licentious radio

Thursday, April 17, 2003
[10:49:06 AM]

Another Baghdad diary [channel4.com]: "As the Marines prepare to airlift little Zahra and the others to hospital, they try to stop us filming -- we point out that it was they who shot the people, and if it hadn't been for Mohammed, they wouldn't have any chance to save them."

[10:19:37 AM]

About plundering the museum: The day of the jackals [spectator.co.uk].

[10:17:23 AM]

You wonder why Rummy can get away with saying the looting was no big deal. It's scary if he said that because he was uninformed. It's scarier if he was just lying. The scariest is if he was informed, and that is the truth as he sees it.

The antidote to Rumsfeld is Robert Fisk -- a report on the streets of Baghdad.

In this article, he highlights evidence of the potential turmoil we've bought. He also points out that the arsonists seem to be *organized*. What organization is doing the arson? Who would benefit from the arson? When the arsonists get back on the bus and drive out of town, where do they go? Who pays them?

It's going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined [independent.co.uk].

[10:04:05 AM]
Weenies. Pansies. Girly-boys. Weaklings. Cowards. Unpatriotic.

That's what we have to say about anyone in the US government who opposed taking Syria down -- directly.

Blood is in the water. Sharks are swarming. Seize the day.

Rummy said Syria was offering a bounty on dead US soldiers. It's treasonous not to conquer any country Rummy says that about.

[9:57:59 AM]
How willing are you to kill civilians?

Perfectly willing, it turns out -- tactically. The strategy was pretty clearly designed to reduce civilian casualties. The British could have stormed Basra in the beginning. (That would have gotten a lot of British soldiers killed, too.)

But *tactically*, there isn't much evidence of negative consequences for killing civilians. "...The chick got in the way." Soldiers in the field were willing to use cluster bombs in places that weren't clear of civilians.

All this baloney about civilian deaths at checkpoints and warning shots -- it's because the troops don't have physical barriers to stop traffic, and they don't have large signs in Arabic to tell drivers to stop. So they (usually) fire warning shots, and if the vehicle doesn't stop, they slaughter. Let's roll.

The horror of embedded reporting is that we get a fair amount of insight into the behavior of soldiers. A lot of our soldiers were fairly willing to machine-gun down anybody who wasn't known to be safe. We did get the impression that US forces went out of their way not to kill civilians -- in general -- but obviously that didn't extend to putting up stop signs at checkpoints.

The only negative consequence for machine gunning civilians that we saw in the embedded reporting was that one Captain (Captain Ronny Johnson) yelled at the killers who hadn't fired a warning shot. In organizations, you get the behavior that you hold people accountable for. What accountability was there for use of cluster bombs? What accountability was there for killing civilians? Apparently none. (I'm talking about accountability within the US military organization.) To outsiders, the military just lies -- except for the embedded reporter, the media was told warning shots had been fired by Johnson's soldiers. Covering up mistakes and massacres is a long-standing tradition, of course.

So the good news is that only thousands of civilians were killed by the US military, not tens or hundreds of thousands. In a typical Bush-ism, the Army made sure not to keep track of the number of people they killed.

The incident that sticks in my mind was a soldier who killed a woman. She crossed a street several times during a fight. Each time she crossed, an Iraqi fighter would pop out and shoot an RPG. When he recognized the pattern, the US soldier gunned her down.

Was she a willing volunteer, or did the soldiers maybe have a gun pointed at her son? Was she killed instantly? Did she survive? When she was shot, did she get a last look at her son?

Create, promote, allow.... The US was attacking the town. We are responsible for the civilian casualties, no matter what.

Here's an account of killing civilians [counterpunch.org].