The results of the siege of Fallujah

We don't know who injured these people. It could have been at the hands of the Coalition or Sadr's men. Those pics don't prove a thing other than some people got hurt.

We do know that none of this would have happened if Sadr and his idiots hadn't decided it was time to fight the MOST POWERFUL MILITARY IN THE WORLD by hiding in populated cities behind women and children. Those pictures make me hate them so much right now that I would absolutely love to go over there and take some of them out myself. The trouble is that a merciful death by means of a bullet in the head is too quick for them. But that kind of person needs to be eliminated from the face of the planet forever.

Let me point out that there is NOT ONE GODDAMN THING noble about these guys. They are NOT "freedom fighters" and they are NOT "insurgents." They are criminals, pure and simple, murderous armed thugs, deserving of nothing more than a bullet through the skull, good riddance to all of them, but too bad we have to spend a whole bullet to take one out.

Let me also point out that the fourth and sixth pictures are the same. :wink:

Craven, Steissd posted the picture of Palestinians you referred to, not Au. Just wanted to note that in case Au sees this thread & isn't sure what you're talking about.

You're right! Apologies to Au for my falsehood.

Tarantulas, so in other words, it's impossible that US soldiers could have accidentally killed women and children?

When bullets are flying anybody can get killed. I don't know who killed them, I don't point fingers at the US either. I'm just saying that it's a reality of war that we never see.

There have definitely been women and children killed in this war by American soldiers. It's impossible to not have civilian casualties.

I didn't say it was impossible for US soldiers to inflict those injuries. I said we just don't know.

I will say this, though - it's more likely that the injuries were inflicted by Sadr's untrained civilians indiscriminately firing rifles and RPGs and mortars than it is by trained US soldiers who are restricted in what they can do by the Geneva Convention and the US laws of war.

You are being sarcastic, right? Bullets are not guided weapons. Furthermore, when you shell houses from AH-1s, you destroy everything in the immediate area, including those inconvenient people who happen to be caught nearby. I don''t think Hellfire missiles pay much attention to the Geneva Conventions. As for the "trained soldiers," I doubt a scared 18 year old is going to hold his fire when he thinks everyone is trying to kill him.

I think its stupid that people post pictures to play the emotional pity. Tarantulas is right; we dont know if American soldiers even killed them. And with that Aljazeera sticker on there I start to doubt it even more.

However, even if we did kill them, it wouldve been because their "brave freedom fighters" were cowardly enough to hide behind children in homes when the Americans came.

These pictures also fail at even causing me to even think stopping the war. I don't think we should;ve gone in to begin with but we sure as hell cant pull out because some children died. I can show you some gruesome pictures of what happens when people get in car crashes. That doesnt mean we should ban cars or anything like that.

Just out of curiosity, why would you doubt al-Jazeera? Is it becasue it is Arab run?


If 'we' did kill them, its because we fired on occupied areas with heavy weaponry. Sort of like destroying a room to swat a fly.


So the dead civillians don't matter beacuse they are Iraqi, or becasue national pride in involved, or why? Help me out here, I really am trying to understand your position.


Really, the leap from attempting to end an illegal occupation and banning car crashes is a little bit of a stretch, don't you think? I've yet to work an auto accident that was produced by the deliberate attempt to kill others. Accidents are just that...accidents. This is different.
Very often those on the far right have stated :people get killed in wars...get over it. I for one refuse to "get over it." I refuse to think of other people as "objects" or "obstacles." Too many of the rightists here seem to think that this is a John Wayne movie, or a video game, where the violence is imaginary. Well guess what, it isn't. Death is messy, and smells of piss and **** and blood and bile. It isn't pretty, and it isn't noble. Its simply death.

I think anyone who has any knowledge of Al-Jazeera is only sensible to look at anything they report with a very wary, suspicious eye.

They have been Bin Laden's mouthpiece.

No, they have covered his press releases, much the way the American media covers the press releases. Try to avoid seeing things through manichaen specacles. American exceptionalism is the problem, not the solution.

Well, I have no knowledge of Al-Jazeera - never been there, never talked to one of its journalists, can't even speak/read Arab.

Up to now I believed, Al Jazeera provides Arab news from an Arab perspective.

Good analogy. Now to make it accurate we need to make the flies realy big and give them AK-47's.



I never said they didn't matter, let alone because they are Iraqi. But I'll help you with my position. Civilian casualties happen in every war and they happen in great numbers. This often should be a reason not to go war but certainly is not a reason to back out of one after we have comitted ourselves to it.



I've seen death and horrible violence with my eyes. A month before i joined these forums, I watched by my friend get shot in the back with a shotgun at midnight on his birthday because (stupidly) we were playing dingdong door ditch. The body was horribly repulsive when the cops got there, and where his back should've been there was a just a bloody "hole". When i was younger and was visiting India a friend of mine from there was kidnapped on the way to a radio station and hacked to pieces. I know what death is and I certainly dont need a lecture from you.



Maybe its just me but you seem to be trying to paint me as racist against Arabs with a couple of your comments.

Its not you.

The language is Arabic. It is supposed to be terribly difficult to learn. I figure it would be rather like my experiences learning Greek. I didn't take ancient Greek, it took me!


You are correct. Just as ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN< etc are American news with a corrsponding American prespective.

They have an English language website. http://english.aljazeera.net .
It doesn't have the full contents of the Arabic language edition, but it isn''t bad.
As a side note, apparently there is a push on for AJ to begin an Arabic Pedagogy program similar to the BBC's famous English program of the 1930s through 1970s.

AJ also has streaming video, but like CNN it is subscriber only.

...and there are many who believe AJ takes risks to promote and propagandize for Bin Laden.

Criticising Al Jazeera is in no way a criticism of Arabic people.

I didn't imply thast it was. I'm sorry if you took it that way.
As for your first assertion, I don't see AJ as that different from any other news agency worldwide. What it provides is a different perspective.

News channels at war: Al-Jazeera accused of hiding Bin Laden

Oliver Burkeman in New York
Saturday February 2, 2002
The Guardian

An interview in which Osama bin Laden justifies the killing of innocent people and warns the west it is facing "an unbearable hell" was suppressed by the Arabic-language satellite broadcaster al-Jazeera, executives at the US news channel CNN alleged yesterday.
The hour-long interview, in which the al-Qaida leader says "freedom and human rights in America are doomed", was recorded by al-Jazeera in October but only broadcast by CNN on Thursday.

Al-Jazeera said it had withheld the interview because it did not want to be seen as a mouthpiece for Bin Laden.

The Arabic broadcaster's director-general, Mohammed Jassim al-Ali, said it would "sever its relationship with CNN and... take the necessary action to punish the organisations and individuals who stole this video and distributed it illegally." (*Why didn't they want to the world to know what Bin Laden said?)

CNN said the interview had been circulating in intelligence circles for some weeks. It said the US government had had a copy and that Tony Blair had quoted from the interview in a speech to the House of Commons in November.

The footage, shot against a now-familiar canvas backdrop, shows Bin Laden wearing combat fatigues with a submachine-gun close at hand. He tells al-Jazeera's Kabul correspondent that "the battle has moved inside America". He dodges questions about his responsibility for the September 11 attacks, but says they were justified.

"America has made many accusations against us and many other Muslims around the world," Bin Laden says. "Its charge that we are carrying out acts of terrorism is unwarranted... If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists. (Nobody killed his damn sons. They were the instigators.)

"The battle has moved to inside America... We will work to continue this battle, God permitting, until victory or until we meet God."

The US government, he said, "will lead the American people, and the west in general, into an unbearable hell and a choking life."

He avoided the question of whether he was behind the anthrax attacks in the US. "These diseases are a punishment from God and a response to oppressed mothers' prayers in Lebanon and Palestine," he said.

Al-Jazeera sources said the interview was recorded on October 21, two weeks into the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan. It may prove to have been Bin Laden's last.

"We decided under the circumstances at that time that airing the interview would have strengthened the belief that we are a mouthpiece for Bin Laden," an anonymous al-Jazeera journalist told Reuters. "The interview was not that newsworthy. It was full of preaching and looked like a Friday sermon." (*Is that what their sermons look like?)

But Bin Laden also uses the interview to attack the Gulf state of Qatar, where al-Jazeera is based, for supporting the war on terrorism, raising the suspicion that the channel did not want to upset its host state which has, by the standards of Arab governments, been indulgent towards its relatively free debate.

Al-Jazeera said CNN had had the tape in its possession for two months. The US broadcaster did not address that charge, but said in a statement that an affiliation agreement allowed it to use "any and all footage owned or controlled by Al-Jazeera".

CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, said the interview left important questions for al-Jazeera. "Among them, why was the interview not ever televised? Why did al-Jazeera initially deny the existence of the tape? And what other tape doesal-Jazeera have, or did it have, that had never been acknowledged or televised?" he said.

The station's director general responded: "Al-Jazeera does not feel it is obligated to explain its position and its reasoning of why it chose not to air the interview. Al-Jazeera would have expected CNN to use its judgment and respect its special relationship with al-Jazeera by not airing material that al-Jazeera itself chose not to broadcast."

---------
Guilty. They had a reporter WITH Bin Laden, the worst global terrorist in the world. They should have given info on where he was.

You are aware that CNN, The NY TImes, the Wash Post, and even Penthouse Magazine have had reporters inside the AQ camps for months at a time, aren't you?

I also notice that in your selective highlighting you ignored this:


Sort of invalidates your thesis, no?

As for this question:

The answer is: what do "Christian sermons" look like? there is no uniform manner of preaching in Islam either. Certainly Fundamentalist ISlam, like Fundamentalist Christianity, teaches hate and intolerance. I find it dissapointing that our administration adheres to such a philosophy. I have always maintained that the far right, and AQ have much in common.

Harbus Online printed (March 4, 2002 ) an excerp from Rick Zednik's article, which was published in the Columbia Journalism Review - the latter on sunscrition only, the excerp can still be found here:

Inside Al Jazeera - The World's Most Controversial TV Station