posted April 05, 2005 07:40 PM              

Sunday 20 March 2005, 4:04 Makka Time, 1:04 GMT

Journalists accuse US soldiers of targeting children




Related:
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All is quiet in Falluja, or at least that is how it seems, given that the mainstream media has largely forgotten about the Iraqi city. But independent journalists are risking life and limb to bring out a very different story.

The picture they are painting is of US soldiers killing whole families, including children, attacks on hospitals and doctors, the use of napalm-like weapons and sections of the city destroyed.

One of the few reporters who has reached Falluja is American Dahr Jamail of the Inter Press Service. He interviewed a doctor who had filmed the testimony of a 16-year-old girl.

"She stayed for three days with the bodies of her family who were killed in their home. When the soldiers entered she was in her home with her father, mother, 12 year-old brother and two sisters.

She watched the soldiers enter and shoot her mother and father directly, without saying anything. They beat her two sisters, then shot them in the head. After this her brother was enraged and ran at the soldiers while shouting at them, so they shot him dead," Jamail relates.

Disturbing reports

Another report comes from an aid convoy headed up by Dr Salem Ismael. He was in Falluja last month. As well as delivering aid he photographed the dead, including children, and interviewed remaining residents.

Again his story does not tally with the indifference shown by the main media networks.

"The accounts I heard ... will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in Falluja, but the truth is worse than you could possibly have imagined"

Dr Salem Ismael,
aid convoy leader

"The accounts I heard ... will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in Falluja, but the truth is worse than you could possibly have imagined," he says.

He relates the story of Hudda Fawzi Salam Issawi from the Julan district of Falluja: "Five of us, including a 55-year-old neighbour, were trapped together in our house in Falluja when the siege began. On 9 November American marines came to our house.

'My father and the neighbour went to the door to meet them. We were not fighters. We thought we had nothing to fear. I ran into the kitchen to put on my veil, since men were going to enter our house and it would be wrong for them to see me with my hair uncovered.

"This saved my life. As my father and neighbour approached the door, the Americans opened fire on them. They died instantly.

"Me and my 13-year-old brother hid in the kitchen behind the fridge. The soldiers came into the house and caught my older sister. They beat her. Then they shot her. But they did not see me. Soon they left, but not before they had destroyed our furniture and stolen the money from my father's pocket."

Targeting media

Journalist and writer Naomi Klein has also come under attack for insisting that US forces are eliminating those who dare to count casualties.

No less than the US ambassador to the UK David Johnson wrote a letter to British newspaper The Guardian that published Klein's work, demanding evidence, which she then provided.

The first piece of evidence Klein sent to Johnson was that the hospital in Falluja was raided to stop any reporting of casualties, a tactic that was later repeated in Mosul.

"The first major operation by US marines and Iraqi soldiers was to storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the facility under military control.

US troops have reportedly used
napalm-like weapons

"The New York Times reported that 'the hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumours about heavy casualties', noting that 'this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons'.

The Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers 'stole the mobile phones' at the hospital - preventing doctors from communicating with the outside world."

As Dahr Jamail reports from his online diary "doctors are now technically forbidden to talk to the media or allow them to take photos in Iraqi hospitals unless granted permission from the Ministry of Health and its US-adviser".

Napalm-like weapons

Allied to this are various reports of the US using napalm and napalm-like weaponry in Falluja.

US troops are accused of
threatening Falluja hospital staff


Jamail recounts: "Last November, another Falluja refugee from the Julan area, Abu Sabah, told me: 'They (US military) used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.'

"He explained that pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burned peoples' skin even when water was dumped on their bodies, which is the effect of phosphorous weapons, as well as napalm."

The reports of the use of napalm in civilian areas are widespread, as are many other frightening allegations.

The attacks on the hospitals and medical facilities in Falluja are also in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions.

posted April 05, 2005 11:29 PM            

quote:

---

If SOME soldiers in the past have been caught killing innocent people as they took pictures and found it funny, then I won't say it isn't true either.

---

Which US soldiers participated in that sequence of events?

posted April 06, 2005 03:33 AM            

I want to see those pictures of dead innocent Iraqis laying on the ground with American soldiers posing in the pictures and laughing about it.

posted April 06, 2005 10:03 AM            

Otherwise, there's no basis for communication and no reason for further response.

There are pictures of American soldiers, men and women standing by Iraqi prisoners who were posed in sexually suggestive and embarrassing positions and laughing.

Your comment they killed innocent Iraqis and took the same kind of pictures goes far beyond anything I've seen.

posted April 06, 2005 10:06 AM              

Those people pictured in those very well publicized photos were tortured (as defined by the Geneva conventions if not by the Admin as they weren't considered "enemy combatants").

A few in American custody did die, and I don't doubt that some of those were tortured to death (ah, overzealous CIA/contractors) - both in Iraq and in Afghanistan (and in some lovely third party countries) - but the soldiers pictured with the "detainees" were laughing over their humiliation, not their death.
Now, you may destain them for that (I do), but please don't claim that those Privates, Specialists, and Sgts killed them.

SBM - In all seriousness (this isn't meant as a dig) if you're looking for slightly more credible indepent(ish) media, you might want to try www.motherjones.com .

posted April 06, 2005 04:48 PM              

By DEXTER FILKINS (NYT) 924 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 14 , Column 5

ABSTRACT - Capt Donald Reese, company commander of unit charged with abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, testifies that top military intelligence officer at prison, Col Thomas M Pappas, was in cellblock on night prisoner died during interrogation; suggests that Pappas was aware of efforts to conceal death; Reese testifies at hearing for one of seven accused members of his unit, Specialist Sabrina Harman, who appears in some of photos of prisoner abuse showing human pyramid of detainees and in photo with dead detainee referred to by Reese; Reese testifies that in addition to Pappas, others in room were members of CIA; his testimony appears to be first to suggest that senior officer was aware of suspicious death immediately after it happened, and that he was involved in or knew of attempts to hide it (M)

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/16/terror/main680658.shtml

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/30/iraq/main614905.shtml

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0331-13.htm

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30714FF3B540C718EDDAB0994DC404482&incamp=archive:search

posted April 06, 2005 06:51 PM              

Now, this is just conjecture based from the info that I've seen, but I'm betting that those soldiers
1) Had been given the "suggestion" that doing X actions to prisoner or prisoners would "really help with the interrogations"
and
2) Were, by and large, not the brightest bulbs in the package.
3) Disregarded what they knew and felt to be right, even by the Army's standards, given weak control and sanction for cruelty.
4) Seriously got carried away in their roles (as will happen to many when put in that situation).

But those soldiers did not kill anyone.

People with much higher clearances and/or salaries may have, but not them - and you almost certainly won't find pictures of the actions of the former.

posted April 06, 2005 08:04 PM              

ABC News has obtained two new photos taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq showing Spc. Charles Graner and Spc. Sabrina Harmon posing over the body of a detainee who was allegedly beaten to death by CIA or civilian interrogators in the prison's showers. ( see...... http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum16/HTML/001160.html )

also.... unless you can post a note from GOD that this iraqi is completely free from sin, then calling him innocent is pure conjecture on your part....

I'm going to put my feet up on my desk and stand by with a bowl of popcorn while you hunt up that note from GOD........

posted April 06, 2005 08:13 PM              

here, a valiant guard single-handedly holds off several rioting terrorists who are attempting to overpower him.......

posted April 06, 2005 08:45 PM              

I don't even think they ever lived to even know the date of there trial.

Sad that after 3 years detainees from cuba were let go because they were found to be innocent.

I'd hate to be innocent and have to live in a dark room with no light for 3 years.

posted April 06, 2005 09:04 PM              

She said her daughter came back a different person. She moved away from everyone and didn't want to talk to anyone. She of course gave her mother back the lab top.

When the mother was using her lab top she saw a folder named Iraq and found pictures like the ones petron had posted.

I'm sure someone had a digital camera and saved it on her pc.

The girl was very bothered by this and that is when the mother knew why she was acting the way she was.

posted April 06, 2005 09:13 PM              

Those guys with the bandages over their eyes - hell, they sure did resist detention.

That limp guy...damn if he didn't have a knife.

Those soldiers are getting compartive slaps on the wrists and their superiors...well, a black mark or two on their record, if anything.

posted April 06, 2005 09:22 PM              

Yup, that is sad, and it's sad that we've decided to pick and choose who's a legitimate combatant (and just who and what's covered under the Geneva Convention) and who's not.

(An old article, but here's an example: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4999734/ )

And, knowing how much people love it when lefties compare Bush cadre to old Nazis, this quote (from some blog...dammit, I closed the window and lost the addy) struck me as funny:

Gonzales wrote that the Geneva Convention was "obsolete" when it came to the war on terror, reasoning that America's adversaries were not parties to the convention and that the Geneva concept was ill suited to anti-terrorist warfare.

In 1941, the head of Hitler's military, Wilhelm Keitel, mustered identical arguments against recognizing the Geneva rights of Soviet soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front.

Keitel even called Geneva "obsolete," a remark noted by U.S. prosecutors at Nuremberg, who cited it as an aggravating circumstance in seeking, and obtaining, the death penalty.

Keitel's remarks were made in response to a valiant memorandum prepared by German military lawyers who argued that the interests of Germany's soldiers, and the interests of morale and good order, would be served by adhering to the Geneva treaty.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, echoing the opinions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. military lawyers, sent Gonzales a letter that hit the same notes.

Funny.

Did you get a chance to check out MoJo?
There's an article on Afghanistan that you might find interesting.

***Edit
re: this quote, though:
Sad that after 3 years detainees from cuba were let go because they were found to be innocent.

posted April 06, 2005 10:49 PM              

This news goes way back and there is evidence for it.

I have even seen pictures of his grandfather who also by the way funded nazis and helped them escape from germany, sitting with his fellow skull and bone friends. The person in the middle held skulls and bone in there hands.

Pretty spooky if you ask me.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/02/60minutes/main576332.shtml

Sometimes people think they are well informed when in reality they aren't.

It pretty funny how when bush supposedly won the election, fox news was the one that announced it first and everyone didnt even bother because they said oh fox news found out they one.

Little do they know the person that announced it is related to mr. bush.

But then again. You didn't hear about it in your local news did you?

I think not.

October 11, 2003
Bush-Nazi Link Confirmed
by John Buchanan

Documents in National Archives Prove
George W. Bush's Grandfather Traded
with Nazis - Even After Pearl Harbor

WASHINGTON -- After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his "enemy national" partners.

The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.

Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial tycoon for nearly a year after the U.S. entered the war.

No Story?

For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II and its aftermath.

The White House did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.

The Summer of '42

The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway in New York under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran simultaneously in the New York Herald-Tribune and Washington Post on July 31, 1941. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.

"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the front-page Herald-Tribune headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's original patron a decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen's autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also acknowledges his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.

The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen's U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs" including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.

Business is Business

The "bank," founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury bonds. The company's activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.

The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC's private banker. A confidential FBI memo from that period suggested, without naming the Bush and Harriman families, that politically prominent individuals were about to come under official U.S. government scrutiny as Hitler's plunder of Europe continued unabated.

After the "Hitler's Angel" article was published Bush and Harriman made no attempts to divest themselves of the controversial Thyssen financial alliance, nor did they challenge the newspaper report that UBC was, in fact, a de facto Nazi front organization in the U.S.

Instead, the government documents show, Bush and his partners increased their subterfuge to try to conceal the true nature and ownership of their various businesses, particularly after the U.S. entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense, Thyssen's personal appointee to oversee U.S. matters for his Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to U.S. government investigators any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of Thyssen in it. Brown Brothers Harriman sent letters to the government seeking reconsideration of the seizures by using false information.

UBC's original group of business associates included George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, who had a relationship with the Harriman family that began in 1919. In 1922, Walker and W. Averell Harriman traveled to Berlin to set up the German branch of their banking and investment operations, which were largely based on critical war resources such as steel and coal.

The Walker-Harriman-created German industrial alliance also included partnership with another German titan who supported Hitler's rise, Friedrich Flick, who partnered with Thyssen in the German Steel Trust that forged the Nazi war machine. For his role in using slave labor and his own steel, coal and arms resources to build Hitler's war effort, Flick was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to prison.

The Family Business

In 1926, after Prescott Bush had married Walker's daughter, Dorothy, Walker brought Bush in as a vice president of the private banking and investment firm of W.A. Harriman & Co., also located in New York. Bush became a partner in the firm that later became Brown Brothers Harriman and the largest private investment bank in the world. Eventually, Bush became a director of and stockholder in UBC.

However, the government documents note that Bush, Harriman, Lievense and the other UBC stockholders were in fact "nominees," or phantom shareholders, for Thyssen and his Holland bank, meaning that they acted at the direct behest of their German client.

Seized

On October 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the U.S. Congress seized UBC and liquidated its assets after the war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No. 248 in the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by U.S. Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley.

In August, under the same authority, Congress had seized the first of the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities, Hamburg-American Line, under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by Crowley. Eight days after the seizure of UBC, Congress invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act again to take control of two more Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses - Holland-American Trading Corp. (Vesting Order No. 261) and Seamless Steel Equipment Corp. (Vesting Order No. 259).

The documents from the Archives also show that the Bushes and Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold, coal, steel and U.S. Treasury bonds, to their foreign clients overseas between 1931-33, as Hitler engineered his rise to power.

Still No Story?

Since 1942, the information has not appeared in any U.S. news coverage of any Bush political campaign, nor has it been included in any of the major Bush family biographies. It was, however, covered extensively in George H.W. Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. Chaitkin's father served as an attorney in the 1940s for some of the victims of the Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.

The book gave a detailed, accurate accounting of the Bush family's long Nazi affiliation, but no mainstream U.S. media entity reported on or even investigated the allegations, despite careful documentation by the authors. Major booksellers declined to distribute the book, which was dismissed by Bush supporters as biased and untrue. Its authors struggled even to be reviewed in reputable newspapers. That the book was published by Lyndon LaRouche's organization undoubtedly made it easier to dismiss, but does not change the facts.

The essence of the story has been posted for years on various Internet sites, including BuzzFlash.com and TakeBackTheMedia.com, but no online media seem to have independently confirmed it.

In the 1990s, former U.S. Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John Loftus, now honorary president of the Florida Holocaust Museum, wrote a book and launched a web site (<>www.john-loftus.com) which did breakthrough reporting, including establishing the link between Prescott Bush, Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and forced labor at Auschwitz. Although the widely-respected Loftus established a successful international speaking career with his information, no U.S. newspaper or major TV news program acknowledged his decade of work, nor did he ever see many of the recently released documents.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media have apparently made no attempt since World War II to either verify or disprove the allegations of Nazi collaboration against the Bush family. Instead, they have attempted to dismiss or discredit such Internet sites or "unauthorized" books without any journalistic inquiry or research into their veracity.

Loyal Defenders

The National Review ran an essay on September 1 by their White House correspondent Byron York, entitled "Annals of Bush-Hating." It begins

mockingly: "Are you aware of the murderous history of George W. Bush - indeed, of the entire Bush family? Are you aware of the president's Nazi sympathies? His crimes against humanity? And do you know, by the way, that George W. Bush is a certifiable moron?" York goes on to discredit the "Bush is a moron" IQ hoax, but fails to disprove the Nazi connection.

The more liberal Boston Globe ran a column September 29 by Reason magazine's Cathy Young in which she referred to "Bush-o-phobes on the Internet" who "repeat preposterous claims about the Bush family's alleged Nazi connections."

Poles Tackle the Topic

Newsweek Polska, the magazine's Polish edition, published a short piece on the "Bush Nazi past" in its March 5, 2003 edition. The item reported that "the Bush family reaped rewards from the forced-labor prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp," according to a copyrighted English-language translation from Scoop Media (<>www.scoop.co.nz). The story also reported the seizure of the various Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.

Still Not Interested

Major U.S. media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald, as well as Knight-Ridder Newspapers, have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them beginning Friday, August 29. Newsweek U.S. correspondent Michael Isikoff, famous for his reporting of big scoops during the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual affair of the 1990s, declined twice to accept an exclusive story based on the documents from the archives.

Aftermath

In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.

CIA to meet on release of Nazi papers
Report: Senator says more documents will be released
Sunday, February 6, 2005 Posted: 9:14 PM EST (0214 GMT)

The CIA has faced congressional pressure to release more documents.


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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- CIA officials will meet Monday with a government working group in an attempt to resolve whether more records detailing ties between former Nazis and U.S. intelligence should be made public.

The Ohio senator who co-authored 1999's Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act told The Associated Press on Sunday that the CIA has agreed to release more information.

"This is really what we anticipated when we wrote the law," Republican Sen. Mike DeWine told the AP.

A CIA official told CNN that the agency will be represented at Monday's meeting by the deputy executive director, the director of congressional affairs and an official from the general counsel's office.

"The agency has renewed its commitment to be as flexible and forward-leaning as possible in reviewing documents for declassification and release, and will be taking a fresh look at material that has not yet been declassified regarding U.S. intelligence ties to former Nazis" who aided the United States, the official said.

The meeting was scheduled to take place at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, with members of the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group.

Last week, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement expressing concern that the CIA "has refused to declassify thousands of documents on Nazi war criminals," and called on the agency "to make public all relevant classified records as required by law."

"Sixty years after the end of the war, the time has come to make this information available," said Abraham Foxman, the organization's national director. "With the number of survivors and witnesses diminishing by the day, and the reality that the Holocaust is fading into the pages of history and memory, we should not have to wait any longer."

The CIA official said Sunday that "all materials in our files dealing with the commission of war crimes have already been released."

But Foxman's statement said some remain out of public view.

"What's so puzzling about this is the agency has already released a significant number of documents," he said. "Why the change of heart now not to finish the process?"

He added, "What is there still left that some feel needs to be hidden? The expediency and the errors of the past are not a reflection of the intelligence community today. One finds it difficult to understand why the leadership today is protecting the truth."

In a letter to CIA Director Porter Goss, the ADL called for "the immediate release of the classified files as mandated by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act."

Officials said that, if no deal were reached, they expected DeWine, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to call for a public hearing as soon as this week. DeWine had threatened to require that Goss testify.

The CIA position has been that any documents withheld include materials compromising to "sources and methods" or cover individuals who do not fit the legal definition of "war criminals."

Critics contend the documents contain embarrassing details about relations among the CIA, its predecessor and former Nazi officials.

The CIA sought out former Nazi officials for intelligence on the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, according to the AP.

CNN's Lesa Jansen contributed to this report.


http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/06/cia.nazis/

posted April 06, 2005 11:11 PM            

It's also true that those enemy combatants do not and did not observe the rules of the Geneva Conventions themselves.