By Robert Fisk - 01 April 2004

What has happened to the Coalition Provisional Authority, also known as the occupying power?

Things are getting worse, much worse in Iraq. Yesterday’s horrors proved that. Yet just a day earlier, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, America’s deputy director of military operations, assured us that there was only an “uptick” in violence in Iraq.

Not a sudden wave of violence, mark you, not a down-to-earth increase, not even a “spike” in violence - another of the general’s favourite expressions. No, just a teeny-weeny, ever-so small, innocent little “uptick”. In fact, he said it was a “slight uptick”.

Our hands were numb, recording all this, so swiftly did General Kimmitt take us through the little uptick.

By Robert Fisk - 01 April 2004

“The bodies were hanging upside down on each side of the bridge. They had no hands, no feet, one had no head.” My old Iraqi friend had been driving into Fallujah just after the massacre, the stoning, the burning. He was shaking as he told me what he saw. “They were hanging upside down above the highway, on the old railway bridge which bridge, now a road bridge. The people of Fallujah were just driving over the bridge as if nothing was happening, right past the bodies.” The bridge is on the west side of the Sunni Muslim city, across the Euphrates river, and the corpses had been tied to the girders about six feet above the road. “When we left, there were no helicopters, no police, no soldiers, it all seemed quite normal; except for the bodies. They were burnt brown. I couldn’t tell if they were men or women.”

In fact, there were four Western men slaughtered in Fallujah yesterday - all contractors for the Americans, some apparently armed - and they had been dragged from their cars, mutilated, stoned, burnt, beaten with iron pipes. One of them was decapitated, then dragged through the streets behind a car. What the Anglo-American occupation power later called a “particularly brutal” crime - a somewhat restrained comment in the face of such barbarity - was all too real on the videotapes filmed by Iraqi camera crews in Fallujah but which were not shown on Western television stations last night.