RAHUL MAHAJAN
Currently in New York City, Mahajan said today: “I was in Fallujah during the attack in April, and reported on the closure of the Fallujah General Hospital as well as the closure of the al-Sadr Teaching Hospital in Najaf. This time, U.S. forces have gone a step further. Not only did a bomb destroy the Nazzal Emergency Hospital, but Fallujah General Hospital was a primary initial target in this assault. It has been occupied and largely kept from functioning by U.S. soldiers; they have also turned it into a military target by attacking resistance fighters from nearby positions. An unnamed American officer justified it by saying that doctors’ and administrators’ reports of civilian casualties during the last assault made the hospital a ‘center of propaganda.’ When I was there, the stream of casualties I saw coming into one minor clinic during a few hours was fully consistent with the doctors’ claims — as was the evidence from the graves that journalists saw later on. This time around, one of the targets of the assault is information; as little as possible about civilian casualties is to be allowed out to the world. This is a shameless violation of the laws of war and a sign that much worse can be expected once the United States achieves ‘information dominance.’ Estimates are that the last assault killed 900-1,000 people; this time, the toll could be many times as high.” Mahajan is author of the book Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond.
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AS’AD ABUKHALIL
Professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus and visiting professor at University of California at Berkeley, AbuKhalil said today: “It must be a mere coincidence that the battle of Fallujah began days after Bush’s victory. … We are to believe all are terrorists in Iraq now, except those who are working for the occupation forces. Fallujah will open a battle well outside the city, and well outside Iraq: the entire Arab/Muslim public opinion has been watching developments carefully and cautiously, hoping for a defeat of Bush. But now they will see the scenes of carnage on live TV contrasted with the celebratory ambiance in Washington, D.C. An army of 150,000 is pitted against some 2,500 insurgents. That will pass in U.S. homes as military heroism and bravery.”
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DAHR JAMAIL
An independent journalist, Jamail is now in Baghdad and is posting stories to the above web page.
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ANAS SHALLAL
A business owner in the Washington area, Shallal is founder of Iraqi-Americans for Peaceful Alternatives.
JAMES JENNINGS
President of Conscience International, Jennings is just back from a humanitarian aid project in Darfur, and is also coordinator of the Fallujah-Najaf Defense Committee. He worked alongside Margaret Hassan in Iraq on children’s health projects. He said today: “Darfur burns while our ‘compassionate conservative’ president bombs Iraq. After loudly proclaiming Darfur a genocide and telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ‘We are doing all we can,’ the Bush administration’s good cop, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in effect admitted in his September 9 testimony that the amount spent in one year on aid to Sudan is about the same as operations in Iraq cost in one day. Look at the figures: FY ’04 aid to Darfur was $211 million. For FY ’05 U.S. aid to Darfur is estimated to be $299 million. But military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are chewing up money at the rate of $2 billion a week. Meanwhile, 1.5 million human beings are sitting on the ground in huts made of sticks and grass, being viciously attacked by horse-and-camel-mounted Janjaweed militias, with many malnourished or dying of malaria, and the Bush administration says ‘We are doing all we can.’ ‘Compassionate conservatives’ evidently like to throw nice-sounding slogans around and cry crocodile tears, while they in fact devour the poor and unfortunate.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167