Update [2005-11-28 18:30:48 by Steven D]:A new Dahr Jamail story on the aftermath of Fallujah one year later is here. As always, it is well worth your time to go read him. His story of failed promises and continuing misery is emblematic of our entire Iraq misadventure.

With all the ongoing discussion and debate over the use of White Phosphorus munitions by our troops in their attacks on Fallujah, and the controversy over whether that use as described by US military sources was legal under American and international law, I believe we have lost our focus on what is the far more significant and important question: namely what really happened to the citizens of Fallujah when American forces besieged the city in April, and then followed that up with a more extensive assaults in September and November, 2004.

The questions regarding the deployment of white phosphorus munitions in the attacks on Fallujah are certainly interesting in their own right (Were they used? How? Against who? Was it legal?), and they have ignited anew the moral and ethical issues regarding the manner in which we are waging war in Iraq.

Ultimately, however, much as its deployment operates on the battlefield, the debate about white phosphorus only serves to obscure the reality of the Fallujah saga. Because in the big picture, it isn’t whether our military’s use of certain weapons was illegal or immoral, but whether the attack on the city itself was illegal and immoral.

US Media: Telling the Pentagon’s Side of the Story

In general, the US military claims that civilian deaths in Iraq caused by Coalition forces are greatly exaggerated. Military spokespeople invariably state that our weapons are used sparingly, and in such a way as to minimize “collateral damage.” The story line we’re served always goes that the superior technology our weapons possess allow great precision in targeting, and thus, the ability to limit the destruction to only legitimate military targets. Indeed, recently an American Air Force General made the claim that some instances of civilian deaths allegedly caused by our forces were staged by the insurgents themselves:

U.S. Air Force commander: Some incidents of Iraqi civilian deaths were staged

(Dubai, United Arab Emirates -AP, Nov. 20, 2005 8:30 PM) _ A top U.S. Air Force general said Sunday that reports of civilian casualties in Iraq as a result of American military action were exaggerated.

“I would tell you first off I don’t believe most of it and I am very much aware that some of that has been staged,” said Lt. Gen. Walter E. Buchanan III, Commander of the 9th U.S. Air Force and U.S. Central Command Air Forces.

Buchanan, speaking to The Associated Press on the sidelines on the annual Dubai Air Show, said the U.S. Air Force was doing everything necessary to minimize civilian casualties.

“We are very, very careful, and we use precision-guided munitions. We only drop the weapons we have to and they are always the smallest weapons possible,” he said. . . .

“We control the collateral damage, and we have very strict rules of engagement to guide us through minimizing noncombatant injuries and death,” Buchanan said.

It may seem strange, in light of the recent revelations regarding the lethal use of White Phosphorus munitions, of second generation “napalm” bombs and of thermobaric explosives, but this has been the consistent position by the US military in Iraq regarding civilian casualties, and indeed it was the claim that they essentially made about their attacks on Fallujah. They denied (and continue to deny) that civilians were ever targeted by our forces, and that any civilian casualties resulted from either the actions of insurgents or unavoidable accidents.

But is that claim a valid one?

It’s difficult to know based on what is available to us in the reporting from the mainstream American media. The US media either tends to operate as a forum for official statements from the Pentagon or CENTCOM, or they report the conflict from the limited, and censored viewpoint of journalists embedded with actual combat units. But there are other sources available for those who choose to look for them.

The Other Side of the Story

The major US media has largely ignored reporting that comes from sources other than the US military, such as actual Iraqi victims, independent freelance reporters or individuals engaged in charitable work in Iraq for what are called “Non-Governmental Organizations” (“NGOs”). The tales told by these sources, however, reveal a very different view of Fallujah than the one we have generally been offered.

As long ago as April, 2004, NGOs operating in Iraq were complaining about the manner in which the US forces were conducting operations in and around Fallujah:

The siege of Fallujah and other cities, combined with insurgents’ increased targeting of foreigners, makes staff of international NGOs extremely vulnerable. As a result, several NGOs have removed staff in the past several weeks. Under extraordinary pressure and with deep concern, they issued this statement.

13 April 2004

from the NGOs Coordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI)
“Emergency Response Working Group”

NGO members of the NCCI – Emergency Response Working Group denounce the current violations of international conventions governing armed conflicts.

The Working Group condemns military operations conducted against civilians and the attempts to prevent protection and relief of injured people.

In particular, the NCCI – Emergency Response Working Group is appalled by the witnessed:

· Use of health facilities as bases for military operations

· Occupation by coalition forces of hospitals . . .

· Obstruction of access of wounded to health care facilities

· Shooting at ambulances carrying patients

· Arrest of wounded patients inside hospitals

· Posting of snipers shooting at civilians

· Prevented evacuation for 18 to 40 year old males from Fallujah

· Lack of respect and the destruction of religious buildings

The working group also reminds all belligerent parties that the use of unconventional weapons is prohibited by international laws.

Casualty statistics are steadily increasing, civilian populations have been displaced and there is a lack of food, clean water and medicines as well as severe impediments to their provision.

The NGOs call upon all parties to refrain from the disproportionate use of force and to protect civilian populations as stipulated by international laws governing armed conflict. The NGOs continuing to provide much needed assistance to the victims of this conflict throughout Iraq call upon the warring parties to make every effort in order to facilitate their access to the victims.

The NGOs view the current attempts to establish a cease-fire in Fallujah as a positive step, and encourage the energetic pursuit of an end to the hostilities and resolution of the conflict through peaceful means.

Philippe Schneider
NCCI – Executive Coordinator

Remember this was during April 2004, shortly after the incident in which four American security contractors had been brutally murdered and their bodies burned. In response, American forces clearly “took the gloves off” presumably under orders from their civilian overseers in the Bush administration:

from the April 20, 2004 edition

US marines seal off the hotbed city of Fallujah in Iraq. American snipers approach Vietnam-era kill rates. Foot patrols use portable battering rams to enter through walls, to avoid booby-trapped doors.

President Bush vowed last week that “resolute action” would be used to quell the uprising in Iraq. Monday the hardening US military policy showed signs of working: Fallujah civic leaders called on militants to surrender their heavy weapons; if they do, US forces promised not to resume their offensive against the besieged city.

Eventually the American forces were called off after a political agreement was reached. But what cost was paid by the citizens of Fallujah? This report by Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell, American Friends Service Committee’s representatives in Iraq, summarizes the harm done to people living in the wrong place at the wrong time:

The people of Falluja remembered the siege of April all too well. They remembered being trapped when Coalition forces surrounded and blockaded the city and seized the main hospital, leaving the population cut off from food, water, and medical supplies. Families remembered the fighting in the streets and the snipers on the rooftops, which prevented movement by civilians. They remembered burying more than 600 neighbors – women, children, and men – in makeshift graves in schoolyards and soccer fields.

Think about that for a moment. Food and water cut off. The hospital seized and patients forcibly removed. And of course, the constant sniper fire, that made merely exposing oneself outside a life or death decision for many:

The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday that the “top sniper” in Fallujah – a corporal from a Midwestern city – had 24 confirmed kills in less than two weeks of conflict. That compares, the paper noted, with the Marine Corps sniper record in Vietnam of 103 kills in 16 months.

Despite the claims that Fallujah was a necessary battle, the result of the city having become the center of the insurgency, we tend to forget (or were never told) that the American commander on the ground in Fallujah in April, 2004 was opposed to its assault and subsequent siege by the Marines under his command:

The order to attack Fallujah in early April followed tough talk in Washington about punishing those responsible for the gruesome deaths of four armed U.S. contractors whose vehicles were ambushed in Fallujah on March 31.

Senior U.S. officials in Iraq say the order overruling the Marine commander, who favored a more measured response, originated from Bush’s White House, the Washington Post reported. Conway said he and other Marine officers had a more deliberative plan for bringing the city under control.

Revenge

“We felt we had a method that we wanted to apply to Fallujah; that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge,” Conway said in the interview. Conway said he favored using targeted operations against armed enemy forces while collaborating with local officials to rebuild the city and ease tensions.

Instead, Bush administration officials in Washington second-guessed the commander and demanded a full-scale assault on Fallujah. “We had our say, and we understood the rationale, and we saluted smartly, and we went about the attack,” Conway said.

The assault proved disastrous, however. Six Marines were killed along with hundreds of people in Fallujah, many of them civilians who died under a U.S. bombardment including 500-pound bombs dropped on the city and cannon fire that raked the city’s streets. There were so many dead that the soccer field was turned into a mass grave.

Yes, the Bush administration backed down, initially, from the Fallujah attacks in April, concerned about the PR nightmare they were creating for themselves. But they didn’t abandon the goal of razing Fallujah in order to save it. Instead they merely delayed the final assault until after the November elections in the US:

More important, the all-out assault on Fallujah in Iraq, which some experts believe will include the heaviest fighting U.S. soldiers have faced since Vietnam, was finally launched, less than a week after the election. On the same day, the Iraqi government declared a 60-day state of emergency for most of the country. The two long-pending moves were likely put off until after the election for the simple reason that they could have potentially hurt Bush at the polls.

In fact, since Election Day some journalists have acknowledged that certain sensitive topics were deemed off-limits by the White House, or taken off the table for purely political reasons. “In Iraq, the American forces have been poised to make a major assault on Fallujah. We all anticipate that that could happen at any moment,” said NBC’s Tom Brokaw on Nov. 4. Addressing Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, Brokaw asked, “What about other strategic and tactical changes in Iraq now that the election is over?” (emphasis added). Miklaszewski confirmed the obvious: “U.S. military officials have said for some time that they were putting off any kind of major offensive operation in [Fallujah] until after the U.S. elections, for obvious political reasons.”

And this time, the carnage and the destruction wreaked on Fallujah was far worse:

Under threat of a new siege, an estimated 50,000 families or 250,000 people fled Falluja. They fled with the knowledge that they would live as refugees with few or no resources. They left behind fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, as males between the ages of 15 and 45 were denied safe passage out of the city by US-led forces. If the displaced families of Falluja were fortunate, they fled to the homes of relatives in the surrounding towns and villages or to the city of Baghdad – homes that were already overcrowded and overburdened after 20 months of war and occupation. Many families are forced to survive in fields, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings without access to shelter, water, electricity, food or medical care and alongside tens of thousands of displaced and homeless people already living in the rubble of Baghdad.

What of the estimated 50,000 residents who did not leave Falluja? The US military suggested there were a couple of thousand insurgents in the city before the siege, but in the end chose to treat all the remaining inhabitants as enemy combatants.

Preceding the siege, journalists were prevented from entering the city, the main hospital was seized by US forces and access denied to the wounded. The population was subjected to daily aerial bombardments. The use of cluster bombs in urban areas was recorded. Doctors reported seeing patients whose skin was melted from exposure to phosphorous bombs. Water and electricity were cut off and people quickly ran out of food as they were trapped in their homes by sniper fire. Families trying to flee the devastated city were executed, including a family of five, shot down trying to cross the river to safety; their murder was witnessed by an AP photographer. With few independent journalists reporting on the carnage, the international humanitarian community in exile and the Red Cross and Red Crescent prevented from entering the besieged city, the world was forced to rely on reporting from journalists embedded with US forces. In the US press, we saw casualties reported for Falluja as follows: number of US soldiers dead; number of Iraqi soldiers dead; number of “guerillas” or “insurgents” dead. Nowhere were the civilian casualties reported in those first weeks.

Although there has been resounding silence about the humanitarian disaster in Falluja, the true cost to the civilian population is emerging. Preliminary estimates are as high as 6,000 Iraqis killed, a third of the city destroyed, and over 200,000 civilians living as refugees. . . .

All males refused exit out of Fallujah (“We assume they’ll go home and just wait out the storm or find a place that’s safe,” one 1st Cavalry Division officer, who declined to be named, said Thursday. Army Col. Michael Formica, who leads forces isolating Fallujah, admits the rule sounds “callous.” But he insists it’s is key to the mission’s success . . . ). Water and electricity cut off. Six thousand dead. It all seems a little abstract when put down in writing. So let’s examine a few personal accounts to bring home the true nature of the horror we (by which I mean the US) caused to these people:

Dahr Jamail, speaking on Democracy Now!, November 2004:

“I have interviewed many refugees over the last week coming out of Fallujah at different times from different locations within the city. The consistent stories that I have been getting have been refugees describing phosphorus weapons, horribly burned bodies, fires that burn on people when they touch these weapons, and they are unable to extinguish the fires even after dumping large amounts of water on the people. Many people are reporting cluster bombs, as well. And these are coming from the camps that I have been to, different people who have emerged from Fallujah anywhere from one week ago up to on through up toward near the very beginning of the siege.”

Fadhil Badrani, reporter for the BBC and Reuters

“There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It’s hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens.”

Burhan Fasa’a, an Iraqi journalist who worked for the Lebanese satellite TV station, LBC

“Americans did not have interpreters with them . . . so they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English. They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and [they] shot people because [the people] didn’t obey [the soldiers’] orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of English.” . . . “Soldiers thought the people were rejecting their orders, so they shot them. But the people just couldn’t understand them.”

More individual Iraqis (as reported to Dahr Jamail):

“I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks,” said Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, a resident of Fallujah. “This happened so many times.”

Other refugees recounted similar stories. “I saw so many civilians killed there, and I saw several tanks roll over the wounded in the streets,” said Aziz Abdulla, 27 years old, who fled the fighting last November. Another resident, Abu Aziz, said he also witnessed American armored vehicles crushing people he believes were alive.

Abdul Razaq Ismail, another resident who fled Fallujah, said: “I saw dead bodies on the ground and nobody could bury them because of the American snipers. The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah.”

A man called Abu Hammad said he witnessed US troops throwing Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates River. Abu Hammed and others also said they saw Americans shooting unarmed Iraqis who waved white flags.

Believing that American and Iraqi forces were bent on killing anyone who stayed in Fallujah, Hammad said he watched people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. “Even then the Americans shot them with rifles from the shore,” he said. “Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot.”

Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein reported witnessing similar events. After running out of basic necessities and deciding to flee the city at the height of the US-led assault, Hussein ran to the Euphrates.

“I decided to swim,” Hussein told colleagues at the AP, who wrote up the photographer’s harrowing story, “but I changed my mind after seeing US helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.”

Hussein said he saw soldiers kill a family of five as they tried to traverse the Euphrates, before he buried a man by the riverbank with his bare hands.
“I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some US snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim,” Hussein recounted. “I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards.”

A man named Khalil, who asked not to use his last name for fear of reprisals, said he had witnessed the shooting of civilians who were waving white flags while they tried to escape the city. “They shot women and old men in the streets,” he said. “Then they shot anyone who tried to get their bodies.”

“There are bodies the Americans threw in the river,” Khalil continued, noting that he personally witnessed US troops using the Euphrates to dispose of Iraqi dead. “And anyone who stayed thought they would be killed by the Americans, so they tried to swim across the river. Even people who couldn’t swim tried to cross the river. They drowned rather than staying to be killed by the Americans,” said Khalil.

Trust me. There’s many more stories just like these. And if you don’t believe these, how about reporting from an embedded journalist with the Marines:

One fear playing on the mind of the task force was that of “friendly fire”, also known as “blue on blue”.

“Any urban fight is confusing,” Lt Col Newell, the force’s commander, told his troops before the battle. “The biggest threat out there is not them, but us.”

My Conclusion

I am not a journalist. A journalist seeks to present the truth as best he or she can after discovering as many facts about an event as are possible. Truth is seen as an objective goal that can be best ascertained if one digs hard enough to discover the facts, all while remaining a dispassionate and neutral demeanor throughout this process.

I can hardly remain dispassionate, and I am certainly not neutral. I see the people in the Bush administration as liars and war criminals, and those who act as their spokespeople, whether in the military or as civilians working for the State Department or the Pentagon, as either willing or unwitting accomplices to a crime. So I don’t pretend to offer a carefully constructed narrative, which weighs all sides of this story with objectivity.

My training was as a lawyer, an advocate. And as an advocate I take a position and support it with the best evidence I can muster. And the evidence that I’ve gathered makes it clear to me that despite what the Generals and Bush loyalists have told us, we do indeed target Iraqi civilians, and we do so indiscriminately. We do so with white phosphorus to choke and burn and terrorize them, and with thermobaric bombs* to destroy their homes, crushing all who may be inside under the rubble.

But we also target them with siper rifles and .50 caliber machine guns, with mortars and tank tracks and every other weapon we have available in our arsenals. We even use hunger, and thirst, and the deprivation of medical care as weapons. And all against those whose only crime was to live in a nation governed by Saddam Hussein at the time George W. Bush was President of the United States.

And that is the true significance of the assault on Fallujah and, indeed, of the Iraq War as a whole. It’s all bad, from white phosphorus to starvation tactics to the destruction of an entire city reminiscent of the way Nazi soldiers operated when they met resistance in WWII.

Simply put: The biggest threat out there is not them, it’s us.

**********************************************

* A short note on Thermobaric Weapons courtesy of DEFENSE TECH:

War is hell. But it’s worse when the Marines bring out their new urban combat weapon, the SMAW-NE. Which may be why they’re not talking about it, much.

This is a version of the standard USMC Shoulder Mounted Assault Weapon but with a new warhead. Described as NE – “Novel Explosive”- it is a thermobaric mixture which ignites the air, producing a shockwave of unparalleled destructive power, especially against buildings.

A post-action report from Iraq describes the effect of the new weapon: “One unit disintegrated a large one-storey masonry type building with one round from 100 meters. They were extremely impressed.” Elsewhere it is described by one Marine as “an awesome piece of ordnance.”

It proved highly effective in the battle for Fallujah. This from the Marine Corps Gazette, July edition: “SMAW gunners became expert at determining which wall to shoot to cause the roof to collapse and crush the insurgents fortified inside interior rooms.”

As they say, go read the whole article.