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.
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
