Justified Homicide
So Colin Powell, the My Lai apologist, has produced another opus. Contradicting the eye-witness accounts of literally hundreds of experienced war journalists and live footage from a French TV crew, he claims that the US’s tank assault on the journalists’ hotel in Baghdad was a justified response to “hostile fire appearing to come from a location later identified as the Palestine Hotel“. Uh-huh.
Powell also claims that “The U.S. military does not target civilians or civilian structures“… I wonder, then, who it was that destroyed Baghdad’s water and power. Still mostly non-functional, some doctors are reporting the early signs of a cholera and typhoid problem. And since when are journalists’ office *not* “civilian structures”?
On the same day as the attack on the Palestine Hotel, a US aircraft fired two missiles at the Baghdad bureau of Arabic satellite TV channel al-Jazeera, killing the station’s correspondent, Tareq Ayoub. American forces also opened fire on the offices of Abu Dhabi television on the same day.
Mr al-Ali has given me a copy of his letter to Victoria Clarke, the US Assistant Secretary of State of Defence for Public Affairs in Washington, sent on 24 February this year. In the letter, he gives the address and the map coordinates of the station’s office in Baghdad–Lat: 33.19/29.08, Lon 44.24/03.63–adding that civilian journalists would be working in the building. The Americans were outraged at al-Jazeera’s coverage of the civilian victims of US bombing raids. And on 8 April, less than three hours before the Reuters office was attacked, an American aircraft fired a single missile at the al-Jazeera office — at those precise map coordinates Mr al-Ali had sent to Ms Clarke — and killed the station’s reporter Tareq Ayoub. “We find these events,” Mr al-Ali wrote in his slightly inaccurate English, “unjustifiable, unacceptable, arousing all forms of anger and rejection and most of all need an explanation.”
The lack of concern by US journalists over the execution of these “foreign” journalists is a sign either of spectacular cowardice, or craven complicity. When you start giving assent-through-silence to your military’s slaughter of “foreign” journalists, then it’s just a matter of time before you find yourself in front of a firing squad.
Meanwhile, US troops continue to fire on Iraqi demonstrators, this time in Fallujah. With mass looting, chaos, rapine, and armed bandits controlling large areas of Iraq, that country now uncomfortably resembles the shambles of a country that Lebanon became after its invasion by Israeli and Syrian forces.
Earlier here.