The Third Anniversay of the Second Attack on Fallujah: WILLY PETE DOES FALLUJAH

Willy Pete did this Fallujan woman. How much suffering might she have endured while her body carmelized? An official military morgue photo (source)



********

This November marks the third anniversay of the second of two American-led military assaults culminating in the massive destruction of most of the ancient Iraqi city of Fallujah. Consequently, I am republishing my account of this event here on Mosquito Blog, lest we forget what the Bush regime has perpetrated in our names. It was first published by the Southern ((I)) in print form, and later at OpEdNews.com, the web-link of which site you can access by clicking here.

Earlier this year I posted the first four articles in this series at Mosquito Blog. They dealt with the first assault ending in May, and the immediate aftermath. In the rest of the articles, this being the eighth and last, I have started getting into the much more brutal second assault in November, something most of us know little about, due to the moral poverty of the mainstream media.

Posting this last article right now has the benefit of being just before the last week of the Light in the Dark Peace Festival, the program of which is posted farther down on this blog. This Monday night, the 17th, Kathy Kelley, the courageous humanitarian fighter for peace and justice in Iraq, will be speaking at the Naro, and on Tuesday, the dramatic fictionalized film about crimes perpetrated by American troops in Iraq, REDACTED, will be shown. Reading this last article may perhaps motivate you to attend one or both of these events.

*********

Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times

Part 8: Willy Pete Does Fallujah

By Mac McKinney


"I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of the rising wind. 'The horror! The horror!'

- Marlow from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness





















This used to be a human face and skull. This is what the Pentagon's exotic weapons and your tax dollars do to humans. Yes, the horror, the horror! An official military morgue photo (source)

************************

On March 3, 2005, Dr Khalid ash Shaykhli, an Iraqi health ministry official, made a shocking announcement at a Baghdad press conference, stating that his medical team had discovered that the US military had employed chemical weapons in their November, 2004 assault that all but leveled the city of Fallujah, weapons that included mustard gas, nerve gas and burning agents. The Australian Journal, Green Left Weekly, March 16, 2005 issue quoted from Al Jazeera satellite news that "Shaykhli said that during the US assault, fleeing residents described 'seeing corpses that had melted, which suggests that US troops used napalm gas, a poisonous compound of polystyrene and aircraft fuel which melts bodies'. He also said that his researchers had found evidence of the use of mustard gas and nerve gas. 'We found dozens, not to say hundreds, of stray dogs, cats, and birds that had perished as a result of those gasses', he told the press conference, which was held in the health ministry's Baghdad building."
(source)

Although there were several prominent American media representatives there, only the Christian Scientist Monitor carried this story, and only on its website. Once again the American media was ignoring a report of a major American breach of international conventions. Even so, the Pentagon was already getting defensive as early as December of 2004, made nervous perhaps by Islamic website charges as well as GI blogs and "after-action reports" on the Internet that were touting the use of Willy Pete (white phosphorus), propane bombs and napalm against Fallujah. Official Pentagon spokesmen began claiming that white phosphorus was only used as an illumination device:

Official Denials

"In December the US Government formally denied the reports (based on insurgent claims-parentheses mine), describing them as 'widespread myths'. 'Some news accounts have claimed that US forces have used outlawed phosphorus shells in Fallujah,' the USinfo website said. 'Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes.' (Peter Popham, the Independent UK) (source)




















Another victim of Willy Pete's handiwork. An official military morgue photo (source)

But the charges persisted throughout 2005, strengthened by bloggers who had started looking back at reports issued by embedded reporters in Fallujah during the November, 2004 siege, bloggers such as Mike Whitney:

"The US also used napalm in the siege of Falluja as was reported in the UK Mirror ('Falluja Napalmed', 11-28-04) The Mirror said, '[that] President George Bush has sanctioned the use of napalm, a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and jet-fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980, will stun the world. Reports claim that innocent civilians have died in napalm attacks, which turn victims into human fireballs as the gel bonds flames to flesh. Since the American assault on Falluja there have been reports of 'melted' corpses, which appeared to have napalm injuries." ("Incinerating Iraqis; The Napalm Cover Up" by Mike Whitney) (source)

Finally, the official Pentagon story-line began to unravel after several revelations surfaced toward the end of 2005, the most powerful being an Italian documentary by Sigfrido Ranucci of RAINews24 entitled "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre." (source)

To again quote from Peter Popham of The Independent UK, Tuesday, November 8, 2005 regarding this film:

"But now new information has surfaced, including hideous photographs and videos and interviews with American soldiers who took part in the Fallujah attack, which provides graphic proof that phosphorus shells were widely deployed in the city as a weapon.

"In a documentary to be broadcast by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, this morning, a former American soldier [Jeff Englehart] who fought at Fallujah says: 'I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete.'

'Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for.'

"Photographs on the website of RaiTG24, the broadcaster's 24-hours news channel, www.rainews24.it, show exactly what the former soldier means. Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.

"A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says: 'A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact.'

"The documentary, entitled 'Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre,' also provides what it claims is clinching evidence that incendiary bombs known as Mark 77, a new, improved form of napalm, was (sic) used in the attack on Fallujah, in breach of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1980, which only allows its use against military targets." (source)




















The carmelized head of an Iraqi burned to death by Willy Pete, unless luckily already slain before being scorched to this altered state. An official military morgue photo (source)

At the same time, corroborating evidence now surfaced about the use of Willy Pete as a weapon. To quote Chris Floyd of the Moscow Times in his article, "The White Death of Fallujah":

"A Daily Kos diarist, Stephen D., dug up one of the U.S. military's own publications, Field Artillery Magazine, which eagerly related the use of white phosphorous, which 'proved to be an effective and versatile munition,' the article said. 'We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [High Explosives]. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out." (source)

Sophisms

The Pentagon, no longer able to deny its usage of white phosphorus against humans, was now reduced to various sophisms to justify its onerous use. Danny Mayer of ZNet Magazine explores this in his article, "Willy Peter":

"Because the U.S. is not a signatory to the 1980 Geneva Convention and has challenged the legal definition of chemical weapons, the Pentagon now claims that white phosphorus is 'not a chemical weapon' and therefore 'not outlawed or illegal.'

"For the Pentagon, at least, the 'shake and bake' missions are a 'potent psychological weapon' that will drive the enemy 'out of their holes.' The use of white phosphorus has a particularly brutal history. During the war in Vietnam, the U.S. used white phosphorous as an improved form of napalm, terrorizing enemies. Then, as now, it was touted as a psychological tool of warfare necessary to subdue enemy hamlets.

"Unlike napalm, which in Vietnam left villagers and enemies alike with massive burns all over their bodies, white phosphorus burns down to the bone.

"Le The Thrung, a Vietnamese doctor studying white phosphorus burns in 1969, describes its effects on the skin: 'burning phosphorus produces 800-1,000 degrees centigrade heat. Scattered phosphorus particles go on consuming themselves and deepen burn wounds.' Next, chemical compounds 'create a chemical burn, like an acid, drawing water from the cells. This process generates great pain in the nervous system.' Finally, white phosphorus compounds oxygenate and penetrate 'the blood stream and white blood cells in the dermis, subdermis, and deeper skin layers.' This creates what he calls an 'organic toxicity [that] blocks off all blood circulation with the burn area.'.........

"This is what our military and political leaders currently define as a 'potent psychological weapon?' These are the actions that citizens of empire are to support and legitimize, even if tacitly, in the name of spreading democracy and securing our own nebulous borders?

"No, this is not about our national feelings of moral fortitude. This is about civilians and 'enemies' alike having chemicals dropped on them like rain and their skin bubbling, melting, wasting away with no way to scrape off the pain of oxidizing phosphorus and no way to cauterize the slow, painful melting into the nervous system and bloodstream. No, for those getting 'smoked out of their holes,' there is very little, if anything, psychological about Willy Peter." (source)

How many Fallujans suffered this final indignity of being chemically burned to death in the most agonizing manner imaginable? Dozens, hundreds, several thousand? It is hard to say. Partial American military DD1079 records on the RAI website list 60 bodies destined for Fallujah City Cemetery alone, as well as absolutely macabre photographs of some of the victims. We will likely never know just how many suffered this garish fate. For those readers with strong stomachs who feel compelled to see the photographic proof of the effects of Willy Pete on individual Fallujans, as well as to study the cemetery records, please see:
http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchiesta/en/records.asp

This then was the final twist of the knife to Fallujah during the second assault on that hapless city during Operation Phantom Fury in November, 2004, a rain of fiery, excruciating pain and death upon civilians and combatants, ordered by well-groomed and well-educated US commanders with all the moral angst, apparently, of teenagers whacking pixel images at a video game in the Mall. But on some unconscious level at least, those GIs having to load Willy Pete artillery shells certainly knew that those on the receiving end were flesh and blood beings like themselves who were about to be caramelized. Some of them will inevitably have to deal with the ghosts rising from their subconscious in the middle of the night and hope that military or VA shrinks, booze or drugs can make them go away.




















Another surreal victim of Willy Pete. An official military morgue photo (source)

Making History

One soldier who eye-witnessed the massive destruction of Fallujah and who goes by the blogger name of hEkLe, wrote a tour de force letter in December of 2004 on what he had just experienced, from which I quote:

"We reduced Falluja to rubble. We claimed victory and told the world we held Falluja under total and complete control. Our military claimed very few civilian casualties and listed thousands of insurgents dead. CNN and Fox News harped and cheered on the television that the battle of Falluja would go down in history as a complete success, and a testament to the United States' supremacy on the modern battlefield.

"However, after the dust settled, and generals sat in cozy offices smoking their victory cigars, the front lines in Falluja exploded again with indomitable mortar, rocket, and small-arm attacks on U.S. and coalition forces." (source)

Right after Operation Phantom Fury flattened Fallujah, one of those generals that hEkLe was referring to above also invoked history:

"It ought to go down in the history books", Major General Richard Natonski of the Marines told the New York Times, proud of America's handiwork in conquering Fallujah. Indeed it will, General, right alongside the Warsaw Ghetto, Grozny and Guernica as testimonies to modern man's ongoing, savage inhumanity to his fellow man. The only thing that remains to be done is for another artist to express the story on canvas for posterity.

Postscript to This Series:

This is from a WWII article entitled "British in Africa Lack Killer Urge", by James Aldridge writing in the New York Times on June 24, 1942:

"The German Africa Corps defeated the Eighth Army because it had speed, anger, virility and toughness....They (the Germans) are practical men, taken from a most practical and hard life to fight practically: Nazis trained to kill. The German commanders are scientists, who are continually experimenting with and improving the hard, mathematical formula of killing. They are trained as mathematicians, engineers and chemists facing complicated problems....War is pure physics to them. The German soldier is trained with a psychology of a daredevil track rider. He is a professional killer, with no distractions. He believes he is the toughest man on earth....The British soldier is the most heroic on earth, but do not confuse that with military toughness. He has the toughness of determination but he has not the toughness to kill his enemy."

This article prompted these comments by Wilhelm Reich, the famous psychiatrist, sociologist and writer, in his classic work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1942-Third Edition):

"This is the best description of mechanical militarism that I have ever read. It discloses in one blow the complete identity of mechanistic natural science, mechanical human structure, and sadistic murder. This identity found its highest and most consummate expression in the totalitarian dictatorship-ideology of German imperialism. This mechanical trinity is set in relief against the view of life that regards man not as a machine, the machine not the master of man, and militarism not as his greatest asset. This living functional view has found its last refuge in the Western democracies. It remains to be seen whether it will survive the chaos." (page 332)

Reich goes on to excoriate Aldridge for entreating the British to abandon their appreciation for human live in favor of imitating the Fascists. Again quoting Reich, "Those who attempt to beat the mechanical automations with their own methods will only jump out of the frying pan into the fire, i.e., in their efforts to become more efficient killers, they will transform themselves into mechanical automations and perpetuate the process their opponents have set in motion....

"Our conception of the anti-fascist fight is different. It is a clear, relentless recognition of the historical and biological causes that lead to such murders. The deracination of the fascist plague will come solely from such a recognition and not by imitating it. One cannot vanquish fascism by imitating and subduing it with its own methods, without becoming a fascist oneself. The way of fascism is the way of the automation, death, rigidity, hopelessness. The way of the living is fundamentally different...." (page 333)

Unfortunately, the American Establishment, with its fledgling new CIA, couldn't wait to embrace the research of captured Nazi scientists at the end of WWII and utterly failed to heed this advice. Instead, America has, over time, journeyed into the heart of darkness, succumbing to the fascist plague, and no matter how much various demagogic American politicians project this dark shadow onto those they hypocritically call "Islamo-Fascists" and countless other terms of demonization, this is but deep denial compounding brutal militarism and imperialism, with no end in sight to the ongoing carnage, unless those Americans not infected with this plague can find the will to confront and defeat them.

The Third Anniversay of the Second Attack on Fallujah: Fallujah Becomes Guernica

********
Photo montage of victors and victims: source
Destroyed building: source
Destroyed mosque: source
Inside bombed-out house: source
Critically injured Fallujan boy: source

********

This November marks the third anniversay of the second of two American-led military assaults culminating in the massive destruction of most of the ancient Iraqi city of Fallujah. Consequently, I am republishing my account of this event here on Mosquito Blog, lest we forget what the Bush regime has perpetrated in our names. It was first published by the Southern ((I)) in print form, and later at OpEdNews.com, the web-link of which site you can access by clicking here.

Earlier this year I posted the first four articles in this series at Mosquito Blog. They dealt with the first assault ending in May, and the immediate aftermath. In the rest of the articles, this being the seventh, I have started getting into the much more brutal second assault in November, something most of us know little about, due to the moral poverty of the mainstream media.

*********

Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times

Part 7: Fallujah Becomes Guernica

By Mac McKinney

"The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being. When he violates this sacred trust, he not only profanes his entire cult but threatens the very fabric of international society. The traditions of fighting men are long and honorable. They are based upon the noblest of human traits - sacrifice."

-General of the Army, Douglas MacArthur, 1946, confirming the death by hanging sentence imposed by a United States military commission on General Tomayuki Yamashita, convicted of failing to prevent Japanese Imperial troops under his command from committing massacres and outrages against prisoners of war and civilians in the last stages of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.

***************

After "capturing" Fallujah General Hospital and isolating its staff from the outside world, American forces continued to sweep into the city, pounding targeted areas with artillery and air power to soften them up, as well as cutting all electrical power by late Tuesday, 09 November 2004. Insurgent resistance varied from neighborhood to neighborhood, in some instances light, in others heavy, but fluid enough to reinforce some areas under attack that were hard-pressed. Even so, the best the Mujaheddin, playing David to the U.S. Goliath, could hope to do was to delay the inevitable against overwhelmingly superior firepower, logistics and technology.

By November 10, after two days of fighting, CENTCOM announced that they had taken about 70% of the city. The northwestern Jolan district was occupied with little resistance, as well as the main east-west highway. However, to the southwest, the Resala and Nazal neighborhoods were putting up a better fight. Coalition forces, generally going house to house, continued to target for assault or destruction all buildings that were deemed to be sheltering insurgents, whom we must recall are usually difficult to differentiate from civilians. Unfortunately, targets included many mosques, such as Al Tawfiq and Muhammadia , which were alleged to either be housing wounded fighters or serving as command centers and bunkers.

On November 12, Coalition forces continued to force the Mujaheddin into the southeast corner of the city while the Iraqi Red Crescent, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, declaring the situation in Fallujah a "big disaster", requested permission to enter the city, but received no official reply. By the following day, officials stated they had achieved control of most of the city and were beginning house-to-house clearing operations, claiming that a thousand or so insurgents had been slain and 200 captured.

By November 15, ground troops were still plodding on, house-to-house, aided by ongoing air strikes, artillery, tanks, and explosives experts. The Red Crescent was still not allowed into the city, so they turned their trucks toward the outlying villages where tens of thousands of Fallujans were encamped in tents in very desperate straits.

The following day CENTCOM declared victory in Fallujah, other than for isolated pockets of resistance, which would linger on with nagging persistence. According to GlobalSecurity.org: "As of 15 November 2004, 38 U.S. troops, six Iraqi soldiers and an estimated 1200 insurgents had been killed. Three of the U.S. fatalities were non-battle related injuries. Approximately 275 U.S. troops were wounded as well." (source)

Several senior military officers now began to predict that the insurgency in Iraq would soon collapse.

This, in a nutshell, was the sanitized version of events that was flowing from the corporate media in November. The Pentagon's embedded reporters were, as usual, kept on a tight leash regarding physical access to the city and were briefed regularly by military spokesmen on the "liberation of Fallujah". Moreover, there were no independent, live-reporting media crews within Fallujah during major hostilities, unlike the April siege. Still, the universe itself has eyes and ears, so to speak, and so the unvarnished, other side of the story, with powerful allegations, eventually began to surface, a tiny portion of which I am recounting here. Some of what follows has been corroborated, some of it not, so the reader must decide for himself the veracity of each eye-witness account.


















Marines moving out in Fallujah. (source)

Eye-Witnesses

Let us begin with information provided in this year's Project Censored book, "Censored 2006", that lists civilian suffering in Fallujah as the second biggest story ignored by the Establishment media in 2005. The following is recounted from the book's report, Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Death Toll, and addresses, among other things, American house-to house searches:

"Burhan Fasa'a, an Iraqi journalist, said Americans grew easily frustrated with Iraqis who could not speak English. 'Americans did not have interpreters with them, so they entered houses and killed people because they didn't speak English. They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and shot people because [the people] didn't obey [the soldiers'] orders, even just because the people couldn't understand a word of English.'

"Abu Hammad, a resident of Fallujah, told the Inter Press Service that he saw people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. 'The Americans shot them with rifles from the shore. Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their head to show they are not fighters, they were all shot.' Furthermore, 'even the wound[ed] people were killed. The Americans made announcements for people to come to one mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were killed.' Former residents of Fallujah recall other tragic methods of killing the wounded. 'I watched them [US Forces] roll over wounded people in the street with tanks ... This happened so many times.'

"Preliminary estimates as of December of 2004 revealed that at least 6,000 Iraqi citizens in Fallujah had been killed.....The illegal, heavy handed tactics practiced by the US military in Iraq evident in these news stories have become what appears to be their standard operating procedure in occupied Iraq. Countless violations of international law and crimes against humanity occurred in Fallujah during the November massacre...... According to Iraqis inside the city, at least 60 percent of Fallujah went on to be totally destroyed in the siege, and eight months after the siege entire districts of the city remained without electricity or water. Israeli style checkpoints were set up in the city, prohibiting anyone from entering who did not live inside the city. Of course non-embedded media were not allowed in the city." (source)

The above Project Censored report of American troops wantonly gunning down civilians in the Euphrates River is so ghastly that corroboration is demanded. Revolutionary Worker Online Article #1260, November 28, 2004, does just that with the story of Bilal Hussein:

"Bilal Hussein is an Iraqi photographer for the Associated Press. He stayed inside Fallujah during the invasion, and planned to photograph the advance of U.S. troops from that side.

"But once the bombing and artillery started to flatten his Jolan neighborhood, Hussein realized he was facing death. 'U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses... Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them,' he said. 'There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days.'



















A dead Iraqi, decapitated, apparently holding his dead daughter (source)

"As the U.S. forces entered his neighborhood, Hussein fled in total panic. He decided to escape by crossing the Euphrates River along the western side of Fallujah. Hussein stuck to the shadows, dodging the gunfire, moving house to house, toward the river. He says, 'I decided to swim... but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.' In shock, he watched a family of five shot dead in the water. He helped bury a man by the river bank, digging with his hands. 'I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards.' A peasant family gave him shelter in their house, so he survived to tell what he had seen." (source)

"Inside the city, many are dead. Reporters describe desperate dogs and cats feeding on corpses in the streets...... Much of the city is impassable: Crushed cars fill the streets and intersections. Sewage pipes broken and spewing lakes of filth. Power and telephone lines snarl into spaghetti-like tangles.

"Everything lies covered in layers of soot and debris. This makes the ruins look ancient-as if they had been abandoned and untouched for years. But the heavy dust is only days old, dropped from a fiery sky filled by explosions and the thick smoke of a burning city. The northern neighborhoods were flattened in the fury and flames of the opening attack. The southern industrial districts were leveled in the fierce fighting of the attack's last days. The city's huge northern rail station-once a major transfer point for all of Iraq-was obliterated forever by a single earth-shaking 2000-pound bomb." (source)

Tolls and Ironies

What was the overall toll of destruction? Moscow Times columnist Chris Floyd writes: "By the end of operations, the city lay in ruins. Falluja's compensation commissioner has reported that 36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines. The US claims that 2,000 died, most of them fighters. Other sources disagree. When medical teams arrived in January they collected more than 700 bodies in only one third of the city. Iraqi NGOs and medical workers estimate between 4,000 and 6,000 dead, mostly civilians....."
(Chris Floyd from his article, The White Death of Fallujah) (source)

Indeed, during the middle of the American attack on Fallujah, insurgents suddenly poured into Mosul on November 10, attacking police stations and causing most of the several thousands-strong police ranks to abruptly flee or resign en masse. Furthermore, Dr Ali Fadhil, the Iraqi physician turned journalist, who snuck into Fallujah after the main assault and shot enough footage to eventually broadcast a video-report for Channel Four News in England, actually managed to interview Abu Shaiba, the commander of the 'Army of Mohammad' based in south Fallujah's al-Shuhada'a district:

"With his face covered, Shaiba relates what had happened to the insurgents under his command: 'The fighters withdrew from the town following an order from our senior leadership. We pulled out, but not because we had lost the fight with the Americans. It was a tactical decision to re-group.'


















Resistance fighters on alert in Fallujah (source)

"Finally, Fadhil speculates on the results of the US military offensive against the city. 'If so many of the insurgents escaped, what did the American forces really achieve in Fallujah? The violence has simply spread to other parts of the country; over 300,000 people have lost their homes and now bitterly resent the Americans. 'The City of Mosques' has become the 'City of Rubble.' " (source)

So if many or most of the Mujaheddin had followed the old ditty of "he who fights and runs away will live to fight another day", then who were all the bodies lying buried underneath rubble or being gnawed on by starving, rabid dogs in the streets? Civilians, many of them women and children, or what was left of them, because many had been horribly shredded by ordnance.

















Slain Iraqi in street, his body either eaten by starving dogs or very likely burned to the bone by American incendiaries, judging by the charring on clothes and what looks like charring on bones (source)




















Slain woman in a home (source)

Again, Pepe Escobar writes: "Terrified Fallujans calling Baghdad tell of A-10 jets raining cluster bombs on the city's streets. Iraqi (very) black humor qualifies unexploded cluster bombs as the Iraqi version of Toys 'R' Us: children get injured or killed because they think cluster bombs are toys. Everyone is talking of 'scores of bodies' in streets destroyed by US bombing. There is no power, no water, shops are closed, food is scarce and practically no medical supplies remain, according to Dr Sami al-Jumaili, speaking to al-Jazeera. No more clinics are open throughout the city - and there is no possible way to estimate how many civilians are dead, blown up, burned or injured, although al-Jumaili tells of 'scores of injured civilians'. A brand-new clinic funded by a Saudi Islamic relief non-governmental agency was bombed by the Americans during the weekend, as well as a medical dispensary in the city center: this was apparently the last place where anybody could get any medical attention." (source)

The use of cluster bombs in populated cities is illegal, but then again, so are military assaults against civilian populations. But our commanders were used to ignoring ethics by now, so why not throw in some white phosphorus to boot. But that is in the next chapter.

********

Next Chapter, Part 8:

Willie Pete Does Fallujah

The Third Anniversay of the Second Attack on Fallujah: Cruel November Arrives

(art source)










This November marks the third anniversay of the second of two American-led military assaults culminating in the massive destruction of most of the ancient Iraqi city of Fallujah. Consequently, I am republishing my account of this event here on Mosquito Blog, lest we forget. It was first published by the Southern ((I)) in print form, and later at OpEdNews.com, the web-link of which site you can access by clicking on this article's above title.

Earlier this year I posted the first four articles in this series at Mosquito Blog. They dealt with the first assault ending in May, and the immediate aftermath. In the rest of the articles, this being the sixth, I will go into detail about the much more brutal second assault, something most of us know little about, due to the paucity of the media.

*********

Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times

Part 6: Cruel November Arrives

By Mac McKinney

A Native American Parable:

A Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson about how he felt. He said 'I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is the vengeful, angry, violent one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one.' The grandson asked him, 'Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?' The grandfather answered: 'The one I feed.'

******************

By October of 2004, while the Bush Administration was focusing on winning the November elections, the American military was not so quietly finalizing preparations for a second assault on Fallujah, which some analysts were predicting would not occur until after Bush was re-elected, so as not to jeopardize Bush's compassionate conservative campaign image.

However, bombing runs against alleged insurgent safe-houses and meeting places, such as restaurants, were now occurring daily, coupled with ongoing reports of related civilian casualties. American officials once again trumpeted their sophisticated use of "smart" bombs and missiles to unerringly obliterate the "bad guys", although forensic evidence on the ground has time and again painted a picture of this ordnance as neither terribly bright at times nor terribly discriminating. And on the ground, Marines were also engaging in almost daily and nightly firefights along the city's perimeter with the Mujaheddin.

On October 14, 2004, CNN reported, quoting from Wikipedia, "that the US offensive assault on Fallujah had begun and broadcast a report from a young Marine outside Fallujah, 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert, who announced that 'troops have crossed the line of departure.' Hours later, CNN reported their Pentagon reporters had determined that the assault had not, in fact, begun." The Los Angeles Times would later report that "the Marine's announcement was a feint--part of an elaborate 'psychological operation' (PSYOP) to determine the Fallujah rebels' reactions if they believed attack was imminent."
(source)

There was no doubt that the American military was eager to finish what it had started in April, like a hungry lion stalking an escaped and wounded prey, still game, but slowly tiring. The generals had also convinced themselves that Fallujah was the heart of all their troubles in Iraq. Conquer the city and the insurgency would be broken, like a Jihadist Napoleon meeting his Waterloo. Set a harsh example, as the Romans once taught their legions, and the other cities of Iraq would fall in line. But first the November 2nd presidential election had to come and go, so everything was to be put into place in the meantime, the new order of battle completed and the ever pliable, interim Allawi government's authorization to attack officially secured.

Operation Phantom Fury

The pending operation was officially named Phantom Fury and, according to GlobalSecurity.org, an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Marines and U.S. Army troops, as well as 2,000 of Allawi's Iraqi Security Forces, would be deployed, backed by all manner of weaponry and aircraft, against some 2000 to 3000 hardcore Mujaheddin. Residents of Fallujah, once a vibrant city of some 300,000 to 350,000 people, were being warned by the military to flee the coming onslaught, the Americans accenting this by cutting off food and water supplies. Thus a vast, unorganized exodus into the desert and neighboring towns and cities began. Think of the evacuation of New Orleans just before Katrina struck to imagine the scale of confusion and hardship for tens of thousands of Iraqis who now had to huddle in chaotic tent cities with sparse food, water and medical support. Typhoid fever and other diseases would quickly break out.

Not everyone in Fallujah could or would leave the city and their homes though, just as in New Orleans. Perhaps as few as several thousand to as many as 50,000 civilians stayed behind, but no one will ever know now, in the aftermath. The frightening thing about this was that the Americans would soon declare parts of the city "weapons free" once the attack began. This means, in combat jargon, that GIs are free to kill anything that moves. Another term for this is "free-fire zone", a phrase made infamous in Vietnam, as entire swaths of territory would fall under that designation, giving the American military and its allies carte-blanche to slaughter thousands upon thousands of "gooks".

On November 2, 2004, George Bush won re-election. Reports immediately began surfacing that a second major assault on Fallujah was now imminent. On November 7, ominously, the Iraqi interim government declared a 60 day state of emergency across Iraq. The following morning of November 8, Prime Minister Allawi formally authorized Operation Phantom Fury, later to be called Operation al-Fajr (the Dawn) by his Defense Minister. Allawi's stated goal was "to liberate the people" and "clean Fallujah from the terrorists".

That same day the new offensive began, on what was also Laylat e-Qadr, the most important and holy night of the year for the Islamic world, the assault commencing with coordinated heavy air strikes, artillery, infantry and armor. But there was an immediate glitch. The CENTCOM commander, Gen. George Casey, had to acknowledge that a number of the Iraqi forces, apparently hundreds of them (possibly upset about killing humans on a holy day), had failed to show up. However, this was not a strategic setback, because the Iraqis had no major, independent responsibilities anyway, but the White House had wanted to give the assault as prominent an Iraqi face as possible.

Onslaughts from the North, the Southeast and the West began simultaneously, with the highest priority given to storming the city's western outskirts, where Marines and Iraqi Security commandos raced to secure two bridges across the Euphrates River and seize Fallujah General Hospital. Why, we must ask, was the hospital such an important target, especially when it is against the Geneva Conventions to target hospitals at all?

The Hospitals

First we must recall that during the April siege of Fallujah, bloody reports from the city's hospitals of civilian casualties, along with powerful newscasts by Al Jazeera, were instrumental in turning public opinion against the siege, ultimately leading to a ceasefire. These were lessons learned at the Pentagon. Not surprisingly, Prime Minister Allawi banned Al Jazeera from Iraq altogether in August. A second step would obviously be to silence the hospital staff at Fallujah General. Here are several accounts of what transpired:

The official version of events is recounted in the pro-Establishment, GlobalSecurity.org article on Operation Phantom Fury:

"In the first stage of their assault, a Marine unit and other troops seized two strategic bridges and a hospital situated on a peninsula formed by the Euphrates River leading to an area that was a possible fall back zone for insurgents driven out of central Fallujah. However, according to MNF-I (Multi National Force-Iraq) the hospital was being used as a center for enemy propaganda to inflate the number of civilian casualties. Iraq's 36th Commando Battalion was placed in charge of Fallujah General Hospital which was kept open to provide medical services to injured civilians. However, according to Defense Tech, the 36th Commando Battalion was originally a 'political' unit drawn from the militias of the five major political parties, but only its Kurdish pesh merga element has really proved reliable." (source)

Here is a second account from the Canadian journalist, Naomi Klein, dated Dec 4:

"The first major operation by US marines and Iraqi soldiers was to storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the facility under military control. The New York Times reported that 'the hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumours about heavy casualties', noting that 'this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons'. The Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers 'stole the mobile phones' at the hospital - preventing doctors from communicating with the outside world. But this was not the worst of the attacks on health workers. Two days earlier, a crucial emergency health clinic was bombed to rubble, as well as a medical supplies dispensary next door. Dr Sami al-Jumaili, who was working in the clinic, says the bombs took the lives of 15 medics, four nurses and 35 patients....."
(source)

Pepe Escobar, Asia Times' Roving Eye reporter, also had several notes on all of this:

1) "Dr Muhammad Ismail, a member of the governing board of Fallujah's general hospital 'captured' by the Americans at the outset of Operation Phantom Fury, has called all Iraqi doctors for urgent help. Ismail told Iraqi and Arab press that the number of wounded civilians is growing exponentially - and medical supplies are almost non-existent. He confirmed that US troops had arrested many members of the hospital's medical staff and had sealed the storage of medical supplies.

"The wounded in Fallujah are in essence left to die. There is not a single surgeon in town. And practically no doctors as well, as the Pentagon decided to bomb both the al-Hadar Hospital and the Zayid Mobile Hospital. So far, the International Committee of the Red Cross has reacted with thunderous apathy."
(source)

2) "In terms of the information war, the hospital was indeed the most strategic of targets. During the first siege of Fallujah in April, doctors told independent media the real story about the suffering of civilian victims. So this time the Pentagon took no chances: no gory, disturbing photos of the elderly, women and children - the thousands unable to leave Fallujah in advance of this week's offensive, the civilian victims of the relentless bombing.

"But this did not prevent the world from seeing doctors and patients at the hospital handcuffed to the floor - as if they were terrorists. Hospital director Dr Salih al-Issawi told Agence France-Presse that the Americans blocked him and other doctors from going to the center of Fallujah to help another clinic in distress; he also said an ambulance that tried to leave the hospital was shot at by the Americans - just like in April, when all ambulances were targeted. The Geneva Convention is explicit: in a war situation, hospitals and ambulances are neutral...."
(source)

But this is not the military of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur any longer, a military that honored the Geneva Conventions and the Principles of Nuremberg, whose armies won the affection of civilians in both occupied Germany and Japan after WWII. This is the Rumsfeld military, lost in the dark wilderness of Machiavellianism and murderous egocentrism, marching to the drum beat of a soulless, delusional bureaucrat, enamored with the high technology of killing and oblivious to human suffering.

********

Next issue, Part 7:

Fallujah Becomes Guernica

Reflections on Hurricane Season 2005, Part Four

Here is my Fourth article generated by my recent tour of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana to inspect 2005 hurricane damage and what has been done in the aftermath. This series was published at OpEdNews.com in the Spring, but I want to continue to bring Mosquito Blog readers up to date, because government on all levels is still agressively working against the basic interests of many of the disenfranchised in New Orleans, particularly Blacks. There is tremendous injustice going on and charges of racism are rife, but skewed ideology and private business sector avariciousness are equal suspects here.

It will be interesting to compare the pathetic government efforts at recovery in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans to how government will now react in southern California to the wild fires devastation. Stay tuned for that.

In this report I have now waded into the heart of hurricane devastation in New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward, where I found government relief efforts practically invisible, and only some hearty volunteers and social activists present there to help the victims of Katrina survive day to day.

****************************

May 8, 2007

Welcome to the Lower Ninth Ward, Where Tragedy and Hope Meet

By Mac McKinney

Along the Gulf Coast, Post Katrina, Part 4: The Lower Ninth Ward

















Devastated house in the Lower Ninth Ward

After wandering through Orleans Avenue (which was recounted in Part 3) on this increasingly warm and sunny Friday the 13th, I headed on to downtown New Orleans, somewhat disoriented by the unfamiliarity of the streets after some 28 years, but I finally found myself on the end of St. Charles Avenue. I stopped at the nearby St. Charles Bar and Pool Room and ordered a Hurricane, which I sat sipping through a straw like a slow milkshake while I watched an old Gunsmoke episode on the nearest screen. I figured I could use a good shot of rum to get me through the rest of what would surely be a taxing afternoon.

I started walking up busy St. Charles, taking photos, diverting momentarily over to Camp Street, where, surprisingly, I came across the Zen Center of New Orleans, unaware that the city even had a Zen temple. It would take the compassion of Buddha, I thought, to heal all of New Orleans. I walked through Lafayette Square, photographing the statue of school children with John McDonogh, the philanthropist, also unaware that the plight of the public school system would be brutally brought home to me soon in the Lower Ninth Ward.

I eventually reached Canal Street, where I bought some trinkets and took more photographs. You could never guess, looking at downtown New Orleans, that a major hurricane had devastated the city some 20 months ago. Repairs had been relatively quickly and efficiently made, even though parts of downtown had been flooded up to four feet high, as a hotel clerk explained to me. She also told me the easiest way to get to the lower Ninth: drive east on Poydras, right on Claiborne, and just keep going until you cross over a big drawbridge.

So that's what I did. However, once upon S. Claiborne and merged onto N. Claiborne, I was so struck by significant damage right on this major boulevard that I parked and took more photographs. Why, I thought, hadn't such an amazing eyesore as the one shown below been leveled after so long by the city? But again, this was in a predominantly Black district. Is that answer enough?

















An eyesore along N. Claiborne Avenue

After about a ten minute drive I was rolling over the large and rusty looking draw bridge spanning the Industrial Canal, the canal whose levee system had been breached in three places, two of these breaches directly flooding the Lower Ninth, a levee system that investigators have emphasized was one in name only.

As I got off the bridge, I pulled into a close by gas station, jumped out and asked a fellow gassing up to his truck if I was actually in the Lower Ninth right now, which he confirmed. "Where can I find the major damage?" I asked, explaining that I was here to take photos.

"Just turn right at the light two blocks up or take the next right here and start looking," he replied, "The damage is everywhere."

So I turned right, or north, and began what became a two hour plus sojourn up and down the still devastated streets of the Lower Ninth Ward, where some 25,000 people once lived, worked, played and worshipped. On the northside at least, very few people have moved back in. You see a few operable-looking cars parked in front of a few houses, as opposed to the hundreds of abandoned cars all over the place. On the southside, less badly hit, several thousand people have moved back in I am told, and I did see more people out and about, although, due to time constraints, I focused primarily on the northside, where I barely saw a person all afternoon, except for a few city workers, several homeowners, and a handful of contractors, that is until I went by the Common Ground Community Center later on.

You can visit my photo album on the Lower Ninth Ward, by the way, at any time by just clicking here. You can view the photos singly or as a slide show. You don't have to sign in either. There are 176 photos, so take your time.

Almost every house on the northside looks abandoned and damaged, with windows half or all the way out and the front door usually open or loose on its hinges. Some of the front doors or facades had X's on them, ominous reminders of the horrific days of the flooding, when rescuers were putting X's on a house to indicate that it had been checked for people or pets. But many if not most houses had no X. Does that indicate they were never checked?

Gone, obviously, are all the bodies. Gone too are the egregious piles of putrid garbage that had accumulated throughout the Lower Ninth as the floodwaters abated. Determined crews of volunteers dressed in Tyvek suits and respirators came in, from both the Lower Ninth and beyond, to eliminate them. None of this was organized by the city, mind you, despite Mayor Nagin's wonderful-sounding rhetoric, the city acting more like an absentee landlord in a detective series than any kind of leader in the rebuilding efforts here, which just reinforces the viewpoint some residents hold that the city only wants to drive off the black community, so that realtors and carpetbaggers can seize all their property. Or is it just the inertia of bureaucracy and regulations that paralyzes government?

Schools and Churches

In March of 2006 students and organizers also "raided" (since it was off-limits) the Martin Luther King Elementary School on the southside. To quote from an article by Kerul of Common Ground Collective:

New Orleans --In an historic act of solidarity, around 85 students and organizers from across the country risked arrest today by entering Martin Luther King Elementary School in the devastated Lower 9th Ward. Outside the school, a crowd of around 300 gathered wearing Tyvek suits and respirators, holding hand painted signs and chanting to oncoming traffic. In an ongoing effort to rebuild New Orleans, residents of the Lower Ninth Ward requested that these supporters clean the school out....

After raking the leaves and debris littering the entrance to the school, the crowd of volunteers pounded their tools on the pavement, as police observed from across the street. The students made their way into the building, and began sweeping and scooping piles of mud and debris from the lobby, carefully avoiding personal effects and sensitive items, such as plaques and framed pictures that had fallen from the walls in the storm. Among odd findings, an 8 inch dead fish was found in the stairwell leading up to classrooms.

Of the 117 public schools operational before Hurricane Katrina hit, only 20 are open. No plans exist to open schools in the Ninth Ward, giving residents no opportunity to rebuild their community. (March 16, 2006, source)

Unfortunately, over a year later, the school has not reopened, prompting protests. Instead the school has been "moved" uptown, in name only and as a charter school, to the former site of Edgar P. Harney Elementary School in Central City, which does absolutely nothing to help the repopulation and rebuilding of the Lower Ninth. The Louis Armstrong Elementary School, also on the southside, has likewise not reopened. Charter schools, I might add, are looked upon as the Messiah for a new educational paradigm, but the jury has not even formed on this count.

















Joseph Hardin Elementary. Louis Armstrong has yet to reopen on the southside

Things are even worse on the northside, where the Joseph A. Hardin Elementary School has never even been gutted. I can attest to that after stumbling across the school as I drove down St Maurice Avenue. It seemed so disheveled, with weeds and twisted chain-link fencing marring the entrance, that I grew curious and started exploring the premises, soon realizing that no one, apparently, has bothered to do much of anything to this neighborhood tragedy. An overwhelming pathos struck me as I gingerly stepped through semi-dark rooms taking pictures. You'll see what I mean when you look at my photo album. Room after room was trashed, with the ceiling panels falling down, insulation hanging, the overhead trim rusting, trash and desks and books strewn all about, yet, thankfully, there was not a lot of structural damage visible. Can this school be salvaged? I would say yes, but there has to be the will to do so. And unless the schools are all cleaned up and rebuilt, how can the Lower Ninth Ward be revived?

















The lobby of Hardin Elementary in April, 2007

There is a similar problem with the churches on the northside. The two I saw and photographed, the Holy Family Spiritualist Church and The Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church, have both been gutted, thank God, but they still await reconstruction, and for the Ward to be revived, the houses of worship must also be revived.

I continued to drive about, stopping to take photos every few blocks or so. There were crazy juxtapositions such as a boat atop a rusted out truck, fairly intact houses right next to completely shattered ones, a tour bus sitting in a weed-grown lot right next to a house, parked as if it was the family car. After rambling though most of the northside, I finally doubled back toward the direction I had started from, driving south on tree-lined Tennessee Avenue, but then turned right a block, then left again onto Deslonde Street, where I could immediately see some activity in the distance ahead.

Common Ground Collective

The bright color blue caught my eyes as I approached, this anomaly gradually transforming into a house covered with a blue tarp that extended out over the large driveway and, past that, another, corner house whose siding had been painted the same blue tint. This was the ward headquarters, so to speak, of Common Ground Collective, a truly amazing volunteer organization that I can't do justice to in this piece alone, only delineating it here.


















Common Ground Community/Distribution Center in the Lower Ninth Ward

Common Ground was founded in the tumultuous days after Katrina struck by social activists Brandon Darby, Scott Crow, King Wilkerson and Malik Rahim with a treasury of $50 and the awareness that, to quote from a March 2, 2006 Alternet article by Billie Mizell, "they could do a better job at helping people than the government of the most powerful nation in the world. Their small monetary investment has grown; the collective now has hundreds of members who have fed, housed and provided medical care for nearly 20,000 people (many more than that in the year since this was written-Mac).

"How did they do it? They went to the houses that were standing and asked the people who were still around, "What can we do to support you?" What they kept hearing: You can't rebuild a community that's buried under tons of garbage. So they started by picking up trash and decomposing animals, and then moved on to putting tarps over homes.

"They began to envision a relief organization radically different from those that had come to Louisiana in Katrina's aftermath. They wanted to bring together people of every background, race and economic level -- doctors working alongside garbage men working alongside cooks working alongside lawyers working alongside kids, all for one common goal. Space in a local mosque was secured for their headquarters, and soon, monetary assistance started pouring in and volunteers started lining up. A medical clinic was opened, and Red Cross immediately began pointing people in need to Common Ground. (Yes, the Red Cross turned the sick away in droves, instead sending them to a tent run by kids and volunteer nurses.) A legal aid clinic was established to offer immediate assistance to those trying to rebuild their lives and to put pressure on the authorities to focus on relief and rebuilding." (source)

Common Ground eventually divided into two separate organizations: Common Ground Relief and Common Ground Health Clinic. Quoting from Wikipedia:

"Common Ground Health Clinic had its beginnings when four young street medics, who had heard Malik Rahim's plea for support, showed up in Algiers a few days after the hurricane. They began riding around on bicycles asking residents if they needed medical attention. Locals were apparently surprised to be approached in this way, since no representatives of government agencies or of the Red Cross had appeared up to that point. The medics offered first aid, took blood pressure, tested for diabetes, and asked about symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other disease.

"After forming as a more cohesive organization, Common Ground began recruiting volunteers to help rebuild homes and provide other free services in the Lower Ninth Ward.... Thousands of people have volunteered for various lengths of time, creating an unusual social situation in the predominantly black neighborhoods, since most of the volunteers have been young white people from elsewhere. An ABC News Nightline report described the volunteers as "mostly young people filled with energy and idealism, and untainted by cynicism and despair, and mostly white, [who] have come from across America and from countries as far away as Indonesia."

"In addition to providing free food, water, cleaning supplies, protective gear, diapers, and health and hygiene goods, Common Ground has offered legal assistance, day care, tutoring, soil and water testing, and Internet access. Although much of their housing remediation work has been in the Lower Ninth Ward, they have a larger station across the Industrial Canal in the Upper 9th Ward of New Orleans." (source)

So I stopped here and started asking a few questions. Since it was already late afternoon now, I didn't ask many, and later decided I would come back Sunday to ask some more. I then walked to the corner and started talking to a handful of people sporting "I Love New York" tee-shirts. They were all church volunteers from New Jersey, and apparently the corner of Deslonde and N. Derbigny in front of Common Ground was a sort of volunteers' rendezvous point. Countless volunteers from around the globe must have met on this same corner since Katrina hit.

When I cam back Sunday I interviewed Jesse and Dan, two hard-core volunteers who had given up their normal lives and homes to serve the people of the Lower Ninth Ward. Jesse explained how they realized, as the Katrina tragedy unfolded, "that there was something from our government that should have been done, but wasn't, so we stepped in and will help as long as needed."

Both felt that the city of New Orleans was not only not helping, but clearly trying to drive people out of the Lower Ninth while maintaining a PR façade. Consequently a lot of Common Ground's efforts are in the legal arena, educating residents about and protecting them from government and private business ill-intent and dishonesty. A hotline was created for residents to report police corruption and brutality.

Jesse himself explained how he had been cold-cocked and beaten up by five of New Orleans' finest after he accidentally wandered into a melee that the police were starting to break up. Jesse explained how there was really a terrific community fellowship and an old, old culture in the Lower Ninth Ward. Generation after generation of families have lived here and everybody on a street knows everybody else. So what a compound tragedy it will be if this community is not revived.

I asked about the levee system, because I had noted how low it looked to me. Jesse anecdotally described how if one is a good jumper, you can stretch your arm up, leap up and barely touch the top of the levee in certain places. Not very encouraging. That is why, ultimately, New Orleans needs an entirely new engineering project to offer this invaluable city flood and surge protection to suit the challenges of the 21st Century. But that would take a massive New Deal Era TVA-style project, something totally beyond the thinking and capability of the atomistic, corporate-minded Bush Administration.

To add injury to insult regarding the levees, Jesse and Dan conveyed how Mississippi River cruise ship lines were attempting to build docking facilities on the far northern end of the Lower Ninth on a natural hurricane barrier called the Cypress Triangle. This would destroy much of this natural defense against flooding and put residents at even greater risk. To compound matters, they also want to construct dangerous and garish high-voltage towers in the ward, an example of the utter callousness and folly of corporations untethered from social needs. The Army Corps of Engineers' proffered advice to residents in light of all the above is: Put your houses on stilts.

Returning to Friday afternoon timewise, after talking to volunteers, I hopped back in my car and drove over to the southside to survey the damage there. I saw much of the same, but with less destructive intensity, and there were more signs of life, functioning houses here and there, neighbors talking, more cars and trucks driving about, so this was a hopeful sign of progress.

By now it was late afternoon with the sun low on the horizon, so I slowly turned back onto N. Claiborne Avenue and up and over the draw bridge, headed for a look at the French Quarter, which I soon discovered looks completely recovered from Katrina, a stark, stark contrast to what I had just witnessed.

I left the Lower Ninth Ward with competing emotions flowing through me. On the one hand, the enormity of the destruction was unnerving and depressing. On the other hand, the spirit of love, selfless service and dedication among the volunteers I met was absolutely inspiring. If this spirit is contagious enough to spread throughout America, then New Orleans and the Lower Ninth will survive and flourish. But if the current paradigm of privatization, "halliburtonization" as some call it, prevails down here, then the Devil will get his due.

The Third Anniversay of the Second Attack on Fallujah

Inside home looking out, whose owner claimed it was shot into by US snipers from nearby rooftops during the 1st Siege of Fallujah.
(source from Dahr Jamail)

This November will mark the third anniversay of the second of two American-led military assaults culminating in the massive destruction of most of the ancient Iraqi city of Fallujah. Consequently, I am republishing my account of this event here on Mosquito Blog, lest we forget. It was first published by the Southern ((I)) in print form, and later at OpEdNews.com, the web-link of which site you can access by clicking on this article's above title.

Earlier this year I posted the first four articles in this series at Mosquito Blog. They dealt with the first assault ending in May, and the immediate aftermath. In the following articles I will go into detail about the much more brutal second assault.

In light of all the controversy over Blackwater, bear in mind that it was the folly of Blackwater that created the circumstances that led to the siege of Fallujah. Remember this as you read on. Blackwater's presence in Iraq has been like the Black Plaque's from the start.

*********

Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times

Part 5: Cruel November Approaches

By Mac McKinney

The Fallujah Brigade, created to resolve the brutal conflict between the American military and the city of Fallujah by the May Truce, was a political solution, not a military one. The Brigade's overall mission was to pacify the city as an American proxy force through both persuasion and police powers, and to arrest the killers of the Blackwater Four, a goal that was beginning to look like a ludicrous obsession in a country where scores of people were being murdered daily.

The thousand-plus (1600 by some accounts) Fallujah Brigade was hastily created out of, largely, whichever local Iraqis were available with past military experience. Ironically, this included enlisting both members of Saddam Hussein's old Baathist army and, by tactfully looking the other way, insurgents that the Marines had just been fighting against. Consequently, if the Brigade was meant to confront and defang insurgent forces inside Fallujah, it was compromised from the start. And one can imagine Marine Officers knew this. As journalist W. Thomas Smith, former Marine, writing in National Review Online, points out, "Officially, Marine commanders support the Fallujah Brigade. They may not have a choice", as if this was an odious decision. He goes on to emphasize that "Decisions on how to destroy the enemy should be left to the professionals", and then begins a lengthy discourse on the teachings of Sun Tzu, the Chinese author of the hoary Art of War, pointing out in particular the evils of allowing civilians to interfere with the generals. (source)

In early May, the Fallujah Brigade began taking over some of the Marines' responsibilities, although still under the direct control of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. But the Brigade was staring at a transformed city, one that was now militarized and radicalized by recent events. The traditional political structure that had run the city was in chaos, thanks first to the US Army's destabilizing "regency" for months, followed by the Marines' just-aborted siege, so that now the most obvious authorities in Fallujah beyond the Marine Corps perimeter were the ones with all the guns, the insurgents or mujaheddin. And these tended to be God-fearing Sunni Muslims who undoubtedly felt they owed their survival thus far to the grace of Allah, and Allah's intermediaries, the imams, or clerics.

The Shura

Strident martial law, Sharia-style, now began to take effect within the formerly secular-ruled city, a move that was an organic development under siege conditions, but one which would also alienate some Fallujans. A "Mujaheddin Advisory Council or Shura" became a loose umbrella organization to run the very city the Fallujah Brigade was now supposed to take control of, and it included such imposing, hard-line clerics as Abdallah Janabi. The Shura was soon issuing strict Islamist decrees that would have never passed muster during the secular Saddam era. Some have described what was taking place as the "Talibanization of Fallujah."

Pepe Escobar, the well-known journalist who writes the Roving Eye column for Asia Times Online, had this to say in 2004 regarding the new order in Fallujah:

"Writers and professors in Baghdad with close family and tribal ties to Fallujah have explained to Asia Times Online the new order. In today's Fallujah, every military commander is an emir. They may be strident, conservative Salafis, philosophical Sufis, al-Qaeda admirers, former Ba'ath Party army officials, former secret-service agents, or even the average neighbor, a father of six.

"If you qualify as an emir, you are a leading member of what is popularly described as 'the Iraqi resistance' in control of 'liberated Fallujah', a region off-limits to US troops ever since the United States handed over control of the city in May after a month-long siege.

"Along with local imams and tribal chiefs, all emirs are also part of a Shura, a mujahideen council, created last winter and directed by two imams, Abdallah Janabi and Dhafer al-Ubeidi.

"These imams may be considered the spiritual leaders of the resistance in Fallujah. Janabi, from the Saad bin Abi Wakkas Mosque, is a true radical: he is the leader of the takfiris - the fiercest warriors, some Iraqi, some from other Arab countries, some voluntary, some linked to Arab groups. Janabi was the first imam in 2003 to call for armed resistance against the occupation of Iraq, and for the summary execution of spies. Dhafer, from the al-Hadra al-Muhammadiya mosque, is a senior to Janabi in the Shura. His fatwas (religious edicts) carry enormous influence........The mujahideen paint a picture of a city where Sharia law may be the norm, but the air hangs heavy with paranoia - just as it did in Taliban Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The city may now be free of marines, but is under an informal siege by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's new secret-service agents and Central Intelligence Agency operatives. These spies are executed the minute any of the emirs identify them. The emirs parade around town in luxury Western cars with tinted windows, just like the Taliban with their Toyota Land Cruisers did in Afghanistan.

"An undeclared 'foreigner-hunting season' is in effect. It has claimed, among other victims, a Lebanese businessman, the South Korean national Kim Sun-il, and six Shi'ite truck drivers. Janabi justifies all the executions. During the past three months, the mujahideen have also executed more than 30 Fallujah residents, all of them denounced as spies for the Americans..." (Pepe Escobar) (source)

The reference to Minister Allawi above refers to the fact that on June 28, 2004, the American supervised Iraqi Interim Government morphed into the Iraqi Transitional Government, led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shiite with a dual Iraqi-British background who lived in exile in England for years and who was instrumental in helping the Blair Government craft its case for war against Iraq. Allawi quickly took a very hostile position toward the Fallujan insurgency and continuously granted US forces carte-blanche for ongoing military actions against the city, including, for example, sporadically blasting Fallujah with one-ton bombs.

Against this evolving insurgent dynamic in Fallujah, the Fallujah Brigade had to accomplish several key demands of the Marines: 1) apprehend the men responsible for killing the Blackwater Four; 2) broker the handing in of the insurgents' heavy weapons; 3) root out and arrest foreign terrorists (another American obsession); and 4) patrol the city. It soon became apparent that the Brigade was having difficulty on all counts, although they were manning various checkpoints. I return to Escobar's account:

"Every entrance to the city is controlled by the mujahideen, who also control the US-trained Iraqi policemen. Most men now are mujahideen, either in the Iraqi National Guard (the former US-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps); the Iraqi police; and in the population as a whole. The real Ba'ath military power in Fallujah is in the hands of two people with very close ties to the emirs: Jassem Mohammed Saleh - the first commander of the Fallujah Brigade - and Abdullah Hamed.

"The Fallujah-connected sources tell Asia Times Online that the new US-Allawi-appointed Iraqi secret services hoped the Ba'ath military in Fallujah would circumscribe the influence of the mujahideen. The exact opposite has happened. In Fallujah, Ba'athists now answer to the emirs in control of the resistance." (Pepe Escobar) (source)

Brigade Collapse

By June, 2004, the Marines were already expressing public disenchantment with the Brigade, many of whose members saw themselves as peacemakers, not proxy enforcers, and by August, the Marines were openly suggesting that it was a failure. By early September, tensions grew dramatically between the two forces when several Brigade members allegedly fired at Marines near the city limits and the latter returned fire, killing four Iraqis. This incident was the last straw, and on Sept 9th the Corps informed the Brigade they would be dissolved. To quote Colonel Jerry Durant, "The whole Fallujah Brigade was a fiasco. Initially it worked OK, but it wasn't a good idea for very long."
(source)

Brigade members were offered positions with the Iraqi police or national guard. An LA Times article reported, however, that Brigade members were upset and much more likely to join the insurgency. A Major Abed Abaas of the Brigade said, "This was a great violation to the members of the Brigade by the American forces and the Iraqi interim government. Dissolving the Fallujah Brigade, they broke the truce agreed upon last April when the Americans besieged Fallujah."
(source)

Since the Marines never put much stock in the Brigade to begin with, they had never completely ceased military operations against Fallujah. Air strikes continued throughout the summer and fall, often on residential areas, with the rationale that these were legitimate insurgent targets. As a Sept 12, 2004 article by Brian Dominick of the New Standard reports:

"American pilots have struck the city of 300,000 more than a dozen times since ground forces pulled out last spring, however. In fact, they have bombed the city nightly for the better part of the past week, each time striking what US military officials say are terrorist 'safehouses.' On nearly every such occasion, hospital officials have said the strikes killed or wounded women, children and others presumed to be noncombatants.

"New doubt was recently cast on the validity of US targets by an unusual source: In a video the UK Guardian says is being distributed in markets all over Fallujah, unidentified captors reportedly execute an Egyptian man who says his name is Muhammad Fauzi Abdul Aíal Mutwali. Before he is beheaded, Mutwali confesses to having been offered $150 apiece to plant homing devices in the houses of suspected insurgents around the city, to be used to help US pilots hit specific targets in the city.

"In the past, the tactic of using paid informants to determine targets has received criticism for its arbitrary nature and its potential for abuse by competing parties on the ground. This is especially applicable in cases where damage cannot be assessed by the military, and thus informants cannot be held accountable for providing invalid targets.

"While the US military enjoys unbridled control of the skies above Fallujah, the streets appear to belong exclusively to a cabal (the Shura) of some twenty militias whose leaders have begun to meet and coordinate defense of the brazen city, the Guardian reports."
(source)

The military also claimed to be attacking the safehouses of "al-Qaeda in Iraq" led by the mysterious Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom, some declared, had established Fallujah as his operational base. But sightings of Zarqawi proved as reliable as sightings of the Loch Ness monster, complicated by charges that he didn't even exist, at least not on the increasingly mythic level his media persona was attaining. The Pentagon has added to this cynicism by recently admitting that they have been purposely hyping Zarqawi as a propaganda strategy to influence the Iraqi people (and, indirectly, the American people.) So, where does the reality end and the PSYOP begin regarding Zarqawi? (For more on the Pentagon PSYOP Zarqawi Program, click here.

But as October arrived, one thing was proving increasingly reliable - the growing rumors and reports that the Americans were preparing to launch a second major offensive against the city.

Next issue, Part 6:

Cruel November Arrives

Reflections on Hurricane Season 2005, Part Three

Welcome to Orleans Ave, New Orleans, or what's left of it

















A house on Orleans Ave demolished by Katrina

Here is my third article generated by my recent tour of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana to inspect 2005 hurricane damage and what has been done in the aftermath. This series was published at OpEdNews.com in the Spring, but I wanted to bring Mosquito Blog readers up to date, because, as I write, the government is moving to completely shut down and level the still functional housing projects in New Orleans. This move is not about helping the Katrina survivors. This is about cynical politics and greed.

In this report I have finally made it into New Orleans, specifically Orleans Ave, which becomes, when you turn right instead of left toward the French Quarter, a glaring eyesore, to the physical eyes as well as the soul.

****************************

Along the Gulf Coast, Post Katrina, Part 3: Orleans Avenue, New Orleans

On Friday, April 13, 2007, after surveying hurricane damage in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I high-tailed it up to Interstate 10 and headed due west. An hour plus later I was passing the state line into Louisiana and soon bearing down on Slidell as I-10 gradually curved south. Even before Slidell I began to get glimpses of Katrina's wrath out of the corners of my eyes as I sped on - torn up trees, piles of debris or damaged buildings in the distance. By time I had passed Slidell and was hitting the Huey P. Long Bridge, all kinds of questions were percolating in my head – how many towns and cities were hard-hit, how many people displaced; how much had been repaired; what have been the overall costs? And on and on.

As I drove over Lake Pontchartrain and gradually began the downward descent on the southern end of the bridge, the image of the far shore rising out of the vast blue lake waters rammed home to me just how fragile and isolated New Orleans is, and how low. You gained the distinct impression as you reached shore again that you were almost dropping into the lake, and in a sense you are, because, of course, the Crescent City is actually below sea level. And when you realize how the city and parish are bordered on the north by the lake, and east and south by the Gulf of Mexico, that is vulnerable indeed.

At last the skyscrapers of downtown New Orleans began looming into view, introducing some verticality into the geography, as if that was somehow reassuring as the next hurricane season approaches. I was getting more excited now, because I hadn't been to New Orleans since 1979, when I was on leave from the military, and had truly missed the place, which I had found magical and romantic.

Finally, I slowed down and began signaling left to take the exit for Vieux Carré (Old Square), the original French term for the French Quarter. Down I went, until the off-ramp suddenly drops you right onto Orleans Avenue, which runs parallel to better known Canal Street, which takes you smack into the French Quarter. But I had flown in here before, not driven, so I was disoriented. Should I turn left or right? My instincts told me the French Quarter was to the left and what I was really interested in was to the right, because I hadn't come down here to party, but to investigate the aftermath of Katrina. So I turned right.

A fortuitous decision. I hadn't driven two blocks before I was muttering Jesus under my breath. And I hadn't driven but several more before I was parking the car and grabbing my camera. My worst fears were materializing, based upon reports I had read, that the Polyanna depictions of New Orleans on the mend were greatly exaggerated. Now reality was staring me in the face, an entire, devastated neighborhood pretty much left to its own devices, as well as actually sabotaged, I would learn over time, from full recovery by the powers that be.

















Another victim of Katrina

So I began walking around taking pictures. At the time, I didn't even know the controversial story about the Lafitte Housing Project, so it was fortunate that I happened to take a few incidental photos of the Project apartment houses, so I could include them in this photo-essay. I otherwise ignored the Lafitte complex, because it was in pretty darned good shape, although boarded up and peppered with NO TRESPASSING signs. In the back of mind I wondered why, if so many citizens had been displaced or relocated, hadn't these been reopened to ease the suffering and return some of the exiled?
















The Lafitte Housing Project, with minimal hurricane damage, but locked-up anyway

What Orleans Avenue immediately reminded me of was sections of Naples, Italy that I had visited way back in 1980 while in the Navy, for there were still parts of Naples that had never been rebuilt after enduring all the carnage of World War II, as American forces wrestled Italy from German control. So in Naples, you incidentally walked up on a bombed out building every now and then and stared.

Well, I was staring now at street after street that looked like they may each have received a few rounds from Howitzers too. That there was this much damage still visible after some 20 months was shocking and embarrassing, embarrassing for a nation that claims to be the greatest super-power in history. A few trucks, work crews and sledge hammers could remove many of the hideous eyesores marring the neighborhood in a few weeks. Is City Hall, the State of Louisiana and FEMA incapable of something so basic, simple, and inexpensive? Or is something else going on here?

To understand what I am talking about, please visit my photo album on Orleans Avenue by clicking here. You can view the photos singly or as a slide show. You don't have to sign in. Here are a few more of the album shots:

















The abandoned Carver Medical Clinic

















An abandoned grocery store
















A massive, abandoned laundry plant behind Orleans Avenue

Why hasn't the Carver Medical Clinic been reopened? Why haven't the local grocery stores been repaired? These are core necessities. To Hell with making the owners jump through insurance and legal hoops! Subsidize them and get the establishments reopened, and reopen the Lafitte Housing Project as well to repopulate the neighborhood, even if only temporarily reopened.

But there are agendas at work here. The poet Edward Sanders has a great online article about this in a piece explaining why and how he wrote his latest book of poetry, Poems for New Orleans (click here to read). To quote him:

What happened in New Orleans and the Gulf after Katrina is fairly widely known- the ineptitude of FEMA, the callousness of Bush, Karl Rove and the White House, the privatization of much of the recovery- which resulted in massive excess pain for the victims, and profits aplenty for the sharks that grabbed control of, or siphoned off cash from, the recovery.

The Bushies and their ilk fervently believe in turning over as much of our government as they can get away with to the so-called "private sector." Thus, the running of the war in Iraq was considerably "privatized," or halliburtonized, with U.S.-paid mercenaries and companies in key positions in the prosecution of the war. The neocons, in the same mode, tried to privatize as many government functions as possible in the post-Katrina recovery in New Orleans and the Gulf.

In New Orleans in particular, the halliburtonized recovery has been a post-disaster disaster. It's a complicated story, but its essence is that the "Privatizing" of post-Katrina reconstruction and assistance has led to enormous bottlenecks, anger, despair and frustration. (Reference)

So New Orleans' citizens have had to fight two battles, the first against the horrors of Katrina, the second against the "halliburtonization" of the recovery, to adopt Sanders' term. After the American Civil War they called this latter phenomenon "Carpetbagging", taking advantage of disaster to disenfranchise and rob the citizens of the South. This is going on today at the hands of greedy, hateful and unconscionable individuals and organizations, be they insurers, realtors, contractors, speculators, politicians or ideologues.

Sanders had this to say about irresponsible politicians in particular:

Historian Doug Brinkley called it "Lethal Ineptitude" the way Bush, Homeland Security honcho Chertoff, FEMA political hack Brown, Louisiana Governor Blanco, conservative republicrat New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, and others, dripped malice & do-not on New Orleans and the Gulf.

Mayor Ray Nagin, in particular, seems to be a disciple of the kind of privatization-batty neocons who helped ruin the Chilean pension system after the overthrow of Salvador Allende. He is the halliburtonizers best friend. Governor Blanco of Louisiana is not much better, especially in her caving into the forces of unregulated rip-offs by the insurance companies. (ibid)

Now one can begin to understand why Orleans Avenue still looks the way it does. Things would apparently be even worse if the citizens of New Orleans hadn't been fighting back. Too many of them have roots in New Orleans going back generations, too deep to let themselves get screwed over by silver-tongued politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen.

For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) wants to demolish all the major housing projects in New Orleans, claiming that in between hurricane damage, old age and crime infestation, they have got to go, to be replaced by "mixed-income" remodeling, an urban renewal strategy anchored in HUD's Hope VI grant program, which has had only a mixed record nationally where it has been implemented. That the Bush Administration and Republican apparatiks are eager to bring HUD's plan to fruition is obvious. Who can forget Rep. Richard Baker's callous statement in the aftermath of Katrina that, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

A veteran advocate of public housing in New Orleans, Endesha Jaukali, has this retort to HUD's plans:

Mixed income is a pie in the sky illusion...What you're going to do is mix poor people and middle income people right on out of here. (from "New Orleans Housing Fiasco" by Anya Kamenetz click here)

It has been my own experience in Norfolk, Virginia that when the poor and lower middle class are dispossessed and displaced from an area, what fills the void is condominiums and luxury apartments affordable only by the upper middle class, the rich or corporations, the latter two buyers often from outside the area. The displaced are further marginalized, some to the point of homelessness and despair.

So Jaukali and others have launched a class action lawsuit against government agencies to stop the demolition of the projects:

The current class action suit alleges racial discrimination and violation of the 1937 Housing Act, which requires public hearings before demolition of any public housing. HANO (the Housing Authority of New Orleans) has used everything from steel shutters to barbed wire fences and armed guards to keep residents from reoccupying their former units. Resistance has taken many different forms. Since June, for example, the St. Bernard development has had a "Survivor's Village," a tent city of 20 or so residents on the neutral ground outside. Juakali says he modeled the Village on the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, which built a tent city on the Washington Mall. (ibid)

There has also been civil disobedience at the Lafitte. For example, on August 28 of last year, this transpired:

At 2pm today Gregory "DJ" Christy, a resident of the Lafitte housing development, joined by more than 70 supporters entered his apartment with the intention of reoccupying it for the first time since August 2005. 9 supporters of Christy were arrested in the attempt to reopen public housing. All 9 have been bailed out of the Orleans Parish Prison....

Christy's apartment was opened by a group of activists including C3/Hands Off Iberville, the United Front for Affordable Housing, and other community activists. Legal observers from the Common Ground Collective were onsite to monitor the police response. Using a ladder to scale to the second floor window, the activists climbed in, walked downstairs into Christy's unit, and opened the heavy steel door from the inside.

After the door was removed Christy entered his apartment along with several more supporters. Housing Authority police were on the scene when the door fell. City police arrived shortly after preventing others from entering or leaving the apartment. While these 7 were occupying the apartment more than 70 supporters rallied outside. (by Darwin BondGraham, click here)

But as you can see from my photos, unfortunately the Lafitte is still locked up. However, continuous protests have caused authorities to backtrack some, HUD temporarily reopening some housing units in the city to allow some of those scattered to the winds to return. Congress has also weighed in to slow down the demolition plans, and the legal showdown over the class-action lawsuit is scheduled to take place this November. But the hard-pressed citizens of Orleans Avenue, not to mention the rest of the city, especially the Lower Ninth Ward, can use all the support they can garner nationally and internationally in the meantime. Here is a list of organizations that Edward Sanders has come up with that you, the reader, can contact if you feel inspired to help in some way. See his full article for more info on each one:

1. Common Ground Collective
2. Neighborhoods Partnership Network
3. People's Hurricane Relief Fund
4. Rethink (Google them)
5. DNIA, dniaofneworleans@yahoogroups.com (to email)
6. St. John #5 Baptist Church, 635 Hamburg St New Orleans, LA 70122, (504) 288-3272
7. Greater New Orleans Foundation
8. ACORN
(from http://www.woodstockjournal.com/neworleans.html )
Please help the citizens of New Orleans recover their dignity, fundamental rights and heritage. And again, to see the photo album, you can also click here.