If
there is anything worse than the United States destruction of Iraq and
the killing of one million people, it is the fact that this crime has
gone largely unreported. Most Americans don’t know very much about the
invasion and occupation for the simple reason that the corporate media
didn’t tell them much of anything important about it. Media
consolidation into ever larger corporate conglomerates, and political
subservience to big money guaranteed that only those Americans intrepid
enough to seek out their own sources of news know about the degree of
horror their government brought to the Iraqi people.
They
don’t know that shells and missiles made of depleted uranium have
poisoned Iraq’s air and water and that it was first used in the Gulf War
of 1991. They don’t know that thousands of Iraqi children were killed
when sanctions prevented them from getting food and medicine. They don’t
know about the city of Fallujah and how it was destroyed by United
States forces in 2004.
A
campaign to “pacify” this city began after U.S. military contractors
were killed there in 2003. In April and then in November of 2004 the
city was decimated by a campaign meant to destroy popular resistance.
The U.S. military attacked Fallujah’s hospitals in order to prevent the
international media from seeing the carnage they had produced. Civilians
trying to flee were turned back or even killed and soldiers cut off
supplies of water and electricity. Mark77 firebombs, a variant of napalm,
and white phosphorus, a weapon which melts skin and bone, were used
during the attacks. All of these ghoulish concoctions are banned by
international law and so is using collective punishment against a
civilian population.
The result of the use of depleted uranium and other weapons is a rate of genetic damage higher than that of any other population
ever studied. Rates of cancer, leukemia, and infant mortality are
higher in Fallujah than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they were bombed
with nuclear weapons in 1945.
-- Margaret Kimberley, "Hidden War Crimes in Iraq" (Black Agenda Report).