Fisk in Baghdad
Here's something we'll never hear about on CNN. just an example of the atrocities that happen behind the scenes.
Robert Fisk: 'It was an outrage, an obscenity'
27 March 2003
It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.
Two missiles from an American jet killed them all – by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be 'liberated' by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this 'collateral damage'? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.
It's a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them.
How should one record so terrible an event? Perhaps a medical report would be more appropriate. But the final death toll is expected to be near to 30 and Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should not be told.
For another question occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre yesterday. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?
Abu Hassan and Malek Hammoud were preparing lunch for customers at the Nasser restaurant on the north side of Abu Taleb Street. The missile that killed them landed next to the westbound carriageway, its blast tearing away the front of the café and cutting the two men – the first 48, the second only 18 – to pieces. A fellow worker led me through the rubble. "This is all that is left of them now," he said, holding out before me an oven pan dripping with blood.
At least 15 cars burst into flames, burning many of their occupants to death. Several men tore desperately at the doors of another flame-shrouded car in the centre of the street that had been flipped upside down by the same missile. They were forced to watch helplessly as the woman and her three children inside were cremated alive in front of them. The second missile hit neatly on the eastbound carriageway, sending shards of metal into three men standing outside a concrete apartment block with the words, "This is God's possession" written in marble on the outside wall.
The building's manager, Hishem Danoon, ran to the doorway as soon as he heard the massive explosion. "I found Ta'ar in pieces over there," he told me. His head was blown off. "That's his hand." A group of young men and a woman took me into the street and there, a scene from any horror film, was Ta'ar's hand, cut off at the wrist, his four fingers and thumb grasping a piece of iron roofing. His young colleague, Sermed, died the same instant. His brains lay piled
a few feet away, a pale red and grey mess behind a burnt car. Both men worked for Danoon. So did a doorman who was also killed.
As each survivor talked, the dead regained their identities. There was the electrical shop-owner killed behind his counter by the same missile that cut down Ta'ar and Sermed and the doorman, and the young girl standing on the central reservation, trying to cross the road, and the truck driver who was only feet from the point of impact and the beggar who regularly called to see Mr Danoon for bread and who was just leaving when the missiles came screaming through the sandstorm to destroy him.
In Qatar, the Anglo-American forces – let's forget this nonsense about "coalition" – announced an inquiry. The Iraqi government, who are the only ones to benefit from the propaganda value of such a bloodbath, naturally denounced the slaughter, which they initially put at 14 dead. So what was the real target? Some Iraqis said there was a military encampment less than a mile from the street, though I
couldn't find it. Others talked about a local fire brigade
headquarters, but the fire brigade can hardly be described as a military target.
Certainly, there had been an attack less than an hour earlier on a military camp further north. I was driving past the base when two rockets exploded and I saw Iraqi soldiers running for their lives out of the gates and along the side of the highway. Then I heard two more explosions; these were the missiles that hit Abu Taleb Street.
Of course, the pilot who killed the innocent yesterday could not see his victims. Pilots fire through computer-aligned co-ordinates, and the sandstorm would have hidden the street from his vision. But when one of Malek Hammoud's friends asked me how the Americans could so blithely kill those they claimed to want to liberate, he didn't want to learn about the science of avionics or weapons delivery systems.
And why should he? For this is happening almost every day in
Baghdad. Three days ago, an entire family of nine was wiped out in their home near the centre of the city. A busload of civilian passengers were reportedly killed on a road south of Baghdad two days ago. Only yesterday were Iraqis learning the identity of five civilian passengers slaughtered on a Syrian bus that was attacked by American aircraft close to the Iraqi border at the weekend.
The truth is that nowhere is safe in Baghdad, and as the Americans and British close their siege in the next few days or hours, that simple message will become ever more real and ever more bloody.
We may put on the hairshirt of morality in explaining why these people should die. They died because of 11 September, we may say, because of President Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction", because of human rights abuses, because of our desperate desire to "liberate" them all. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I'll bet we are told President Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We shan't mention the pilot, of course.
On the news this morning, Mr. Mohammed Said Al-Sahaf, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Iraq, was giving a list of the attack, injuries, and death tolls throughout the country. In a mocking voice he says "Do the American invading forces think that government buildings are hanging somewhere in the sky or in the middle of an empty desert? No, they're in the middle of the city, full of regular people coming and going and doing their regular business. Do they think these buildings are deserted? Who goes to post offices and telephone offices and other government organized institutions? The citizens. And still, they talk about 'targeting only government buildings' as if they were remote enitites created in a void!
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...give me wings.........
Blue Registered User
Posts: 21
(4/2/03 9:25 pm) Reply
Re: Fisk in Baghdad
Why is it that society only views the 'enemies' media as propaganda, while our own media speaks nothing but the truth?
Censorship through threats, funding (or lack of) and favours is alive and well. They fired Arnet for saying things that were true because they didn't like them. Freedom of nothing.
Re: Fisk in Baghdad
Yeah, firing Arnet was one helluva propaganda bullseye.
And still, you hear about CNN, 'catching the news while it happens', as if there aren't people who pick and chose what to air and what not to, in what voice to air it...etc. This claim to objectivity is so dangerous.
For example, why isn't anyone raising hell over the death of American citizen Rachel Corrie, 23. She was protesting Israeli violence in the occupied territories and she was run over by an Israeli bulldozer. Its like Tianemen Square revisited, only this time the guy behind the wheel didn't even flinch.
I'm shocked that this incident has been kept relatively hush-hush when it is so unbelieavably brutal to none other than America itself. A young all-American university girl, member of the peaceful protest group, the International Solidarity Movemnt, was attempting to prevent the Israeli military from destroying Palestinian civilian homes. And she was killed.
I mean, she was wearing a bright orange jacket, standing in plain view in front of the approaching bulldozer, with friends and other protestors nearby. She was raising her hands and yelling at the bulldozer driver to stop. But the driver kept going, in what can only be described as mercilessly. Even though she was in plain view, even though she was protesting peacefully, Rachel was knocked down and run over and no one could do a single thing about it. She died of her injuries.
Re: Media Lies
I was chatting with a friend of mine who lives in the U.S. and we were discussing the war. She was lamenting the death of innocent people and the false claim of humanitarianism when the plain fact is that this war is all about oil. And then she said something that completely shocked me.
But I think the U.S. is still full of good ideas and ideals. I'd
rather be a woman here where I can own property, hold a job, vote, manage my own finances, read and study and be educated, and not live in fear of being raped or killed or have acid thrown in my face by my own husband. The U.S has its share of domestic abuse problmes here too, but at least women have rights and power and a way to fight it.
Wow! Where on earth did she get those ideas???!! And she's a clever girl who has been around and traveled across the Atlantic, yet even she bought into that sensationalist pile of horse manure.
Let me make one thing clear, Iraq is not Afghanistan. It is a highly developed country, rich with universities, museums, natural resources, businesses and industries. Furthermore, it is a secular country. On a particular note, the art market for Iraqi painters, both male and female, has been at an all-time high for more than a decade.
My cousin, who is just a year older than me, just married and Iraqi fellow from Baghdad, they're not rich by any means but he and his brothers and sisters have all worked hard and studied harded to get their PhDs and work in the academic field. These are run-of-the-mill people. But they value education and the value liberty.
Furthermore, Iraq is not weighed down by fanatics, it is a secularized country. If anything, the current attacks on Iraq will most probably be a triggering cause of unsought Islamic fundamentalism.
While Saddam is definitely a mad man who has no respect for human life, the people of Iraq have always been enlightened folk with a very rich civilization through out history!
Please, when you think of Iraqi women, think of somebody like myself at least, if not better.
I'm really shocked by the image you're being fed.
This war is a media war. Unfortunately, no one can match American hegemony when it comes to world-wide media. It makes me sick.
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...give me wings.........
Blue Registered User
Posts: 22
(4/9/03 8:15 pm) Reply
Re: Media Lies
Living in the Middle East was an eye-opening experience for me (and my wife). While there is still more government control over media than there appears to be here, at least you were aware of it.
Of course the media had an entirely different slant on things, expecially the Palestine/Israel conflict. It was the first time I saw pictures of Israeli bulldozers demolishing Palestinean homes. I understand the frustration of the Palestineans - no one will actually intervene as Israel slowly gobbles up their land. The only thing that makes Palestine 'terrorists' is money. If they had the financial resources equal to Israel, or even a third of them, then it wouldn't be terrorism, it would be war.
If my enemy has a gun, and I only have a stick, it's highly unlikely (and not very smart) to fight him like I have a gun. Of course I'm going to fight dirty - it's about survival.
When discussing suicide bombers et al, western media forgets one thing - provocation.
All that said I should make it clear that while I understand the motivation for the above activities, in doesn't mean I condone them. On the other hand, should a foreign nation invade my own, I wouldn't think twice about employing any tactic necessary to remove them.
I find it interesting that when a conquered nation refuses to give in and be taken over, they're labelled terrorists, but the countries that invade and occupy them never are.
Invasion and Occupation. Words you don't hear to often in the media when discussing Iraq, but someone please show me how they don't apply here.
Quote:Invasion and Occupation. Words you don't hear to often in the media when discussing Iraq, but someone please show me how they don't apply here.
It has always only been a matter of perspective; and time spins its yarns with rarely a thread of truth. Rest assured, there are as many sides to a war as there are warriors to fight it.
Blue Registered User
Posts: 24
(4/9/03 10:24 pm) Reply
Re: Media Lies
Indeed.
But don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. Liberation of poeple is no more a significant goal than the collection of sand.
all the lying on t.v. is making me sick.
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