SwiftVets.com

[Craig]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4118292,00.html

Iraq Desert Bombing Video Shows Carnage


Saturday May 22, 2004 1:31 AM

By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Fragments of musical instruments, tufts of women's hair, and a large blood stain are among the scenes in Associated Press Television News film of a destroyed house that survivors say U.S. planes bombed during a wedding party.

It is the first known footage from the site of Wednesday's attack, which killed up to 45 people, mostly women and children from the Bou Fahad tribe in Mogr el-Deeb, a desert village on the Syrian border.

The U.S. military has said the target was a suspected safehouse for foreign fighters from Syria and denied Friday that children were killed in the airstrikes.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters in Baghdad that U.S. troops who reported back from the operation ``told us they did not shoot women and children.''

``There were a number of woman, a handful of women, I think the number was four to six, caught up in the engagement. They may have died from some of the fire that came from the aircraft,'' Kimmitt said.

But an Associated Press reporter in the Ramadi area, at least 275 miles east of Mogr el-Deeb, was able to identify at least 10 of the bodies as those of children.

At the Bou Fahad cemetery outside Ramadi, where the tribe is based, each of the 28 fresh graves contain one to three corpses, mostly of mothers and their young children.

Relatives said they include those of 2-year-old Kholood and 1-year-old Anoud, daughters of Amal Rikad, who was killed; of 2-year-old Raad and 1-year-old Ra'ed - whose headless body was found near his house - sons of Fatima Madhi, who was killed; of Saad, 10, Faisal, 7, Anoud, 6, Fasila, 5, Kholood, 4, and Inad, 3 - children of Mohammed and Morifa Rikad, who were killed.

There also are photo images of dead children, but it was not possible to determine if those victims were already accounted for by relatives.

In Washington, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers told Congress that ``we feel at this point very confident that this was a legitimate target, probably foreign fighters'' who may have ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian wanted for allegedly organizing attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq on behalf of al-Qaida.

``The intelligence right now and what we found at the site, which were weapons and the sort of things you might not expect at a wedding party, were not consistent with that. They were consistent with folks trying to come into the country, across the desert, in vehicles, staying for the night, trying to make it into Iraq.''

Several shotguns, handguns, Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns were found at the site, according to Kimmitt.

But Bou Fahad tribesmen denied that any foreign fighters were among them. They consider the desolate border area part of their territory and follow their goats, sheep and cattle there to graze. In the springtime they leave spacious homes in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and roam the desert.

Smuggling livestock into Syria is also part of a herdsman's life, although no one in the tribe acknowledged that.

Weddings are often marked in Iraq with celebratory gunfire, but survivors insisted no weapons were fired Wednesday - despite speculation by Iraqi officials that this drew a mistaken American attack.

The first bomb hit the huge goat-hair tent - where male guests were said to be sleeping - at about 2:45 a.m. Wednesday. The barrage didn't stop until sunrise, witnesses said. Women and children were in an adjacent one-story house and the men went to their nearby homes, they said.

After the first missile, Hamdan Khalaf ran in panic and hid in a grassy area.

``In the morning, we went back to the hill and saw people torn apart, attacked by the plane,'' Khalaf, who was not wounded, told APTN.

``We pulled them out of here,'' another man told APTN, standing on a pile of stones as he picked up a stained green cloth that looked like part of a young man's shirt. A severed arm lay in the rubble. ``We took them to hospital - straight to the fridge,'' the unidentified man said.

An angry voice in the background of the tape denounced President Bush. ``This is his terrorism,'' the voice said.

The body of what survivors said was the wedding's cameraman was pulled out of the debris Thursday.

The footage also showed women in colorful clothes sifting through the wreckage and carrying away blankets and other goods. Pieces of rockets and bullet casings were strewn across the sandy plain, as were pots and pans and a satellite dish. Partly charred pickup trucks and a water tanker stood in the desert.

The attack left few survivors. About a dozen wounded were taken to the town of Qaem, about 140 miles northwest of Ramadi and 130 miles north of Mogr el-Deeb.

Witnesses, interviewed Thursday by AP in Ramadi, said revelers at the wedding party began worrying when they heard aircraft overhead at about 9 p.m. Tuesday. Then came military vehicles, which stopped about two miles away from the village and switched off their headlights. The planes were still overhead at 11 p.m, so the hosts told the band to stop playing and everyone went to bed.

About four hours later, airstrikes began and continued until dawn when two helicopters landed and about 40 soldiers searched the house where the women had stayed and a second, vacant house. Soon after, the two houses were blown up. Some witnesses said the houses were attacked by helicopters; others said Americans detonated them with explosives.

Kimmitt confirmed that the operation was an air and ground assault. ``Those people on the ground identified no children as part of that location that were killed,'' he said, adding that they reported only adult deaths.

He also referred to the APTN video, shot Thursday in Mogr el-Deeb, as well as separate APTN footage from Wednesday in Ramadi that showed a headless body of a child and other bodies of children.

``What we saw in those APTN videos were substantially inconsistent with the reports we received from the unit that conducted the operation,'' Kimmitt said. ``We're now trying to figure out why there's an inconsistency.

``We're keeping an open mind as to exactly what happened on the ground. That's why we're continuing to try to gather all the facts; that's why we're not ruling out anything based on information coming forward,'' he added.

[colmurph]

[hist/student]

unabashed comprehensive retraction

[Craig]

[mikest]

[fortdixlover]

Craig and other left aficionados: I challenge you to support this statement in writing:

"Saddam was a monster, whose government was guilty of crimes against humanity on a mass scale, and Bush did humanity a favor by removing him from power."

Saddam's mass graves
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent/2785095.stm

As coalition forces approach Baghdad, BBC Correspondent's John Sweeney reveals even more gruesome evidence of Saddam's tyrannical regime.

You could not get two more different witnesses to the true nature of Saddam's regime.

A former Iraqi colonel and a tomb-raider.

Both men have revealed details of two separate mass graves.

They insist these graves conceal bodies of defenceless civilians murdered by Saddam's forces.

The colonel - anonymous for security reasons - defected from Iraq in early 2003. His body is scarred by horrific torture.

He says he saw army bulldozers bury people - dead and alive - in a pit dug in a long traffic island in Al Hayaniya, a suburb of Basra.

This mass burial took place in 1991, when the mainly Shia people of Basra staged an uprising against Saddam's regime in the wake of the American "100 hours to free Kuwait".

The colonel said: "Basra was assigned to Ali Hassan Al-Majid" - Saddam's cousin, known as "Chemical Ali".

"He didn't try to interrogate people. He would round up 20 or 30 people and murder them on the spot. He enjoyed killing people.

He recalled what happened in a poison gas attack against a Kurdish village: "They removed the corpses and dug a big hole and buried them in it.

"Then they brought some people alive and pushed them into the hole and buried them alive using army bulldozers.

"If they thought someone was in the uprising, they would bring the mother over and kill her and bury her here."

The colonel drew a precise map of the mass grave location.

He indicated it was on the traffic island in Al Hayaniya, on the road towards Sa'ad square in Basra.

Criticism is treason

The tomb-raider and his friends would make a bit of money from robbing Sumerian archaeological sites near the city of Ur, digging for gold bracelets and ancient artefacts.

They found a modern grave, the corpses still with skin, hair and shreds of Arabic dress.

He said: "The skulls had holes in the back of the head, as if they had been shot."

He too drew the precise area of a mass grave.

He estimated between 150 and 250 bodies had been buried there.

He believed the dead were kinsmen Marsh Arabs who had been killed after the failed uprising in 1991.

He mourned Saddam's destruction of his home, saying: "The process of draining the marshes started in 1994, until they disappeared completely by the end of the 90s.

"No-one can say a word against the regime in Iraq. Any criticism is interpreted as treason by the regime and therefore no-one can say a word."

Cried till she died

But why don't people tell foreign journalists inside Iraq about mass graves, torture or talk to the UN weapons inspectors?

The colonel said Saddam's secret police used the threat of torture of family members to keep mouths shut.

He said he was tortured after his parents-in-law fled the country, his flesh scarred for life and his toenails ripped out.


Marsh Arabs' lives were devastated by the end of the 90s.
But, far worse for him to bear, was his pregnant wife being so badly beaten up that she lost her unborn baby.

The colonel was interrogated at the Al-Hakimiya underground prison in Baghdad.

He described the evil place: "Everything is dark red. It's very intimidating and affects you both psychologically and physically.

"All I could hear was people crying for help and begging for mercy but no-one did anything to help them.

"The crying was disturbing at first but you soon get used to it.

"What was very disturbing was the cries of a woman, even though it was a male prison. She cried until she died.

"The screaming was deafening. Are you surprised that people are frightened to talk to the inspectors?"


-----------

Mass Graves Testify to Saddam's Evil

http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/03/16/World/Mass-Graves.Testify.To.Saddams.Evil-621193.shtml

By John M. Powers

Allied forces driving toward Berlin at the end of World War II discovered the Nazi death camps that contained the corpses and barely living remains of Jews and other enemies of national socialism. When the scale of brutality and murder carefully was laid bare, filmed and documented, a deeply shocked world promised, "Never again!"

But within only a few years the Chinese communists were murdering millions of "small landlords." In the 1970s, Pol Pot succeeded in killing two-thirds of the Cambodian population. Countless dead filled the countryside of the former Yugoslavia, and in 1994 militant Hutus murdered as many as a million Tutsis and Hutu moderates within only three months, supposedly protected by the French government - which, in fact, withdrew its troops - and ignored by the United States and the United Nations.

Now another pandemic of mass murder is being documented, recorded and widely ignored. This time the perpetrator is Saddam Hussein, whose Ba'athist Party was based on that of the Nazis, and accounts of its killing efficiency continue to flow to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) reports that since Saddam was ousted 270 sites of mass graves have been reported. These contain an unknown number of Iraqis, Iranian prisoners of war, Iraqi Kurds and Kuwaiti prisoners among the long list of those Saddam tortured and killed. British Prime Minister Tony Blair puts the remains in mass graves at 400,000 so far.

When representatives from USAID, the U.S. Army and a host of human-rights organizations are able fully to begin investigations in force, the nature of the crimes against the Iraqi people will be seen in full. It is a massive undertaking.

Melissa Connor, an archaeological consultant to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which lends its support and expertise to investigations of crimes against humanity, has worked as a forensic archaeologist in the mass-graves investigations in Bosnia and Rwanda. Connor gives Insight an idea of what investigators must do to uncover the bodies of Saddam's victims. She explains that such graves are found by analyzing satellite and aerial photos that show disturbed ground or by interviewing witnesses to the killings. USAID indicated in its report on mass graves in Iraq that in some cases executioners have come forward to help find the killing grounds. Sometimes, Connor adds, the bodies are not fully buried and so quite easily found.

Once a mass grave is identified, Connor stresses, there is prework that must be accomplished before shovel is put to ground. A decision must be made as to the goal of the exhumation. Will it be uncovered to return the remains of loved ones to families? Or for advocacy reasons or to help prosecute the guilty? According to USAID, all of these are goals in Iraq [see sidebar, p. 38].

Once such questions are answered, Connor says, the size of the grave must be determined. She says investigators do this by using imaging technologies or by digging a trench to determine the depth and configuration of the burial. According to the USAID report, "Some graves hold a few dozen bodies - their arms lashed together and the bullet holes in the backs of skulls testimony to their execution. Other graves go on for hundreds of meters, densely packed with thousands of bodies."

Connor points out that everything must be documented in detail for the purposes of evidence, especially if a war-crimes indictment is anticipated. If the remains are skeletal, Connor says, the examination will be anthropological in nature, but if they are "fleshed" there might be an autopsy. During this stage of investigation the cause of death is found. Connor comments that when the victim has been murdered with a high-caliber machine gun it is quite obvious because bones are completely shattered. Spraying civilians with machine-gun fire was a method used by Saddam's henchmen - but more on that later.

Once all the evidence is collected, families can begin to identify remains and take their loved ones home for proper burial, according to their custom, says Connor. Identification occurs much the same way as the finding of the graves. Eyewitness accounts of who was where and when are helpful, says Connor. Clothing, artifacts such as watches or cigarettes, and sometimes even identification cards also help to connect the disappeared with their families. Connor comments that in these situations families of the dead are "sharing with you one of the defining moments in their lives." And the job is enormous. According to Connor, "In Iraq it's going to be an overwhelming process" because the remains in these mass graves are not only those of Iraqis but also of Iranians and Kuwaitis.

William Haglund, a forensic anthropologist and director of the international forensic program for PHR, is not optimistic about families finding their loved ones. He has toured Iraq to assess the capacity for handling investigation of the mass graves. He says many of the bodies are so decomposed that there are no fingerprints and warns that there are few dental records in Iraq. This makes DNA analysis the best way to identify the bodies, but Iraq has no capacity to do such work, according to Haglund. He sees a long road to finding closure.

"The scope of the problem is immense. ... [There are] an estimated 300,000 missing people," says Haglund. "Easily, this is a 50-year job."

In addition to the challenges of the investigation, USAID says in its report, many of Saddam's supporters and those who carried out the murders have threatened the organizations attempting to investigate. But despite the threats and dangers, USAID insists, whenever a mass grave is discovered a team of 20 to 30 experts will be housed on-site for up to six weeks for a thorough inquiry.

The investigators will expose the true nature of what these disappeared Iraqis experienced in their last days. For instance, many of those murdered in the north of Iraq in 1988 were subjected to nerve and mustard gas. Haglund investigated the aftermath of the gassings and explains the way the Iraqi Kurds died. Once the gas is ingested there is "difficulty breathing, burns on the skin ... an agonizing way to die," he says.

Margaret Samuels, a social worker by training and clinical coordinator at the Yale University School of Medicine Child Study Center, helped as a psychosocial worker in Bosnia, Kosovo and now, Iraq, counseling families of the victims of mass murder. To help families who still hold out hope that their loved ones are alive, Samuels attempts to prepare them for the horror when they visit the graves or when identifying a loved one. She tries to convey that they will be looking at bones with remnants of clothing. If fleshed, the bodies will have the stench of death and sometimes be bloated or mutilated. She says she also attempts to keep the children of these families occupied so they are not exposed to the gruesome display.

In her line of work Samuels hears the firsthand accounts of families still caught in the pain of not knowing what happened to their loved ones. She describes seeing a list of prisoners posted on the walls of one of Saddam's prisons, in front of which throngs of Iraqis looked for the names of the missing. She also met with former prisoners who told her of their time in Saddam's prisons. One man in particular broke down in tears as he described the emotional and physical torture he survived. Samuels says many of the reports of torture she heard involved beatings, electrocutions and such mutilation as cutting off hands or surgically removing the ears of army deserters.

There was no end to the gruesome creativity of Saddam's henchmen. As reported by Insight's Timothy W. Meier, Saddam's methods included using hammers to break bones, ripping out fingernails, amputating limbs with a chain saw, crucifixion, throwing live victims in acid baths and ovens, cutting loose wild dogs to attack victims, raping women in the presence of their children and husbands, cutting off a ***** or a breast, and stripping children naked and forcing their parents to watch as they were stung by hornets and scorpions [see "Horror Stories," May 13-26, 2003]. The graves contain evidence of these and other sadistic crimes.

Some of Saddam's victims escaped to tell their tales on the day his statue was torn down in Baghdad. The USAID report contains three survivor accounts from mass executions outside Mahawil in the south of Iraq. The survivors all describe being taken into custody without a reason being given. They describe seeing women and children also in custody, all of them haphazardly blindfolded. Once they were herded into holding areas they could see a pile of tires set on fire and were ordered to run past these. Some of the women, children and elderly men were tripped or fell near the fire and were unceremoniously beaten to death with pipes or thrown into the blazing tires to burn alive. All of the survivors who escaped their would-be executioners had been shot and partially buried, crawling away to their homes under cover of dark and living thereafter in hiding.

The experience can be overwhelming for both families of victims and investigators of these crimes, Samuels says. It is "almost impossible to move on until some of these things are processed," she says, and almost the whole of Iraq is being affected by the ongoing uncovering of Saddam's atrocities.

Jim Prince is president of the Democracy Council, which promotes democratic institutions in the developing world, and has worked in Iraq. He tells Insight about his experiences at the mass graves of Iraq, describing the scenes of chaos and pain as families uncovered the dead. "It was horrible," Prince says. "Right after the uprising in northern Iraq a lot of relatives who heard about the mass graves ... would go [to the sites] and start digging with their hands and become a mess. You'd have bones and clothing everywhere and people screaming." Prince continued, "The first time I went it was very windy and we were getting people's hair in our mouths and eyes. In the open fields they were just pawing at the earth to try and match up bones and pictures. ... It's not something that leaves you quickly."

Prince also visited the torture chambers with victims, and remembers: "To me it became intensely personal. I was looking at somebody that experienced this." He says it changed his mind about the war in Iraq. Prior to seeing Saddam's legacy of brutality firsthand, he thought a peaceful resolution to the Iraq crisis had been possible, but after seeing the evidence he had a change of heart. He describes why:

"You come away from these fields and torture chambers - the senselessness of it - having seen pure evil and knowing that to do nothing in the face of such evil is to perpetuate it. It's not a question of weapons of mass destruction, it's a question of evil, and if you let it continue, you have to take responsibility for what's happening. You can't just turn a blind eye."

John M. Powers is a writer for Insight.
email the author

[sparky]

I just LOVE it when conservatives decide that human rights isn't for sissies! Funny what they'll do to save face after a fraudulent war and an approaching election.

I mean, it's not like any of them gave a **** when it happened. If you want to see who gave a crap about Saddam's nerve gas back in the 80's, it's the very groups that disgust conservatives like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Human Rights Commission.

It's public record. Just go look at a newspaper right after it happened.

[Marine4life]

OOPS!!! Collateral damage, that never happens in war. The USS Cole was no accident, nor the WTC. Sorry hard to find mercy in my heart. I forgot about Clintons Somalia experiment, how many unarmed Marines died in that one? Many more military people died under Clintons rein than Bush's to this date and he didn't even declare a war.
_________________
Helicopter Marine Attack Squadron 169 which is now HMLA-169. They added Huey's to compliment the Cobra effectiveness. When I served we just had Snakes.

[mikest]

[hist/student]

unabashed comprehensive retraction

[Marine4life]

Yes Mikest you can go to the Government and ask for the statistics and they will supply them, us.gov probably would help you too. As for the mercy part that remains unchanged, you see just as was in Nam the enemy dressed in many forms even as civillians. The same is true in Iraq. Those who might wait to see if that was a wedding could very well be added to the list of dead. You see these people don't conform to the liberal logic, lets just have a big hug. Now what kind of a wedding has the weapons that they found in a country that weapons are banned. In a time of war you are the enemy if you are armed with the weapons of that country. As I said no mercy from me. And I nor would I expect my CIC to appologize to terrorists.
_________________
Helicopter Marine Attack Squadron 169 which is now HMLA-169. They added Huey's to compliment the Cobra effectiveness. When I served we just had Snakes.

[mikest]

[Marine4life]

I am not a lost cause mikey, I am like many that are sick of you liberals terrorist huggers trying to give away our way of life. In Colton , Ca today 4 men tried to rob a store owned by a mother and son, they attacked the mother and the son shot three of them killing one. The police stance is that they had the right to self defense. I suppose you would like to jail that son and hug the criminals. We are at war get that through your thick liberal grape. Those people would kill you on the spot if you showed up at that so called wedding. Us military Vets were taught that it is the enemy or us that is essential for survival, and I for sure don't want my son to have second thoughts over there. That weak line of thought will send my son home in a bodybag. As far as remorse, Vets don't have any reason for remorse, we do what we do to ensure that you have the right to complain about us. At one point I did have some respect for you but you have destroyed that thought. May I suggest a more peacefull place if you don't have the stomach for active war, CANADA. By the way I do have room for sympathy, it starts with the families of the USS Cole, Somalia, 9-11, and for the soldiers that perished in Iraq, not for the enemy.
_________________
Helicopter Marine Attack Squadron 169 which is now HMLA-169. They added Huey's to compliment the Cobra effectiveness. When I served we just had Snakes.

[mikest]

Wow, what a stupid post. You lost respect for me because while I agree that the soldiers had no other choice but to shoot, I still feel sorry for the inocent people killed? You assume that I don't believe the son had the right to shoot the people attacking his mother? You are wrong, idiot. I had some respect for you before as well. Now I see that it was misplaced. I feel sorry for your son because his mother is quite heartless. I pray that he still has some humanity in him because this world is missing a great deal of it. Women like you remind me of a line from a movie. You're a Bi*** with a capital C. You know nothing about me and many other Dems who believe in many of the same things people within your party do. But the ideologues like you are destroying your party, just as the fringe is attempting to do to mine.

A person with no compassion for the loss of innocent life is not human. And that describes you perfectly. You disgust me. The President has also said he regrets the loss of innocent life. I will remember that a man I have only some respect for is far more human than you. Of course a cockroach id as well.

[Marine4life]

Mikey you are a clasic demodumby stupidio. So now your way to dis me is to call me a woman. Wow that hurt you ignoramus. Go hug your terrorist now, don't go away mad just go away. You make the majority on this board sick, read the posts. Oh thats right your kind ignore the facts and ramble on and on the DNC sheepherders broken record. In case you haven't noticed, you are a minority on this board. The vast majority are conservative and dead against your idol Kerry. So now that we had our slam dunk fest may I suggest that you get to the real issue Kerry, Quit trying to devert the topic to uneducated slanders and just answer the questions at hand, is Kerry a traitor? Most of us say yes, so prove us wrong. Most of us beleive that he committed treason, prove us wrong, Most of us beleive he is a liar, prove us wrong. That's what I thought, I can't hear you, speak up. I predict the response to this will be an attack on me or Bush to divert the topic once again.
_________________
Helicopter Marine Attack Squadron 169 which is now HMLA-169. They added Huey's to compliment the Cobra effectiveness. When I served we just had Snakes.