Anything Concerning the Iraq conflict..

Further into that article it says that Iraqi's are looting gov't offices of furniture and weapons.

Coalition troops will "assume" that those iraqi's with weapons are combatants and will shoot.

I understand the necessity for protecting ones self (especially after the incidents of pretending to surrender and then killing US/British troops. But......don't these Iraqi's have the right to defend themselves against Iraq's military?

Is fair to assume that they will all be against this "liberation"?

The most difficult part of this whole thing will be the aftermath . The hardest work is yet to come.

So if/when Suddam is dead, will that mean the end of the liberation?

The end of the liberation will come when the Baathist die hards are no longer a threat to the countries stability. Then will come the task of rebuilding Iraq and keeping out the influence of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait and Jordan.

So this war is going to last a long time then?

Will the Baath party still be willing to fight without Saddam? Assuming they believe he's dead, of course. Which may be very difficult to do with the geneva conventions rules on POW's.

Any guesses on the length of this war?

The liberation continues......

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15580
The Real Face of War

By Maria Tomchick, AlterNet
April 8, 2003

The televised face of this war is a lie. It's a flickering screen with a Fox-TV newsman's macho boast that US troops are in the heart of Baghdad and are "here to stay." It's a Pentagon press conference assuring us that another city has been "taken," but not yet "secured."

Occasionally, however, we catch glimpses of the reality: descriptions of incidents that reflect the real impact on both sides.

A U.S. Marine in a medevac unit outside Al Kut, unable to save a dying American soldier, buries his resucitation equipment in despair. I'm reading this in my morning paper. I close my eyes and try to imagine where this Marine came from, what he did before he was shipped over to Iraq. Maybe he worked in an inner-city hospital where gunshot wounds are the norm, but the hospital's emergency room has the equipment and personnel to save lives and patch together even the worst cases. But the stripped-down, gritty, sweltering reality of a battlefield after three days of non-stop fighting with bullets still whizzing overhead and not enough clamps to stop the bleeding and not enough hands to patch all the wounds fast enough has finally broken his will. What will be left of this man when he returns home?

I read a quote from soldiers who've shot up a van full of women and children. The soldiers' initial, agonized question, "Why did they do it? Why did they try to run the checkpoint?" will eventually, with the passage of time, become "Why did I do it? Why did I shoot them all?" The soldiers will remember that brief scene over and over again in their nightmares for the next 20, 30, 40 years.

These soldiers weren't the only ones who prepared for the worst, only to realize that war brings on the worst in spite of their best-laid plans.

Ibrahim al-Yussuf's parents thought they could save their 12-year-old son by sending him to live with relatives in Zambrania, a small, rural village outside of Baghdad. The city was too dangerous, they thought, as loud explosions and fireballs lit up the skyline at night. After all, a U.S. HARM missile demolished a busy market, killing 67 people and wounding dozens more. If Ibrahim left the city he'd be out of the way of stray missiles.

But soon after the war started, U.S. military planners set up "kill boxes" in the region south of Baghdad, a largely rural area, where Zambrania and several other villages lie. Kill boxes were used in Afghanistan; they're grid-like areas on the military planners' maps that are designated as free-fire zones. U.S. fighter pilots are allowed to shoot anything that moves within these zones. But, just as in Afghanistan, there is no way that civilians on the ground can know when they've entered a kill box until a bomb falls on them.

Ibrahim and his 17-year-old cousin, Jalal, left home to have lunch with Abdullah, a friend who owned the neighboring farm. They were torn apart by a U.S. bomb because they were outside, walking, and a kill box had been superimposed over their home.

Zambrania and the neighboring village of Talkana have lost 19 people because of U.S. fighter planes. In Manaria, a village 30 miles south of Baghdad, 22 people have died and 53 have been injured in air raids. Most of the dead and wounded are children and women. Many of the wounds look suspiciously like those caused by cluster bombs, anti-personnel weapons that release a spray of deadly shrapnel that can cut through flesh, bone and even the soft, mud-brick walls of Iraqi houses. The U.N. has condemned the use of cluster bombs, a key component of the U.S. arsenal, because so many more civilians are killed by cluster bombs than any other kind of ordnance except land mines. And like a land mine, a cluster bomblet can lie unexploded, waiting for a victim to brush by it or a curious child to pick it up.

The use of cluster bombs in these rural areas is, surely, a war crime. As the daughter of a farmer, I feel physically ill at the thought of a rural landscape littered with these little packages of death. And then I read about the Hilla massacre.

The Red Cross reported 61 civilians killed and 450 people injured over two days Â– March 31 and April 1 Â– by cluster bombs dropped in the Hilla region south of Baghdad. Described as "a horror," two nights of U.S. bombing produced babies cut in half, dozens of severed bodies, and scattered limbs. The victims were farmers and their families. There were no Iraqi artillery, Republican guard troops or military installations within miles.

And the horrors continue to unfold. Patrick Baz, a veteran photographer for Agence France Presse who covered the war in Beirut in the 1980s, was shocked when he stumbled upon a farm torn up by U.S. missiles in al-Janably. Inside the farmhouse were the remains of a family of 20 people, 11 of them children.

Children make up the largest number of civilian victims in Iraq; they are, after all, an estimated 60 percent of the population. There really is a good reason why Al Jazeera TV broadcasts so many pictures of suffering Iraqi children.

Dimitrius Mognie, a Greek doctor and humanitarian aid worker, recently visited a hospital in Baghdad, where he described the shortage of antibiotics, bandages and even anesthetics. He was struck by the enormous number of children in the hospital beds and the heartbreaking lack of resources available for them. He witnessed doctors amputating a child's limb using only local anesthetics; the doctors had to give the child a new shot every five minutes. Nearby lay a 9-year-old boy suffering from a horrible abdominal wound that he sustained when he "had picked up something that exploded" Â– clearly, an injury from a cluster bomb.

Meanwhile, on the urban battlefield, families with young children have been caught in the crossfire in Basra, Nasiriya, Najaf,and Baghdad. Eyewitness reports of civilians killed in those cities evoke memories of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the No Gun Ryi slaughter in Korea. George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have told us that few civilians will be killed. But the real face of this war is inescapable: hundreds, if not thousands, of civilian dead, and most of them children.

Maria Tomchick is co-editor and contributing writer for Eat the State!, a biweekly newspaper based in Seattle, Washington.

Some of the sources for this article:
www.Iraqbodycount.net
"Thousands Flee Baghdad as U.S. Troops Edge Nearer," Matthew Green, Reuters, 4/5/03
"Cluster bombs liberate Iraqi Children," Pepe Escobar, Asia Times online
"'Kill box' policy reflects intensified onslaught," Owen Bowcott and agencies, The Guardian, 3/27/03
"I saw the heads of my two little girls come off," Sydney Morning Herald, 4/2/03
"Samar's story," Kim Sengupta, The Independent, 4/4/02
"So this is what war looks like?" Tim Wise, Znet, 4/2/03
"Barrage of Fire, Trail of Death in the Capital," Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, 4/6/03

It would seem that Journalists also need to be liberated....

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,141 ... 91,00.html
Journalists take aim at Pentagon
By Joanne Ostrow, Denver Post TV-Radio Critic

U.S. military fire killed three journalists in two buildings in Baghdad on Tuesday.

The Pentagon denied deliberately targeting journalists, claiming U.S. forces came under "significant enemy fire" from both buildings and responded in self-defense.

Witnesses contradict that claim. In fact, journalists from around the world aren't buying it. Some predict the assault on al-Jazeera offices in particular will be taken as intentional in some quarters.

The U.S. attack on the Palestine Hotel, known as home base to the international journalist community, killed a Reuters cameraman and a Spanish TV network cameraman. Separately, at the al-Jazeera facilities, a television reporter was killed and three other al-Jazeera employees were wounded in the strikes.

"Conspiracy theory, right or wrong, has a lot of traction in the Arab world," said CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who was among the first to say the attacks warrant thorough investigations.

People are going to take this as a direct target on al-Jazeera, agreed Martha Brant, a Newsweek correspondent in Doha, Qatar. "It's confusing," she said. "Why, if they can avoid a mosque, why couldn't they avoid the hotel or al-Jazeera, which is clearly marked?"

On CNN's "Larry King Live," al-Jazeera correspondent Omar al Issawi said: "We expect an investigation into what happened. We're not prejudging anything. If it was a mistake, we'd like the U.S. military to come out and say it was a mistake."

Issawi, based in Doha, echoed other reporters' statements that no gunfire elicited the U.S. attack. "I can almost guarantee you there was no gunfire coming from that area. Any gunfire is audible and visible to all" via the network's fixed camera position.

Jasim Al-Azzawi, a news anchor for Abu Dhabi TV, similarly told CNN: "No fire was emanating from the building or the lobby. I doubt very much that the U.S. would target media people on purpose. But there was something wrong."

CBS News' Bob Simon told King, "I can't believe that it was deliberate. I refuse to believe it." However, he said, the picture of the war emerging around the world is quite different from what Americans are seeing. "Even British television is far more skeptical about the number of civilian casualties, about what's happening," Simon said. "I'm sure overseas the version that the Pentagon targeted journalists will appear far more credible."

"We're not talking about this just because we're journalists," Amanpour said. The larger issues concern the Pentagon's rules governing embedded reporters versus independent reporters, and the matter of civilian casualties or "collateral damage."

The Pentagon pushed the responsibility back on the non-embedded journalists. After expressing condolences, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said: "War is a dangerous, dangerous business, and you're not safe when you're in a war zone."

An outpouring of angry questions and denials from war correspondents filled the airwaves Tuesday.

"Don't journalists accept this as the fortunes of war?" Larry King asked Amanpour, now in Kuwait City. Even if there was some sniper fire, which journalists deny, she said, "The question remains, was it a proportionate response?"

"This poses a very significant dilemma, I believe," Amanpour told her colleague Wolf Blitzer. "The Pentagon have been all over the map in their response to this," she said.

"The question remains the proportionate response to a civilian building. In my view," Amanpour said, "that's a major question that needs to be asked, and urgently."

The Bush regime has treated the press with nothing but disdain since the day they were appointed though. They bombed Al Jazeera in Afghanistan and a lot of people think that was a response to Al Jazeera implicating them in possible war crimes. They did their best to discourage anybody who was not "imbedded" from reporting on Iraq.

Since the independent press in Iraq; a group of international journalists, mostly young and idealistic; and Al Jazeera, an agency praised by many press groups for remaining as unbiased as possible under some extremely tenuous circumstances, have been reporting on a lot of things that could be considered war crimes committed by the US, it is not really surprising that Bush and his buddies decided to target them.

There were no snipers. In a building full of reporters all looking for a story? They never noticed men with guns or heard gunshots? If there would have been a sniper in that building he wouldn't have had time to shoot...he'd be too busy giving interviews.

I have a casual aquaintance over there. A photographer looking for his big break. His sister forwarded me a series of his e-mails. He has gone from being for the war because of Saddam's tyranny to being against it because of Bush's tyranny. He was staying at the Palestine along with everybody else. Right now his family is trying to find out if he's okay. They haven't heard from him since Friday night.

His last e-mail said that he was going to try to get out before the US troops got there because when they showed up things got dangerous. He stressed that the danger wasn't from being caught in the cross-fire, it was from, "...nailing that shot that shows what's really happening."

I've sent her an e-mail asking if I can put his e-mails up here and am waiting for a response. Hopefully in a day or two I'll be able to post them.

Enough With the Conspiracy theories already!

Gilligan casts doubt on source of hotel attack

I have never been an advocate of the media being in a war zone

And this is 1 of the many reasons why.
along with keeping ourselves (the soldiers) safe, we also have to ensure the safety of non-combatants who are so eager for a story they knowingly put themselves in harms way.

Example
While helping secure the Kandahar airbase a reporter came up to me and started asking inane questions about how i felt about being in Afghanistan fighting for freedom.I was trying to cover my ARCs and The reporter and cameraman where standing directly in my face effectivelly blocking 95% of my vision.

not to mention the multitude of broadcasts starting with the reporter ducking for cover while the group he is leaching off of for a story comes under fire...hey buddy grab a weapon and help out don't be a hinderance. your not doing that pinned down soldier anygood by filming him and trying to find out how he "feels" the war is going.

It was unfortunate that the american pulled the trigger before Visually confirming that the target was indeed the enemy ...but hey IF IT MOVES SHOOT IT! isnt that the american way?..
damn i'm ranting again...sorry :oops:

to sum it up they are in a war zone bullets will fly and shit will happen they should not have been there in the first place..yes the american shouldnt have shot at them but what did they expect the fighting and bullets to just go around them? it's urban warfare it is confusing at the best of times the enemy is everywhere try walking down a street either in a city or even suburbia and try and picture every window,bush,parked car dumpster or balcony could have an enemy waiting to get you in his sights tell me thats not nerve racking.I don't want to justify what the americans did but the reporters just should not have been there........

The thing is that the press do belong in war zones, especially when the war involves a democracy and is purportedly being fought to bring democracy. Freedom of the press is a pillar of democracy and members of the press have done as much as the military in ensuring our freedom over the years.

The controversy isn't over them being accidentally killed. There have been at least twelve members of the press killed in Iraq, but the controversy is really over only four of those. Those four seem to be the victims of purposeful US attacks.

The attack on the Palestine was misguided at best. It doesn't matter if the tank actually shot at the 15th floor or not, it did attack the hotel. Some journalists reportedly feel they were being sent a message that the US is in charge now and they should report accordingly. Given how the Bush regime has bullied the main-stream press at home since coming to office and the fact that anybody watching the war knows that the independent press are staying at the Palestine, firing any shells at the hotel at all is a high;y suspect act.

What is likely the purposeful targeting of Al Jazeera is worse than misguided...it is just one more thing that will help in turning the entire Middle East against the US. Al Jazeera made sure the US military had their coordinates specifically so they wouldn't be bombed. It appears that the US instead used those coordinates to try to silence a portion of the press that will not bow down to them.

I totally agree that the situation is suspect.

But as for Freedom of the press!?
To cover the news then have it heavily censored?

I also agree that the war should be covered by the media preferably from an un-biased point of view, also from a safe distance out of the soldiers way. maybe a small light wieght live feed camera strapped to a soldiers helmet that would bring the war up close and personal no hiding the horrors of war that way.

Can you truly depend on Canadian/american/British news coverage to give you an accurate and un-biased report of what is going on? :roll:

My reply mainly had to do with non-combatants in a war zone and how I believe they should not be there and since the media have no weapons and cannot help in a fight they have no place on the front lines it is just 1 more thing to worry about especially when they get in the way as is often been my experience.

But the press being there helps and supports democracy. If it wasn't for the independent press in Iraq we would have very little idea as to what is happening. We would have no information on civilian casualties, would not hear from Iraqis who aren't really happy to be "liberated" by the US, and would have a very unbalanced view of the war.

By searching for information from the non-imbedded press we can get an idea what is really happening. Not all reports are biased. Not all reports are censored. Without a free and independent press we would not be able to question the actions of the US.

If for no other reason than how uncomfortable a free press makes the Bush regime, that free press is something we need.

"Not all reports are biased"

I hate to break this to you but all reports are biased. The reporters can't help but bring there own personal views into the story.