- Yesterday
- “Cruel irony and “not good good enough for ‘our boys’ ” is an understatement. I have no idea why any British reporter would put the word scandal in inverted comments as Brian Brady has done in today’s story. A scandal is exactly what it is. It is scandalous that both ordinary soldiers and bomb disposal specialists should be exposed to yet further danger while a pack of dirty mercenaries should be laughing all the way to the bank. “
- Today
“Reuters - Mon Sep 4, 9:49 AM ET Danish soldiers carry the body of one of two British soldiers killed in a roadside bomb attack near Basra in southern Iraq, September 4, 2006. REUTERS/Atef Hassan”
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I think we’ve been all been expecting, and dreading, this. I’ve written about it repeatedly recently:
(more…)Back on July 27th I wrote about the Statement issued by Grand Ayatollah Najafi covered in this article in Al-Zaman [Arabic]:
“the situation in the south of the country is coming very badly unstuck for the green zone government. In particular this statement by Grand Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi is ominous:
“We fear the coming of a day when we cannot restrain a revolution of the people, with all its unsavory consequences.”
Al-Najafi is often thought to be second most important of the four Grand Ayatollahs living in Najaf with Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani being “primus inter pares” (the fifth Grand Ayatollah Kazem al-Hairi lives in Iran.) Al-Najafi’s office would not under any circumstances have issued that statement unless the Grand Ayatollahs (who act collegially) were of the opinion that their ability to restrain their followers was slipping. … … … .”
On August 10th I wrote this:
“It remains to be seen whether the Grand Ayatollahs already deeply concerned that their ability to restrain their followers is slipping will succeed in holding them back one more time. Should they fail the bloodbath created by the American occupation’s policies in Iraq will pale into insignificance.”
American Mercenary Firm Laughs All The Way To The Bank- British Soldiers “make do” (and die)
Yankee Poodle Tony’s Government The British The Blair Government has sold off 4½ million pounds worth of armoured personnel carriers for £44,000 including four to American mercenary firm Blackwater. British Ministers claimed that adaptations made to the Mamba Mine Protected Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC), which if you follow the chain of ownership is manufactured by a BAE (British Aerospace) subsidiary, made it unsuitable for its use in Iraq which included the transportation of bomb disposal teams, and too difficult to maintain. The ministers appear to be being more than somewhat “economical with the actualité.” The American mercenary firm that bought them for the princely sum of £2,933.33 apiece describes them as “the armoured personnel carrier of choice for Blackwater ops in Iraq” and clearly don’t have any problem maintaining them as they’re in daily use on Route Irish - “the most dangerous road in the world.” The British newspaper Scotland on Sunday first broke the story last Sunday and has an even more damning follow-up today.
If You Don’t Approve Of Bombing Kids Don’t Give The Bombers Money
‘How can we stand by and allow this to go on?’
Published: 31 July 2006
They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. ” Mehdi Hashem, aged seven Qana,” was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy’s body lay. “Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 Qana”, “Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one Qana.'’ And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas’s little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father’s shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.
You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the ” pinpoint accuracy'’ it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana as if that justified this massacre. Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about “Muslim terror” threatening ” western civilisation” as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.
And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.
And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: “For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B”. No doubt the manufacturers can call it “combat-proven” because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.
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What’s At Stake In Lebanon And Gaza?
The attacks on Israeli troops by Hamas and Hizbollah are very unlikely to have been co-ordinated but the effect, a multiplier effect, is as though they were. Both operations, were carried out from territory Israel had evacuated, both resulted in the capture of Israeli soldiers and both have been used as the “cassus belli” for a war of punishment by Israel that targets civilians in the hope of fomenting civil war.
- Israel’s reaction to the two events essentially has been the same:
- Rejection of any negotiation or prisoner swap – which both Hamas and Hizbollah have forward as their core demand.
- A “shock and awe” campaign in Gaza and Lebanon targetting civilians in the hope of pressurising the fighters on them to release the captives.
