US disputes civilians trapped in Fallujah

[Whois]

Here's some more of that 'propaganda' that someone was complaining about.


http://www.news.com.au/common/printpage/0,6093,11389249,00.html

US disputes civilians trapped
From correspondents near Fallujah, Iraq
November 15, 2004

THE US military said overnight it saw no need for the Iraqi Red Crescent to deliver aid to people inside Fallujah as it did not think any Iraqi civilians were trapped inside the city.

"There is no need to bring (Red Crescent) supplies in because we have supplies of our own for the people," said US Marine Colonel Mike Shupp.
"Now that the bridge (into Fallujah) is open, I will bring out casualties and all aid work can be done here (at Fallujah's hospital)."

He said he had not heard of any Iraqi civilians being trapped inside the city and did not think that was the case.

The Iraqi Red Crescent believes at least 150 families are trapped inside Fallujah and that many are in desperate need of food, blankets, water and medicine.

Some residents still inside the city, contacted by Reuters today, said their children were suffering from diarrhoea and had not eaten for several days.

Asked what he intended to do about families and other non-combatants trapped inside the city, Col Shupp said: "I don't think that is the case.

"I haven't heard that myself and the Iraqi soldiers didn't tell me about that. We want to help them as much as we can. We are on the radio broadcast telling them how to come out and how to come up to coalition forces."

The Red Crescent has sent a convoy of seven aid trucks and ambulances to Fallujah, but it has been stopped at the city's main hospital, on the west bank of the Euphrates river, away from the city centre.

There is almost no-one at the hospital for doctors to treat and residents still in the city are said to have been too scared to leave their homes during the fighting.

The Red Crescent has said the only effective way it can help them is to go into the city.

Fallujah's normal population is about 300,000. About half the residents are thought to have fled before the main US-led assault on insurgents in the city began last week.

[Whois]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1350926,00.html

Civilian cost of battle for Falluja emerges

Rory McCarthy in Baghdad and Peter Beaumont
Sunday November 14, 2004
The Observer

The full cost of the battle of Falluja emerged last night as large numbers of wounded civilians were evacuated to hospitals in Baghdad, as insurgents stepped up retaliatory attacks in other cities.
As the first Red Crescent aid convoy was allowed into Falluja, Iraq's Health Minister, Alaa Alwan, said ambulances had begun transferring a 'significant number' of injured civilians out of the battle zone, although he did not specify how many.

The evacuation of the wounded from Falluja came as insurgents consolidated their grip on large areas of Iraq's third largest city, Mosul, setting up checkpoints and conducting their own patrols, and as fresh Iraqi and US troops were rushed north to counter the new threat.

The moves came amid renewed warnings from aid groups that Iraq's civilian population was facing a 'humanitarian catastrophe'.

Although many of Falluja's 200,000 to 300,000 residents fled the city before the assault, between 30,000 and 50,000 are believed to have remained during the fighting.

The horrific conditions for those who remained in the city have begun to emerge in the last 24 hours as it became clear that US military claims of 'precision' targeting of insurgent positions were false.

According to one Iraqi journalist who left Falluja on Friday, some of the civilian injuries were caused by the massive firepower directed on to city neighbourhoods during the battle.

'If the fighters fire a mortar, US forces respond with huge force,' said the journalist, who asked not to be named.

The city had been without power or water for days. Frozen food had spoiled and people could not charge their cellphones. 'Some people hadn't prepared well. They didn't stock up on tinned food. They didn't think it would be this bad,' he said.

At the main hospital, cut off from the rest of the city, doctors have reportedly been treating the injured with nothing but bandages, while the Red Crescent says people have been bleeding to death for lack of medical attention.

The claims came as an Iraqi Red Crescent convoy entered Falluja yesterday with the first aid supplies to reach the city since US-led forces began to blast their way in five days ago.

Prior to that the city had been surrounded by a US military cordon and subjected to heavy daily bombardment.

Red Crescent spokeswoman Firdoos al-Abadi - who had described the situation inside the city as 'catastrophic' - said 30 volunteers with five trucks and three ambulances had driven into the city west of Baghdad.

The aid convoy reached Falluja's main hospital, on the west bank of the Euphrates, but US forces stopped it crossing the river into the city centre, saying bridges were insecure.

The fears of large numbers of civilian injured have raised fresh warnings that the suffering in Falluja will be used to rally insurgents across northern Iraq.

As new attacks took place in Baghdad and Samarra and President Bush used a radio address to warn of increasing violence in the run-up to elections in January, US Marine officers in Falluja itself said they hoped to have the whole of the city under their control within 72 hours.

The predictions came as US troops, tanks and artillery launched a major attack on what they said were the final positions of insurgents still holding outs, leaving a pall of black smoke covering much of the city.

Iraq's national security adviser, Qassem Dawoud, said about 1,000 insurgents had been killed and another 200 captured during the Fallujah operation. This could not be independently verified.

Meanwhile, the US death toll rose to 24 after two marines were killed by a home-made bomb.

[ASsman]

"Hahaha, what civilians?" *sees civilian walking behind journalist**takes out his 9mm and pops him*"Uh yah, no civilians here. Just dead terrorists" "They all look the same, like black people" - Pompous General

[D_Raay]

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....
You know, the thing that really gets me about the American butchery in Iraq is that it is a well-known fact - doubted by no one - that the reasons uniformed American men and women are even in Iraq are lies. Well-established lies, proven many times. No weapons of mass destruction. And no connection to al-Qaeda (even though al-Qaeda was invented by the CIA as an excuse to make wars everywhere).

Yet it apparently has occurred to no one with any degree of power in this warped society of ours that this means all the lives we have squandered in our War of Lies in Iraq are an absolutely evil abomination, completely unnecessary, except to maintain the fiction that the lies about weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda somehow don't really matter, and that we can kill anybody we want at any time.

There are two ways you can look at this. If you know a little about real American history, you know we have butchered people all over the world and clothed the horrific deeds in noble rhetoric so as not to offend our bloated sense of self-worth.But if you think America has any remaining shred of decency and honesty in the way it barges around the world, killing innocent people with impunity as it goes, then I have to tell you that in your profound and deliberate ignorance, you are an accessory to mass murder.

I strongly urge anyone who supports the murderous and evil American presence in Iraq to instruct their children to immediately go and start killing their own neighbors, especially if their skin is not lily white, because this is exactly what the U.S. invasion of Iraq is telling us to do. We don't need a reason to kill people, unless it's because they have something that we want.

Since Iraq has something we want - namely oil - it's OK to kill them. That's what we are teaching are children. This is no joke. That's what our children are learning. Just listen to the soldiers in Iraq describe what they are doing.


Horror grips us as we watch you die.
All we can do is echo your anguished cries.
Stare as all human feelings die.
We are leaving - you don't need us.
Crosby, Stills, and Nash

[ASsman]

You type fast. Or some shit.

Also nice post. (y) (y)

[Whois]

November 13, 2004
GENEVA CONVENTIONS
Rights Lawyers See Possibility of a War Crime
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

ASHINGTON, Nov. 12 - Human rights experts said Friday that American soldiers might have committed a war crime on Thursday when they sent fleeing Iraqi civilians back into Falluja.

Citing several articles of the Geneva Conventions, the experts said recognized laws of war require military forces to protect civilians as refugees and forbid returning them to a combat zone.

"This is highly problematical conduct in terms of exposing people to grave danger by returning them to an area where fighting is going on," said Jordan Paust, a law professor at the University of Houston and a former Army prosecutor.

James Ross, senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch, said, "If that's what happened, it would be a war crime."

A stream of refugees, about 300 men, women and children, were detained by American soldiers as they left southern Falluja by car and on foot. The women and children were allowed to proceed. The men were tested for any residues left by the handling of explosives. All tested negative, but they were sent back.

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, defended the actions of American troops in Iraq, saying: "Our forces over there are not haphazardly operating indiscriminately, targeting individuals or civilians. The rules of engagement are researched and vetted, and our forces closely follow them."*

Because the United States has refused to take part in the International Criminal Court, it is unclear whether American troops could be held accountable.**

* Hahahahahahahahaha, suuuure you are.

**BINGO we have a winner (y)

[ASsman]

International? Hahahaha! Wow.

[ASsman]

Monday, November 15th, 2004
Fallujah Devastated: Witnesses Describe Humanitarian Crisis and Civilian Death Toll

The Iraqi city of Fallujah is devastated after a week of intense fighting that has left at least 1200 Iraqis dead. Witnesses describe bloated and decomposing bodies in the streets, smashed homes, ruined mosques and severed power and telephone lines. We go to Baghdad to speak with Dahr Jamail, one of the few independent reporters in Iraq. The battle for Fallujah continued today with US warplanes, artillery and mortars attacking the Sunni city as bloody urban warfare on the ground entered a second week.

American military commanders claim they occupy the city, but expect several more days of fighting and stiff resistance. One U.S. Major General told the BBC "We're more determined and we're going to wipe them out."

Thirty-eight US soldiers have been killed and 275 wounded in the assault. Six Iraqi government troops have also died. The US military says it has killed about 1,200 Iraqis, all of them fighters with the resistance. While there are no figures on civilian deaths and the US-backed Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi claims no civilians were killed, witness accounts paint a very different and bloody picture.

A Reuters correspondent said he saw bloated and decomposing bodies in the streets, smashed homes, ruined mosques and severed power and telephone lines. Several accounts say bodies found were being eaten by dogs and cats.

A member of an Iraqi relief committee told Al Jazeera television he saw 22 bodies buried under rubble in the city's northern district. He said the bodies included "two children whose ages did not exceed 15 and a man with an artificial leg...it was a very painful sight."

The Iraqi Red Crescent - one of the few aid agencies operating in Iraq - is still negotiating with U.S. forces after being denied access to Fallujah. It says it knows of at least 150 families trapped inside the city in desperate need of food, clean water and medical supplies. One Iraqi father in Fallujah told Reuters that his children were sick from diarrhea and had not eaten for days. The U.S. military says it can take care of Fallujah's humanitarian needs by itself.

* Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist currently based in Baghdad. He is one of the only independent, unembedded journalists in Iraq right now. He publishes his reports on a blog called DahrJamailIraq.com.

(No transcript just yet)
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/15/1448207

[ASsman]

http://www.beastieboys.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=38409
Watch it.

[Ali]

What does it matter? It's not like there's PEOPLE dying there. It's just more Iraqis being liberated (from their bodies). Good thing they believe in life after death.

[ASsman]

Not even. Bush is going to be like "Hey look dinasoures!" everyone turns their head. BOOM! We are in Iran, oh and we can't leave the place all bombed up the ass. So we have to stay, bomb it some more, kill a few people, and then recontruct. Oh and it will cost 1020302 Billion Dollars. 10$ Tax cut for the working class, and that's that.

[Ali]

Not even. Bush is going to be like "Hey look dinasoures!" everyone turns their head. BOOM! We are in Iran, oh and we can't leave the place all bombed up the ass. So we have to stay, bomb it some more, kill a few people, and then recontruct. Oh and it will cost 1020302 Billion Dollars. 10$ Tax cut for the working class, and that's that. again

Rinse and repeat, muthafukah, don't stop until the WHOLE WORLD dances to the Bush tune.

And he has four more years to do it.

[Whois]

http://www.whatisdeepfried.com/STRIP_157.html

[infidel]

An Associated Press photographer named Bilal Hussein calls Fallujah his home town. He was there to watch our justice come down. "Destruction was everywhere," said Hussein. "I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. Even the civilians who stayed in Fallujah were too afraid to go out. There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days."

After a few days, the shooting got too close for comfort, so Hussein decided to try and flee across the Euphrates River with other civilians. "I decided to swim," said Hussein, "but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river." Down by the river, he was treated to the sight of a family of five being shot down as they tried to cross the water. Not long after, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands. I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards."

Stories like this have been coming out of Fallujah for days now. Thousands of families went without food and water, trapped in their homes, watching tanks roll over dead bodies that littered the streets. Aid organizations like the Red Cross and the Red Crescent were barred from entering the city to distribute food and medical supplies. Large numbers of wounded civilians have been evacuated to hospitals in Baghdad because the Fallujah hospitals have either run out of supplies or been blasted to rubble.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111604A.shtml

[Ali]

"but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river." Down by the river, he was treated to the sight of a family of five being shot down as they tried to cross the water. Not long after, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands. I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111604A.shtml time for an election?