From: Adam <""4thwormcastfromthemolehill\"{at}the field.near
the bridge">

George Sherwood wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Aug 2006 16:11:14 +0100, Phil Payne wrote:
>
>>> http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/07/18/lebano13760.htm
>>>
>>> "Some of the rockets launched against Haifa over the past two days
>> contained
>>> hundreds of metal ball bearings that are of limited use against military
>>> targets but cause great harm to civilians and civilian
property. The ball
>>> bearings lodge in the body and cause serious harm."
>>>
>>> I do not know how accurate the HRW site is.
>> They've been pretty good in the past.  I see no reason to doubt them.
>
> The I guess you would admit that Saddam committed genocide in Iraq.
>
> http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/
>
> George

Ah the wonders of an anti-insurgency operation. When doth one become
genocide.....is it numbers of dead civies?

The US is looking awfully like an arsonist crying "fire" on this one.


Anyway this was an anti-terrorist campaign, part of Iraq's very own
"war on terror" so....it would seem that torture, secret prisons,
mass killing of civilians who happened to be the in wrong place & time
etc are merely SOP....

http://hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFALINT.htm

Puts it quite nicely esp:

"A destruction process has an inherent pattern. There is only one way
in which a scattered group can effectively be destroyed. Three steps are
organic in the operation:

Definition

|

|

Concentration (or seizure)

|

|

Annihilation"


Sweet. Mucho like "Iraq will be the battlefield with the Islamists
where we will destroy them" etc.etc.

Humm....

"Summarily executing noncombatant or captured members of an
ethnical-national group as such is not a legitimate wartime or
counterinsurgency measure, regardless of the nature of the conflict."

Ahhh how sweet. That is sooooo pre-9-11. Entertaining to see pre-9-11
things brought into the open because of 9-11 while the lawyers are
desperately trying to pretend 9-11 had not happened as otherwise their
court has no legitimacy....

What a wondrous web lawyer live in.

& then..

"In addition to this argument of principle, many features of Anfal far
transcend the realm of counterinsurgency. These include, first of all, the
simple facts of what happened after the military goals of the operation had
been accomplished:

ƒù the mass murder and disappearance of many tens of thousands of
non-combatants--50,000 by the most conservative estimate, and possibly
twice that number;

ƒù the use of chemical weapons against non-combatants in dozens of
locations, killing thousands and terrifying many more into abandoning their
homes;

ƒù the near-total destruction of family and community assets and
infrastructure, including the entire agricultural mainstay of the rural
Kurdish economy;

ƒù the literal abandonment, in punishing conditions, of thousands of women,
children and elderly people, resulting in the deaths of many hundreds.
Those who survived did so largely due to the clandestine help of nearby
Kurdish townspeople.

"

Woooooo boy now the US is like a polar bear in summer.

1) So how many have been murdered/disappeared since 03/2003? 50 thousand?
Theat's the rough figure for Anfal. 2) Phosphorous, napalm etc
3) The near total destruction of the iraqi economy per se. 4) If you can't
afford to feed your kids how much would you spend on your parents?

It was a nasty event. But it was a proto-"WoT" which the US
covered Iraq for.


Adam

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