same position. Most say they probably would have, even though the mosque had already been cleared once. "What does the American public think happens when they tell us to assault a city?" one of them said. "Marines don't shoot rainbows out of our asses. We fucking kill people."

Another Marine in the unit I followed—a Democrat's dream, he returned home from fighting in Falluja in time to vote for Kerry—added, "Americans celebrate war in their movies. We like to see visions of evil being defeated by good. When the people at home glimpse the reality of war, that it's a bloodbath, they freak out. We are a subculture they created and programmed to fight their wars. You have to become a psycho to kill like we do. To most Marines that guy in the mosque was just someone who didn't get hit in the right place the first time we shot him. I probably would have put a bullet in his brain if I'd been there. If the American public doesn't like the violence of war, maybe before they start the next war they shouldn't rush so much."

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