← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · heritagelost
Thread ID: 13144 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2004-04-12
2004-04-12 13:59 | User Profile
The Government is using government press passes to blackmail the nations' media. The aren't allowed to report non-pentagon originated war news.
The official pentagon reports are misleading. It will say something like, today 5 American soldiers died, and 100 Iraqis died as a result of the fighting.
They would have you assume that the Americans are racking up a body count of 20 to 1.
First of all. In modern US conflicts, the amount of people wounded who survive has skyrocketed as a result of improved body armor and medical treatment. During Vietnam, only 1 in 16 casualties was a death. There were 15 wounded for every one dead! It's almost hard to believe those numbers but it's true. Of course many were very serious injuries that debilitated the American for the rest of his life. We've all met crippled Vietnam vets.
A wounded Iraqi has no body armor and little access to medical treatment. So you would exspect a huge unbalance in the amount of deaths, due to those factors alone.
Also, the U.S. government has over 10,000 mercenaries in Iraq. They are heavily armed, in the most dangerous areas, and probably given the "dirtiest" jobs. Yet the Pentagon refers to them as "civillians casualties" when they die in combat. (If they are even reported dead at all!)
Now. When the Pentagon says X amount of Iraqis died as a "result of the fighting." God only knows how many are actually insurgents. Fallahja hospital officials tell Al-Jazeera that hundreds of women and children have been killed. 40 people were killed in the destroyed Mosque, of which hospital officials say almost none were men of military age. Elsewhere in the city, 25 members of the same family were killed while attending a family gathering.
Hospital officials also report that innocent civilians were machine gunned in front of the hospital while trying to bring injured relatives in. One car containing a man driving injured family members to the hospital drove slowly up to the facility holding a white flag out the window and yelling for the Americans not to shoot. The car was machine gunned and the occupants all killed.
Some of the "Iaqis killed as a result of the conflict" are our own Iraqi bitch troops. As of a few days ago, 43% (900 out of 2100) of US forces in Fallahja are actually US trained Iraqi Defense Force members. (It is reported in todays news that another 600 Iraqis were sent the city, and they are refusing to follow orders).
2004-04-12 14:25 | User Profile
heritagelost,
A great post. The Army was not letting the DAV talk to wounded soldiers. I don't know if this still the case.
2004-04-12 16:25 | User Profile
Just got done watching a live Pentagon "press conference" on all the cable news channels. Gen. Abi-zaid-something and the other guy with the Hispanic name, forget their names at the moment, were on live via satellite link from Iraq, answering questions from hand picked tame journalists at the Pentagon.
It's bad enough listening to meaningless questions from reporters from the major networks; even worse is listening to questions from "reporters" for the Army Times and Stars and Stripes! Yeah, those are real hard ball, in-your-face, agressive truth getting types of questions...not!
Gen. Abi-something even said that the US military never, ever, ever targets civilians! And everyone in the room kept a straight face, too!
Never mind the photos of dead Iraqi babies in Fallujah, never mind that the US military wants the arab news reporters to be removed from Fallujah so that they can cover up what is happening. Never mind the other eyewitnesses reporting that US troops are targetting civilians and shooting up ambulances and bombing civilian locations (hospitals, power generators, mosques) that aren't even on the front lines.
No, our "boys" simply would never do such a thing.
2004-04-12 17:45 | User Profile
This report from the BBC reminds us why General Sherman said "War is hell!"
Scale of Falluja violence emerges The scale of the fighting in the Iraqi town of Falluja last week is becoming clear as a shaky ceasefire takes hold. A group of five international charities estimated that about 470 people had been killed, while hospital officials put the death toll at about 600.
Reuters television footage from Falluja showed corpses of children, women and old men lying in the street beside body parts no one has had time to collect.
"Hospitals and medical staff are overwhelmed," the five charities said.
They added that they were "asking desperately for blood, oxygen and antiseptics".
The group said that at a conservative estimate, about 1,200 had been wounded, according to Reuters, which did not name the aid agencies involved.
Residents of Falluja have reportedly been burying the dead in their gardens and a football field because it is too dangerous to go to the cemeteries on the outskirts of town.
'Flight'
Kifaya Ilawee fled the town when her neighbour's house was hit by a shell.
"I have lived in Falluja for 30 years. I have never seen anything like this, what we saw every day in Falluja last week," she told Reuters.
She is now living in Baghdad with 35 others who also fled the fighting.
Umm Samir left the town with her family on Saturday, London's Guardian newspaper reported.
When the Americans arrived there were only about 50 guerrillas - by the end of the week there were a few thousand Nada Rabee Falluja resident She described "constant bombing" as US-led coalition forces battled insurgents during the week in Falluja, known as the city with 100 mosques.
US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said on Monday that about 70 coalition soldiers had been killed in Iraq in April, and that about 10 times that number of Iraqis had been killed over the same period.
The US says most of the Iraqi dead were fighters.
Umm Samir, 62, says her family was originally pleased that the Americans had deposed Saddam Hussein.
But then the US troops began treating Iraqis "disrespectfully... as though we were beneath their feet," she told the Guardian.
'Provocation'
American behaviour had helped provoke ordinary people to join the resistance, she said, adding that even she and her older sister wanted to join the fighters.
"When the Americans arrived there were only about 50 guerrillas," another Falluja resident, Nada Rabee, told Reuters.
"By the end of the week there were a few thousand. They are just making the situation worse."
A New York Times report corroborates these claims.
The US newspaper says that many people - perhaps tens of thousands - who did not consider themselves full-time resistance fighters were now prepared to join the insurgency.
Khalif Juma, a 26-year-old vegetable seller, told the newspaper he was angry about the US treatment of radical Shia religious leader Moqtada Sadr, for whom an arrest warrant has been issued.
"To be honest, we weren't like this before. But we're religious people, and our leader has been threatened," he told the newspaper.
"We would be ashamed to stay in our houses with our wives at a time like this."
He and his cousins have bought a crate of Kalashnikov rifles, he said.
Story from BBC NEWS: [url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/3619661.stm[/url]
Published: 2004/04/12 16:02:03 GMT
é BBC MMIV
2004-04-12 20:51 | User Profile
Did you see the news reports today.
Hundreds of Iraqi Defense Force members are refusing to fight.
Pentagon; "It's not a mutiny. It's just a "command malfunction."
Looks like Pentagon officials are Janet Jackson fans.
Al-Jazeera has been putting Iraqi war news on their English website. Al-Jazeera has reporters in Fallujah who say that the US is blocking major roads and access to several main cemetaries. As a result, relatives are burying dead family in two seperate football (we call it soccer) stadiums. One of their reporters who visited one, said the field was half full of grave sites. A significant portion had female names, and many were labeled as being children.
However, the American news today quoted some jack-off US commander saying "I'm sure 95% of the people we killed were men of military age."
Another media reported said that 70 coalition soldiers (not including "contractors," and a few that are now listed as missing) have been killed this month along with 700 armed insurgents. WOW! The magical 1-10 ratio. The official US body count from Vietnam. Isn't this amazing.
Vietnam War Historians today openly admit that the 1-10 ratio is a total fabrication, and individual units would count anything as part of their body count even counting vietcongs that were blown in half as two bodies to up their numbers.