Falluja round-up

Here's the on-topic stuff.

This is an incredible story of incredible events from an independent reporter who returned at the beginning of March from Falluja/Fallujah.
Mark Manning's full report

A very useful summary of some pertinent points here from Warszawa, who posts or posted at MLMB:
ML post 1
ML post 2

I take the liberty of reproducing W's precis below.

Mark Manning, unembedded in Fallujah: DU, napalm, phosphorus...
Posted by warszawa on March 25, 2005, 1:18 pm
User logged in as: warszawa

From the Santa Barbara Independent. (This is just an extract from a long article/interview, well worth reading in full):
http://www.independent.com/cover/Cover956.htm

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[...] “There were 500,000 people living in Falluja at the time, not the 250,000 that the media reports. They were given one week to leave home,” Manning said. “After three days, they were told they had to walk out. Then after a week, the U.S. forces sacked the city and killed anyone that was left.” Manning expressed outrage that no provision was made for the mass exodus of refugees. “There were no refugee camps. Families were living in chicken coops, tents, and cars. In Iraq, the winters are very cold and very wet. And these are people who left with pretty much just the clothes on their back.”

Manning said he interviewed doctors who told him that the first target during the second siege was the hospital. That’s because televised images of the casualties incurred during the first assault proved so damaging in the court of international public opinion. “If you were a male between the ages of 14 and 50, you were considered a terrorist. Troops went into the hospital, dragged people out of their beds, and evicted them. The hospital was sealed. No one was allowed in during the four-month seige. If an ambulance went out to pick up the wounded, it was fired on,” Manning said.

By the time Manning arrived in Falluja, he said the dead bodies had been disposed of. “You could smell them, but you couldn’t see them,” he said. Doctors he interviewed told him that chemical weapons had been deployed because they handled many dead bodies bearing no evident sign of trauma. As to the evidence of napalm, Manning said he saw — and has in his possession — photographs of the dead, whose clothes had been melted into their skin. As to the uranium-tipped shells, he said there was evidence everywhere. “The heat generated by these is so intense that they can basically burn through three layers of concrete to get to a target.” He said that one family showed him where the shell from a Bradley Tank went through the front of a house, through four walls, and killed their son in his bed. “The whole town is radiated,” said Manning. “We are poisoning the whole country.”

--- INSERT: According to Manning, the ‘bum’ winked at him and said: ‘Look in my eyes. I have the eyes of a former sniper. You thought you had the goods on George Bush, didn’t you? You’ve been sandbagged, boy.’ — Mark Manning ---

Over the course of his interviews, Manning said he spoke with a mother who saw her son killed in front of her. He talked to a father who had lost his wife, brother, and daughters. “I talked to a 17-year-old girl who saw her father and mother shot by Marines,” said Manning. “She was hiding under the bed with her brother when her parents’ bodies dropped on the ground in front of her them... Her parents’ brains were on the floor. The girl and her brother stayed under the bed for three days, until the Marines came back, and this time they found her and her brother. They shot her brother in the head and they shot her three times, in the chest and the legs. When she told me about it,” said Manning, “I had to look down. I felt I was personally responsible. And she did too.”

Because of incidents like these, Manning said, the resistance has grown from about 5,000 to 250,000. “Everybody’s in the resistance. You don’t ask them directly; that wouldn’t be wise. But everybody’s in the resistance,” he said.

Kidnappers’ Tea Party
Manning said his time in Falluja convinced him that the war is not winnable as it’s currently being fought. “There are kids everywhere over there. It’s like Jimboree at lunchtime. So when we make a mistake and drop bombs on the wrong location, it’s kids we’re killing. Can you imagine the hate and anger, the desire for revenge these people have? It’s just not going to work.”

The Iraqis he spoke to, said Manning, were critical of both Saddam Hussein and George Bush. “They said Saddam Hussein committed mass murder, torture, mass arrests without cause. But they see the Americans as doing all of these same things.” Since the hostilities started, Manning said 28,000 Iraqis have been killed. (American military officials do not track Iraqi civilian casualties, relying instead upon the Iraqi Health Ministry, which reports only 3,500 civilian casualties. A British study — now several months old — placed the figure above 100,000.)

If Americans have any hope of being regarded as anything but an occupying force, Manning said, they need to show respect. “This is a very traditional country. You don’t shake hands with women, but Americans are not only shaking the women’s hands, they’re frisking them in public. They’re detaining the sisters of suspected terrorists and sending them to Abu Ghraib where they are systematically raped. They are kicking down doors and walking into mosques with their boots on. You have no idea how profoundly disrespectful this is to the people there.”

To highlight the Iraqi sensitivity to slights perceived or real, Manning described how he was almost kidnapped. He was sipping tea with an Iraqi family in their home, hoping to persuade them to agree to an interview when a group of eight men showed up. “They said I was a spy, and they were going to take me away,” Manning said. Zarqa came to his aid, as she often had, but so did the family he was visiting. “They were infuriated at the lack of respect the kidnappers were showing. They shouted at them. … If they had kidnapped me, it would have been such a huge insult to this family.” In the end, the kidnappers were invited to tea and they accepted. Manning said he spoke to them at length, but never asked what they would have done with him. “I stayed away from that,” he said, adding, “Everybody has tea over there. Even if you go to kidnap people, you have tea.”

As an American in Falluja, Manning said he had to be careful about playing the devil’s advocate in interviews by arguing the Bush administration’s case. He did repeat Bush’s argument that the United States needs to fight terror in Iraq to keep it from coming to America. “They just laughed,” he said. “They asked, ‘How are we going to get there? Look at us.’”

Manning, Zarqa, and their driver traveled next to Baghdad, where they witnessed the recent elections. “The big story about those elections is that nobody really knows what the story is,” he said. Manning said that the United Nations observers never left the Green Zone during the elections, adding that observers were stationed at only five of Iraq’s 90-plus polling places. In addition, he said, Al Jazeera, the Arab news organization, had been kicked out. “Iraqis were told that if they wanted food rations, they had to vote. Everybody over there is on food rations,” he said. “And the food ration guys were at the polling places to make sure people voted.”

Manning took specific exception to some of CNN’s coverage of the elections. “They showed a long line of people in Falluja waiting to vote, but it wasn’t a voting line. It was the checkpoint line, people waiting to get into the city.” While in Falluja, he said he only encountered other reporters once. It was an embedded CNN crew. “They came in with two Apaches, four Bradleys, and eight Humvees. They sealed off the block. Then they brought in a tank and soldiers who tossed candy to the kids. Then eight guys dressed in orange jumpsuits got out and started sweeping the streets,” he said. “It was a staged event.” [...]

http://www.independent.com/cover/Cover956.htm

PICTURE CAPTION: "This hole shows where a depleted uranium shell passed through, Manning said, 'burning' holes through walls rather than knocking them down outright. Manning said so much depleted uranium’s been deployed in Falluja and Iraq that the whole nation will be afflicted with radiation poisoning."

Back in the US, his taped interviews were stolen and he was issued with a death threat
Posted by warszawa on March 25, 2005, 1:33 pm, in reply to "Mark Manning, unembedded in Fallujah: DU, napalm, phosphorus..."
User logged in as: warszawa

This part of the article might just possibly be of some relevance to the Sgrena/Calipari case:
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"Shocking stuff, but Manning’s biggest surprise came after he’d returned home to the United States. Arriving in San Francisco late on the night of February 11, Manning and Natalie Kalustian, a close friend and filmmaking partner, crashed at the Oceanside Motel on 46th Avenue. The next morning, after a stroll near Baker Beach, they returned to their car to find one of the windows smashed. Expensive camera and computer equipment lay in plain view, but only Kalustian’s purse was gone. Inside the purse, Manning said, were keys to their motel room. And when Manning and Kalustian returned to the motel, he recounted, someone had broken into their room. Even though there was jewelry and more film equipment lying about, he said, none of it was touched. In fact, said Manning, none of the suitcases had even been opened. The only thing missing, Manning said, was the big bowling-ball shaped bag containing his camera — and all his taped interviews.

At that time, Manning had not been back in the United States for more than 10 hours.

The next day, Manning said, a mysterious man contacted them to arrange a meeting, claiming he had the stolen purse. Manning and Kalustian went to a spot near 6th and Mission as instructed, where they were met by a man who appeared to be a “full-on street bum,” Manning said. After returning the purse, the man pulled Manning to one side, opened his wallet, and flashed what Manning estimated was $5,000 worth of $100 bills. According to Manning, the “bum” winked at him and said, “Look in my eyes. I have the eyes of a former sniper. You thought you had the goods on George Bush, didn’t you? You’ve been sandbagged, boy.”

Manning said he has received more phone calls and mysterious emails from the man since returning to Santa Barbara, but holds out little hope of getting the missing tapes back. He’s most worried, he said, that whoever stole his tapes might seek to make examples of the Fallujans who spoke to him. “I risked my life to get those interviews,” he said, “and I saw the level of fear in the people I talked to.”

Also have a look at xymphora's interesting analyses comparing Sgrena's experiences and Manning's. Hmmm...

More from Manning here:

Interview with Dahr Jamail here and Mark Manning interview, courtesy sau @ falluja forum. Dahr Jamail is currently conducting a lecture tour in the US, and I hope we'll hear more on this.

From sau today, more evidence of military abuses in Mosul