LOOK AT THE RECORD: U.S. HAS TARGETED CIVILIANS BEFORE
By John Catalinotto
Rocket attacks from U.S. jets on a place of worship and a hospital. Bombs directed at a convoy of fleeing refugees. Repeated hits by 2,000-pound bombs on clearly marked Red Cross food warehouses. Fragmentation bombs on civilian homes.
All these things have occurred in the first three weeks of the Pentagon's attacks on Afghanistan.
Most people living here, because they've never been informed by the corporate media, probably don't realize that these kinds of U.S. attacks are all too familiar to people in other countries. A look at recent U.S. wars against Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia and Sudan is eye-opening.
The Pentagon always claims not to be targeting civilians, that civilian deaths are merely "collateral damage." But it openly admits to tactics aimed at destroying the civilian infrastructure. This always leads to civilian deaths, sometimes long after the fighting ends.
Often, however, the claims of not directly targeting civilians are an outright lie. The U.S. military targets civilians as part of its strategic aims today just as it did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and across Korea and Vietnam, where millions died.
AL AMARIYAH, FEB. 13, 1991
In the midst of what the Pentagon called the "surgical" bombing of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, the Pentagon incinerated civilians in a Baghdad bomb shelter. Here's a description of that event in the 1992 book, "The Fire This Time," written by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, now an anti-war activist.
"Probably 1,500 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed when the Amariyah civilian bomb shelter was hit by two bombs in the early morning hours of Feb. 13, 1991. One bomb opened a hole in the shelter's roof. The second bomb, much bigger and more powerful, traveled through the hole and blasted its way through one floor to the bottom floor of the shelter, where it exploded. ...
"The first bomb hit at 4:30 a.m. It did not kill everyone. Neighborhood residents heard screams as people tried to get out of the shelter. They screamed for four minutes. Then the second bomb hit, killing almost everybody. The screaming ceased.
"There were at most 17 survivors," said Clark.
The shelter was in a suburb of Baghdad where many families from people in the government lived. It was under intense surveillance by U.S. planes and satellites. There was no way for the Pentagon not to have known that civilians were in the shelter and that it was a war crime to hit it.
MEDICINE FACTORY IN SUDAN--AUGUST 1998
After U.S. embassies were blown up in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the Clinton administration decided on a military strike against "military targets" allegedly connected with Osama bin Laden. When, on Aug. 20, 1998, some 16 U.S. cruise missiles hit a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan's capital, President Bill Clinton told the press he had "convincing information" that the plant had been used to manufacture chemical weapons.
Clinton lied and knew it. He had no certain knowledge about the plant's ownership or what it produced. On Oct. 27, 1999, the New York Times reported that the U.S. attack was "one of the most debated military actions undertaken by the administration."
The report explained that, "Within days, Western engineers who had worked at the Sudan factory were asserting that it was, as Sudan claimed, a working pharmaceutical plant. Reporters visiting the ruined building saw bottles of medicine but no signs of security precautions and no obvious signs of a chemical weapons manufacturing operation."
The raid itself killed few people on the spot. But it eliminated a factory that produced and packaged about half of the medicines, including veterinary medicines, used to defend the health of millions of Sudanese people and the livestock that the people depend on for sustenance.
YUGOSLAVIA: REFUGEES, BRIDGES, TV, CHINESE EMBASSY
NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999, allegedly to stop military and police "atrocities," targeted the Yugoslav population, especially in Serbia.
On Sept. 19-21, 1999, the Washington Post ran a series of articles by Dana Priest about Pentagon debates on the conduct of the war. It showed clearly that all the assaults on the Serb civilian industrial infrastructure were aimed at demoralizing the Yugoslav population and leadership. Attacks on the Yugoslav Army were considered a public-relations adjunct.
Still, the Pentagon tried to cover up some of the attacks clearly aimed at civilian deaths.
One was the April 12, 1999, attack on a railway bridge near Gdelicka, Yugoslavia. U.S. Air Force jets dropped two guided bombs on the bridge. The bombs hit not only the bridge but a passenger train on it. At least 14 people were killed.
Gen. Wesley Clark, the U.S. officer running NATO's bombing onslaught, told the world that the train had appeared so suddenly that the pilot had no chance to abort the attack. He apologized at the time for what he called "collateral damage."
To justify the bombing raid, Clark claimed that the train's speed had made it impossible for the pilot to divert the bomb. Then he showed the attack on a video filmed from the head of a rocket-propelled AGM-30 bomb.
What Clark failed to say was that the film was shown at three times its normal speed. It was a gross propaganda trick.
A German daily newspaper, the Frankfurter Rundschau, exposed this U.S./NATO gimmick in its Jan. 6, 2000, edition.
As the newspaper put it: "During the Kosovo war, NATO used two video films to try and demonstrate that a bomb attack on a passenger train was an unavoidable accident. ... But the films were played through at least three times the normal speed."
The FR also said that the U.S. Air Force admitted it found out months after the attack on the train that the videos had "given a false picture of the events leading up to the attack." But, an Air Force spokesperson told the FR, "We saw no reason to publish the films after we noticed the mistake."
On April 13, 1999, NATO warplanes killed at least 75 to 100 ethnic Albanian refugees and injured at least 30 more in a convoy crossing a bridge near Djakovica in Kosovo, the Associated Press reported. At the same time, another U.S.- directed bomber hit an ethnic Albanian village in Kosovo, killing at least 20 inhabitants and injuring many others, according to a French Press Agency reporter at the scene.
Were these purposely targeted? Or were they the inevitable "mistakes" of a war machine geared up for the kill and searching for targets?
About the illegal attack on the Yugoslav civilian media, there can be no doubt.
On the morning of April 23, 1999, at 2 a.m., a missile from a NATO plane exploded inside a Belgrade television station killing 16 people. They were camera technicians, makeup people, sound technicians and copyeditors. None was military. None was a government employee tied to either Slobodan Milosovic or the Yugoslav military.
They were average citizens of Belgrade simply making a living. The cruise missile that was intentionally aimed at them that morning changed that forever. A small monument with the names of the dead has been erected next to the television station.
It was followed by a missile attack on the Chinese Embassy. Washington denied this attack was on purpose. First the Pentagon said it targeted the wrong building in an unfortunate accident. Then it came up with the story that the CIA was responsible for the mistake because it provided maps of Belgrade made three or four years earlier, when the embassy had been at a different location.
Two excuses are weaker than one, as the old saying goes.
All these are war crimes under the Geneva Convention. Yet the U.S. and NATO generals who committed these crimes are free to commit others. Moreover, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is the one now charged with war crimes. He faces trial before a court in The Hague that is a tool of NATO.
'BLACK HAWK DOWN'
Perhaps the war crime most likely to be repeated in Afghanistan is the one that took place on Oct. 3, 1993, in Somalia. With little evidence, U.S. spokespeople now even blame Bin Laden's group for the Somali resistance that day. If true, this should give the Pentagon another reason to rethink the attack on Afghanistan.
This mass murder was supposed to be part of a "humanitarian mission" to feed hungry Somalis. It's story--told from the point of view of the U.S. troops, of course--will be spread widely through the new movie "Black Hawk Down," based on a book by journalist Mark Bowden.
Black Hawk helicopters circled above Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, and Humvees topped with heavy-gauge machine guns brought in backup squads. Teams of Rangers and Delta Force elite troops encircled a building in the middle of the city, near the teeming Bakara market. A meeting of supporters of the Somali leader Mohamed Farah Aidid, whom Washington was hunting, was supposedly taking place in the building.
The rotors on these helicopters created such a powerful downdraft that they had actually ripped the clothes off of women on the street below and lifted the tin roofs off dwellings. They had been invulnerable death machines of the occupation.
But when the people of Mogadishu saw them hovering over the downtown area and realized they were carrying out a military operation right in their capital city, they ran in by the thousands, mostly unarmed, to resist.
Women and children shielded men with their bodies as the men, some armed with World War I rifles, crawled out in the street to fire on the 17 copters and their crews. Old men rode in on horses and even cows to fight the invaders.
The heavy guns of the U.S. forces killed at least 500 Somalis in the 15-hour battle that followed, most of them civilians. Though they outgunned and slaughtered the Somalis, the determined mass Somali resistance finally overwhelmed the elite U.S. troops, surrounding and trapping 100 of them after two Black Hawks were shot down.
Eighteen U.S. elite troops were killed and nearly 80 injured. Soon the Clinton administration, fearing that mass opposition to the occupation of Somalia would be aroused at home, withdrew all U.S. troops from Somalia.
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