Zionist Israel,City of London prostitutes Barack Obama and W Bush should be prosecuted as well as their Presidents of Vice Dick Cheney and Joe 'I'm A Zionist Catholic' Biden and given at least the same sentences theey gave to Saddam Hussein and Moamar Gaddafi.
Depleted Uranium And The Iraq War's Legacy Of Cancer
Mintpress News-Jul 2, 2014
Depleted uranium was used in Iraq warzone weaponry, and now kids are playing in contaminated fields and the spent weapons are being sold ...
After All We Did For Them in Fallujah!
Center for Research on Globalization-7 hours ago
This came to public notice when reports out of Fallujah after 2004 described a ... which is more powerful and damaging than depleted uranium.
The Dirty War on Syria: Barrel Bombs, Partisan Sources and War ...
Center for Research on Globalization-3 hours ago
... not to speak of the depleted uranium, napalm, white phosphorous and .... resistance in Fallujah (Iraq), back in 2004 (Democracy Now (2005).
Fallaujah,Iraq WMDS>U.S.,NATO,Jew York Times War Crimes
The Impacts of Depleted Uranium. Cancer, Birth Defects and The ...
Center for Research on Globalization - Apr 1,
2013
Under the title 'Fallujah's children's 'genetic damage',
that old war ... the effects of depleted uranium on the children of
Fallujah with that of ...
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Depleted uranium used by US forces blamed for birth defects and ...
RT - Jul 22, 2013
The US military's use of depleted uranium in Iraq has led
to a sharp increase in ... “We went to Fallujah and we found the levels
of cancer.
|
RT
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AMERICA'S FALLUJAH LEGACY: WHITE PHOSPHOROUS ...
Center for Research on Globalization - Apr 17,
2012
FALLUJAH, Iraq, Apr 13, 2012 (IPS) – At Fallujah
hospital they ... Other than the white phosphorus, many point to depleted
uranium (DU), ...
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What we saw after Katrina
Socialist Worker Online - Aug 27,
2015
... depleted uranium testing for all deployed National
Guard members. ... as well as soldiers fresh from the streets of Baghdad and
Falluja.
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http://theislamicmonthly.com/ten-years-after-fallujah-the-rise-of-the-city-as-a-strategic-military-problem/
Ten Years After Fallujah: The Rise of the City as a Strategic Military Problem
ABOUT THE AUTHORAhmed Kanna is an
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Pacific.MORE BY THIS AUTHOR
Were one event to encapsulate the moral gravity and
historic meaning of the United States’ military intervention in Iraq, that event
would for a number of reasons be the 2004 siege of Fallujah. First, it was a
“classic” case of urban siege warfare, in which a military armed force
surrounded and bombarded a supposed insurgent territory. Second, it showed the
true nature of U.S. military intervention. No talk about “hearts and minds”;
only encirclement, “uprooting,” and enormous massacre of a largely unarmed
civilian population. Third, Fallujah became not only an example and symbol of
American barbarism for any observer not laboring under the ideological blinders
of U.S. patriotism, it also represented, from the U.S. military perspective, a
strategic failure (though, needless to say, not moral). Its legacy from the
latter perspective has been an important shift in U.S. military strategy. In
this shift, the “city” and the “urban human condition” have emerged as central
problems of theory and strategy.
The iriee glow from the fire reflects off a Bradley
Fighting Vehicle from Apache Troop, 2-7 Cav, 2nd BCT, 1st Cav Div as it rolls
back out to battle during combat operation in Fallujah on the 13th of Nov 2004
during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Photo by SFC Johancharles Van Boers, 55th Signal
Company, Combat Camera, Fort Meade, Maryland. Release for Public Use
Various journalists have cited credible evidence of
the American use of illegal chemical weapons at Fallujah. According to the
BBC and Countercurrents, the U.S. military used white
phosphorous — which burns on contact with the skin until it runs out of oxygen —
and depleted uranium during their siege. The Guardian’s George Monbiot,
reporting in the aftermath of the siege, reminds readers not to “forget that the
use of chemical weapons was a war crime within a war crime within a war crime.
Both the invasion of Iraq and the assault on Falluja were illegal acts of
aggression. Before attacking the city, the marines stopped men ‘of fighting age’
from leaving. Many women and children stayed: the Guardian’s correspondent
estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were left. The marines
treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They levelled
thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent and,
according to the UN’s special rapporteur, used ‘hunger and deprivation of water
as a weapon of war against the civilian population.’ ”
Patrick Cockburn reported in The Independent
that the impact of the siege might be worse compared with the atomic bomb attack
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II. He cites evidence
from a survey of 4,800 Fallujans conducted by Dr. Chris Busby of the University
of Ulster, which found that “dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and
leukaemia … exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.” Cockburn continues: “Infant
mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan
and eight times higher than in Kuwait.” Moreover, the survey discovered “a
38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and
significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. At Hiroshima
survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia, but in Fallujah Dr Busby says
what is striking is not only the greater prevalence of cancer but the speed with
which it was affecting people.” Busby said that “to produce an effect like this,
some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks
happened.” Busby suggested that some form of uranium was used in the
attack: “My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break
through walls and kill those inside.”
While Cockburn and others have rightly highlighted
the ways that events such as Fallujah expose the fundamental immorality of the
U.S. imperial project, in this essay I want to focus on the questions that it
raises for the study of urbanism and of empire, and of urbanism as an object of
imperial knowledge and intervention. As we know from the works of Edward Said,
geographer Derek Gregory, anthropologists James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Arjun
Appadurai, and others, imperial claims about “knowing the native” imply an
imaginative mapping of the native as situated in a relationship of spatial break
from the imperial position. The space of the native becomes objectified as
static, fixed in time. This is what Gregory, for example, has called an “object
ontology” in which space is reduced to static objects either to be built up,
torn down or reengineered in a top down manner, ideally by experts operating
through virtual media and at a remove from the complexities of the situation on
the ground. What I am suggesting is that there is more than a family resemblance
between the seemingly benign, antiseptic imagery of Corbusian urban modernism
with its fetish of the architect — or planner — expert, with the bloody and
destructive project of U.S. urbicide, the “killing of the city” and its
inhabitants. This will not surprise anyone who knows about the entwinement of
modernization discourse with projects such as concentration camps (aka
“strategic hamlets”), the napalming of villages and countryside, and President
Richard Nixon’s readiness to use nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War, all
discussed nearly a half-century ago by Noam Chomsky in American Power and
the New Mandarins, his study of the more-than-eager complicity of American
liberal academics with the Vietnam War effort. The only difference between
counterinsurgency in Iraq in 2004 and in Vietnam in the late 1960s was a shift
from the rural to the urban context of intervention.
There are certainly haunting parallels between
Fallujah and other historical examples, including the Pequot War of the 1630s,
the free-fire zones of Vietnam, the Israeli Gaza campaigns of the 2000s,
“Defensive Shield,” “Caste Lead,” “Protective Edge.” But what is also
interesting is how in the recent years of a more explicitly urban turn in U.S.
military thinking, we see a more complicated problematization of the urban from
a counterinsurgency perspective. No longer do we see the city as a static
object, a “target.” It becomes almost an actor in itself, an “organism” with its
own “metabolism,” David Kilcullen, an influential urban counterinsurgency
theorist, writes in his recent and influential book, Out of the Mountains:
The Coming of the Urban Guerilla. We might say that the United States went
to Fallujah only to learn the lessons of the “Chicago School” of urban
sociology.
050129-N-1810F-193
Fallujah, Iraq (Jan. 29, 2005) – U.S. Navy Seabees assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Twenty Three (NMCB 23) patrol the streets of Fallujah, one day prior to IraqÕs historic democratic elections. Seabees have been assigned to Provisional Support Battalions (PSB) under the direction of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF), commanded by U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant General John F. Sattler. Seabees are providing additional security for coalition camps and voting precincts. Female Seabees will be assigned directly to polling stations, screening female citizens as they enter the voting precinct. U.S. Navy photo by PhotographerÕs Mate 3rd Class Todd Frantom (RELEASED
Fallujah, Iraq (Jan. 29, 2005) – U.S. Navy Seabees assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Twenty Three (NMCB 23) patrol the streets of Fallujah, one day prior to IraqÕs historic democratic elections. Seabees have been assigned to Provisional Support Battalions (PSB) under the direction of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF), commanded by U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant General John F. Sattler. Seabees are providing additional security for coalition camps and voting precincts. Female Seabees will be assigned directly to polling stations, screening female citizens as they enter the voting precinct. U.S. Navy photo by PhotographerÕs Mate 3rd Class Todd Frantom (RELEASED
The years after the Fallujah siege saw the rise of,
or more accurately, the revival of, Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine,
COIN, the “hearts and minds” project. This can be explained by both the
strategically counterproductive effects of Fallujah, intensifying an already
fearsome insurgency, as well as a dawning awareness by U.S. military theorists
of larger trends in the field of imperial intervention. These are summarized in
remarkably overlapping studies by Mike Davis, a Marxist critic of U.S.-led
neoliberalism and militarism, and Kilcullen, who is also an adviser to the
American military counterinsurgency project and something of an academic star in
that world. Their studies try to answer the question: What is the larger context
of this shift?
Davis writes in his study published in Social
Text that by 2030, approximately 60% of the world’s population — 5 billion
people — will live in cities. Of these, 2 billion to 3 billion will be informal
workers, most living in slums or shantytowns. They will be highly informalized
and particularly vulnerable to “emergent diseases and subject to a menu of
megadisasters following in the wake of global warming and the exhaustion of
urban water supplies.” At the time of the siege of Fallujah, more people
worldwide already inhabited cities than rural villages. Moreover, while the
population of rural areas had by then stagnated, the growth of cities was
already exploding by 60 million people annually. By around 2025, Davis notes,
urban areas in less-developed nations will account for 90% of world population
growth. This will be an urban population “almost completely delinked — or
‘disincorporated’ from industrial growth and the supply of formal jobs … a mass
of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and
the corporate matrix,” he writes. Kilcullen adds to this picture in Out of
the Mountains, showing that the global population is undergoing what he
calls “megatrends” of climate change, urbanization, “littoralization” — movement
from the interior regions (“the mountains”) to the coasts, as well as
information interconnection. All of these, Kilcullen says, make the kinds of
intervention exemplified by Fallujah counterproductive and obsolete. The world’s
imperialists and capitalists need a smarter intervention, he argues, one that
accounts for the fact that the city is “a living organism,” not a static
object.
Kilcullen’s work reflects, as mentioned, a broader
trend, what might be called the “urbanization” of American military theory over
the past five to 10 years. Along with quasi-anthropological notions of culture —
analyzed and critiqued by the excellent work of anthropologists such as Rochelle
Davis, Catherine Lutz and David Price — the city and urban life, particularly in
the global south, became a focus of strategic thinking in the U.S. military
during this time. By the late 1990s, following the U.S. military debacle in a
highly urbanized and littoralized Somalia, along with the NATO intervention in
the former Yugoslavia, the Army War College’s journal began suggesting that “the
future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl
of houses that form the broken cities of the world,” Stephen Graham writes in
New Left Review in 2007. More recently, websites such as
GlobalSecurity.org and academic journals such as Small Wars have been
grappling with Kilcullen’s “megatrends.” (Kilcullen dedicated his 2010
book, Counterinsurgency, to the editors of Small Wars,
writing: “They gave the counterguerilla underground a home, at a time when
misguided leaders banned even the word ‘insurgency,’ though busily losing one.”)
Globalsecurity.org — which describes itself as “the leading source of background
information and developing news stories in the fields of defense, space,
intelligence, WMD, and homeland security” — notes, ominously, that approximately
75% of the world’s population will soon live in urban areas. Echoing Davis, an
article on the website points out that the increasing population and
accelerating growth of cities pose urgent problems for future U.S. military
missions. “Urban areas are expected to be the future battlefield and combat in
urban areas cannot be avoided.” The article says the term “Military Operations
on Urban Terrain” refers to all military actions “planned and conducted on a
terrain complex where man-made construction affects the tactical options
available to the commander.” Patrick Marques of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, wrote
in a 2003 graduate thesis that these urban terrains are disproportionately
cities of the global south — the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia in
particular. The author adds that urbanized terrain poses delicate issues of
human rights, which previous rural terrains did not, ignoring the entire
human-rights-violating history of U.S. and English anti-insurgent campaigns
dating back to the 17th century. On the other hand, Marques and
Globalsecurity.org contend, urbanized terrains also present commanders with
advantages that may not have been available in the “classical” rural theaters,
such as the ability to cultivate local (or local in appearance) operatives and
have them blend in with urban populations.
What should be noted at this juncture about this
literature is its naturalization of urban growth and of the inevitability of war
— “Urban areas are expected to be the future battlefield and combat in urban
areas cannot be avoided,” the article in Globalsecurity.org notes. Insofar as it
naturalizes what are in fact social and political processes, this literature is
revealing of the ideology of the U.S. empire. The assumption that war is
inevitable, anthropologist Catherine Lutz argues in The Bases of
Empire, is one of the basic “mythic structures” of the U.S. empire. Writing
about the more than 900 military facilities established by the U.S. in dozens of
countries across the world, Lutz shows how the project of encircling the globe
is buttressed by a set of powerful beliefs largely impervious to contradictory
evidence. Along with what Hugh Gusterson in Cultural Anthropology has
called “nuclear orientalism”— which sees only the U.S. and Europe as trustworthy
enough to develop nuclear weapons — and the racism underpinning much of the
militarized foreign policy, Lutz points to the influential notion in U.S.
culture that “war is often necessary and ultimately inevitable. It is widely
believed that humans are naturally violent and that war can be a glorious and
good venture.”
This is an important critique, and as is clear from
what I’ve been arguing, the Saidian tradition, the demystification of
orientalist cultural and geographic representations, is a central part of any
attempt to grapple with the U.S. empire. However, my aim in the larger project
of which this paper is a brief outline is to go beyond the critique of
orientalism while retaining its critical thrust. In my view, the rise of the
urban as a problem in U.S. military theory in recent years is not sufficiently
grasped by pointing out the role of orientalism and racism in empire. One
reason, maybe the most important, is that the critique of orientalism rests on
representational assumptions about the workings of power. To oversimplify, it
says that for power to subjugate the so-called native, it must produce images
and discourses of the native as the imperialist’s Other. What we see in urban
counterinsurgency is more complicated. A large part of the literature and
representations produced by the counterinsurgency project does indeed lend
itself to anti-orientalist critique. But works such as those of Kilcullen,
considered by many to be at the cutting edge of the field, are distinguished by
their almost complete indifference to questions about what the “native” is like,
what the contours of her culture are and so on. Kilcullen’s is a much more
behaviorist approach to power. Chomsky identified this among U.S. modernization
theorists in the 1960s, and Kilcullen (who doesn’t seem to have read Chomsky)
simply and without irony reproduces this. As Kilcullen’s counterinsurgent
colleague John Nagl put it: “Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill.”
Winning hearts and minds is not the priority, therefore producing knowledge
about the native’s culture is not a priority. Ensuring that you as the
counterinsurgent constitute the field of power such that your target population
has no choice but to go through you is the main objective. Not hegemonic power,
but disciplinary power — that is the point for Kilcullen et al. The coming age
of the urban counterinsurgent, he suggests in Out of the Mountains, is
an age of disciplinary power, and while the critique of orientalism will still
help us understand much about the workings of empire in the coming years, we
will need to complement this critique with different analytical tools for
understanding power in the increasingly urbanized and littoralized world that is
emerging.
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Obama's Ludicrous 'Barrel Bomb' Theme: Singling Out Assad
Center for Research on Globalization-Sep 30, 2015
... President George W. Bush ordered the devastation of Fallujahand ... that is not to mention the U.S. bombs that involve depleted uranium, ...
Two Suns in the Sunset
Dissident Voice-Sep 16, 2015
... first opportunity for the regime to test its depleted uranium munitions. ... in cancer rates (e.g. in Fallujah) notwithstanding this ordnance is not ...
Iraqi Doctors Call Depleted Uranium Use “Genocide”
Center for Research on Globalization-Oct 22, 2014
Contamination from depleted uranium (DU) munitions is causing ... such as Fallujah during 2004, and Basra during the 1991 US war on Iraq.
U.S. Depleted Uranium as Malicious as Syrian Chemical Weapons
Huffington Post-Aug 29, 2013
"Depleted Uranium (DU) weaponry has been used against Iraq for the first ... "Noting the birth defects in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Jamail says: ...
AMERICA’S FALLUJAH LEGACY: WHITE PHOSPHOROUS, DEPLETED URANIUM: THE FATE OF IRAQ’S CHILDREN
Those Laboratory Mice Were Children...
Credit:Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.
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FALLUJAH, Iraq, Apr 13, 2012 (IPS) – At Fallujah hospital they cannot offer any statistics on children born with birth defects – there are just too many. Parents don’t want to talk. “Families bury their newborn babies after they die without telling anyone,” says hospital spokesman Nadim al-Hadidi. “It’s all too shameful for them.”
Buy this picture
FALLUJAH, Iraq, Apr 13, 2012 (IPS) – At Fallujah hospital they cannot offer any statistics on children born with birth defects – there are just too many. Parents don’t want to talk. “Families bury their newborn babies after they die without telling anyone,” says hospital spokesman Nadim al-Hadidi. “It’s all too shameful for them.”
“We recorded 672 cases in January but we know there were many more,” says Hadidi. He projects pictures on to a wall at his office: children born with no brain, no eyes, or with the intestines out of their body.
Facing a frozen image of a child born without limbs, Hadidi says parents’ feelings usually range between shame and guilt. “They think it’s their fault, that there’s something wrong with them. And it doesn’t help at all when some elder tells them it’s been ‘god’s punishment’.”
The pictures are difficult to look at. And, those responsible for all this have closed their eyes.
“In 2004 the Americans tested all kinds of chemicals and explosive devices on us: thermobaric weapons, white phosphorous, depleted uranium…we have all been laboratory mice for them,” says Hadidi, turning off the projector.
The months that followed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 saw persistent demonstrations against the occupation forces. But it wasn’t until 2004 when this city by the Euphrates river to the west of Baghdad saw its worst.
On Mar. 31 of that year, images of the dismembered bodies of four mercenaries from the U.S. group Blackwater hanging from a bridge circulated around the world. Al-Qaeda claimed the brutal action – and the ocal population paid the price for Operation Phantom Fury that followed. According to the Pentagon, this was the biggest urban battle since Hue (Vietnam, 1968).
The first crackdown came in April 2004 but the worst was in November of that year. Random house-to- house checks gave way to intense night bombings. The Americans said they used white phosphorus “to illuminate targets at night.” But a group of Italian journalists soon gave documentary evidence that white phosphorus had been just another of the banned weapons used against civilians by the U.S. troops.
The total number of victims is still unknown. In fact, many of them are not born yet.
Abdulkadir Alrawi, a doctor at Fallujah hospital, is just back from examining an intriguing new case. “This girl was born with the Dandy Walker syndrome. Her brain is split in two and I doubt she’ll survive.” As he speaks, the lights go off again in the whole hospital.
“We lack the most basic infrastructure, how do they want us to cope with an emergency like this?”
According to a study released by the Switzerland-based International Journal of Environmental Researchand Public Health in July 2010, “the increases in cancer, leukaemia and infant mortality and perturbations of the normal human population birth sex ratio in Fallujah are significantly greater than those reported for the survivors of the A-Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.”
Researchers found there had been a 38-fold increase in leukaemia (17-fold in the Japanese locations). Reputed analysts such as Noam Chomsky have labelled such conclusions as “immensely more embarrassing than the Wikileaks leaks on Afghanistan.”
Samira Alaani, chief doctor at Fallujah hospital, took part in a study in close collaboration with the World Health Organisation. Several tests conducted in London point to unusually large amounts of uranium and mercury in the hair root of those affected. That could be the evidence linking the use of prohibited weapons to the extent of congenital problems in Fallujah.
Other than the white phosphorus, many point to depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive element which, according to military engineers, significantly increases the penetration capacity of shells. DU is believed to have a life of 4.5 billion years, and it has been labelled the “silent murderer that never stops killing.” Several international organisations have called on NATO to investigate whether DU was also used during the Libyan war.
This month the Iraqi Health Ministry, in close collaboration with the WHO, will launch its first study ever on congenital malformations in the governorates of Baghdad, Anbar, Thi Qar, Suleimania, Diala and Basra.
Sandwiched between the borders of Iran and Kuwait, Basra sits above massive oil reserves. The population in this southernmost province has suffered fighting much more than any other region: from the war with Iran in the 1980s to the Gulf War in 1991 and the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
A study by the University of Baghdad pointed out that cases of birth defects had increased tenfold in Basra two years before the invasion in 2003. The trend is still on the rise.
Basra Children’s Hospital, specialising in paediatric oncology, opened in 2010. Funded with U.S. capital, this facility was initiated by former U.S. first lady Laura Bush. But like the hospital in Fallujah, this supposedly state-of-the-art facility lacks basic equipment.
“The X-ray machine spent over a year-and-a-half stored at Basra port due to an administrative dispute over who should pay port fees. Our children would die as they waited for radiotherapy treatment that did not come,” says Laith Shakr Al-Sailhi, father of a sick boy and director of the Children’s Cancer Association of Iraq.
“The waiting list for treatment in Baghdad is endless and time is never on the side of the patients,” says Al- Sailhi from the barracks that host his NGO headquarters next to the hospital.
“Besides, these children’s diseases also lead to economic ruin of their families. Those who can afford it pay up to 7,000 dollars in Syria or up to 12,000 dollars in Jordan for treatment. The cheapest option is Iran, with rates at an average of 5,000 dollars.
“Today, families are flocking to Tehran for their children to be treated. Many of them are sleeping in the streets because they can’t afford to pay a hotel room.”
Copyright © Karlos Zurutuza, IPS, 2012
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