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April 16, 2002
Dave Marsh
Hymns: How I Got Through
Last Week
April 15, 2002
Susi Abeles
A
Field Trip to Jenin
Breyten Breytenbach
A Letter to Ariel Sharon:
"You Won't Break Them"
Gregory
Wilpert
CounterCoup
in Venezuela
Kristen Schurr
Amid the Rubble of Nablus
Jordy
Cummings
An
Open Letter to Abe Foxman
Christopher Reilly
The Media, the CIA
and the Chavez Coup
James
T. Phillips
"Homicide"
Bombers
April 14, 2002
William Blum
The CIA and Venezuela
David
Vest
A
Good Old-Fashion "Incursion"
Ralph Nader
General Motors:
Stuck in Reverse
M. Junaid
Alam
From
the Ashes: Palestinian Struggle for Freedom
Sam Bahour
Palestinians and Americans
April 13, 2002
Beth Daoud
Life
in the Ruins of Nablus
Patrick Cockburn
Bulldozing History:
The End Nears for Stalin's
Most Monstrous Hotel
Gregory
Wilpert
The
Coup in Venezuela:
an Eye-Witness Account
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Thoughts on Our War
Against Terrorism
Anne Winkler-Morey
Why
I Didn't Organize
a Passover Seder This Year
April 12, 2002
Nancy Stohlman
Live from East Jerusalem:
International Nonviolence
Brian
J. Foley
Defeating
Evil
Olivier Audeoud
Did the US Break
the Laws of War?
Rep. Ron
Paul
The
Middle East Quagmire
Michael Colby
Republican Porn:
Oiling Up the Caribou
John Chuckman
Tom
Friedman's Fabrications
April 11, 2002
Patrick Cockburn
Battle of St. Petersburg Zoo
Jeff Halper
After
the Invasion:
Now What?
Falk / Krieger
Taming the Nuclear Monster
Steve
Perry
The
Good Life of
Nellie Stone Johnson
Nick Ring
Efficiency and Occupation:
Terrorism vs. Taylorism
Alexander
Cockburn
From
the West Bank to BBQ
to Old Sparky, And Beyond
April 10, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
Blaming the Victims:
Hating the Palestinians
George
Monbiot
World
Bank to West Bank
Fran Schor
US-Sponsored State Terror
David
Vest
Political
Color Schemes
Jack McCarthy
Florida State Radicals:
The Berkeley of the South
Rises Again
Doreen
Miller
A
Tale of Two Warring Tribes
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Five
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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The
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Al Gore:
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April 16,
2002
Inside Jenin:
Rubble and Decomposing
Bodies
By Brian Wood
in Jenin Refugee Camp
It was by accident how we four internationals
ended up in the Jenin Refugee Camp. We weren't planning to go
there today because we've been interviewing refugees that are
in the villages outside of Jenin. We got to a village adjacent
to the camp to interview some people and one of our friends who
just came from the camp said, that we could go in just for a
couple of hours and have a look around and see how we could help.
So, we decided to go in, the four of
us, one from Italy, named Patricia, Sofia, Matt and myself. There
is a lot of military on the way. You have to go through several
villages and these villages have been systematically invaded
over the last few nights.
We finally reached the camp. The first
things we saw were houses with large holes in them from tank
shells. On the outskirts of the camp things aren't so bad. From
the interviews that we've done with the refugees, well, it's
not so bad relative to the center of the camp_I'll explain to
you in a minute.
The refugees that we've interviewed have
told us that all the fighters had congregated at the center of
the camp. When the Israelis came through the edges of the camp
they were able to penetrate it fairly easily, because there wasn't
a lot of resistance, and actually, some people have reported
that there was no resistance.
On the outside of the camp, the houses
are, generally, still standing. The majority that we saw are
not for living in. There are still people on the outskirts of
the camp. It's not totally deserted like we thought we would
find. The people obviously have no place to go; so, they are
still in there homes with huge holes and the inside trashed,
because soldiers have gone through them, breaking everything.
We walked through, we slithered our way
to the center of the camp. When we made it to the center of the
camp we viewed the paths the Israeli bulldozers had cleared so
that tanks could enter the camp because the camps have very small
alleyways and there's not enough room for tanks to get through.
As the refugees we interviewed had told us all along the bulldozers
bulldozed a path from the north to the south end of the camp,
about 10 meters wide, so of course this took down dozens and
dozens of homes with it.
These homes, many of them, had families
still buried inside, under the rubble. Some of them are still
alive, though perhaps, a lot of them are dead.
We met up with another friend in the
camp and she said that one guy was buried under the rubble of
his home for 10 days, and he worked himself out, dug himself
out. And now he's walking around talking like a normal human
being.
We maneuvered our way to the center of
the camp where all the resistance had gathered and where I guess,
something like 13 Israeli soldiers were killed. The first attempt
of the Israeli soldiers to enter the center of the camp failed
drastically, with their ground troops, because they lost 13 of
their soldiers. At that point the Israelis began bombarding the
camp with F-16s, with Apaches helicopter gunships, and reinforcing
their ground troops.
There is an area right in the center
of the camp that must be 5000 square feet where it was all full
of homes and now there's just piles of rubble everywhere. There's
people buried under these homes, they're dead.
As we walked we saw many bodies buried
under rubble, just in the remains of their homes and were killed.
Their bodies are decomposing, there's all kinds of maggots and
lice and flies eating their bodies. I won't go into more detail
than that, but I'll just say that it's the most gruesome thing
I've ever seen in my life, with body parts lying all over.
These bodies have been in the homes,
we actually viewed six bodies, people that were killed inside
homes. They've been there for about six days now and these last
few days it's been quite hot, so the rate of decomposition has
rapidly increased at this point.
The people in the camp are still very
afraid as the Israeli military is still inside the camp. When
they move APC's and tanks around everybody runs, but for the
last three days the people have been out and about in the camp,
but of course they are absolutely frightened for if they see
any soldiers or tanks they run for cover and run to hide. Of
course it's for good reason because of the massive, massive destruction,
a large amount of executions and the number of people killed
in the camp itself.
There is no food, water or electricity
in the camp. I kept asking people what they eat and theyd say,"
we have something." But when I would ask them at first if
they had any food or water, they'd say "No."
And the number one thing they need in
the camp right now is water. The Israelis not only bulldozed
dozens and dozens of homes on top of people, they also destroyed
all the streets and all the water manes
If the Israeli military would leave the
camp at least the Palestinians could repair the water lines under
ground and water service in the camp could continue. But the
military is still in the camp full force.
The camp is just an absolute disaster,
so much of it is in total ruins. Anywhere you walk around you
know exactly where there's a body because you can smell them.
When you walk by a house and if there's a body inside, you smell
it without going in and seeing it. Because the smell is the most
raunchy thing I've smelled in my life.
The people are still making do with what
they have. The United Nations (UN) is trying to get food and
water into the refugee camp but the Israelis continue to forbid
them to enter the camp. We were actually with two big trucks
that had been stalled by the Israeli military for eight hours
today to get into the camp to deliver food and water.
Where we met up with the UN we asked
if they'd mind we could take what we could carry up into the
people and sure enough they were very happy to let us do this.
So we took whatever water and bread we could carry. There was
only three of us and we had to walk about a half of a mile, so
it was very difficult to take very much.
We need internationals to come here as
soon as possible. We have some more coming from Jerusalem tomorrow
to help us, to continue to bring food and water to people. The
UN has food and water for them but they're not allowed to enter
so we will do what we can to carry what we can by hand.
QUESTION: What about reports of mass
graves, have you seen anything like that?
ANSWER: In interviewing refugees people
have said they had seen with their own eyes these mass graves.
We were only in the camp today for maybe two or three hours this
afternoon and actually the only thing we did besides bring food
and water, was when Palestinians stopped us and told us they
knew where there were people alive still under the rubble of
their homes. So we were trying to find them but of course we
didn't' have any luck because the people aren't exactly sure
where they are now.
We did not personally see these mass
graves today. Some of the refugees we've interviewed in the last
few days have seen these and one we met up with in the camp was
with an Israeli journalist who lives in the West Bank and this
Israeli journalist confirmed that the Israeli military had said
they removed bodies from the camp and took them into the Jordan
Valley to bury them in some graves that they have out there.
I've heard these reports on television
here, on different news services, Arab news services, and people
on the ground have said this and now Israeli journalists confirmed
that the Israeli government or military had said they had trucked
bodies from the camp to the Jordan Valley near the border with
Jordan.
QUESTION: But what about the possibility
of the UN doing air-drops - is the airspace restricted?
ANSWER: I'm not sure if the UN has the
capability. All I've ever seen in the year I've lived here are
ground vehicles. If they could do airdrops I think it would be
difficult for two reasons. For one there's F16s always flying
around, over the camp, over Jenin city and even last night there
were about ten of them. It was night time and we could see their
lights flashing and they kept flying over.
The other difficulty is if people tried
to obtain food from some place, any time they try to retrieve
bodies of people, any time the UN even tries to distribute food
without permission the soldiers shoot at people, the UN people
and the refugees in the camp. So it would be very difficult.
The soldiers did let us walk around.
We encountered a lot of soldiers when we were carrying the food
and water and they tried to stop us but we just told them "we're
taking bread and water to the women and children" and just
kept walking.
Brian Wood is
one of three members of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East
Peace that have joined many internationals in witnessing the
Israeli invasion and trying to end the Israeli illegal military
occupation of Palestine. More on their trip at: http://www.ccmep.org/palestine.html
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