Voice of Revolution

Illegitimate President, Fraudulent Democracy

Time to Bury U.S. Style Democracy

As Bush traveled to Latin America and now Asia, proclaiming to be the greatest defender of democracy, the world’s people are denouncing him as a war criminal. Americans are among the peoples opposing Bush’s crimes and demanding that he be held accountable. Already, in the court of world public opinion, he has no legitimacy and nor does the system of U.S.-style democracy he represents.

There is growing denunciation of the war against Iraq. November 8 marks the one-year anniversary of the war crimes against the valiant resistance of the people of Fallujah. The U.S. crimes a year ago are now being even further exposed. The U.S. has finally admitted using white phosphorous (WP) as an offensive weapon, something documented at the time of the assault and siege of the city. WP, like napalm, burns skin to the bone. Both are chemical weapons and cannot be used against civilians or in civilian-populated areas.

The use of chemical weapons by the U.S. stands alongside the outright massacres of civilians that did and are taking place, the bombing of hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure and the ongoing occupation of the city that has regularly brought civilian deaths.

As well, yet more reports are surfacing of unrelenting U.S. torture of prisoners. At Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where a hunger strike by prisoners persists, the U.S. has refused to allow UN representatives to visit with the prisoners. The CIA and its secret prisons and torture are also being exposed. Bush, far from rendering account himself and holding all those responsible accountable, is demanding that Congress not pass an amendment that outlaws, again, cruel and unusual punishment.

And, as occurred in November 2004, the fraud of U.S. elections themselves are again being exposed. The fraud of vote counting in 2004 has recently been confirmed by the government, right while vote fraud occurs again, in 2005, in Ohio and elsewhere.

At the same time that government vote rigging is being further exposed, the government is also organizing to make it far more difficult for anyone to vote. Plans are being made to impose “REAL ID” identification requirements that many people, especially workers and minorities, will be unable to meet, making them unable to vote. Both vote rigging and blocking voting are part of current trends toward elimination of universal suffrage and elections themselves. Those elections that do occur are to be rendered meaningless. This is already being done both by eliminating the power of those elected, as is occurring in various cities with Control Boards, and by blocking the large majority from voting at all.

Whether abroad or at home, the future of humanity requires that U.S.-style democracy be buried. Fallujah represents both the criminal brutality of U.S. democracy and the peoples’ fierce resistance. It, like resistance across Iraq, at Guantánamo and worldwide, shows that it is U.S.-style democracy that is seeing its end. The same is true inside the country, as the fraud of U.S.-style democracy is increasingly rejected.

Bush and the ruling circles cannot save this democracy and are rapidly moving to impose outright military rule. The people, far from succumbing to this brutality and repression, are stepping up their organized resistance and building broader unity, as witnessed in thousands of demonstrations across the country, including every state, and occurring every month, for the past six months. Numerous efforts are going forward where the people are taking matters into their own hands. This was witnessed in people’s relief efforts in New Orleans and now with the upcoming conference and march in New Orleans, December 8-10, to defend the rights of the people.

With many local elections in 2005 and Congressional elections in 2006, people are broadly discussing not so much who to elect, but how to change the electoral set-up so as to bring the people themselves to power. Efforts to select candidates, achieve electoral reform, and organize to be effective in the electoral arena are also underway.

All these many and varied organizing efforts, as the peoples commonly chant, “Are What Democracy Looks Like.”

[TOP]

Students, Teachers, Parents Step Up Opposition to Military Recruiting

Thousands of youth organized against military recruitment in more than 35 actions across the country on November 17. Parents and teachers also joined marches, rallies and meetings of various kinds organized in Florida, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, as well as Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, and many east coast, mid-west and west coast states. Under the banner Not Your Soldier! many organizations, affinity groups, and anti-war and campus networks took their stand against military recruitment and demanded an end to the war in Iraq now.

Leading up to this coordinated day of action, youth in many areas are stepping up their organizing to block the military from securing student information (names, addresses and phone numbers) as mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. They are also stepping up campaigns to kick recruiters off campuses and high schools and demand funding for education. Tens of thousands of youth are investigating how to stay out of the military and participating in the work of many websites providing information on how to oppose recruitment and stay out of the military. Below are some recent examples from Massachusetts and California

Massachusetts

In Massachusetts more than 5,000 high school students in five of the state’s largest school districts organized against recruitment by demanding that their names be removed form lists turned over to military recruiters. In Boston, about 3,700 students, or almost 20 percent of those enrolled in the city’s high schools, got their names removed. At Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, 952 high school students, more than half the student body, ordered the school system not to give their names to the military this year.

Overall, almost 20 percent of public high school students targeted by recruiters in Cambridge, Boston, Worcester, Lowell, and Fall River have joined in having their names removed. This represents a significant increase over the previous year. The area, which has a large number of poor and minority students, is especially targeted by the military.

The organizing effort is a reflection of the growing anti-war movement, where youth are often in the forefront.

California

On November 8 (Election Day), the people of San Francisco voted to keep military recruiters out of the public schools. 59 percent of voters said “yes” to Proposition I, which was put on the ballot by the anti--recruitment group College Not Combat. Prop I was initiated in part because activists continually confronted campus and city police in their anti-recruitment efforts. College Not Combat activists report that Prop I was a good means to secure broad public opinion for keeping recruiters out of public high schools and campuses. The proposition reads in part, that citizens “want it to be city policy to oppose military recruiters’ access to public schools and to consider funding scholarships for education and training that could provide an alternative to military service.” Enthusiasm for Proposition I was high not just in San Francisco but also with residents of neighboring towns, who want similar measures on their ballots.

Below Are Some Anti-Recruitment Websites:

www.collegenotcombat.com
www.CourageToResist.org
www.Resisters.info
www.BendermanDefense.org
www.objector.org/recruiting.html
www.nyspc.net/
www.militaryfreezone.org
www.leavemychildalone.org

[TOP]

GAO Report Upholds Ohio Vote Fraud Claims

- Joe Baker, Rock River Times -

As if the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby wasn’t enough to give the White House some heavy concerns, a report from the Government Accounting Office (GAO) takes a big bite out of the Bush clique’s pretense of legitimacy. This powerful and probing report takes a hard look at the election of 2004 and supports the contention that the election was stolen. The report has received almost no coverage in the national media.

The GAO is the government’s lead investigative agency, and is known for rock-solid integrity and its penetrating and thorough analysis. The agency’s agreement with what have been brushed aside as “conspiracy theories” adds even more weight to the conclusion that the Bush regime has no business in the White House whatever.

Almost a year ago, Rep. John Conyers, senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the GAO to investigate the use of electronic voting machines in the November 2, 2004, presidential election. That request was made as a flood of protests from Ohio and elsewhere deluged Washington with claims that shocking irregularities were common in that vote and were linked to the machines.

CNN said the Judiciary Committee got more than 57,000 complaints after Bush’s claimed re-election. Many were made under oath in a series of statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations carried out in Ohio by the Free Press and other groups seeking to maintain transparent elections.

Online Journal.com reported that the GAO report stated that “some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.”

This is the only democratic nation that permits private partisan companies to count and tabulate the vote in secret, using privately-held software. The public is excluded from the process. Rev. Jesse Jackson and others have declared that “public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines.” The makers of nearly all electronic voting machines are owned by conservative Republicans.

The chief executive of Diebold, one of the major suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren “Wally” O’Dell, went on record in the 2004 campaign vowing to deliver Ohio and the presidency to George W. Bush.

In Ohio, Bush won by only 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Honest election advocates contend that O’Dell’s statement to hand Ohio’s vote to Bush still stands as a clear indictment of an apparently successful effort to steal the White House.

Some of the GAO’s findings are:

1. Some electronic voting machines “did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.” In short, the machines; provided a way to manipulate the outcome of the election. In Ohio, more than 800,000 votes were cast on electronic voting machines, some registered seven times Bush’s official margin of victory.

2. the report further stated that: “it was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works, so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate.” Very many sworn statements and affidavits claim that did happen in Ohio in 2004.

Next, the report says, “Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.” The GAO found that falsifying election results without leaving evidence of doing so by using altered memory cards could easily be done.

The GAO additionally found that access to the voting network was very easy to compromise because not all electronic voting systems had supervisory functions protected by password. That meant access to one machine gave access to the whole network. That critical finding showed that rigging the election did not take a “widespread conspiracy” but simply the cooperation of a small number of operators with the power to tap into the networked machines. They could thus alter the vote totals at will. It therefore was no big task for a single programmer to flip vote numbers to give Bush the 118,775 votes.

Another factor in the Ohio election was that access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user ID, coupled with easy-to-guess passwords. Even amateur hackers could have gotten into the network and changed the vote. System locks were easily picked, and keys were easy to copy, so gaining access to the system was a snap.

One digital machine model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary manner that if one machine experienced a power failure, the entire network would go down. That is too fragile a system to decide the presidency of the United States. Problems obviously exist with security protocols and screening methods for vendor personnel.

The GAO study clearly shows that no responsible business would operate with a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one used in the 2004 election.

These findings are even more damning when we understand the election in Ohio was run by a secretary of state who also was co-chairman of Bush’s Ohio campaign. Far from the conclusion of anti-fraud skeptics, the GAO’s findings confirm that the network, which handled 800,000 Ohio votes, was vulnerable enough to permit a handful of purposeful operatives to turn the entire election by means of personal computers using comparatively simple software. […]

Joe Baker is Senior Editor of the Rock River Times, Rockford, Illinois

[TOP]

Some Facts About Elections

1) 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. Diebold is based in Ohio. Its chairman and CEO is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

http:/www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html
http:/www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
http:/www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886

2) ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.

http:/www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
http:/www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html

3) 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml

4) Diebold’s new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http:/www.diebold.com/solutions/default.htm

5) Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states. Diebold employed consultant Jeff Dean, who was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States. He had already been convicted on 23 felony counts, including planting back doors in his software and using a “high degree of sophistication” to evade detection over a period of 2 years.

http:/www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
http:/portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/301469.shtml
http:/www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf

6) Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-time Bush supporter, used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator, in an election he was expected to lose, based on votes counted by ES&S machines. He is a likely Republican candidate for President for 2008.

http:/www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html

7) All — not some — but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.

http:/www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.htmwww.
yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm

8) There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.

http:/www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
http:/www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html

[TOP]

Voting Rights and Katrina

- Ryan Paul Haygood -

As thousands celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act on August 6th, the black and white images of peaceful Blacks being tear-gassed and clubbed on “Bloody Sunday” while marching for the right to vote were, for many, faded memories of a so-called bygone era.

That is, until a month later, when the television again focused the nation’s attention on another tragedy: Hurricane Katrina. What we saw televised in New Orleans was not just the function of a broken levee. It was the intersection of race and class, laid bare for the world to see how such factors literally amounted to life or death.

The striking nexus between Bloody Sunday and Hurricane Katrina is not simply that both were televised, but rather what that coverage revealed. Katrina’s vulnerable, the poor and politically disfranchised who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society, were without the economic or other means to get out of harm’s way.

Today, a growing national trend of exploiting the fear of minimally existent voter fraud threatens to hinder access to the ballot box by requiring voters to present a photo ID that our nation’s most vulnerable – the poor, elderly and many racial minorities – are likely not to have the means to acquire.

The National Commission on Federal Election reform, co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and James Baker, recently recommended federal legislation requiring all voters to present a “Real ID” card in order to vote. To obtain this type of photo identification, documentary proof would be required of an individual’s full legal name and date of birth, Social Security number, primary address and citizenship.

Unfortunately, the Commission’s “Real ID” recommendation is more draconian than any ID requirement adopted in any state to date, including Georgia’s recently enacted and widely criticized law, which President Carter, ironically, has condemned as “discriminatory.”

Georgia’s voter identification bill is one of the strictest measures in the nation. Voters are required to present one of six government-issued photo identifications at the polls, reducing from 17 the number of previously allowed forms of identification, including bank statements and utility bills, which contain no photo. Georgia’s discriminatory photo ID law has been blocked in federal court.

Proponents of photo ID requirements argue that such measures are necessary to prevent fraud and to enhance confidence in election results. But the type of voter fraud addressed by photo ID requirements is extraordinarily small, and supporters of the photo ID measures have yet to make a convincing case that existing methods of discouraging and addressing fraud are insufficient.

While the anti-fraud benefits of photo ID measures are suspect, there is strong evidence that such requirements will reduce political participation by otherwise eligible rural, elderly, disabled, poor and racial minority voters, who are less likely to have photo identification or the means to acquire one.

Like the warnings about the capacity of New Orleans’ levees to withstand the force of a major hurricane, a photo ID requirement will predictably increase the ranks of the disfranchised.

Many who were left behind in New Orleans did not have access to a car, and thus are least likely to possess a driver’s license. The hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Katrina may find it impossible to recover the identity papers they left behind or to obtain new records from government offices and hospitals that were destroyed. These citizens, and many like them across the country, will be politically disfranchised by the Commission’s ID proposal, if enacted, and by photo ID requirements like Georgia’s.

Four decades after the Voting Rights Act’s (VRA) passage, the Hurricane Katrina experience reminds us that the VRA is still necessary to protect our nation’s most vulnerable from present attempts to dilute their voting strength.

Ryan Paul Haygood is assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.

[TOP]

Chemical Weapons Used During Assault on Fallujah

The Independent, November 8, 2005 Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.

Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumors have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city.

On 10 November last year, the Islam Online website wrote: “U.S. troops are reportedly using chemical weapons and poisonous gas in its large-scale offensive on the Iraqi resistance bastion of Fallujah, a grim reminder of Saddam Hussein’s alleged gassing of the Kurds in 1988.”

The website quoted insurgent sources as saying: “The U.S. occupation troops are gassing resistance fighters and confronting them with internationally banned chemical weapons.”

In December the U.S. government formally denied the reports, describing them as “widespread myths.” “Some news accounts have claimed that U.S. forces have used ‘outlawed’ phosphorus shells in Fallujah,” the USinfo website said. “Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. U.S. forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes.

“They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.”

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 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 meters 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 Center of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, color close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelized 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-colored 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 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.

Meanwhile, five U.S. soldiers from the elite 75th Ranger Regiment have been charged with kicking and punching detainees in Iraq.

The news came as a suicide car bomber killed four American soldiers at a checkpoint south of Baghdad yesterday.

[TOP]

Incendiary Weapons: The Big White Lie

- The Independent (Britain), November 17, 2005 -

The Iraqi government is to investigate the United States military’s use of white phosphorus shells during the battle of Fallujah — an inquiry that could reveal whether American forces breached a fundamental international weapons treaty.

Iraq’s acting Human Rights minister, Narmin Othman, said last night that a team would be dispatched to Fallujah to try to ascertain conclusively whether civilians had been killed or injured by the incendiary weapon. The use of white phosphorus (WP) and other incendiary weapons such as napalm against civilians is prohibited.

The announcement came as John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defense, faced mounting calls for an inquiry into the use of WP by British forces as well as what Britain knew about its deployment by American troops. Mr. Reid said that he would look into the matter.

The move by the Iraqi government and the growing concern at Westminster follows the Pentagon’s confirmation to The Independent earlier this week that WP had been used during the battle of Fallujah last November and the presentation of persuasive evidence that civilians had been among the victims.

The fresh controversy over Fallujah, which has raged for a full 12 months, was initially sparked last week by a documentary by the Italian state broadcaster, RAI, which claimed there were numerous civilian casualties. A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday he would “not be surprised” if WP had been used by U.S. forces elsewhere in Iraq.

Lt. Col. Barry Venable said the incendiary shells were a regular part of the troops’ munitions. “I would not rule out the possibility that it has been used in other locations.” [A reporter from California’s North Country Times also reported soldiers firing into buildings a mixture of white phosphorous and high explosives known as “shake and bake.”]

The Pentagon’s admission of WP’s use – it can burn a person down to the bone – has proved to be a huge embarrassment to some elements of the U.S. government. In a letter to this newspaper, the American ambassador to London, Robert Tuttle, claimed that U.S. forces “do not use napalm or WP as weapons.” Confronted with the Pentagon’s admission, an embassy spokesperson said Mr. Tuttle would not be commenting further and “all questions on WP” should be referred to the Pentagon. The U.S. embassy in Rome had issued a similar denial.

The size or scale of the inquiry to be undertaken by the Iraqi government is unclear, and it is not known when its investigators will arrive in Fallujah. An official with the human rights ministry said that while it was also not known how long the inquiry would take, “the people of Fallujah will be fully consulted”. The Pentagon says the use of incendiary weapons against military targets is not prohibited.

But article two, protocol III of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Weapons bans their use against civilians. Perhaps of crucial importance to the Iraqi investigators, the treaty also restricts their use against military targets “inside a concentration of civilians.” […]

Bush’s Arsenal: The allegation:

• Napalm/Mark 77s: Widespread reports during the initial U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 suggested marines had dropped incendiary bombs over the Tigris River and the Saddam canal on the way to Baghdad.

• Cluster bombs: 33 civilians, including many children, were reportedly killed in a U.S. cluster bomb attack on Hilla, south of Baghdad. Reports of attacks on Basra were also widespread.

• White Phosphorus: Coalition troops were reported to have used WP indiscriminately against civilians and insurgents during the Fallujah offensive of November 2004.

What the U.S. said:

• Napalm/Mark 77s: The Pentagon denied reports it had used napalm, saying it had last used the weapon in 1993 and destroyed its last batch in 2001. “We don’t even have that in our arsenal.”

• Cluster bombs: General Richard Myers, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said coalition forces dropped nearly 1,500 cluster bombs during the war and only 26 fell within 1,500ft of civilian areas.

• White Phosphorus: “[WP was used] very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.” U.S. State Department

How the UK backed them up:

• Napalm/Mark 77s: “The U.S. has confirmed to us they have not used Mk 77 firebombs, essentially napalm canisters, in Iraq at any time.” Adam Ingram, Armed Forces minister, January 2004

• Cluster bombs: The Ministry of Defense said it supported the use of cluster bombs against legitimate military targets to protect British troops and civilians, insisting care was taken to avoid populated areas.

• White Phosphorus: “Use of phosphorus by the U.S. is a matter for the U.S.,” Tony Blair’s spokesman said yesterday.

How the U.S. “came clean”:

• Napalm/Mark 77s: It took five months for the U.S. to admit its marines had used Mk 77 firebombs (a close relative of napalm) in the invasion. The Pentagon said their functions were “remarkably similar”.

• Cluster bombs: General Myers admitted: “In some cases, we hit those targets knowing there would be a chance of collateral damage.” It was “unfortunate” that “we had to make these choices”.

• White Phosphorus: Pentagon spokesman Lt-Col Barry Venable said this week that WP had been used, “to fire at the enemy” in Iraq. “It burns... it’s an incendiary weapon. That is what it does.”

How Britain “came clean”:

• Napalm/Mark 77s: “First of all they didn’t use napalm. They used a firebomb. It doesn’t stick to your skin like napalm, it doesn’t have the horrible effects of that. “ John Reid, Defense Secretary

• Cluster bombs: Adam Ingram, Armed Forces minister, said: “There were troops [and] equipment in and around built-up areas, therefore bombs were used to take out the threat to our troops.”

• White Phosphorus: The Government maintains it used WP in Iraq only to lay smoke screens. “We do not use white phosphorus against civilians,” the Defense Secretary John Reid said.

[TOP]

Toxic Truths from the Iraqi Battlefront

- Siddharth Varadarajan, The Hindu, November 15, 2005 -

Fiction: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Lt. Col. William Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, 1979.

Non-fiction: “At the end of the fight we thought back on some of the things we were the proudest of. What jumped to the forefront was infantry and tank platoon sergeants ... telling us that the artillery and mortars were awesome. At the end of the day, that is what it is all about: our maneuver brethren recognizing why we are called the ‘King of Battle’.” Captain James T. Cobb, First Lieutenant Christopher A. LaCour, and Sergeant William H. Hight in “The Fight for Fallujah,” Field Artillery magazine, 2005. (Among the ‘awesome’ mortars fired were White Phosphorous chemical munitions).

Concerned at the environmental consequences of having dumped thousands of pounds of chemical weapons of various types into the ocean off its coast soon after World War II, the U.S. in the 1980s decided to prepare a master-list of all such dumps for future monitoring.

The report, authored by William R. Brankowitz of the Army Chemical Materials Agency, was titled “Summary of Some Chemical Munitions Sea Dumps by the United States” and was printed for internal circulation on January 30, 1989. Among the 50-plus incidents catalogued involving mustard gas, lewisite, and other nasty chemicals were the following two: Between September 14 and December 21, 1945, 924 canisters of White Phosphorous (WP) cluster bomb munitions from the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland were loose-dumped in the Atlantic Ocean along with WP smoke canisters and smoke projectiles and arsenic trichloride; and then on June 18, 1962, 5,252 WP munitions were dumped in the Atlantic along with mustard projectiles, 20 drums of cyanide and 421,157 pounds of radiological waste.

Another report prepared in March 2001 titled “Offshore disposal of chemical agents and weapons conducted by the United States” by the Historical Research and Response Team of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, corroborated the same information, including the dumping of WP.

These reports are significant because they tell us that as far as the U.S. military’s own inventory of weapons was concerned, White Phosphorous was classified as a “chemical munition” or a “chemical agent and weapon” as recently as 1989 and 2001. And for good reason too. The WP had been dumped into the ocean in 1945 and 1962 but was obviously considered dangerous enough for the U.S. Army to be concerned about its toxicity five decades later.

So how come a weapon that is not considered kosher enough to dump in the ocean in 1945 is OK to dump on human beings in Fallujah, Iraq, some 60 years later? And even if the Pentagon believes it’s OK, how come it can get away with now saying WP is not a chemical weapon?

For a war launched by the United States in the name of dealing with the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, the allegation of chemical weapon use leveled by Italy’s RAI television channel last week was undoubtedly as incendiary as the munitions in question. Quoting former U.S. Army personnel involved in the massive, no-holds-barred military assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah last November, a documentary produced by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta charged the U.S. with the indiscriminate use of White Phosphorous munitions and showed graphic and shocking visual evidence of the effect this weapon produced on its human victims, many of whom were civilian.

According to the military affairs website, globalsecurity.org, WP “results in painful chemical burn injuries. The resultant burn typically appears as a necrotic area with a yellowish color and characteristic garlic-like odor. White phosphorus is highly lipid soluble and as such, is believed to have rapid dermal penetration once particles are embedded under the skin.” Basically, the chemical burns the human body but can leave the clothes covering it intact. This is exactly what the Italian documentary showed.

In the documentary, Maurizio Torrealta asked Peter Kaiser, spokesperson of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, whether White Phosphorous was a prohibited substance. “No, white phosphorous is not prohibited by the Convention on chemical weapons in the context of war operations, provided that use is not made of that substance for its toxic properties. For example, white phosphorous is normally used to produce smoke bombs that hide troop movements, and this is considered a legitimate use with respect to the conventions. But if the toxic or caustic properties of White Phosphorous are used as a weapon, then it is prohibited.”

I did a Google News search of how the U.S. media was reporting the allegation and discovered that apart from the Boston Globe and Christian Science Monitor, virtually no “mainstream” American newspaper had bothered to cover the story. A few ran denials by the Pentagon that the U.S. had used illegal weapons but most chose to ignore the issue altogether. To the best of my knowledge, not even the Daily Press of Newport, Virginia — whose probe into the presence of deadly White Phosphorous landmines in Chesapeake Bay and other chemical weapons elsewhere on the U.S. east coast led to the two Army reports mentioned above being declassified last month — reported the Fallujah allegations let alone the coincidence of WP being involved.

One of the collateral benefits of defeating a country in war is that victory brings with it not just Victor’s Justice but Victor’s Book-keeping as well. Thanks to Paul Volcker and the CIA-run Iraq Survey Group of Charles Duelfer — which preceded him and couldn’t find WMDs and so decided to find a corruption scam — we now know the fate of virtually every farthing paid into and out of the Iraqi oil-for-food accounts. What we don’t know is how many Iraqi civilians have been killed in U.S. offensive operations — “We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks had famously said — or how they died and are still dying. After Nuremberg, all aggressors have realized the value of sloppy record-keeping.

When the allegation of chemical weapon use in Fallujah first surfaced last December, the U.S. State Department swung into action to deny the charge. On December 9, 2004, its International Information Programs posted a response on its website under the section “Identifying Misinformation”: “[S]ome news accounts have claimed that U.S. forces have used ‘outlawed’ phosphorus shells in Fallujah. Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. U.S. forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.”

The State Department’s response was carefully formulated because the Chemical Weapons Convention — to which the U.S. is a signatory — does not outlaw the use of WP if the purpose is to use the smoke the munition generates to mark a target or obscure ground movement or even as an incendiary against material facilities. But using it as a weapon to directly attack human beings is generally considered illegal since the CWC bans the use of “any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals.” Thus, the ST100-3 Battle Book published by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth in July 1999, notes in chapter 5: “Burster Type White phosphorus (WP M110A2) rounds burn with intense heat and emit dense white smoke. They may be used as the initial rounds in the smokescreen to rapidly create smoke or against material targets, such as Class V sites or logistic sites. It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets.”

Accordingly, on the day the Italian documentary was to be telecast, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, spokesperson of U.S. military in Iraq, admitted the use of WP in Fallujah as a battlefield prop but told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!: “I know of no cases where people were deliberately targeted by the use of white phosphorus.”

Unfortunately for the State Department and Lt. Col. Boylan, an in-house Army magazine, Field Artillery, had already published a breathless and rather candid account of the utility of deliberately targeting people with WP by three soldiers who had taken part in Operation Phantom Fury. “White Phosphorous proved to be an effective and versatile munition. 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.”

In the course of two years, the world has borne witness to the ease with which the United States has broken one civilized norm after the next. First out was the taboo against indefinite detention, then the one on torture and collective punishment, then the ban on the use of disproportionate force and the use of indiscriminate weapons in closely confined areas where non-combatants could be targeted. In Fallujah, that martyred city which will now take its place in the annals of human infamy alongside Guernica, the U.S. appears to have crossed yet another frontier. And there is no Paul Volcker to catalogue the crime.

[TOP]

Fallujah Revisited

- Dahr Jamail, Iraq Dispatches, November 14, 2005 -

Nearly a year after they occurred, a few of the war crimes committed in Fallujah by members of the U.S. military have gained the attention of some major media outlets (excluding, of course, any of the corporate media outlets in the U.S.).

Back on November 26, 2004, in a story I wrote for the Inter Press Service titled “’Unusual Weapons’ Used in Fallujah,” refugees from that city described, in detail, various odd weapons used in Fallujah. In addition, they provided detailed descriptions such as “pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on the burns.”

This was also mentioned in a web log I’d penned nine days before, on November 17, 2004, named “Slash and Burn” where one of the descriptions of these same weapons by the same refugee from Fallujah said, “These exploded on the ground with large fires that burnt for half an hour. They used these near the train tracks. You could hear these dropped from a large airplane and the bombs were the size of a tank. When anyone touched those fires, their body burned for hours.”

On December 9th of 2004 I posted a gallery of photos, many of which are included in the new RAI television documentary about incendiary weapons having been used in Fallujah.

Like the torture “scandal” of Abu Ghraib that for people in the west didn’t become “real” until late April of 2004, Iraqis and journalists in Iraq who engaged in actual reporting knew that U.S. and British forces were torturing Iraqis from nearly the beginning of the occupation, and continue to do so to this day.

All of this makes me wonder how much longer it will take for other atrocities to come to light. Even just discussing Fallujah, there are many we can choose from. While I’m not the only journalist to have reported on these, let me draw your attention to just a few things that I’ve recorded which took place in Fallujah during the November, 2004 massacre.

In my story “Fallujah Refugees Tell of Life and Death in the Kill Zone” published on December 3, 2004 there are many instances of war crimes that will, hopefully, be granted the attention they deserve.

Burhan Fasa’a, an Iraqi journalist who worked for the Lebanese satellite TV station LBC and who was in Fallujah for nine days during the most intense combat, said Americans grew easily frustrated with Iraqis who could not speak English.

“Americans did not have interpreters with them,” Fasa’a said, “so they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English. They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and [they] shot people because [the people] didn’t obey [the soldiers’] orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of English.” He also added, “Soldiers thought the people were rejecting their orders, so they shot them. But the people just couldn’t understand them.”

“I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks,” said Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, a resident of Fallujah. “This happened so many times.”

Other refugees recounted similar stories. “I saw so many civilians killed there, and I saw several tanks roll over the wounded in the streets,” said Aziz Abdulla, 27 years old, who fled the fighting last November. Another resident, Abu Aziz, said he also witnessed American armored vehicles crushing people he believes were alive.

Abdul Razaq Ismail, another resident who fled Fallujah, said: “I saw dead bodies on the ground and nobody could bury them because of the American snipers. The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah.”

A man called Abu Hammad said he witnessed U.S. troops throwing Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates River. Abu Hammed and others also said they saw Americans shooting unarmed Iraqis who waved white flags.

Believing that American and Iraqi forces were bent on killing anyone who stayed in Fallujah, Hammad said he watched people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. “Even then the Americans shot them with rifles from the shore,” he said. “Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot.”

Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein reported witnessing similar events. After running out of basic necessities and deciding to flee the city at the height of the U.S.-led assault, Hussein ran to the Euphrates.

“I decided to swim,” Hussein told colleagues at the AP, who wrote up the photographer’s harrowing story, “but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.”

Hussein said he saw soldiers kill a family of five as they tried to traverse the Euphrates, before he buried a man by the riverbank with his bare 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,” Hussein recounted. “I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards.”

A man named Khalil, who asked not to use his last name for fear of reprisals, said he had witnessed the shooting of civilians who were waving white flags while they tried to escape the city. “They shot women and old men in the streets,” he said. “Then they shot anyone who tried to get their bodies.”

“There are bodies the Americans threw in the river,” Khalil continued, noting that he personally witnessed U.S. troops using the Euphrates to dispose of Iraqi dead. “And anyone who stayed thought they would be killed by the Americans, so they tried to swim across the river. Even people who couldn’t swim tried to cross the river. They drowned rather than staying to be killed by the Americans,” said Khalil.

Why should blatant lying from the military come as a surprise? Even back in November of 2003, I wrote about how U.S. forces claimed to have been attacked by, and then killed 48 Fedayin Saddam in Samarra. Then magically, overnight, they raised the number to 54. Upon investigation of this, I found that 8 civilians had been killed in the city, and wrote about it here and posted photos of it here.

However, why should any of us be surprised at this? When we have an administration that led the country into an illegal war of aggression and continues to lie about it, events like torturing and the use of incendiary weapons on civilians are small change.

[TOP]

A Name that Lives in Infamy

The Destruction of Falluja Was an Act of Barbarism that Ranks alongside My Lai, Guernica and Halabja

- Mike Marqusee, November, 10 2005 -

One year ago this week, US-led occupying forces launched a devastating assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja. The mood was set by Lt Col Gary Brandl: "The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan.

He's in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him." The assault was preceded by eight weeks of aerial bombardment. US troops cut off the city's water, power and food supplies, condemned as a violation of the Geneva convention by a UN special rapporteur, who accused occupying forces of "using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population". Two-thirds of the city's 300,000 residents fled, many to squatters' camps without basic facilities.

As the siege tightened, the Red Cross, Red Crescent and the media were kept out, while males between the ages of 15 and 55 were kept in. US sources claimed between 600 and 6,000 insurgents were holed up inside the city - which means that the vast majority of the remaining inhabitants were non-combatants.

On November 8, 10,000 US troops, supported by 2,000 Iraqi recruits, equipped with artillery and tanks, supported from the air by bombers and helicopter gunships, blasted their way into a city the size of Leicester. It took a week to establish control of the main roads; another two before victory was claimed.

The city's main hospital was selected as the first target, the New York Times reported, "because the US military believed it was the source of rumours about heavy casualties". An AP photographer described US helicopters killing a family of five trying to ford a river to safety. "There were American snipers on top of the hospital shooting everyone," said Burhan Fasa'am, a photographer with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. "With no medical supplies, people died from their wounds. Everyone in the street was a target for the Americans."

The US also deployed incendiary weapons, including white phosphorous. "Usually we keep the gloves on," Captain Erik Krivda said, but "for this operation, we took the gloves off". 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 - a proportionately higher death rate than in Coventry and London during the blitz.

The collective punishment inflicted on Falluja - with logistical and political support from Britain - was largely masked by the US and British media, which relied on reporters embedded with US troops.

The BBC, in particular, offered a sanitised version of the assault: civilian suffering was minimised and the ethics and strategic logic of the attack largely unscrutinised.

Falluja proved to be yet another of the war's phantom turning points. Violent resistance spread to other cities. In the last two months, Tal-Afar, Haditha, Husaybah - all alleged terrorist havens heavily populated by civilians - have come under the hammer. Falluja is still so heavily patrolled that visitors have described it as "a giant prison". Only a fraction of the promised reconstruction and compensation has materialised.

Like Jallianwallah Bagh, Guernica, My Lai, Halabja and Grozny, Falluja is a place name that has become a symbol of unconscionable brutality. As the war in Iraq claims more lives, we need to ensure that this atrocity - so recent, so easily erased from public memory - is recognised as an example of the barbarism of nations that call themselves civilised.

Mike Marqusee is a co-founder of Iraq Occupation Focus www.iraqoccupationfocus.org.uk