Monday, May 3rd, 2004

Listen to the report from Free Speech Radio News’ Aaron Glantz on democracynow.org

U.S. forces pull out of Fallujah following a brutal U.S. siege which killed some 600 Iraqis, wounded 1,000 and left some 60,000 people displaced. We go to Fallujah to get a report from Free Speech Radio News’ Aaron Glantz who describes dozens of bodies buried in the city’s soccer stadium after US forces blocked roads heading toward the cemetery. As the world focused its attention on allegations of torture and human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of U.S. forces, violence and bloodshed continued throughout the country.

A total of 11 U.S. troops were killed in four separate attacks Sunday. A mortar attack on a US base near Ramadi in al-Anbar province killed 6 soldiers and wounded 30, many of them seriously, so that the death toll will probably rise. Another five died in attacks in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Amara.

April marked the bloodiest month in Iraq since the invasion with a total of 136 US soldiers killed and over 1,300 Iraqis.

Meanwhile, the former Iraqi general reportedly chosen to head a new force in Fallujah, Gen. Jasim Saleh, entered the Sunni town with 200 Iraqi peacekeepers Friday after US forces pulled out following weeks of bloody fighting. Masked gunmen in Falluja celebrated the US withdrawal. Marine officers warned they would give Gen Saleh only a few days to disarm them.

Saleh served in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Republican Guard in the 1980s and later headed Saddam’s infantry forces.

But this weekend, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, Gen. Richard Myers, contradicted officers on the ground by denying that Saleh has been given control of Fallujah. Myers told Fox News that Saleh was still being considered for the position and he did not believe he would pass the vetting process for taking command.

For weeks, Fallujah was under a siege by US troops as reports emerged of a massacre of Iraqis at the hands the US military. US aircraft and artillery reepeatedly bombarded the town. Doctors there say at least 600 people were killed and over 1,000 injured. Local hospitals have reported the majority of the dead are women, children and the elderly. More than 60,000 women and children fled the city during a brief ceasefire but the US blocked any men of military age from leaving. Dozens of bodies have been buried in the city’s soccer stadium after US forces blocked roads heading toward the cemetery.

The slowly swelling crowd of irate Israelis began arriving not long after Mordechai Vanunu’s supporters had strung themselves in an almost festive line across the road from Ashkelon prison at eight o’clock that morning. Separated only by a thin blue line of police, several armed with assault weapons, the two groups eyed each other with the edgy apprehension nurtured over nearly two decades of waiting for this day.

While working as a technician inside Israel’s highly secret nuclear weapons facility in Dimona, Vanunu had gradually come to feel the world should know what his country had long denied, that it had clandestinely developed the capacity to build and deliver a nuclear arsenal capable of massive destruction throughout the entire Middle East. After considerable soul-searching, he brought his story, coupled with photographs secretly taken at Dimona, to England, where the “London Times” brought his almost surreal tale to light in 1986. The story caused an instantaneous international furor, sparking both denials in Tel Aviv and demands from nuclear weapons experts to visit Dimona, where the veracity of Vanunu’s story could be verified. Israel refused every request. Shortly before the story broke, an Israeli agent playing on his isolation and fear lured Vanunu to Rome. Kidnapped in the Eternal City and secretly spirited to Israel, he was tried and sentenced to 18 years of solitary confinement. In 1998, under mounting international pressure, Vanunu was removed from segregation. Throughout his years in prison, he never wavered in his conviction that his actions were justified, and he developed a far-flung network of sympathetic supporters with whom he frequently corresponded. International interest in his case grew, cresting on April 21, the day of his release, when more than eighty supporters from around the globe, including his adoptive parents, Mary and Nick Eoloff of Minnesota, gathered across from the heavy blue and white prison gate, holding banners, singing, and anxiously awaiting his appearance.

By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness
April 30, May 3

I’ve spent the last week bouncing back and forth between refugee camps and the University. With all the fighting in Fallujah, many families have fled the city and come to Baghdad. Most are housed in private homes, but the Red Crescent Society has set up a tent camp inside the city in an area called Ghadaa and there is also a bomb shelter housing many families that I was able to visit. We’ve gone several times to play games with the kids, interview the families, deliver toys and on one occasion, in the words of my British friend Jo Wilding, I came along for a “knickers” delivery to the woman at the shelter. Many told us stories of the kinds of “collateral damage” that are occurring inside Fallujah, with women, children, and the elderly being injured or killed. Anyone who ventured out of their home to look for food was at risk of being targeted. Two of the families at the shelter told us that ambulances were being shot at, which matched two different eye-witness accounts by human rights workers. They also told us that a private hospital had been bombed and the government hospital near the bridge was surrounded by Americans so no one could go near it. The only one bringing aid in, according to one family we talked to, was the Mujahedeen.

Over the past week, the fighting in Fallujah intensified and in one of the daily press conference held every afternoon (which some friends call the Five o’clock Follies) General Kimmitt was asked why didn’t the American troops just pull out of Fallujah? People have been asking this question for days and finally last night Kimmitt responded by saying that the only security being offered to the people of Fallujah is being provided by the Americans in the Coalition-controlled areas of the town. To pull back would be to give Fallujah back to the insurgents (and by this he means mostly Baathist and foreign fighters despite the fact that most of the evidence indicates that a large part of the resistance is indigenous and tribal … these are local people fighting for their town). In this, is the root of the problem, to pull out is viewed as a humiliating defeat for the Americans and a win for the insurgents. That seems to be unconscionable to people the military minds that are running this campaign in Fallujah. So much of this war is wrapped up in a pathological desire to never lose face. Winning should not be about who is left standing at the end. It should be about who protects the most lives. These people, and I would include both the Americans and the insurgents in this statement, are operating at the level of the kindergarten sandbox.

In the midst of all this I’m still teaching English to students at the University of Baghdad and on April 21st I gave my students a written exam (incidentally my most interesting reason from a student about why he had missed the test was that he had been delayed at an American checkpoint. I toyed with the idea of telling him, “Oh yeah, right! I’ve heard that one before!”). I’m new to this teaching thing and so it didn’t occur to me how long it would take me to actually grade a test that was filled with mostly essay-type questions (somewhere in the range of 15 hours). Much of the time I spent complaining about how they don’t pay me enough for this job (they talk of giving me something in the range of 2000 Iraqi Dinars per lecture … I have four lectures per day, two days a week so I would, in theory, rakes in a whopping $11 each week … If I ever end up seeing any of this money I will probably just donate it to their book fund).