Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - The Hospital Of Horrors

[polly7]

By Robert Fisk

Source: The IndependentFriday, April 27, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-children-of-fallujah-the-hospital-of-horrors-by-robert-fisk

The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.

"We see this all the time now," Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of these still-born children. "I've never seen anything as bad as this in all my service," she says quietly. Al-Hadidi takes phone calls, greets visitors to his office, offers tea and biscuits to us while this ghastly picture show unfolds on the screen. I asked to see these photographs, to ensure that the stillborn children, the deformities, were real. There's always a reader or a viewer who will mutter the word "propaganda" under their breath.

But the photographs are a damning, ghastly reward for such doubts. January 7, 2010: a baby with faded, yellow skin and misshapen arms. April 26, 2010: a grey mass on the side of the baby's head. A doctor beside me speaks of "Tetralogy of Fallot", a transposition of the great blood vessels. May 3, 2010: a frog-like creature in which – the Fallujah doctor who came into the room says this – "all the abdominal organs are trying to get outside the body."

This is too much. These photographs are too awful, the pain and emotion of them – for the poor parents, at least – impossible to contemplate. They simply cannot be published.

more ....

ETA: No pictures at link.

[Arkansas Granny]

1. Please tell me that there are no pictures at the link. I want to read more, but I can't look

at pictures like those that are described.

[polly7]

2. Oh, sorry about that. No, there are no pictures. I've edited the OP to add that.

[hedgehog]

3. There needs to be a careful study of this - {perhaps alongside

studies of births in Vietnam - Agent orange) - and there need to be comparison studies as well. The article itself hints that centuries of inbreeding may be involved. If so, then other cities will have the same problem. I am not denying that there may be a problem here - I am saying that until it is documented people will ascribe stories such as these to propaganda.

[bettydavis]

4. Depleted Uranium is what it is! I saw Helen Caldicott....

discuss this back in 2004.. I can't find the exact link but here's one.

War is hell. Remember the old war on drugs PSA's? Same applies. WARS: don't buy them and don't try them....

[polly7]

5. Democracy Now! airs an exclusive excerpt of "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre,"

http://www.democracynow.org/2005/11/8/u_s_broadcast_exclusive_fallujah_the

Democracy Now! airs an exclusive excerpt of "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre," featuring interviews with U.S. soldiers, Iraqi doctors and international journalists on the U.S. attack on Fallujah. Produced by Italian state broadcaster RAI TV, the documentary charges U.S. warplanes illegally dropped white phosphorus incendiary bombs on civilian populations, burning the skin off Iraqi victims. One U.S. soldier charges this amounts to the U.S. using chemical weapons against the Iraqi people. [includes rush transcript]

Excerpt:

JEFF ENGLEHART: The gases from the warhead of the white phosphorus will disperse in a cloud. And when it makes contact with skin, then it’s absolutely irreversible damage, burning of flesh to the bone. It doesn’t necessarily burn clothes, but it will burn the skin underneath clothes. And this is why protective masks do not help, because it will burn right through the mask, the rubber of the mask. It will manage to get inside your face. If you breathe it, it will blister your throat and your lungs until you suffocate, and then it will burn you from the inside. It basically reacts to skin, oxygen and water. The only way to stop the burning is with wet mud. But at that point, it’s just impossible to stop.

REPORTER: Have you seen the effects of these weapons?

JEFF ENGLEHART: Yes. Burned. Burned bodies. I mean, it burned children, and it burned women. White phosphorus kills indiscriminately. It’s a cloud that will within, in most cases, 150 meters of impact will disperse, and it will burn every human being or animal.

more ....


Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/fallujah-the-hidden-massacre/

Military and War75 Comments

This war can not have witnesses. It can not have witnesses because it is based on lies. The Americans have permitted only embedded journalists to go to Fallujah. Despite that, for example the image of the marine that shoots the wounded and unarmed warrior inside the Fallujah Mosque has gone out. And exactly because this image has gone out, we do not know how, and because it has circulated all over the world, the NBC journalist that has recorded it has been immediately expelled from the embedded body. Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre is a documentary film by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta which first aired on Italy’s RAI state television network on November 8, 2005.

The film documents the use of weapons that the documentary asserts are chemical weapons, particularly the use of incendiary bombs, and alleges indiscriminate use of violence against civilians and children by military forces of the United States of America in the city of Fallujah in Iraq during the Fallujah Offensive of November 2004.

Watch the full documentary now



Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - families fight back
Special Report day three: Abandoned and afraid, the parents of Iraq's suffering children wait in vain for help
ROBERT FISK FALLUJAH FRIDAY 27 APRIL 2012

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-children-of-fallujah--families-fight-back-7682416.html

Back story: The evidence was clear, but no one cared – except you

It's the same old story. Know nothing. See nothing. Say nothing. When children died in a plague of cancers in southern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, the Americans and the Brits didn't want to know about it. Nor, of course, did Saddam Hussein. If children had been poisoned by our depleted uranium munitions, then Saddam would lose face, wouldn't he? Independent readers contributed $250,000 for medicines for the children we met in Iraq who were suffering from cancers and leukaemia after that war.

Margaret Hassan of Care – later murdered by unknown killers months after her kidnapping, following the "liberation" of Iraq – helped us distribute the medicines from our readers across the country. No thanks from Saddam, of course. And all the children died. And not a word from our masters, armaments manufacturers and jolly generals.

It's the same again in Fallujah today. The doctors talk of a massive increase in child birth deformities. The Americans used phosphorous munitions – possibly also depleted uranium (DU) – in the 2004 battles of Fallujah. Everyone in Fallujah knows about these deformities. Reporters have seen these children and reported on them. But it's know nothing, see nothing, say nothing. Neither the Iraqi government nor the US government nor the British will utter a squeak about Fallujah. Even when I found in the Balkans a 12-year-old Serb girl with internal bleeding, constant vomiting and nails that repeatedly fell out of her hands and feet – she had handled the shrapnel of depleted uranium munitions after a Nato air strike near Sarajevo in 1995 – Nato refused to respond to my offer to take a military doctor to see her.

Already, I had discovered that up to 300 Serb men, women and children who had lived close to the Nato target in the Sarajevo suburb of Hadjici, had died of cancers and leukaemias over the five years that followed the bombing. As for southern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, the less said, the better.

[polly7]

6. Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - Sayef's story

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101626075


Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - Sayef's story
Special Report day one: The phosphorus shells that devastated this city were fired in 2004. But are the victims of America's dirty war still being born?

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-children-of-fallujah--sayefs-story-7675977.html

1 / 3

For little Sayef, there will be no Arab Spring. He lies, just 14 months old, on a small red blanket cushioned by a cheap mattress on the floor, occasionally crying, his head twice the size it should be, blind and paralysed. Sayeffedin Abdulaziz Mohamed – his full name – has a kind face in his outsized head and they say he smiles when other children visit and when Iraqi families and neighbours come into the room.

But he will never know the history of the world around him, never enjoy the freedoms of a new Middle East. He can move only his hands and take only bottled milk because he cannot swallow. He is already almost too heavy for his father to carry. He lives in a prison whose doors will remain forever closed.

It's as difficult to write this kind of report as it is to understand the courage of his family. Many of the Fallujah families whose children have been born with what doctors call "congenital birth anomalies" prefer to keep their doors closed to strangers, regarding their children as a mark of personal shame rather than possible proof that something terrible took place here after the two great American battles against insurgents in the city in 2004, and another conflict in 2007.

After at first denying the use of phosphorous shells during the second battle of Fallujah, US forces later admitted that they had fired the munitions against buildings in the city. Independent reports have spoken of a birth-defect rate in Fallujah far higher than other areas of Iraq, let alone other Arab countries. No one, of course, can produce cast-iron evidence that American munitions have caused the tragedy of Fallujah's children.

Fallujah: A history

The first battle of Fallujah, in April 2004, was a month-long siege, during which US forces failed to take the city, said to be an insurgent stronghold. The second battle, in November, flattened the city. Controversy raged over claims US troops had deployed white phosphorus shells. A 2010 study said increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in Fallujah exceeded those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Tomorrow: The doctors fighting to improve the lives of Fallujah's suffering children

[Citizen Worker]

7. Just remember, 'they hate us for our freedoms.' Fallujah, this is what democracy looks like.

[just1voice]

8. Does anyone remember the Fallujah invasion?

The media exploited it as some glorious military event to rid Afghanistan of some final "terrorist stronghold" saying the citizens had been warned to get out weeks in advance. The U.S. military apparently thought that was enough fair warning so they followed up the "invasion" of that city with numerous documented war crimes.

Nothing like pure propaganda as a cover for massive crimes against humanity. Still, people here and everywhere else soak up the mainstream media's lies every single day as if these crimes and lies and 1000s of others never happened.

The people who planned all of the crimes are all free and clear too as we're told to just look ahead and forget the worst political criminals the U.S. has ever endured.

[polly7]

9. Oh yes, I remember.

http://www.brussellstribunal.org/Reflections_On_Fallujah.htm

GRAPHIC PHOTOS at links.

http://open.salon.com/blog/judy_mandelbaum/2012/01/09/the_fallujah_tragedy_a_war_crime_by_any_other_name

http://thefallujahproject.org/home/node/88

http://www.scribd.com/doc/38397725/Testimonies-of-Crimes-Against-Humanity-in-Fallujah

[yurbud]

10. what would it take to get most Americans to care about crimes like this?

[polly7]

11. I really don't know. Seeing the pictures on the nightly news, maybe.

And it's not just Americans. Much of the world seems blind to the plight of these people.

[yurbud]

12. I can remember seeing photos like this of Agent Orange birth defects in Vietnam

in very mainstream sources like LIFE magazine.

I wonder if those penetrated people's consciousness or if they only cared about our casualties (which is a task to get a lot of people to notice in itself).