BAGHDAD, Nov 26 (IPS) - The U.S. military has used poison gas and other non-conventional weapons against civilians in Fallujah, eyewitnesses report.

”Poisonous gases have been used in Fallujah,” 35-year-old trader from Fallujah Abu Hammad told IPS. ”They used everything -- tanks, artillery, infantry, poison gas. Fallujah has been bombed to the ground.”

Hammad is from the Julan district of Fallujah where some of the heaviest fighting occurred. Other residents of that area report the use of illegal weapons.

”They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud,” Abu Sabah, another Fallujah refugee from the Julan area told IPS. ”Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.”

He said pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on the burns. Phosphorous weapons as well as napalm are known to cause such effects. ”People suffered so much from these,” he said.

Macabre accounts of killing of civilians are emerging through the cordon U.S. forces are still maintaining around Fallujah.

”Doctors in Fallujah are reporting to me that there are patients in the hospital there who were forced out by the Americans,” said Mehdi Abdulla, a 33-year-old ambulance driver at a hospital in Baghdad. ”Some doctors there told me they had a major operation going, but the soldiers took the doctors away and left the patient to die.”

Kassem Mohammed Ahmed who escaped from Fallujah a little over a week ago told IPS he witnessed many atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in the city.

”I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks,” he said. ”This happened so many times.”

Abdul Razaq Ismail who escaped from Fallujah two weeks back said soldiers had used tanks to pull bodies to the soccer stadium to be buried. ”I saw dead bodies on the ground and nobody could bury them because of the American snipers,” he said. ”The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah.”

Abu Hammad said he saw people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. ”The Americans shot them with rifles from the shore,” he said. ”Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot..”

Hammad said he had seen elderly women carrying white flags shot by U.S. soldiers. ”Even the wounded people were killed. The Americans made announcements for people to come to one mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were killed.”

Another Fallujah resident Khalil (40) told IPS he saw civilians shot as they held up makeshift white flags. ”They shot women and old men in the streets,” he said. ”Then they shot anyone who tried to get their bodies...Fallujah is suffering too much, it is almost gone now.”

Refugees had moved to another kind of misery now, he said. ”It's a disaster living here at this camp,” Khalil said. ”We are living like dogs and the kids do not have enough clothes.”

Spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad Abdel Hamid Salim told IPS that none of their relief teams had been allowed into Fallujah, and that the military had said it would be at least two more weeks before any refugees would be allowed back into the city.

”There is still heavy fighting in Fallujah,” said Salim. ”And the Americans won't let us in so we can help people.”

In many camps around Fallujah and throughout Baghdad, refugees are living without enough food, clothing and shelter. Relief groups estimate there are at least 15,000 refugee families in temporary shelters outside Fallujah.

http://ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=26440

DO NOT Support "Our" Troops: The Toxicity of Center-Rightists, Liberals, and the Establishment Left

INTRODUCTION: THE IDEOLOGICAL CRISIS

Time for some house cleaning. The American imperialist project has reached new levels of viciousness, inhumanity, and immorality with support, explicitly and implicitly expressed, from all quarters of the American political spectrum.

Rather than burden the Federation rank-and-file and sympathizers with a meanderingly obvious screed against the war criminals currently occupying the White House, the Federation instead has chosen to aim its polemical energy at an overlooked target: insidious counter-revolutionary elements who APPEAR to be our allies, but upon closer inspection, ultimately reinforce American empire as much — while getting away with it.

All Federation members and sympathizers, if they have not done so, should loan or purchase Noam Chomsky's 1969 anti-Vietnam War classic, American Power and the New Mandarins. In this work, Chomsky delineated two strains of anti-war thought: 1) radical strains that repudiated the war on principle for its imperialist assumptions and original stated raison d'etre (all regardless of outcome or level of success) and 2) the pragmatic-practical liberal-bourgeois strains that escalated protest because the war became increasingly unsuccessful, prolonged, expensive, or politically costly. With slight modification, we can apply this model for analyzing the motivations of those who purport to be against war to the present imperial excursion into Iraq.

It is imperative that we not be hoodwinked and fooled by the unprincipled "anti-war" thought of organizations and characters like MoveOn.org and former partisans of Howard Dean and John Kerry. Equally important is the development of immunity to the nonsensical "Support Our Troops" mantra emanating from many center-right, liberal, and establishment left circles. Regardless of personal or familial ties, it is impossible to support direct agents and executors of a racist-imperialist war crime.

These two topics will form the subject of this pamphlet, the first in a new Federation series to which all readers are encouraged to contribute.

PHONY ANTI-WAR OPINION

When encountering one who professes to hold anti-war views, one should query the individual for specificity. The results are frequently revealing and unpleasant.

Most responses do not repudiate the notion of pre-emptive war and its racist contempt for Iraqi self-determination. They instead adopt the following lines:

• That the war was "not adequately planned," particularly after the initial invasion, the implication, stated or not, being that if it were, then the imperial excursion might have somehow been acceptable.

• That weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were not found, the implication, stated or not, being that if they were, then the imperial excursion might have somehow been acceptable.

• That the war is costing unexpectedly large sums of money, the implication, stated or not, being that if it could be conducted on the cheap, then the imperial excursion might have somehow been acceptable.

• That the war is taking longer than the originally projected six months, the implication, stated or not, being that if it could have been conducted quickly and tidily, then the imperial excursion might have somehow been acceptable.

• That the war was conducted in a "unilateral way" "without allies" by our President and had the United States gone through an imperialist body like the United Nations or NATO, the latter instrumental to the illegal imperialist excursion into Kosovo, then the Iraqi imperial excursion might have somehow been acceptable. Beating up someone alone: not cool. Beating up someone "multilaterally" with a group of like-minded thugs: kosher, goes the logic embraced by the likes of Howard Dean, MoveOn, John Kerry, and their devoted cults.

None of these unprincipled strains holds up to much scrutiny, and from them, one can easily extend logically to pro-war positions. It is these unprincipled strains, however, that dominate political conversation from the center-rightists, the liberals, and the establishment left. As revolutionaries, we need to actively resist defering to them. Only one position ought be acceptable to us: the complete repudiation of the pre-emptive war doctrine regardless of practical outcome — a corollary, the advocacy of completely removing ALL impediments to self-determination for potential targets of the US imperialist project, such as deadly embargoes, sanctions, and support for totalitarian (and often pro-capitalist) dictators.

ANTI-WAR RACISM AND THE CASE OF MICHAEL MOORE

An equally unsettling notion — but one that we must confront — is that racist elements pollute and degrade large segments of American anti-war thought. We must differentiate ourselves explicitly and forthrightly from these noxious tendencies.

The first tendency consists of apologists for the occupation. Some who say "the war was wrong" (almost always along the lines previously stated above) now argue that the US occupation is nonetheless necessary, "that we must stay the course," "finish the job," and "can't just pack up and leave." Again, such is the line adopted by the Kerry-MoveOn-Dean wing of the center-right-liberal- establishment-left spectrum. The underlying racist assumption is that Iraqis cannot govern themselves without the benevolent paternalist (and, presumably, superior) meddling of the United States. But as the social revolutions in Brazil, Venezuela, and Indonesia are demonstrating, even after decades of grave repression, social regeneration can occur WITHOUT the oversight of the benevolent United States empire-monster (no thanks, please). The apologists for the occupation claim that the "insurgents" must be quelled without mentioning that 1) the primary reason behind their efforts is ejection of the United States, that 2) their primary recruitment source is (rightful) anger over the United States and private United States business interests' presence, and that 3) the majority of the Iraqi population supports both the ejection of the United States and the broad resistance to it. Rather than continue an incompetent and racist occupation, the United States ought:

a) Pay MASSIVE material reparations for devastation of their country: first by Reaganite support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, then Clintonian bombing and sanctions throughout the 1990s, and finally, Bush imperialism of the 21st century.

b) Ban all American private enterprise from Iraqi construction or energy and instead allow Iraqi enterprise to re-develop the country and its economy.

The second tendency of Racist Anti-war Thought (RAT, which is what it resembles) is the excessive emphasis placed on American troops, who in the past year have been directly implicated in systematic torture, humiliation of enemy combatants who have surrendered, and activities defined clearly as war crimes under the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law.

The political devolution of sell-out filmmaker Michael Moore, who supported war criminal Wesley Clark for President before becoming a Ralph Nader-baiting partisan automaton for war criminal John Kerry, is a useful lens to examine this second RAT tendency. Moore deserved accolades for including brutal images of US military terror and its Iraqi civilian consequences in his recent film, Fahrenheit 9/11. Unfortunately, the overarching framework of that film and sell-out filmmaker Moore's subsequent web site pronouncements and book projects leave much to be desired. Moore, like so many people in the center-right-liberal- establishment-left spectrum, places undue or total emphasis on American troops, but makes little mention of the far higher level of Iraqi civilian casualities and injuries the imperial project has caused at the hands of these very American troops. Moore ends his film, for examples, with "Will [the American troops] ever trust us again?" and this is the title of the new American troop-centric book he has recently published. Besides racist hierarchizing of American troops' welfare over that of Iraqi civilians, this critique fails to mention the "troops" and their disgusting behavior. The brutal details of the Fallujah decimiation (a military victory via wholescale razing and devastation rather than any tactical ingenuity) are beginning to emerge. One precis of a firsthand accounts reads:

"Aside from the usual killing, the Marines made a point of wrecking every house they searched, blowing holes in every bare wall they could find, and leaving bloody footprints on the floor of a mosque (where shoes aren't allowed) and shitting there. It's not enough to kill people in great quantities, they want to humiliate the survivors too."

To ignore this barbaric behavior while ethnocentrically urging support for its executors and devoting little to no focus on its victims is profoundly racist. We will explore this contradiction below.

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS (YOU MEAN WAR CRIMINALS? NUH-UH) AND DE GENOVA'S PRESCIENCE

This brings us to the conclusion of this Glorious Revolutionary Pamphlet: a discussion of imperial agents — the "troops" — and the call by many of the center-right-liberal-establishment-left spectrum to support them.

No. No. No.

Reviewing an incident of almost two years ago — the plight of Columbia University anthropology professor Nicholas De Genova — is an instructive starting point. In the Spring of 2003, De Genova called for "a million Mogadishus" at a Columbia University anti-war teach-in. The substance of this metaphorical call for the halt of the American imperial project, which employed admittedly ill-advised rhetoric, was largely ignored by the center-right-liberal- establishment-left spectrum, most of whom forgot how to recognize and detect metaphor. Instead, De Genova's remarks resulted in a torrent of criticism and accusations that he wished for the deaths of American troops. Tucked beneath and later lost amidst this outcry, however, was a question that all those of the "Support the Troops" tendency must confront: how does one support troops executing a grotesque and inhumane collective war crime?

The Federation cannot support agents of the following: destruction of civilian hospitals, destruction of civilian water and energy supplies, destruction and razing of civilian homes, prison torture and humiliation, and military orders to shoot without regard for whether potential targets are "hostile." The Federation cannot support agents of barbaric behavior such as that described in the anti-Hugo Chavez London Independent (hardly a bastion of radical sentiment) below:

"Mr Tellaib, 33, a merchant, said: 'We were stopped, in a line of cars, by some Humvees which had overtaken us. One soldier waved us forward, but as I drove up there was firing from another Humvee. I was shot in the side of the head, and my wife and elder son were shot in the chest. I think they must have died then. There was blood all over my eyes. I lost control of the car which fell into the river. I managed to get out, and then tried to get the others out, but I could not and the car sank."

The only troops deserving of support and who deserve the term "war hero" are those who disobey orders and resist this war. It is impossible otherwise to support the troops when they are carrying out war crimes and are thus war criminals, some individually, all collectively.

CONCLUSION

The Federation hopes this pamphlet series helps us identify counter-revolutionary elements disguised as "progressive" forces. Those interested in contributing to the series are encouraged to do so.

end communique

(November 25, 2004)

FALLUJAH NAPALMED

Nov 28 2004

US uses banned weapon ..but was Tony Blair told?

By Paul Gilfeather Political Editor



US troops are secretly using outlawed napalm gas to wipe out remaining insurgents in and around Fallujah.

News that President George W. Bush has sanctioned the use of napalm, a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980, will stun governments around the world.

And last night Tony Blair was dragged into the row as furious Labour MPs demanded he face the Commons over it. Reports claim that innocent civilians have died in napalm attacks, which turn victims into human fireballs as the gel bonds flames to flesh.

Outraged critics have also demanded that Mr Blair threatens to withdraw British troops from Iraq unless the US abandons one of the world's most reviled weapons. Halifax Labour MP Alice Mahon said: "I am calling on Mr Blair to make an emergency statement to the Commons to explain why this is happening. It begs the question: 'Did we know about this hideous weapon's use in Iraq?'"

Since the American assault on Fallujah there have been reports of "melted" corpses, which appeared to have napalm injuries.

Last August the US was forced to admit using the gas in Iraq.

A 1980 UN convention banned the use of napalm against civilians - after pictures of a naked girl victim fleeing in Vietnam shocked the world.

America, which didn't ratify the treaty, is the only country in the world still using the weapon.