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There
has been an intriguing drop in media coverage of the Westerners who
went
to Iraq as voluntary human shields. This fact alone merits
investigation.
They
initially sought to
be “a factor in the ongoing postponement of this criminal war,”
according
to Truth Justice Peace [TJP] Human Shields. Now that the forcible
ouster/disarmament
of Saddam is in progress, those who haven’t left are resolved to
emplace
themselves near such essential civil infrastructure as “water plants,
power
plants, food silos, oil refineries, etc.”
The
human shield organizers
insist that they are choosing where they go with UN help and are
“not being deployed to military sites.” However, Iraqi officials
deported
Ken O’Keefe, Gordon Sloan and three other “key organizers” who were in
the process of surveying and verifying the “civilian importance” of
prospective
locations.
The
Al-Dawra oil refinery
near Baghdad is one of the approved sites currently ‘shielded’ by
Westerners.
“This refinery is the lifeblood of the country, and that is why we
chose
to come here,” said 40-year-old Mohammed Variawa, having left his wife
and two children behind in South Africa. Saddam’s Oil Minister Amer
Mohammad
Rashid lauded them for defending “not only Iraq, but the cause of all
humanity.”
Human
shields there complained
of how the air was “thick with smoke from nearby bombing.” Journalists
who had been outside of the area knew that the choking pollution had
another
cause. They asked Rashid why his government decided to ignite a vast
series
of oil trenches ringing the city. It is “one of our defense measures,”
he replied adding, “Let them come to Baghdad. But let them finish first
with Umm Qasr and Basra. We will then crush their heads. What is
important
in a war is the end result.”
US
Defense officials have
conceded that the smoking oil fires may potentially cause a minor
impediment
to laser-guided munitions, but GPS-directed ordnance have continued to
strike selected targets with above-expected accuracy. This is a
relatively
minor example of how willing Saddam is to undertake tactics that impose
the majority of negative effects upon his own people for the promise of
the slightest inconvenience to his enemies.
Saddam
has not limited himself to
using Western human
shields to protect his dictatorship. Fedayeen [i.e. Sturmabteilung]
paramilitaries
have placed Iraqi civilians [including children] in front of them while
firing at our troops. Weapons, aircraft and other military equipment
have
been found in and around hospitals, water treatment plants cemeteries
and
even ancient historical sites.
Saddam’s
minions must be
encouraged to persist in such tactics, because they know that the blame
for the resultant suffering of their own will fall almost completely
upon
the US.
Most
human shields portray
the Iraqis as having a singular perspective: “There is a great feeling
of hatred towards the Americans... People are not happy with this
situation
and the proportions with which the war is continuing.” When we are
shown
the familiar images of civilians chanting anti-American slogans around
a bomb crater, the Baghdad-based reporters rarely mention that
attentive
Saddam officials brought them there.
Iraqis
who are not under
the watchful eye of government ‘minders’ however, paint a different
picture.
Inspired by the apparent bravery of the human shields, 23-year-old
Newsweek
photographer Daniel Pepper went to Baghdad on Jan. 23 to join them.
Once
there, he greeted a taxi driver with what he said was the typical human
shield mantra, “Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good.” The cabbie was
incredulous.
He told Pepper that all of “Iraq's oil money went into Saddam's pocket
and that if you opposed him politically he would kill your whole
family.”
Other journalists recounted similar “spontaneous, emotional, and
secretive
outbursts imploring visitors to free them from Saddam's tyrannical
Iraq.”
[These stories are apparently not for public consumption.]
Additionally,
Pepper became
“increasingly concerned” about the progressively tight restrictions
that
he and his compatriots were facing and finally decided to leave the
country.
After crossing the border into Jordan, he felt comfortable enough to
ask
a different Iraqi driver how he felt about the war. “Don't you listen
to
Powell on Voice of America radio?” he said. “Of course the Americans
don't
want to bomb civilians. They want to bomb government and Saddam’s
palaces.
We want America to bomb Saddam.”
American
Pastor Kenneth
Joseph initially entered Iraq as an anti-war protester. As such, he
managed
to videotape 14 hours of unsupervised interviews. He did not hear what
he expected. Many expressed a willingness to endure such hardships as
having
their homes demolished if it meant the permanent removal of Saddam.
Some
compared him to Hitler and Stalin describing Saddam and his sons as
“sick
sadists.” Tales of “slow torture” and wholesale slaughter included
people
being “put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they
could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head.”
Al-Jazeera
gleefully broadcasts
images of mutilated corpses if the US can be blamed. When will they and
their Western sycophants bring us these other stories?
REFERENCES
http://www.anglingforums.co.uk/torben/
http://homepage.mac.com/christiaanbriggs/humanshields/news.htm
http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=128&fArticleId=100490
http://iafrica.com/news/us_terror/iraq/222429.htm
http://iafrica.com/news/sa/222067.htm
http://electroniciraq.net/news/401.shtml
http://www.upi.com/print.cfm?StoryID=20030321-023627-5923r
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/03/23/do2305.xml
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