- As Glenn
Greenwald, among others, has pointed out, the new Bushist line is that
everyone killed by American forces in Iraq is "al Qaeda"
a transparent falsehood belied by the Pentagon's own assessments but now
mindlessly adopted by almost every corporate media venue, with the honorable
exception (as always) of McClatchy Newspapers. Of course, the Invader-in-Chief
and his multitude of bootlickers in traditional media and the blogosphere
have always vastly inflated the numbers and importance of those elements
in Iraq that are associated with al Qaeda in some way, however tenuous.
Indeed, we know, again from the Pentagon itself, that the exaggeration
of al Qaeda's influence in Iraq has been part of a deliberate, well-funded
"psy-ops" scheme. (See "Hubub
in Hibhib: The Timely Death of al-Zarqawi.") But now they have
decided to dispense with the subtleties of psy-ops and simply repeat "al
Qaeda" with every breath, in an effort to demonize all resistance
(both in Iraq and at home, both violent and non-violent) to Bush's murderous
boondoggle.
-
- But while this deceit is peddled for domestic consumption
avidly gobbled up and regurgitated by the bootlickers, and spreading
the intended misinformation among casual consumers of the news (i.e., the
vast majority of Americans) Iraqis have to deal with the brutal reality
of the war. And they know that everyone killed there by the invading forces
is not "al Qaeda." They know that many Iraqis being killed by
the Anglo-American coalition are
innocent civilians. And they are increasingly embittered at the American
slander of their dead.
-
- This slander is being applied even to those Iraqis who
have taken up arms against the very "al Qaeda" terrorists that
the American military is purportedly protecting them from, Iraqis who are
cooperating with the American-backed government and its American-trained
military and security forces. The BBC
reports about an horrific massacre of Iraqi civilians last week an
air attack with missiles and gunships that literally ripped to shreds the
bodies of village guards who had just returned from a raid with Iraqi government
forces on a suspected terrorist hideout. These men were then accused of
being "al Qaeda gunmen" in Pentagon press releases trumpeting
this magnificent feat of arms accusations then duly (not to mention
dully) parroted in the press.
-
- But the people in the village of al-Khalis tell a different
story. (And for all the bootlickers out there who have fully entered into
the spirit of the sectarian bloodbath unleashed by Bush and resolutely
reject any contradiction of Pentagon propaganda by Sunni victims, al-Khalis
is a largely Shiite village, on the side of the American-backed Iraqi government.)
The BBC, which acknowledges that it too simply repeated the Pentagon line
in its first reports on the "triumph," has gone back to the village
to dig up the truth and to do what the Bush Regime never does, and
what the American press does only with the most extreme rarity: give names
to the "collateral damage" of Bush's aggression.
-
- Village Disputes Story of Deadly Attack
(BBC):
-
- Excerpts: A group of villagers in Iraq is bitterly disputing
the US account of a deadly air attack on 22 June, in the latest example
of the confusion surrounding the reporting of combat incidents there.
-
- On 22 June the US military announced that its attack
helicopters, armed with missiles, engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen
who had been trying to infiltrate the village of al-Khalis, north of Baquba,
where operation "Arrowhead Ripper" had been under way for the
previous three days. The item was duly carried by international news agencies
and received widespread coverage, including on the BBC News website.
-
- But villagers in largely-Shia al-Khalis say that those
who died had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. They say they were local village
guards trying to protect the township from exactly the kind of attack by
insurgents the US military says it foiled...
-
- They say that of 16 guards, 11 were killed and five others
injured two of them seriously when US helicopters fired rockets
at them and then strafed them with heavy machinegun fire. Minutes before
the attack, they had been co-operating with an Iraqi police unit raiding
a suspected insurgent hideout, the villagers said.
-
- They added that the guards, lightly armed with the AK47
assault rifles that are a feature of practically every home in Iraq, were
essentially a local neighbourhood watch paid by the village to monitor
the dangerous insurgent-ridden area to the immediate south-west at Arab
Shawkeh and Hibhib, where the al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was
killed a year ago.
-
- The BBC then quotes the American command's version of
the incident:
-
- "Coalition Forces attack helicopters engaged and
killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen southwest of Khalis, Friday. Iraqi police were
conducting security operations in and around the village when Coalition
attack helicopters from the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade and ground forces
from 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, observed more than
15 armed men attempting to circumvent the IPs and infiltrate the village.
The attack helicopters, armed with missiles, engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda
gunmen and destroyed the vehicle they were using."
-
- This, say the villagers of al-Khalis, is simply a lie.
Here is the account they gave to the BBC when it followed up on the story:
-
- At around 2am on Friday morning, the village guards were
at their usual base in an unfinished building on the edge of the Hayy al-Junoud
quarter about 1.2 miles south-west of al-Khalis village centre. They were
surprised when a convoy of Iraqi police suddenly turned up, headed by the
commander of the Khalis emergency squad, Col Hussein Kadhim.
-
- The police told them they were about to raid a suspect
house in nearby al-Akrad Street and asked for the village mukhtar (headman)
to accompany them. The Mukhtar of Hayy al-Junoud, Jassem Khalil, and his
brothers Abbas and Ali, went with the police. Some of the other guards,
about half altogether, also offered to go along. The raid turned out to
be a false alarm there was nothing suspicious at the house in question.
-
- But as the police and guards began to return, the police
received an urgent radio message from the Joint Operations Centre saying
that US helicopters were about to raid the area. The police disappeared
immediately. But before the guards could even get to their own car, they
were hit by a rocket strike by American helicopters which suddenly appeared
overhead. So too were the remainder of the guards, still at their base
in the unfinished building nearby.
-
- The rocket attacks were followed by a prolonged period
of strafing by heavy machinegun fire from the helicopters. "It was
like a battlefront, but with the fire going only in one direction,"
said a local witness. "There was no return fire".
-
- ...When frightened villagers ventured out at first light,
they found 11 of the village guards dead, some of their bodies cut into
small pieces by the munitions used against them. All but two of those killed
were Shia and they have been buried at Najaf. The other two who were from
the local minority Sunni community.
-
- So here we have a local guard, an admirable example of
Shia-Sunni cooperation, working with the Iraqi government against suspected
insurgents, ground into mulch by American bullets then denounced by American
brass as killers and terrorists. Thus yet another village has been turned
against the blind and brutal occupation; thus many more seeds of revenge
and bitterness have been planted.
-
- Is this part of the much-ballyhooed "counterinsurgency
doctrine" crafted by the sainted General Petraeus to win hearts and
minds, to teach peace to the conquered? Or just the inevitable product
of a war of aggression, an action conceived in deceit and callous inhumanity?
-
- The BBC goes on to ask a few more pertinent questions:
-
- If the villagers' account is true, the incident would
raise many questions, including: On what basis did the US helicopters launch
their attack that night? How many other coalition reports of successes
against "al-Qaeda fighters" are based on similar mistakes, especially
when powerful remote weaponry is used?
-
- The incident also highlights the problems the news media
face in verifying such combat incidents in remote areas where communications
are disrupted, where direct independent access is impossible because of
the many lethal dangers they would face, and where only the official military
version of events is available.
-
- Ah yes, it's the best of all possible worlds for dirty
warriors like George Bush and Dick Cheney: a bloodbath "where only
the official military version of events is available." But as we all
know, "murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak with most miraculous
organ." And the names of the slaughtered in al-Khalis cry out with
bitter eloquence their silent condemnation.
-
- Jassem Khalil, the Mukhtar of Hayy al-Junoud
- Abbas Khalil, his brother
- Ali Khalil, his other brother
- Kamal Hadi, their cousin
- Shaker Adnan
- Abdul Wahhab Ibrahim
- Mohammad al-Zubaie
- Abbas Muzhir Fadhel
- Jamal Hussein Alwan
- Abdul Hussein Abdullah
- Ali Jawad Kadhem
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- Copyright © 2007 Chris Floyd
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