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Friday, October 24, 2003
David Irving
comments: Fisk --
one of the greats MEET Robert Fisk
-- consistently one of the world's
greatest and bravest writers. Unlikely to
win the Noble Prize for Literature or any
other "meaningful" award; but able, I make
so bold as to say, to sleep with his
conscience untroubled each night.
A few months ago
he spoke at a university in the United
States. No US newspaper (to my knowledge)
carries his despatches, and yet over a
thousand students turned up to meet and
hear the British journalist in person.
What does that tell us about
the growing might of the Internet? And
about why the traditional enemy is taking
frantic steps to control it? 
David
Irving starts a new US tour this
Fall 2003. Locations include: Atlanta, New
Orleans, Houston, Arlington (TX), Oklahoma
City, Albuquerque, Tucson, Phoenix, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Portland (Oregon),
Moscow (Idaho), Sacramento, Las Vegas,
Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago,
Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville. The
theme is comparisons -- Hitler, Churchill,
Iraq, war crimes law, and Iraq.
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Eye
witness One, two, three,
what are they fighting for? The
worst problem facing US forces in Iraq may not
be armed resistance but a crisis of morale.
Robert Fisk reports on a near-epidemic of
indiscipline, suicides and loose talk By Robert Fisk I WAS in the police station in the town of
Fallujah when I realised the extent of the
schizophrenia. Captain Christopher Cirino of
the 82nd Airborne was trying to explain to me the
nature of the attacks so regularly carried out
against American forces in the Sunni Muslim Iraqi
town. His men were billeted in a former
presidential rest home down the road - "Dreamland",
the Americans call it - but this was not the extent
of his soldiers' disorientation. "The men we are
being attacked by," he said, "are Syrian-trained
terrorists and local freedom fighters." Come again?
"Freedom fighters." But that's what Captain Cirino
called them - and rightly so. Here's the reason. All American soldiers are
supposed to believe - indeed have to believe, along
with their President and his Defence Secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld - that Osama bin
Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring over
Iraq's borders from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (note
how those close allies and neighbours of Iraq,
Kuwait and Turkey are always left out of the
equation), are assaulting United States forces as
part of the "war on terror". Special forces
soldiers are now being told by their officers that
the "war on terror" has been transferred from
America to Iraq, as if in some miraculous way, 11
September 2001 is now Iraq 2003. Note too how the
Americans always leave the Iraqis out of the
culpability bracket - unless they can be described
as "Baath party remnants", "diehards" or
"deadenders" by the US proconsul, Paul
Bremer. Captain Cirino's
problem, of course, is that he knows part of the
truth. Ordinary Iraqis - many of them long-term
enemies of Saddam Hussein - are attacking
the American occupation army 35 times a day in
the Baghdad area alone. And Captain Cirino works
in Fallujah's local police station, where
America's newly hired Iraqi policemen are the
brothers and uncles and - no doubt - fathers of
some of those now waging guerrilla war against
American soldiers in Fallujah. Some of them, I
suspect, are indeed themselves the "terrorists".
So if he calls the bad guys "terrorists", the
local cops - his first line of defence - would
be very angry indeed. No wonder morale is low. No wonder the American
soldiers I meet on the streets of Baghdad and other
Iraqi cities don't mince their words about their
own government. US troops have been given orders
not to bad-mouth their President or Secretary of
Defence in front of Iraqis or reporters (who have
about the same status in the eyes of the occupation
authorities). But when I suggested to a group of US
military police near Abu Ghurayb they would be
voting Republican at the next election, they fell
about laughing. "We shouldn't be here and we should
never have been sent here," one of them told me
with astonishing candour. "And maybe you can tell
me: why were we sent here?"  Little wonder, then, that Stars &
Stripes, the American military's own newspaper,
reported this month that one third of the soldiers
in Iraq suffered from low morale. And is it any
wonder, that being the case, that US forces in Iraq
are shooting down the innocent, kicking and
brutalising prisoners, trashing homes and -
eyewitness testimony is coming from hundreds of
Iraqis - stealing money from houses they are
raiding? No, this is not Vietnam - where the
Americans sometimes lost 3,000 men in a month - nor
is the US army in Iraq turning into a rabble. Not
yet. And they remain light years away from the
butchery of Saddam's henchmen. But human-rights
monitors, civilian occupation officials and
journalists - not to mention Iraqis themselves -
are increasingly appalled at the behaviour of the
American military occupiers. Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints,
who overtake convoys under attack - or who merely
pass the scene of an American raid - are being
gunned down with abandon. US official "inquiries"
into these killings routinely result in either
silence or claims that the soldiers "obeyed their
rules of engagement" - rules that the Americans
will not disclose to the public.  
THE ROT comes from the top. Even during the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, US forces declined
to take responsibility for the innocents they
killed. "We do not do body counts," General
Tommy Franks announced. So there was no
apology for the 16 civilians killed at Mansur when
the "Allies" - note how we Brits get caught up in
this misleading title - bombed a residential suburb
in the vain hope of killing Saddam. When US special
forces raided a house in the very same area four
months later - hunting for the very same Iraqi
leader - they killed six civilians, including a
14-year-old boy and a middle-aged woman, and only
announced, four days later, that they would hold an
"inquiry". Not an investigation, you understand,
nothing that would suggest there was anything wrong
in gunning down six Iraqi civilians; and in due
course the "inquiry" was forgotten - as it was no
doubt meant to be - and nothing has been heard of
it again.
Again, during the invasion, the Americans
dropped hundreds of cluster bombs on villages
outside the town of Hillah. They left behind a
butcher's shop of chopped-up corpses. Film of
babies cut in half during the raid was not even
transmitted by the Reuters crew in Baghdad. The
Pentagon then said there were "no indications"
cluster bombs had been dropped at Hillah - even
though Sky TV found some unexploded and brought
them back to Baghdad. I first came across this absence of remorse - or
rather absence of responsibility - in a slum suburb
of Baghdad called Hayy al-Gailani. Two men had run
a new American checkpoint - a roll of barbed wire
tossed across a road before dawn one morning in
July - and US troops had opened fire at the car.
Indeed, they fired so many bullets that the vehicle
burst into flames. And while the dead or dying men
were burned inside, the Americans who had set up
the checkpoint simply boarded their armoured
vehicles and left the scene. They never even
bothered to visit the hospital mortuary to find out
the identities of the men they killed - an obvious
step if they believed they had killed "terrorists"
- and inform their relatives. Scenes like this are
being repeated across Iraq daily. Which is why Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and
other humanitarian organisations are protesting
ever more vigorously about the failure of the US
army even to count the numbers of Iraqi dead, let
alone account for their own role in killing
civilians. "It is a tragedy that US soldiers have
killed so many civilians in Baghdad," Human Rights
Watch's Joe Stork said. "But it is really
incredible that the US military does not even count
these deaths." Human Rights Watch has counted 94
Iraqi civilians killed by Americans in the capital.
The organisation also criticised American forces
for humiliating prisoners, not least by their habit
of placing their feet on the heads of prisoners.
Some American soldiers are now being trained in
Jordan - by Jordanians - in the "respect" that
should be accorded to Iraqi civilians and about the
culture of Islam. About time. But on the ground in Iraq, Americans have a
licence to kill. Not a single soldier has been
disciplined for shooting civilians - even when the
fatality involves an Iraqi working for the
occupation authorities. - No action has been taken, for instance, over
the soldier who fired a single shot through the
window of an Italian diplomat's car, killing his
translator, in northern Iraq.
- Nor against the soldiers of the 82nd
Airborne who gunned down 14 Sunni Muslim
protesters in Fallujah in April. (Captain Cirino
was not involved.)
- Nor against the troops who shot dead 11 more
protesters in Mosul. Sometimes, the evidence of
low morale mounts over a long period. In one
Iraqi city, for example, the "Coalition
Provisional Authority" - which is what the
occupation authorities call themselves - have
instructed local money changers not to give
dollars for Iraqi dinars to occupation soldiers:
too many Iraqi dinars had been stolen by troops
during house raids.
Repeatedly, in Baghdad, Hillah, Tikrit, Mosul
and Fallujah Iraqis have told me that they were
robbed by American troops during raids and at
checkpoints. Unless there is a monumental
conspiracy on a nationwide scale by Iraqis, some of
these reports must bear the stamp of truth. Then there was the case of the Bengal tiger. A
group of US troops entered the Baghdad zoo one
evening for a party of sandwiches and beer. During
the party, one of the soldiers decided to pet the
tiger who - being a Bengal tiger - sank his teeth
into the soldier. The Americans then shot the tiger
dead. The Americans promised an "inquiry" - of
which nothing has been heard since. Ironically, the
one incident where US forces faced disciplinary
action followed an incident in which a US
helicopter crew took a black religious flag from a
communications tower in Sadr City in Baghdad. The
violence that followed cost the life of an Iraqi
civilian.  Suicides among US troops in Iraq have risen in
recent months - up to three times the usual rate
among American servicemen. At least 23 soldiers are
believed to have taken their lives since the
Anglo-American invasion and others have been
wounded in attempting suicide. As usual, the US
army only revealed this statistic following
constant questioning. The daily attacks on
Americans outside Baghdad - up to 50 in a night -
go, like the civilian Iraqi dead, unrecorded.
Travelling back from Fallujah to Baghdad after dark
last month, I saw mortar explosions and tracer fire
around 13 American bases - not a word of which was
later revealed by the occupation authorities. At
Baghdad airport last month, five mortar shells fell
near the runway as a Jordanian airliner was
boarding passengers for Amman. I saw this attack
with my own eyes. That same afternoon, General
Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US officer in
Iraq, claimed he knew nothing about the attack,
which - unless his junior officers are slovenly -
he must have been well aware of. But can we expect anything else of an army that
can wilfully mislead soldiers into writing
"letters" to their home town papers in the US about
improvements in Iraqi daily life. "The quality of life and security for the
citizens has been largely restored, and we are a
large part of why it has happened," Sergeant
Christopher Shelton of the 503rd Airborne Infantry
Regiment bragged in a letter from Kirkuk to the
Snohomish County Tribune. "The majority of the city
has welcomed our presence with open arms." Only it
hasn't. And Sergeant Shelton didn't write the
letter. Nor did Sergeant Shawn Grueser of West
Virginia. Nor did Private Nick Deaconson. Nor eight
other soldiers who supposedly wrote identical
letters to their local papers. The "letters" were
distributed among soldiers, who were asked to sign
if they agreed with its contents. But is this, perhaps, not part of the fantasy
world inspired by the right-wing ideologues in
Washington who sought this war - even though most
of them have never served their country in uniform.
They dreamed up the "weapons of mass destruction"
and the adulation of American troops who would
"liberate" the Iraqi people. Unable to provide fact
to fiction, they now merely acknowledge that the
soldiers they have sent into the biggest rat's nest
in the Middle East have "a lot of work to do", that
they are - this was not revealed before or during
the invasion - "fighting the front line in the war
on terror".  What influence, one might ask, have the
Christian fundamentalists had on the American army
in Iraq? For even if we ignore the Rev Franklin
Graham, who has described Islam as "a very evil
and wicked religion" before he went to lecture
Pentagon officials - what is one to make of the
officer responsible for tracking down Osama bin
Laden, Lieutenant-General William "Jerry"
Boykin, who told an audience in Oregon that
Islamists hate the US "because we're a Christian
nation, because our foundation and our roots are
Judeo-Christian and the enemy is a guy called
Satan". Recently promoted to deputy under-secretary
of defence for intelligence, Boykin went on to say
of the war against Mohammed Farrah Aidid in
Somalia - in which he participated - that "I knew
my God was bigger than his - I knew that my God was
a real God and his was an idol". Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld said of
these extraordinary remarks that "it doesn't look
like any rules were broken". We are now told that
an "inquiry" into Boykin's comments is underway -
an "inquiry" about as thorough, no doubt, as those
held into the killing of civilians in Baghdad. Weaned on this kind of nonsense, however, is it
any surprise that American troops in Iraq
understand neither their war nor the people whose
country they are occupying? Terrorists or freedom
fighters? What's the difference? 
... on this
website
Robert Fisk reports from
Baghdad 'They're
getting better,' Chuck said approvingly. 'That
one hit the runway'
Comments by Stephen Sniegoski: -
The hunt
for weapons of mass destruction yields --
nothing
-
Official Is
Prepared To Address Issue Of Iraqi
Deception
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