Vote No War / Protests Set for Nov. 9 – 2004-11-09 09:58:55
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/VNW411A.html
The US has surrounded the sealed-off City of Fallujah and is preparing to launch the complete destruction of the city.
They have told the people that any traffic on the street is now subject to attack and any males between the ages of 15 and 55 who go outside will automatically be killed by the US soldiers.
The US is terrorizing and bombing the citizens of Fallujah every night, recently targeting and fully destroying its emergency hospital, collapsing homes around families, dismembering children. Many of the 300,000 population have fled for their lives, everything they have ever had left behind or destroyed.
Now the top enlisted Marine in Iraq has called on his troops to commit war crimes against the tens of thousands of remaining residents and what stands of that proud and historic city. Referring to the assault on the ancient citadel city of Hue — destroyed by US soldiers in Vietnam — Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent told an assembled group of 2,500 Marines in a “pep-talk”: “You’re all in the process of making history. This is another Hue city in the making. I have no doubt, if we do get the word, that each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done — kick some butt.” (AP, November 7 2004)
The Rape of Hue
The US moved to reoccupy Hue after Vietnamese forces had liberated it in the Tet Offensive of 1968. The Under Secretary of the Air Force, Townsend Hoopes, described the results of the US assault on Hue in a March 1968 memo as leaving “a devastated and prostrate city. Eighty percent of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, and in the smashed ruins lay 2,000 dead civilians… Three quarters of the city’s people were rendered homeless and looting was widespread, members of the ARVN [US-backed South Vietnamese troops] being the worst offenders.” (Cited in Noam Chomsky’s forward to the papers of the 1967 International War Crimes in Vietnam Tribunal)
The resistance in Iraq is carrying out coordinated efforts across the country to dislodge US occupation forces with attacks on police stations and other targeted representatives of US puppet installations.
In recent days many US soldiers have been badly wounded and there is more to come as the US military leadership predicts the most bloody urban fighting since Vietnam.
Instead of Liberation, US Intervention Has Brought Martial Law
The US is using all of its firepower, night vision, high-tech weaponry, and bombing capacity against defenseless civilians as well as resistance fighters primarily armed with Kalishnakov rifles and improvised explosive devises. With all this military might, the US is unable to stop the Iraqi people from fighting for their national sovereignty. The US-installed “prime minister” of Iraq has today declared martial law in Iraq for the next two months aggregating even greater unilateral authority.
This is no time for anti-war and progressive people in the US to “mourn,” dwell and lament on the failure of the Democratic Party candidate to defeat the Republican Party candidate, at least not those who are really committed to ending this criminal war and securing justice at home.
If nothing else, we all know that if Kerry was President-elect, nothing would be different for the people of Iraq right now. Kerry has not condemned the bombings of Falluljah at any point, nor the attacks on the Iraqi people, nor the use of US soldiers as cannon fodder in this war of aggression and conquest.
Now the people of Fallujah wait for the next attack, and the US soldiers wait for their orders to carry out actions that they will have to reconcile for the rest of their lives, if they survive.
VoteNoWar members across the US are planning emergency demonstrations the DAY AFTER a reinvasion of Fallujah. We call on other committed organizations and activists to also initiate such actions, at local federal buildings, recruiting stations, or traditional public assembly locations.
Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca .
© Copyright belongs to the author 2004 . For fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement.
What Sort of Criminal Monsters Bomb Hospitals?
Kurt Nimmo / Global Research (November 9, 2004)
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/NIM411A.html
“A hospital has been razed to the ground in one of the heaviest US air raids in the Iraqi city of Falluja,” reports the BBC (http://www.uruknet.info/?p=6879 ).
“A nearby medical supplies storeroom and dozens of houses were damaged as US forces continued preparing the ground for an expected major assault.”
“Wounded or sick civilians, civilian hospitals and staff, and hospital transport by land, sea or air must be specially respected,” declares the fourth Geneva Convention
(“Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War”: http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/texts/doc_geneva_con.html ).
‘Ameircan Values’
Ari Fleischer said, in May 2003, that “American values” are consistent with the Geneva Convention
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030507-18.html ).
“The war on terrorism is a war not envisaged when the Geneva Convention was signed in 1949. In this war, global terrorists transcend national boundaries and internationally target the innocent. The President has maintained the United States ‘ commitment to the principles of the Geneva Convention, while recognizing that the Convention simply does not cover every situation…”
Ari was addressing prisoners at Camp Gitmo , but obviously the Bushcons also believe “the Convention simply does not cover” civilian hospitals.
The convention also regulates the treatment of civilians in occupied territories and forbids “grave breaches,” including the “willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment” of civilians,” but this is precisely what happened in Falluja last April. “All of the Middle East and indeed the whole world is now extremely suspicious that US Marine forces slaughtered civilians in Fallujah indiscriminately,” Joseph Arrieta wrote at the time
http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/04/05/20_falluja.html.
“Not only that, it appears Marine snipers did a lot of killing. This is not some errant bomb or missile that created ‘collateral damage,’ it’s the alleged deliberate, careful sighting of civilian targets with spotters targeting men, women, children and ambulances,” all war crimes. “According to the relatively few media reports of what took place there, some 600 Iraqis were killed during these two weeks, among them some 450 elderly people, women and children,”
Children Beheaded During First US Attack on Fallujah
Orit Shohat reported for Haaretz on April 28th http://www.uruknet.info/?colonna=m&p=2261.
The sight of decapitated children, the rows of dead women and the shocking pictures of the soccer stadium that was turned into a temporary grave for hundreds of the slain-all were broadcast to the world only by the Al Jazeera network. During the operation in Falluja, according to the organization Doctors Without Borders, US Marines even occupied the hospitals and prevented hundreds of the wounded from receiving medical treatment. Snipers fired from the rooftops at anyone who tried to approach.
Rahul Mahajan, who serves on the Administrative Committee of United for Peace and Justice, the nation’s largest antiwar coalition, writing for Counterpunch on April 19, provides details of massive US war crimes in regard to Iraqi hospitals and ambulances (http://www.uruknet.info/?colonna=m&p=2024 ):
“Although the first Western reports of US snipers shooting at ambulances caused something of a furor, two days ago at a press conference the Iraqi Minister of Health, Khudair Abbas, confirmed that US forces had shot at ambulances not just in Fallujah but also in Sadr City … He condemned the acts and said he had asked for an explanation from his superiors, the Governing Council and Paul Bremer. … There are also persistent claims that after an outbreak of hostilities American soldiers visit hospitals asking for information about the wounded, with the intent of removing potential resistance members and interrogating them. … By any reasonable standard, these hospital closings (and, of course, the shooting at ambulances) are war crimes. … In the case of Fallujah, it’s clear that one of the reasons the mujahideen were willing to talk about ceasefire was to get the hospital open again; in effect, the United States was holding civilians (indirectly) hostage for military ends.”
Now that Bush has received his “mandate” from the American people (or the 60% that bothered to vote), we can expect more war crimes. Bombing hospitals, more than likely with patients and staff, will now become routine as Bush “stays the course,” that is attempts to defeat the indigenous Iraqi resistance called “terrorists” by the Bush Ministry of Disinformation.
Americans should be ashamed of these war crimes. But the fact is most people are hardly even aware they occur. Of course, this is no excuse, for as Nuremberg Trials demonstrated the German people were responsible for allowing their leaders to engage in war crimes and crimes against humanity. As Telford Taylor said in the opening statement of the Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No.10 in 1946,
“I do not think the German people have as yet any conception of how deeply the criminal folly that was nazism bit into every phase of German life, or of how utterly ravaging the consequences were. It will be our task to make these things clear.” ( http://www.humanitas-international.org/holocaust/drtrial1.htm )
Hopefully, in the not too distant future, it will be the task of a likewise tribunal to make clear to the American people the “criminal folly” of Bush and his camarilla of Straussian neocon sadists. Unfortunately, in the meantime, it appears thousands of Iraqis, mostly innocent civilians, will pay the ultimate price, the same way Jews, Poles, Russians, Germans with the wrong political ideas, and millions of others paid the ultimate price.
http://www.kurtnimmo.com/blog/
Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca .
© Copyright belongs to the author 2004 . For fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement.
