^
well obviously you have to take things easy because you live in US-of-A, the so-called liberator of the world :-)
I have always had a choice.
Ask Saddam .. when if ever
people had a choice?
It is shocking enough to read the posts on AOL’s message board that defend what Bush is doing, but I can not believe that anyone else would.
Yes Saddam really does need to go, but not like Bush and Blair are doing it.
They admit that they targeted civilian residential areas just for the sake of taking out Saddam and his sons. Why isn’t the world doing something about that? Has Bush got the whole planet that brain washed?
How can the world look at the injuries to these people, especially the children in Iraq and say this invasion is right? All Bush has done with this invasion is lower himself and the United States to the level of Saddam.
If there truly is a hell, I think that Bush and Saddam will have eternity to discuss this in depth!!!
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by bcsm57: *
They admit that they targeted civilian residential areas just for the sake of taking out Saddam and his sons.
[/QUOTE]
All this shortly after their statement saying that it isn't crucial to find or kill Saddam or his sons. These damn coalition terrorists can never get their story straight.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Fret Wizard: *
All this shortly after their statement saying that it isn't crucial to find or kill Saddam or his sons. These damn coalition terrorists can never get their story straight.
[/QUOTE]
Wait.. a few days ago Gen Brooks said that finding WMD was not the main priority?? Ah, but they found some!! So killing Saddam isn't the main priority?? Wait.. those WMD turned out to be nothing?? We bombed Saddam's favorite pizza shack?? What day is it?? Was it odd numbered days that we want to kill Saddam or was it even numbered days?? Oh forget it.. I say we just bomb an embassy in Bogota today... the American people need some diversity, Iraq is getting boring...
US deliberately targeting civilians - British Human Rights Observer
I saw the injuries to Iraqi civilians](I saw the injuries to Iraqi civilians | Iraq | The Guardian) Guardian 08 Apr 03
I have just returned from Baghdad, where I spent six-and-a-half weeks as a human rights observer. I visited hospitals, taking witness statements from civilians who had been injured in the attacks. I then visited the sites where they were injured to take further witness statements and damage reports. We set our own agenda and were not taken to see things we had not requested to visit.
One extended family we met in al-Kindi hospital had lost three members and the others were injured. The neighbours told us they had seen the plane circling overhead before firing three rockets, one of which took off the entire upper storey of the house. We drove around looking for a possible military target that the rockets might have been fired at but could find nothing other than farmhouses, fields, a marketplace and a mosque.
I was also given accounts which indicate the use of cluster bombs in residential areas. One man described an explosion in the air and then nine explosions on the ground. There are 10 bomblets in each cluster, indicating that one remained unexploded. A family of farmers described seeing unexploded yellow cylinders. Unexploded cluster bomblets are effectively landmines and as such banned by international treaty.
**In another incident an anti-personnel weapon was used in a residential area in the middle of the night. The missile went through the wall of a bedroom where Munib Abid was asleep with his wife and child, fragmenting into thousands of square pieces around 5mm in length. Munib had an incision down the length of his abdomen to remove the pieces from his liver and intestines. He had gas gangrene in his legs, which were peppered with fragments. Again, we were unable to find a military target at which an anti-personnel weapon could legitimately have been fired. **
On the basis of the statements I was given, it is difficult to come to any conclusion other than that the US and UK have been deliberately targeting civilians, perhaps in the hope that they will take things into their own hands and remove Saddam themselves. Whatever their aim, the civilian deaths and injuries are unacceptable and the tactics which have caused them are illegitimate and wrong.
Jo Wilding
Bristol
He witnessed doctors amputating a child’s limb using only local anesthetics; the doctors had to give the child a new shot every five minutes. Nearby lay a 9-year-old boy suffering from a horrible abdominal wound that he sustained when he “had picked up something that exploded” – clearly, an injury from a cluster bomb. 
The Real Face of War](Alternet.org) Alternet 08 Apr 03
By Maria Tomchick, AlterNet
April 8, 2003
The televised face of this war is a lie. It’s a flickering screen with a Fox-TV newsman’s macho boast that US troops are in the heart of Baghdad and are “here to stay.” It’s a Pentagon press conference assuring us that another city has been “taken,” but not yet “secured.” Occasionally, however, we catch glimpses of the reality: descriptions of incidents that reflect the real impact on both sides.
A U.S. Marine in a medevac unit outside Al Kut, unable to save a dying American soldier, buries his resucitation equipment in despair. I’m reading this in my morning paper. I close my eyes and try to imagine where this Marine came from, what he did before he was shipped over to Iraq. Maybe he worked in an inner-city hospital where gunshot wounds are the norm, but the hospital’s emergency room has the equipment and personnel to save lives and patch together even the worst cases. But the stripped-down, gritty, sweltering reality of a battlefield after three days of non-stop fighting with bullets still whizzing overhead and not enough clamps to stop the bleeding and not enough hands to patch all the wounds fast enough has finally broken his will. What will be left of this man when he returns home?
**I read a quote from soldiers who’ve shot up a van full of women and children. The soldiers’ initial, agonized question, “Why did they do it? Why did they try to run the checkpoint?” will eventually, with the passage of time, become “Why did I do it? Why did I shoot them all?” The soldiers will remember that brief scene over and over again in their nightmares for the next 20, 30, 40 years. **
These soldiers weren’t the only ones who prepared for the worst, only to realize that war brings on the worst in spite of their best-laid plans. Ibrahim al-Yussuf’s parents thought they could save their 12-year-old son by sending him to live with relatives in Zambrania, a small, rural village outside of Baghdad. The city was too dangerous, they thought, as loud explosions and fireballs lit up the skyline at night. After all, a U.S. HARM missile demolished a busy market, killing 67 people and wounding dozens more. If Ibrahim left the city he’d be out of the way of stray missiles.
**But soon after the war started, U.S. military planners set up “kill boxes” in the region south of Baghdad, a largely rural area, where Zambrania and several other villages lie. Kill boxes were used in Afghanistan; they’re grid-like areas on the military planners’ maps that are designated as free-fire zones. U.S. fighter pilots are allowed to shoot anything that moves within these zones. But, just as in Afghanistan, there is no way that civilians on the ground can know when they’ve entered a kill box until a bomb falls on them. Ibrahim and his 17-year-old cousin, Jalal, left home to have lunch with Abdullah, a friend who owned the neighboring farm. They were torn apart by a U.S. bomb because they were outside, walking, and a kill box had been superimposed over their home. **
Zambrania and the neighboring village of Talkana have lost 19 people because of U.S. fighter planes. In Manaria, a village 30 miles south of Baghdad, 22 people have died and 53 have been injured in air raids. Most of the dead and wounded are children and women. Many of the wounds look suspiciously like those caused by cluster bombs, anti-personnel weapons that release a spray of deadly shrapnel that can cut through flesh, bone and even the soft, mud-brick walls of Iraqi houses. The U.N. has condemned the use of cluster bombs, a key component of the U.S. arsenal, because so many more civilians are killed by cluster bombs than any other kind of ordnance except land mines. And like a land mine, a cluster bomblet can lie unexploded, waiting for a victim to brush by it or a curious child to pick it up.
The use of cluster bombs in these rural areas is, surely, a war crime. As the daughter of a farmer, I feel physically ill at the thought of a rural landscape littered with these little packages of death. And then I read about the Hilla massacre. The Red Cross reported 61 civilians killed and 450 people injured over two days – March 31 and April 1 – by cluster bombs dropped in the Hilla region south of Baghdad. Described as “a horror,” two nights of U.S. bombing produced babies cut in half, dozens of severed bodies, and scattered limbs. The victims were farmers and their families. There were no Iraqi artillery, Republican guard troops or military installations within miles.
And the horrors continue to unfold. Patrick Baz, a veteran photographer for Agence France Presse who covered the war in Beirut in the 1980s, was shocked when he stumbled upon a farm torn up by U.S. missiles in al-Janably. Inside the farmhouse were the remains of a family of 20 people, 11 of them children. Children make up the largest number of civilian victims in Iraq; they are, after all, an estimated 60 percent of the population. There really is a good reason why Al Jazeera TV broadcasts so many pictures of suffering Iraqi children.
Dimitrius Mognie, a Greek doctor and humanitarian aid worker, recently visited a hospital in Baghdad, where he described the shortage of antibiotics, bandages and even anesthetics. He was struck by the enormous number of children in the hospital beds and the heartbreaking lack of resources available for them. He witnessed doctors amputating a child’s limb using only local anesthetics; the doctors had to give the child a new shot every five minutes. Nearby lay a 9-year-old boy suffering from a horrible abdominal wound that he sustained when he “had picked up something that exploded” – clearly, an injury from a cluster bomb.
Meanwhile, on the urban battlefield, families with young children have been caught in the crossfire in Basra, Nasiriya, Najaf,and Baghdad. Eyewitness reports of civilians killed in those cities evoke memories of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the No Gun Ryi slaughter in Korea. George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have told us that few civilians will be killed. But the real face of this war is inescapable: hundreds, if not thousands, of civilian dead, and most of them children.
Maria Tomchick is co-editor and contributing writer for Eat the State!, a biweekly newspaper based in Seattle, Washington.
Bad time to be a former Saddam supporter.
[thumb=B]basra.JPG[/thumb]
An Iraqi suspected by residents of being a Fedayeen paramilitary loyal to Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) is beaten by local Iraqis on a street in the city of Basra, southern Iraq (news - web sites), April 8, 2003. British officials said a local 'Sheikh' would form the leadership in Basra province, as residents no longer under the yoke of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's loyalists complained of lawlessness. REUTERS/POOL/Jon Mills
More chicks (and children) who got in the way.
For whatever it may be worth, the author is Jewish.
‘A picture of killing inflicted on a sprawling city - and it grew more unbearable by the minute’]('A picture of killing inflicted on a sprawling city - and it grew more unbearable by the minute' | World news | The Guardian)
Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, 9 April 2003
…] Over at Kindi hospital, doctors had already passed their own point of exhaustion. By mid-afternoon all 12 operating theatres were in action, and still the wounded and dead kept coming in.
The doctors tried to maintain their clinical detachment, reeling off the kinds of injuries they were seeing - burnt faces, disembowelled torsos, fractured limbs and skulls, bodies coated with an all-over glaze of blood. They spoke about the technical difficulties of operating with fitful generators, and with their limited stocks of surgical and other supplies. They attempted to put a figure on the daily death toll - four or five, they said.
…] "It is very difficult to a see a child lying in front of you and I have seen three children.
“I keep seeing the faces of my own children in these children. It could be my kid. It could be my cousin, and still the Americans continue, and they don’t stop.”
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Imdad Ali: *
Bad time to be a former Saddam supporter.
[thumb=B]basra.JPG[/thumb]
An Iraqi suspected by residents of being a Fedayeen paramilitary loyal to Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) is beaten by local Iraqis on a street in the city of Basra, southern Iraq (news - web sites), April 8, 2003. British officials said a local 'Sheikh' would form the leadership in Basra province, as residents no longer under the yoke of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's loyalists complained of lawlessness. REUTERS/POOL/Jon Mills
[/QUOTE]
and we will see more of such incidents and mark my word, americans won't interfere. they won't take the risks of letting these supports live for another day. if people wants to get rid of them, americans will let them do it infront of their eyes.
this is what is call selective liberation for the chosen ones, only for those who are on your side. rest can go to hell like we care.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by EntityParadigm: *
and we will see more of such incidents and mark my word, americans won't interfere. they won't take the risks of letting these supports live for another day. if people wants to get rid of them, americans will let them do it infront of their eyes.
this is what is call selective liberation for the chosen ones, only for those who are on your side. rest can go to hell like we care.
[/QUOTE]
It's possible they won't interfer EntitiyPardigm. You might be right. I don't know.
I do know that the G.I.'s were letting some fighters go home if they laid down their arms
Possible those Iraqi's who are exacting revenge on Baath Party members are victims of the Baath party. Maybe even victims of the
very person they are taking revenge on. Perhaps the suspected Fadayeen would have been better off surrendering to the Brits or Americans.
Perhaps the lawlessness is to be expected and allowed for a short time to help diffuse the anger of the people.
Personally, I don't believe in an Eye for an Eye, but I also never lived under Saddam Hussein. So I'm not sure if I would be on my best behavior.
I doubt if the 20 year old G.I.'s even know how to handle the tension of the people. I'm not sure I would know what to do. Probobly if I butt in someone would kill me....
A rather compelling read by Julian Barnes:
Victory in just three weeks, relatively few western casualties and now, at last, even dancing on the streets. So, asks Julian Barnes, did those of us who opposed the Iraq conflict get it wrong?
This war was not worth a child’s finger, The Guardian, 11 April 2003
“Two children were killed when it exploded, Hamed said. His son’s stomach was cut open, spilling out his intestines. Ali lay in a bed at Kadhymia Hospital yesterday. Bandages covered his entire stomach and both thighs, which were cut up by the blast. A tube was stuck in his abdomen to drain blood.”
Grisly Results of U.S. Cluster Bombs](Newsday | Long Island's & NYC's News Source - Newsday) Newsday 15 Apr 03
By Thomas Frank STAFF CORRESPONDENT; Staff correspondent Craig Gordon in Qatar contributed to this story.
Baghdad - The little boy wailed and moaned and squirmed on the hospital bed stained with his own blood. A doctor struggled to hold a gauze bandage over the boy’s eyes, which no longer existed. Ali Mustapha had found a small cylindrical object on the street near his Baghdad home yesterday morning. He picked it up. He played with it. He had it in his hands and the object - a live explosive - literally blew up in his face.
At Kadhymia Hospital, Dr. Ausama Saadi’s diagnosis was blunt: “He will be blind for the rest of his life.” Ali is 4. Although combat in Baghdad is virtually over, carnage continues as civilians are cut, gouged and killed when unexploded munitions in city neighborhoods suddenly detonate, often in the hands of people who don’t know what they have innocently picked up. An alarming number of Iraqis being injured and killed are children, who are drawn to the small, grenade-like explosives that can look like toys, said doctors and parents.
“It doesn’t look like a bomb, and they start to play with it,” said Dr. Gelal Alta’ai at Kadhymia Hospital. The suffering and reports of explosives detonating in Baghdad’s neighborhoods have raised concerns among human rights groups that the United States fired scatter-shot rockets and artillery into heavily populated areas where their imprecise trajectories increase the possibility of civilian casualties. “These are not the kind of weapons you use in cities,” said Steve Goose, a weapons researcher for New York City-based Human Rights Watch.
The U.S. Central Command acknowledged yesterday in response to questions from Newsday that U.S. forces have hit urban areas of Baghdad with “cluster bombs,” which scatter hundreds of small “submunitions” in an area the size of a football field. A CentCom spokeswoman said that the cluster bombs were aimed at Iraqi missile systems and artillery and that “we had to use them in an urban environment because that was where Saddam Hussein put those weapons.” Human rights groups want cluster bombs banned because their hundreds of grenade-like explosives scatter widely, sometimes out of combat areas, and can linger for years, detonating unexpectedly.
“From a humanitarian perspective, you don’t use them, because they’re very hard to target,” Goose said. He also noted that they have a high failure rate - up to 25 percent - leaving hundreds of bomblets "lying on the ground acting like little landmines."In early April, the CentCom in Qatar began investigating reports that cluster bombs killed 11 civilians in Hillah, a city 60 miles south of Baghdad.
Goose said that before yesterday he had not seen or heard any evidence of the U.S. military using cluster bombs in Baghdad. Husain Hamed said one cluster bomb was fired into his Baghdad neighborhood. Four days ago, a group of children, including Hamed’s son, Ali, 10, started playing with what Hamed said turned out to be a small explosive, about the size of a medicine bottle with a hollowed-out bottom.
**Two children were killed when it exploded, Hamed said. His son’s stomach was cut open, spilling out his intestines. Ali lay in a bed at Kadhymia Hospital yesterday. Bandages covered his entire stomach and both thighs, which were cut up by the blast. A tube was stuck in his abdomen to drain blood. Another tube in his nostril feeds Ali, who cannot eat because his bowel is perforated. “There must be some information about bombs so children know not to use it,” Husain said. “Anyone can play with it. You can collect them. Suddenly, they will explode.” In another Baghdad neighborhood, Saef Sulaiman’s younger brother carried an explosive into the house from outside Friday. .. **Full Article](Newsday | Long Island's & NYC's News Source - Newsday)