By Robert Fisk

6 May 2004 “The Independent” — The pictures are appalling, the words devastating. As a wounded Iraqi crawls from beneath a burning truck, an American helicopter pilot tells his commander that one of three men has survived his night air attack. “Someone wounded,” the pilot cries. Then he received the reply: “Hit him, hit the truck and him.” As the helicopter’s gun camera captures the scene on video, the pilot fires a 30mm gun at the wounded man, vaporising him in a second.

British and most European television stations censored the tape off the air last night on the grounds that the pictures were too terrible to show. But deliberately shooting a wounded man is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions and this extraordinary film of US air crews in action over Iraq is likely to create yet another international outcry.

Listen to the transcript - Real Video / Windows Media Player

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT
LOCATION: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2004/s1090643.htm
Broadcast: 20/04/2004 Iraq power handover ‘a fraud’

Reporter: Tony Jones

TONY JONES: Back now to the day’s developments in Israel and Iraq.

The assassination of Hamas leader Dr Abdel-Aziz Rantissi at the weekend has unleashed rage and fury on the streets of Gaza just days after President George W Bush backed Israel’s sovereignty over West Bank settlements in return for a total pull-out of settlers from the Gaza Strip.

In Iraq, meanwhile, troops from Spain are preparing to go home just as America has announced the death of its 700th soldier in fighting there.

Well, joining me now is Robert Fisk.

He’s a correspondent for the British newspaper the ‘Independent’ and is a 25-year veteran of reporting from the Middle East.

Robert Fisk, thanks for joining us.

ROBERT FISK, WRITER & JOURNALIST: Thank you.

TONY JONES: Let’s start with Iraq if we can and the immense problems the United States now faces in handing the country back to Iraqis.

Just to start with that, anyway.

The June 30th deadline now looks like it’s going to be postponed.

What will be the consequences if it is?

ROBERT FISK: Nothing.

The handover is basically a fraud.

The governing council, which is appointed by the Americans, and which is the Iraqi Government at the moment would merely be handing over to another group of American-picked Iraqis.

They’re not democratically elected, the new institution, whatever it is.

We don’t even know what it’s going to be.

I notice that when President Bush gave his press conference three days ago, he said that Mr Brahimi was working on that, referring to Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister who’s special envoy to Iraq for the UN’s Kofi Annan, but Mr Brahimi found that quite a surprise.

He’s not trying to put together a future government - he’s trying to arrange elections and that may not be until next year.

Even if there was a democratically elected government to hand over sovereignty to, which is there not, the sovereignty doesn’t mean anything because under the laws that Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Baghdad has already enacted for post June 30, all the Iraqi security forces will be commanded by United States officers, so that’s not a handover of sovereignty.

Bush’s War and the Lapdog Press Corps

By ROBERT FISK

Just shut up. That’s the new foreign policy line of our masters. When Senator Edward Kennedy dubbed Iraq “George Bush’s Vietnam”, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told him to be “a little more restrained and careful” in his comments. I recall that when the US commenced its bombing of Afghanistan, the White House spokesman claimed that some journalists were “asking questions that the American people wouldn’t want asked”. Back in the early 1980s, when I reported on the Iranian soldiers on a troop train to Tehran who were coughing Saddam’s mustard gas out of their lungs in blood and mucus, a Foreign Office official told my then editor on The Times that my dispatch was “not helpful”. In other words, stop criticising our ally, Saddam.

So maybe the policy has been around for quite a while. When the occupation authorities deliberately concealed the attacks against US troops after the start of the Iraq occupation last year, journalists who investigated this violence were told that they weren’t covering the big picture, that only small areas of Iraq were restive. And there was a lot of clucking of tongues when a few of us decided to take a close look at US proconsul Paul Bremer’s press laws last year. A whole team of “Coalition Provisional Authority” lawyers was set up to see how they could legalise the closure and censorship of Iraqi newspapers that “incited violence”. And whenever we raised questions about it, the CPA spokesman–and its current attendant lord, Dan Senor, used the same phrase last week–would announce that “we will not tolerate incitement to violence”.

Because I almost lost my own life in December 2001 I take a special interest in journalists - and their fate

By Robert Fisk - 03 April 2004

Yesterday morning, I sat down in a Baghdad home with a poor old man and his daughter who were mourning their adored son and brother who was killed by American soldiers. Now, you may ask why I do not write about Fallujah and the atrocities which occurred there three days ago: the cruel and atrocious murder of four Americans who were hauled, begging for their lives, from their two sports utility vehicles, burned, mutilated, dragged through the streets and then hanged naked - what was left of their bodies - from a decaying British railway bridge over the Euphrates river. The answer is simple. US proconsul Paul Bremer called their deaths “barbaric and inexcusable”. Paul Bremer was right. But their deaths were not inexplicable.

The old man was Abdul-Aziz al-Amairi - his daughter’s name is Sundus - and their son and brother was a journalist, a news cameraman whose brains I saw lying on the back seat of the car in which he, Ali Abdul Aziz, and his reporter colleague, Ali al-Khatib, were shot dead by US troops just over two weeks ago. Because I almost lost my own life on the Afghan border in December 2001, I take a special interest in such people - and their fate. They were journalists.

So here are a few facts. Two Thursdays ago, a rocket smashed into a hotel in southern Baghdad. The spanking new Arab news channel Arabia sent its crew to cover the story. The two Alis arrived with their driver, Abu Mariam, at the scene of the attack, parked their car 250m away and went up to speak to the US troops guarding the road. They were told they could film, but could do no “stand-uppers” - face-to-camera shots in front of the building. They completed their report, returned to their car and prepared to leave.

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.