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Recent Stories
March 26, 2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
29, 2003
Al-Jazeera's Harrowing Footage
Bitter
Truths About Basra
By ROBERT FISK
Two
British soldiers lie dead on a Basra roadway, a small Iraqi girl--victim
of an Anglo American air strike--is brought to hospital with her intestines
spilling out of her stomach, a terribly wounded woman screams in agony
as doctors try to take off her black dress.
An
Iraqi general, surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in
central Basra and announces that Iraq's second city remains firmly in
Iraqi hands. The unedited al-Jazeera videotape--filmed over the past
36 hours and newly arrived in Baghdad--is raw, painful, devastating.
It
is also proof that Basra--reportedly "captured'' and "secured''
by British troops last week--is indeed under the control of Saddam Hussein's
forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of uprising
has broken out in Basra, cars and buses continue to move through the
streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as they are unloaded
from a government truck.
A remarkable
part of the tape shows fireballs blooming over western Basra and the
explosion of incoming--and presumably British--shells. The short sequence
of the dead British soldiers--over which Tony Blair voiced such horror
yesterday--is little different from dozens of similar clips of dead
Iraqi soldiers shown on British television over the past 12 years, pictures
which never drew any condemnation from the Prime Minister.
The
two Britons, still in uniform, are lying on a roadway, arms and legs
apart, one of them apparently hit in the head, the other shot in the
chest and abdomen.
Another
sequence from the same tape shows crowds of Basra civilians and armed
men in civilian clothes, kicking the soldiers' British Army Jeep and
dancing on top of the vehicle. Other men can be seen kicking the overturned
Ministry of Defence trailer, which the Jeep was towing when it was presumably
ambushed.
Also to be observed on the unedited tape--which was driven up to Baghdad
on the open road from Basra--is a British pilotless drone photo-reconnaissance
aircraft, its red and blue roundels visible on one wing, shot down and
lying overturned on a roadway. Marked "ARMY'' in capital letters,
it carries the code sign ZJ300 on its tail and is attached to a large
cylindrical pod which probably contains the plane's camera.
Far
more terrible than the pictures of dead British soldiers, however, is
the tape from Basra's largest hospital that shows victims of the Anglo-American
bombardment being brought to the operating rooms shrieking in pain.
A middle-aged
man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked head to foot in
blood. A little girl of perhaps four is brought into the operating room
on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from
the left side of her stomach. A blue-uniformed doctor pours water over
the little girl's guts and then gently applies a bandage before beginning
surgery. A woman in black with what appears to be a stomach wound cries
out as doctors try to strip her for surgery. In another sequence, a
trail of blood leads from the impact of an incoming--presumably British--shell.
Next to the crater is a pair of plastic slippers.
The
al-Jazeera tapes, most of which have never been seen, are the first
vivid proof that Basra remains totally outside British control. Not
only is one of the city's main roads to Baghdad still open--this is
how the three main tapes reached the Iraqi capital--but General Khaled
Hatem is interviewed in a Basra street, surrounded by hundreds of his
uniformed and armed troops, and telling al-Jazeera's reporter that his
men will "never'' surrender to Iraq's enemies. Armed Baath Party
militiamen can also be seen in the streets, where traffic cops are directing
lorries and buses near the city's Sheraton Hotel.
Mohamed
al-Abdullah, al-Jazeera's correspondent in Basra, must be the bravest
journalist in Iraq right now. In the sequence of three tapes, he can
be seen conducting interviews with families under fire and calmly reporting
the incoming British artillery bombardment. One tape shows that the
Sheraton Hotel on the banks of Shatt al-Arab river has sustained shell
damage.
On
the edge of the river--beside one of the huge statues of Iraq's 1980-88
war martyrs, each pointing an accusing finger across the waterway towards
Iran--Basra residents can be seen filling jerry cans from the sewage-polluted
river.
Five
days ago the Iraqi government said 30 civilians had been killed in Basra
and another 63 wounded. Yesterday, it claimed that more than 4,000 civilians
had been wounded in Iraq since the war began and more than 350 killed.
But Mr Abdullah's tape shows at least seven more bodies brought to the
Basra hospital mortuary over the past 36 hours. One, his head still
pouring blood on to the mortuary floor, was identified as an Arab correspondent
for a Western news agency.
Other
harrowing scenes show the partially decapitated body of a little girl,
her red scarf still wound round her neck. Another small girl was lying
on a stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child
had its feet blown away. There was no indication whether American or
British ordnance had killed these children. The tapes give no indication
of Iraqi military casualties.
But
at a time when the Iraqi authorities will not allow Western reporters
to visit Basra, this is the nearest to independent evidence we have
of continued resistance in the city and the failure of the British to
capture it. For days the Iraqi have been denying optimistic reports
from "embedded'' reporters--especially on the BBC--who gave the
impression that Basra was "secured'' or otherwise in effect under
British control. This the tape conclusively proves to be untrue.
There
is also a sequence showing two men, both black, who are claimed by Iraqi
troops to be US prisoners of war. No questions are asked of the men,
who are dressed in identical black shirts and jackets. Both appear nervous
and gaze at the camera crew and Iraqi troops crowded behind them.
Of
course, it is still possible that some small-scale opposition to the
Iraqi regime broke out in the city over the past few days, as British
officers have claimed. But, seeing the tapes, it is hard to imagine
that it amounted, if it existed at all, to anything more than a brief
gun battle.
The
unedited reports therefore provide damaging proof that Anglo-American
spokesmen have not been telling the truth about the battle for Basra.
And in the end this is far more devastating to the invading armies than
the sight of two dead British soldiers or--since Iraqi lives are as
sacred as British lives--than the pictures of dead Iraqi children.
Yesterday's
Features
Daniel Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris and
Iraq
Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
Adam Engel
Schlock and Awe
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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