This is the same kind of propaganda that was even more evident in the piece that Deborah posted. At least, an actual incident is the source of the piece. (We called them "incidents" during the Blitz.)
The continual bombing with an incredible tonnage of explosives have seemingly produced relatively few civilian casualties. I saw the other day a street full of people carrying three coffins - presumably civilian casualties. It struck me as hardly a wholesale slaughter of civilians.
The market explosion was either a mistake, or an Iraq missile coming down. In a contested air raid, on the street one is in danger from shrapnel and failed missiles. (I recall how with another 16 year old, we stood at the street entrance of our Air Raid Headquarters 'harmonizing' like imaginary Inkspots, or Mills Brothers, when something came howling down. We collided two floors down, our hair standing on end.)
It was shrapnel. We soon learned to recognize it.
During an air raid a lot of stuff comes down from the sky. I rather think that is what hit the market. The 'miss' was so far away from the targets, it seems hardly to be the fault of the air crew. But, it could have been a mistake of the crew, or a mistake in the manufacture of the ordnance. Or, an attempt to knock out a missile battery that was placed in the middle of the civilian population.
FISK says: "Two missiles from an American jet killed them all . . . . "
How does he know? It's a guess. Yet, some distance away a military base was being bombed at the time, so maybe . . . . ?
FISK:"Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists"
Does this sound like a civilian population scared of American bombs? More likely a population aware of the limited nature of the American attack.
FISK: "If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?"
I suppose this could be called "piling it on". It is not reporting, but opinion.
He described the people who died - 28 of them - assuming that each of the other 14 cars contained only the driver. If each of them averaged one passenger, we have a total dead of 42 . Unless some got out of the cars that "burst into flame".
Rather like the other piece, the "report" is propaganda. It's intended for people who already agree with the reporter and will read the story as a confirmation of their views.
We recognize the propaganda issued by the prosecutors of the war. We should also recognize propaganda by those who oppose it. War is horrible enough. It doesn't need a "reporter's" embellishments.
The latest number of dead is 51 according to the Iraqis. Incidentally, another explosion in a neighborhood has occurred - prospect 50 dead. When it was suggested that this might be a Saddam ploy, I shrugged it off. The second explosion makes me think a little more.
Harry --------------------------------------------------------------
Brian wrote:
Fisk is 'embedded' with the citizens of Baghdad.
Brian McAndrews Published on Thursday, March 27, 2003 by the lndependent/UK 'It Was An Outrage, An Obscenity' by Robert Fisk
It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smoldering car.
Two missiles from an American jet killed them all � by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be 'liberated' by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this 'collateral damage'? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.
It's a dirt-poor neighborhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap caf�s. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them.
How should one record so terrible an event? Perhaps a medical report would be more appropriate. But the final death toll is expected to be near to 30 and Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should not be told.
For another question occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre yesterday. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?
Abu Hassan and Malek Hammoud were preparing lunch for customers at the Nasser restaurant on the north side of Abu Taleb Street. The missile that killed them landed next to the westbound carriageway, its blast tearing away the front of the caf� and cutting the two men � the first 48, the second only 18 � to pieces. A fellow worker led me through the rubble. "This is all that is left of them now," he said, holding out before me an oven pan dripping with blood.
At least 15 cars burst into flames, burning many of their occupants to death. Several men tore desperately at the doors of another flame-shrouded car in the center of the street that had been flipped upside down by the same missile. They were forced to watch helplessly as the woman and her three children inside were cremated alive in front of them. The second missile hit neatly on the eastbound carriageway, sending shards of metal into three men standing outside a concrete apartment block with the words, "This is God's possession" written in marble on the outside wall.
The building's manager, Hishem Danoon, ran to the doorway as soon as he heard the massive explosion. "I found Ta'ar in pieces over there," he told me. His head was blown off. "That's his hand." A group of young men and a woman took me into the street and there, a scene from any horror film, was Ta'ar's hand, cut off at the wrist, his four fingers and thumb grasping a piece of iron roofing. His young colleague, Sermed, died the same instant. His brains lay piled a few feet away, a pale red and gray mess behind a burnt car. Both men worked for Danoon. So did a doorman who was also killed.
As each survivor talked, the dead regained their identities. There was the electrical shop-owner killed behind his counter by the same missile that cut down Ta'ar and Sermed and the doorman, and the young girl standing on the central reservation, trying to cross the road, and the truck driver who was only feet from the point of impact and the beggar who regularly called to see Mr Danoon for bread and who was just leaving when the missiles came screaming through the sandstorm to destroy him.
In Qatar, the Anglo-American forces � let's forget this nonsense about "coalition" � announced an inquiry. The Iraqi government, who are the only ones to benefit from the propaganda value of such a bloodbath, naturally denounced the slaughter, which they initially put at 14 dead. So what was the real target? Some Iraqis said there was a military encampment less than a mile from the street, though I couldn't find it. Others talked about a local fire brigade headquarters, but the fire brigade can hardly be described as a military target.
Certainly, there had been an attack less than an hour earlier on a military camp further north. I was driving past the base when two rockets exploded and I saw Iraqi soldiers running for their lives out of the gates and along the side of the highway. Then I heard two more explosions; these were the missiles that hit Abu Taleb Street.
Of course, the pilot who killed the innocent yesterday could not see his victims. Pilots fire through computer-aligned co-ordinates, and the sandstorm would have hidden the street from his vision. But when one of Malek Hammoud's friends asked me how the Americans could so blithely kill those they claimed to want to liberate, he didn't want to learn about the science of avionics or weapons delivery systems.
And why should he? For this is happening almost every day in Baghdad. Three days ago, an entire family of nine was wiped out in their home near the center of the city. A busload of civilian passengers were reportedly killed on a road south of Baghdad two days ago. Only yesterday were Iraqis learning the identity of five civilian passengers slaughtered on a Syrian bus that was attacked by American aircraft close to the Iraqi border at the weekend.
The truth is that nowhere is safe in Baghdad, and as the Americans and British close their siege in the next few days or hours, that simple message will become ever more real and ever more bloody.
We may put on the hairshirt of morality in explaining why these people should die. They died because of 11 September, we may say, because of President Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction", because of human rights abuses, because of our desperate desire to "liberate" them all. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I'll bet we are told President Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We shan't mention the pilot, of course.
� 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
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