You wake up in hospital with no arms, your entire family is dead and the guys who did it are playing Pinochle at an air base in Britain.
You think you might be a wee bit pissed off?
Or a shot at freedom and self-rule with a little assistance from America, Australia, Spain and Britain?
Why would you care. You have no arms and everyone you loved is dead. I guess you could thank your lucky stars that they didn't use a GBU-31 to do it. Then you'd just be pink mist. Or maybe that would have been a blessing.
As far as the internet infrastructure... I think that's a little premature. That's like kicking the mob-rule out of Afghanistan and then debating what fashion designers to bring in to help the women with their new look
Even the Afghani's have stopped hoping for U.S. assistance in rebuilding. Read the entire article and tell me how many references to the U.S. reconstruction efforts there are. Not like the promises weren't made. It may be different in Iraq though. They have oil.
260 million people using the Imperial Measures, all in the good old U.S.A. The 5.8 billion people, everywhere else (including the rest of the British Empire) using metric.
By removing the element of force from society -- using government only to protect against force, not to initiate force -- the free people will prosper. Again, whose logic?
And those in power are those who would benefit the most from a smaller federal government.
OK, the current administration is waltzing down the garden path to your market driven dystopia. Once they get there, we'll have the corporations dictating social policy (who lives and who dies), environmental policy (strip mine it all, let 'em breathe sulphur dioxide), and economic ethics (ya right, like that would ever work).
The per capita numbers were based on real populations. 205 million in 1970, 255 million in 1992. The military budget has little bearing on the well being of the citizens of this country. (There are long term spinoffs from R&D and some economic benefit by employing cannon fodder) Let's deal with the part that I believe has some benefit to society at large. (Not the corps, or the elite, but the masses of people) 205 million at $583 each is $119,515,000,000.00 in 1970 as compared to 255 million at $326 each is $83,130,000,000.00 in 1992.
So, even in real dollars, the non-military side of the federal governments budget has shrunk by 30%. Since Reagan, the federal government has been neutered domestically. That process continues. I guess we'll see where it leads as it seems the country is walking to the neo-con agenda.
Better yet, call up the boys, tell him he's been selling crack to the nine year old kids on the block in exchange for sex. By the time they're through with him, he'll have no life and no stuff. (They'll keep it under the proceeds of crime, they have no compulsion to give it back in most states)
You're right. Humans have no rights. We should feel free to commit war crimes against them (we can't be proscecuted because we took our ball home and refuse to play with the International Criminal Court, which we are... International Criminals that is), we can feel free to turn civilians into pink mist, after all, they were human and we all know that humans do bad things, we just pre-empted them.
You are right. Humans have no rights and when the U.S. Government comes for YOU, we'll remember that and act accordingly. You are human, aren't you??
Do the math. The non-military areas of the federal government theoretically provide benefits to the citizens through program spending and regulation of the economy and the environment.
Non-Military Spending, Per Capita, 1970: $583 Non-Military Spending, Per Capita, 1992: $326
So, even though the government as a whole has grown, the actual beneficial (to the masses) part of the federal government has shrunk by 56%.
The military is a tool for wealth redistribution. Credible military threats to the U.S. as a nation do not exist in today's world. So why the big army?
"The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas." --Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925.
Cubans have a greater life expectancy than Americans. In 1980 American CEOs received 42 times the pay of an average worker, compared with 419 times in 1998. More than 5 million people in Britain are living in conditions of absolute poverty (set at $240 per week), according to Breadline Europe, a recent study led by academics from Bristol University and the London School of Economics. Poverty in other European countries - apart from Russia - is not nearly as high as in Britain. In France, for example, the study found that fewer than 1% of the population lives in absolute poverty. The study found that more than 60% of Russians are now living in poverty, with over a quarter of them in extreme poverty. This compares with a poverty level of less than 5% before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So, you think that s strong central government is the problem? I guess it depends on your yardstick. A strong federal government in the U.S. is the only check that the people of the country have on their most privileged citizens, the corporations and those who control them.
Now for some stats:
1970: Total Military Budget Per Capita = $400
Total Federal Budget Per Capita = $983
Total Military As % Of Budget = 40.1% 1992: Total Military Budget Per Capita = $1170
Total Federal Budget Per Capita = $1496
Total Military As % Of Budget = 78.2%
These numbers were taken from U.S. Census Data at fedstats.gov.
So, measured in cash, you can see that the U.S. Federal Government is on it's way to being a powerless entity, merely a tool for wealth redistribution from taxpayers to the elite. And of course, the number one way to do this in a very quick way is through war. The lower classes pay with their labor and their lives and the elite benefit when the corporations under their control move in to make profits from: Arms Sales, Reconstruction of Infrastructure, and Provision of Goods and Services to the newly subjected lower classes of wherever it is the are taking over this week.
If you still beleive that the U.S. Federal Government is growing too large, look at the rapid deconstruction going on under the current administration. Kyoto is a great example. Cheney, his puppet and the rest of the neo-con administration hate it because it recognizes that destroying the environment is a bad thing for people, but the cost to corporations of implementing it is too high. The Cheney administration's tax cuts will shift the burden of running the tools of state to the lower classes, further increasing the domination of the elite. Eventually of course, the elite will take too much, the masses will rise up and destroy them and a new elite will take their place. History is littered with examples of this pattern, but people never learn from history, only from their own mistakes.
The subject of this article will care. And all of his cousins who've lost mothers and sisters will care too. The US response to this will be... PATRIOT2, more draconian legislation to take away more of the citizens "rights". The current administration has guaranteed an endless supply of Bin Ladens. One of them will get through and then...
I saw this in another thread last night. Someone posted it AC and I can't find a Google for it. It hits the nail right on the head though.
One constant throughout human history has been the struggle between the "haves" and the "have nots." For the purpose of this discussion, I will refer to the "haves" as "the elite" and will call the "have nots" "the rabble." I am doing this to emphasize the fact that the rabble, while comprising most of the population, is almost always pitifully weak and disorganized, thanks to constant manipulation by the elite. "Divide and conquer" has always been the name of the game here; it has always been easy for the elite to manipulate public opinion and keep the rabble squabbling among each other.
The elite, though comprising only 1% of the population (the exact percentages are arguable, though the figures I am using are in the right ballpark), control most of the wealth. (In modern America, one has to be worth at least $100 million to be a serious player.) The elite don't have to work per se; they spend their time making deals, which, although stressful at times, is much too stimulating to fall into the realm of institutionalized drudgery which people commonly refer to as "work." Falling below the elite in status and power are what could be called "elite wannabes," "lackeys of the elite," or "wealthy rabble." These people are very wealthy by rabble standards.
Power and status are hardwired into human behavior. Before the rise of agriculture, when humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers, it was difficult to accumulate power and status, since possessions were limited by what people could carry with them. There were probably powerful lineages that got passed through the generations, but the gap between the powerful and everybody else was limited due to the nature of their lifestyle.
All this changed with the rise of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago. For the first time, people became sedentary, and they produced surpluses of grain which had to be defended. These surpluses meant unprecedented power for whoever was able to control them, and the first elite was born. For the first time, organized war became possible.
Howard Zinn's "A Peoples' History of America" describes the real dynamics at work behind the American Revolution. Rather than some idealistic "liberty and justice for all," the American Revolution was actually fomented by the American elite, who chafed under the British royalty.
It has been pointed out that by fighting an enemy, one takes on many of the characteristics of that enemy. Interestingly, it was World War 2 when America became a fascist power. By fascism, I am referring to Mussolini's definition: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."
By 1945, state and corporate power in America had merged into what was later termed the "military-industrial complex," even though it wasn't until 1961 that Dwight Eisenhower gave his famous speech warning America about a system that had already been in place for 15 years.
Even though America had become fascist by 1945, there remained a vast amount of consolidation to do: there still remained the rabble and their pesky vote (an archaic carryover from the Revolutionary War era). The rabble had recently suffered two major traumas -- the Great Depression and World War Two, and had reached an unprecedented level of solidarity. The rabble had become dangerous, and it was necessary to manipulate them back into their customary position of helplessness, while at the same time enhancing the power of t
Earlier, Sabah walked out of Mansour's al-Saha restaurant - with our take-out lunch - only minutes before a huge explosion made shards of its windows, lacerating customers and freaking the neighborhood. But that is nothing compared with the real damage a block away. Four or five houses have disappeared and in their place is a crater maybe 30-40 meters wide and 15-20 meters deep. Some of the photographers use a chilling term they picked up from the US military in Afghanistan to describe what might have happened to a dozen or more people thought to have died in this missile attack. They have become "pink mist". The smoldering crater is littered with the artifacts of ordinary middle-class life in Baghdad - a crunched Passat sedan, a wrought-iron front gate, the armrest of a chair upholstered in green brocade and a broken bedhead.
A quick excerpt from this article. Saddam must be a real bad guy to drop 8000 pounds of explosives on somewhere he "might" be.
My first real computer (after a used XT) was a 386DX 33mhz with 4MB RAM and a 110MB HD. The 386DX had an integrated FPU and sold for $280 more than the SX chip. Both were 32 bit parts.
If I had an agenda, I would have gone with the higher estimate: 500,000
I guess revisionist history really depends on who you are inclined to believe. When I was looking for a number, I picked one from a site that seemed halfway credible. I saw one sight where the guy said the entire holocaust was two Jewish guys and a Schnauzer killed in a car accident and the bombing of Dresden was a myth propogated by the Communists. You gotta go with something!
The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say - and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right. Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
Robert Fisk in the Independent, April 3.
The problem is by rationalizing that we are saving people by killing them, we become no better than Saddam. Doing nothing was not an option, but this is truly madness.
You're right. The guy is obviously a flake with no right to an opinion. CNN is a much better source for balanced and objective reporting.
(Sorry if the sarcasm is dripping, try not to get some on you.)
Dr Patrick Seale is a writer and consultant on Middle East affairs. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland (the son of the Rev Dr Morris Seale, a missionary and orientalist), he was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy and Psychology; and later at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he studied modern Middle East history and wrote his first book. He studied Arabic in Lebanon at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies. He worked for Reuters for six years, mainly as a financial journalist, and more than a dozen years for The Observer (London) as Middle East correspondent, roving foreign correspondent in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, and Paris correspondent.In 1971 he set up Patrick Seale Books, Ltd. (a literary agency) and the Patrick Seale Gallery in London, dealing in modern painting.In the late 1980s, he decided to devote himself to full-time writing, lecturing and consultancy. He was awarded a doctorate (D.Litt) by Oxford University in 1995 for his published work and was elected a Senior Associate Member of St Antony's College. He runs a consultancy on Middle East affairs for a number of international clients and writes regularly for Al-Hayat (London) and Al-Ittihad (Abu Dhabi), as well as The Daily Star (Beirut), The Saudi Gazette (Jiddah) and Gulf News (Dubai). His books include: The Struggle for Syria, 1965; new edition 1986 French Revolution 1968 (1968) Philby, the Long Road to Moscow, 1973 The Hilton Assignment, 1973 Ed: The Making of an Arab Statesman: Abd al-Hamid Sharaf and the Modern Arab World, 1983 Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East, 1988 Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire, 1992. He helped HRH Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, now Assistant Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia, write Desert Warrior, 1995, a volume of memoirs of the Gulf War. He lives with his family in Paris and the South of France.
Sort of like you won't be seeing this story anywhere in the "Media With Integrity" United States.
By the way, it's from the Independent in the UK (Somewhere where that word still means something to journalists)
Robert Fisk: Wailing children, the wounded, the dead: victims of the day cluster bombs rained on Babylon 03 April 2003
The wounds are vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh. The wards of the Hillah teaching hospital are proof that something illegal - something quite outside the Geneva Conventions - occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon. The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say - and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right. Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways. Rahed Hakem remembers that it was 10.30am on Sunday when she was sitting in her home in Nadr, that she heard "the voice of explosions" and looked out of the door to see "the sky raining fire". She said the bomblets were a black-grey colour. Mohamed Moussa described the clusters of "little boxes" that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were silver-coloured. They fell like "small grapefruit," he said. "If it hadn't exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately," he said. "They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our home, unexploded." Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires attached to them - perhaps the metal "butterfly" that contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs and springs open to release them in showers. Some victims died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel house mortuary at the back of the Hillah hospital. The teaching college received more than 200 wounded since Saturday night - the 61 dead are only those who were brought to the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been buried in their home villages - and, of these, doctors say about 80 per cent were civilians. Soldiers there certainly were, at least 40 if these statistics are to be believed, and amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and both they and their wives and daughters insisted there were no military installations around their homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a missile launcher was positioned in a nearby field - as they were along the highway north to Baghdad? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in these villages - even if aimed at military targets - thus crosses the boundaries of international law. So it was that 27-year old Asil Yamin came to receive those awful round wounds in her back. And so five-year-old Zaman Abbais was hit in the legs and 48-year-old Samira Abdul-Hamza in the eyes, chest and legs. Her son Haidar, a 32-year-old soldier, said the containers which fell to the ground were white with some red and green sometimes painted on them. ''It is
Slashdot Mirror
Let me give you a scenario:
You wake up in hospital with no arms, your entire family is dead and the guys who did it are playing Pinochle at an air base in Britain.
You think you might be a wee bit pissed off?
Or a shot at freedom and self-rule with a little assistance from America, Australia, Spain and Britain?
Why would you care. You have no arms and everyone you loved is dead. I guess you could thank your lucky stars that they didn't use a GBU-31 to do it. Then you'd just be pink mist. Or maybe that would have been a blessing.
As far as the internet infrastructure... I think that's a little premature. That's like kicking the mob-rule out of Afghanistan and then debating what fashion designers to bring in to help the women with their new look
Even the Afghani's have stopped hoping for U.S. assistance in rebuilding. Read the entire article and tell me how many references to the U.S. reconstruction efforts there are. Not like the promises weren't made. It may be different in Iraq though. They have oil.
No, we spend loonies.
Better than Minnie Mouse. She's fucking Goofy and Mickey is not pleased.
I don't know about you, but the less government controlled crap that comes into my house the better!
You mean, like, CNN?
You mean you rest of the world.
260 million people using the Imperial Measures, all in the good old U.S.A. The 5.8 billion people, everywhere else (including the rest of the British Empire) using metric.
Only government can grant a corporation (or individual) the power to initiate force, because only government holds that power to begin with.
But what if it's the corporations who are running the government? (As is quite arguably the case today)
By removing the element of force from society -- using government only to protect against force, not to initiate force -- the free people will prosper. Again, whose logic?
And those in power are those who would benefit the most from a smaller federal government.
OK, the current administration is waltzing down the garden path to your market driven dystopia. Once they get there, we'll have the corporations dictating social policy (who lives and who dies), environmental policy (strip mine it all, let 'em breathe sulphur dioxide), and economic ethics (ya right, like that would ever work).
The per capita numbers were based on real populations. 205 million in 1970, 255 million in 1992. The military budget has little bearing on the well being of the citizens of this country. (There are long term spinoffs from R&D and some economic benefit by employing cannon fodder) Let's deal with the part that I believe has some benefit to society at large. (Not the corps, or the elite, but the masses of people) 205 million at $583 each is $119,515,000,000.00 in 1970 as compared to 255 million at $326 each is $83,130,000,000.00 in 1992.
So, even in real dollars, the non-military side of the federal governments budget has shrunk by 30%. Since Reagan, the federal government has been neutered domestically. That process continues. I guess we'll see where it leads as it seems the country is walking to the neo-con agenda.
Better yet, call up the boys, tell him he's been selling crack to the nine year old kids on the block in exchange for sex. By the time they're through with him, he'll have no life and no stuff. (They'll keep it under the proceeds of crime, they have no compulsion to give it back in most states)
You're right. Humans have no rights. We should feel free to commit war crimes against them (we can't be proscecuted because we took our ball home and refuse to play with the International Criminal Court, which we are... International Criminals that is), we can feel free to turn civilians into pink mist, after all, they were human and we all know that humans do bad things, we just pre-empted them.
You are right. Humans have no rights and when the U.S. Government comes for YOU, we'll remember that and act accordingly. You are human, aren't you??
Do the math. The non-military areas of the federal government theoretically provide benefits to the citizens through program spending and regulation of the economy and the environment.
Non-Military Spending, Per Capita, 1970: $583
Non-Military Spending, Per Capita, 1992: $326
So, even though the government as a whole has grown, the actual beneficial (to the masses) part of the federal government has shrunk by 56%.
The military is a tool for wealth redistribution. Credible military threats to the U.S. as a nation do not exist in today's world. So why the big army?
"The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas."
--Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925.
Cubans have a greater life expectancy than Americans.
In 1980 American CEOs received 42 times the pay of an average worker, compared with 419 times in 1998.
More than 5 million people in Britain are living in conditions of absolute poverty (set at $240 per week), according to Breadline Europe, a recent study led by academics from Bristol University and the London School of Economics. Poverty in other European countries - apart from Russia - is not nearly as high as in Britain. In France, for example, the study found that fewer than 1% of the population lives in absolute poverty. The study found that more than 60% of Russians are now living in poverty, with over a quarter of them in extreme poverty. This compares with a poverty level of less than 5% before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So, you think that s strong central government is the problem? I guess it depends on your yardstick. A strong federal government in the U.S. is the only check that the people of the country have on their most privileged citizens, the corporations and those who control them.
Now for some stats:
1970: Total Military Budget Per Capita = $400
Total Federal Budget Per Capita = $983
Total Military As % Of Budget = 40.1%
1992: Total Military Budget Per Capita = $1170
Total Federal Budget Per Capita = $1496
Total Military As % Of Budget = 78.2%
These numbers were taken from U.S. Census Data at fedstats.gov.
So, measured in cash, you can see that the U.S. Federal Government is on it's way to being a powerless entity, merely a tool for wealth redistribution from taxpayers to the elite. And of course, the number one way to do this in a very quick way is through war. The lower classes pay with their labor and their lives and the elite benefit when the corporations under their control move in to make profits from: Arms Sales, Reconstruction of Infrastructure, and Provision of Goods and Services to the newly subjected lower classes of wherever it is the are taking over this week.
If you still beleive that the U.S. Federal Government is growing too large, look at the rapid deconstruction going on under the current administration. Kyoto is a great example. Cheney, his puppet and the rest of the neo-con administration hate it because it recognizes that destroying the environment is a bad thing for people, but the cost to corporations of implementing it is too high. The Cheney administration's tax cuts will shift the burden of running the tools of state to the lower classes, further increasing the domination of the elite. Eventually of course, the elite will take too much, the masses will rise up and destroy them and a new elite will take their place. History is littered with examples of this pattern, but people never learn from history, only from their own mistakes.
The subject of this article will care. And all of his cousins who've lost mothers and sisters will care too. The US response to this will be... PATRIOT2, more draconian legislation to take away more of the citizens "rights". The current administration has guaranteed an endless supply of Bin Ladens. One of them will get through and then...
I saw this in another thread last night. Someone posted it AC and I can't find a Google for it. It hits the nail right on the head though.
One constant throughout human history has been the struggle between the "haves" and the "have nots." For the purpose of this discussion, I will refer to the "haves" as "the elite" and will call the "have nots" "the rabble." I am doing this to emphasize the fact that the rabble, while comprising most of the population, is almost always pitifully weak and disorganized, thanks to constant manipulation by the elite. "Divide and conquer" has always been the name of the game here; it has always been easy for the elite to manipulate public opinion and keep the rabble squabbling among each other.
The elite, though comprising only 1% of the population (the exact percentages are arguable, though the figures I am using are in the right ballpark), control most of the wealth. (In modern America, one has to be worth at least $100 million to be a serious player.) The elite don't have to work per se; they spend their time making deals, which, although stressful at times, is much too stimulating to fall into the realm of institutionalized drudgery which people commonly refer to as "work."
Falling below the elite in status and power are what could be called "elite wannabes," "lackeys of the elite," or "wealthy rabble." These people are very wealthy by rabble standards.
Power and status are hardwired into human behavior. Before the rise of agriculture, when humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers, it was difficult to accumulate power and status, since possessions were limited by what people could carry with them. There were probably powerful lineages that got passed through the generations, but the gap between the powerful and everybody else was limited due to the nature of their lifestyle.
All this changed with the rise of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago. For the first time, people became sedentary, and they produced surpluses of grain which had to be defended. These surpluses meant unprecedented power for whoever was able to control them, and the first elite was born. For the first time, organized war became possible.
Howard Zinn's "A Peoples' History of America" describes the real dynamics at work behind the American Revolution. Rather than some idealistic "liberty and justice for all," the American Revolution was actually fomented by the American elite, who chafed under the British royalty.
It has been pointed out that by fighting an enemy, one takes on many of the characteristics of that enemy. Interestingly, it was World War 2 when America became a fascist power. By fascism, I am referring to Mussolini's definition: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."
By 1945, state and corporate power in America had merged into what was later termed the "military-industrial complex," even though it wasn't until 1961 that Dwight Eisenhower gave his famous speech warning America about a system that had already been in place for 15 years.
Even though America had become fascist by 1945, there remained a vast amount of consolidation to do: there still remained the rabble and their pesky vote (an archaic carryover from the Revolutionary War era). The rabble had recently suffered two major traumas -- the Great Depression and World War Two, and had reached an unprecedented level of solidarity. The rabble had become dangerous, and it was necessary to manipulate them back into their customary position of helplessness, while at the same time enhancing the power of t
This sums up your position nicely.
You mean a better... police... state?
Earlier, Sabah walked out of Mansour's al-Saha restaurant - with our take-out lunch - only minutes before a huge explosion made shards of its windows, lacerating customers and freaking the neighborhood. But that is nothing compared with the real damage a block away.
Four or five houses have disappeared and in their place is a crater maybe 30-40 meters wide and 15-20 meters deep.
Some of the photographers use a chilling term they picked up from the US military in Afghanistan to describe what might have happened to a dozen or more people thought to have died in this missile attack. They have become "pink mist".
The smoldering crater is littered with the artifacts of ordinary middle-class life in Baghdad - a crunched Passat sedan, a wrought-iron front gate, the armrest of a chair upholstered in green brocade and a broken bedhead.
A quick excerpt from this article. Saddam must be a real bad guy to drop 8000 pounds of explosives on somewhere he "might" be.
My first real computer (after a used XT) was a 386DX 33mhz with 4MB RAM and a 110MB HD. The 386DX had an integrated FPU and sold for $280 more than the SX chip. Both were 32 bit parts.
Pretty much anybody. I guess the old saw about kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out is at play here.
It wasn't on CNN, therefore it is either:
1. Not True.
2. Propoganda from the other side.
Yes. But the SX series of 386 and 486 processors required an off-die FPU.
You won't see major media protesting this law
One Al-Jazeera reporter died in a U.S. airstrike on a building housing Arab media.
Of course they won't protest. This could happen to them!!
If I had an agenda, I would have gone with the higher estimate: 500,000
I guess revisionist history really depends on who you are inclined to believe. When I was looking for a number, I picked one from a site that seemed halfway credible. I saw one sight where the guy said the entire holocaust was two Jewish guys and a Schnauzer killed in a car accident and the bombing of Dresden was a myth propogated by the Communists. You gotta go with something!
The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say - and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right.
Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
Robert Fisk in the Independent, April 3.
The problem is by rationalizing that we are saving people by killing them, we become no better than Saddam. Doing nothing was not an option, but this is truly madness.
You're right. The guy is obviously a flake with no right to an opinion. CNN is a much better source for balanced and objective reporting.
(Sorry if the sarcasm is dripping, try not to get some on you.)
Dr Patrick Seale is a writer and consultant on Middle East affairs.
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland (the son of the Rev Dr Morris Seale, a missionary and orientalist), he was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy and Psychology; and later at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he studied modern Middle East history and wrote his first book. He studied Arabic in Lebanon at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies.
He worked for Reuters for six years, mainly as a financial journalist, and more than a dozen years for The Observer (London) as Middle East correspondent, roving foreign correspondent in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, and Paris correspondent.In 1971 he set up Patrick Seale Books, Ltd. (a literary agency) and the Patrick Seale Gallery in London, dealing in modern painting.In the late 1980s, he decided to devote himself to full-time writing, lecturing and consultancy.
He was awarded a doctorate (D.Litt) by Oxford University in 1995 for his published work and was elected a Senior Associate Member of St Antony's College.
He runs a consultancy on Middle East affairs for a number of international clients and writes regularly for Al-Hayat (London) and Al-Ittihad (Abu Dhabi), as well as The Daily Star (Beirut), The Saudi Gazette (Jiddah) and Gulf News (Dubai).
His books include:
The Struggle for Syria, 1965; new edition 1986
French Revolution 1968 (1968)
Philby, the Long Road to Moscow, 1973
The Hilton Assignment, 1973
Ed: The Making of an Arab Statesman: Abd al-Hamid Sharaf and the Modern Arab World, 1983
Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East, 1988
Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire, 1992.
He helped HRH Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, now Assistant Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia, write Desert Warrior, 1995, a volume of memoirs of the Gulf War.
He lives with his family in Paris and the South of France.
Sort of like you won't be seeing this story anywhere in the "Media With Integrity" United States.
By the way, it's from the Independent in the UK (Somewhere where that word still means something to journalists)
Robert Fisk: Wailing children, the wounded, the dead: victims of the day cluster bombs rained on Babylon
03 April 2003
The wounds are vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh. The wards of the Hillah teaching hospital are proof that something illegal - something quite outside the Geneva Conventions - occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon.
The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say - and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right.
Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
Rahed Hakem remembers that it was 10.30am on Sunday when she was sitting in her home in Nadr, that she heard "the voice of explosions" and looked out of the door to see "the sky raining fire". She said the bomblets were a black-grey colour. Mohamed Moussa described the clusters of "little boxes" that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were silver-coloured. They fell like "small grapefruit," he said. "If it hadn't exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately," he said. "They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our home, unexploded."
Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires attached to them - perhaps the metal "butterfly" that contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs and springs open to release them in showers.
Some victims died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel house mortuary at the back of the Hillah hospital. The teaching college received more than 200 wounded since Saturday night - the 61 dead are only those who were brought to the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been buried in their home villages - and, of these, doctors say about 80 per cent were civilians.
Soldiers there certainly were, at least 40 if these statistics are to be believed, and amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and both they and their wives and daughters insisted there were no military installations around their homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a missile launcher was positioned in a nearby field - as they were along the highway north to Baghdad? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in these villages - even if aimed at military targets - thus crosses the boundaries of international law.
So it was that 27-year old Asil Yamin came to receive those awful round wounds in her back. And so five-year-old Zaman Abbais was hit in the legs and 48-year-old Samira Abdul-Hamza in the eyes, chest and legs. Her son Haidar, a 32-year-old soldier, said the containers which fell to the ground were white with some red and green sometimes painted on them. ''It is
Oh, you meant the bit about Baghdad.
Here is the source, an article by Patrick Seale.