U.S. Specialist Jeff Englehart:
- Every peron in Fallujah was considered an enemy combatant
- Age restrictions on shooting armed children were loosened
- White phosphorous was used
- Would hear calls for ‘Whiskey Pete’ on the communications (slang for white phosphorous)
- Makes contact with skin, then it’s absolutely irreversible damage, burning of flesh to the bone
- Doesn’t necessarily burn clothes, but it will burn the skin underneath clothes
- Breathe it and it will blister your throat and your lungs until you suffocate, and then it will burn you from the inside
- Soldiers also vandalized mosques
Information coming out of Fallujah was nil
- Iraqi police arrested al-Arabiya journalists and confiscated their tapes
- Journalist Giuliana Sgrena
- Kidnapped carrying out an inquiry into the refugees of the city
- Had heard stories from the inhabitants about the use of napalm in Baghdad
- Testimonies from Fallujah about the use of guns and white phosphorus
- Women entered their homes and found a certain dust spread all over the house
Also:
"They told us that we were going to wait after the election, the American election, before going into Fallujah. And we had already set up the whole operation, like it was ready to go. And we were waiting for two or three days for the election to be over with. And then when the election was so close between Kerry and Bush, it was always pissing off a lot of the high command, because they wanted to hurry up and get in there and get it going. And they didn’t want what happened in 2000 with Gore and Bush, the long drawn-out process that lasted almost a week to find out who won. When Kerry conceded, though, it was like within a matter of a day, it was going, it was happening. That was definitely the case. We waited until after the election. We were told directly from the Pentagon to wait until after the election before going into Fallujah, and that’s exactly what we did."
Alice Mahon was a Labour parliamentarian from 1987 until a few months ago, until she decided to walk out on Westminster:
- I didn’t lose my seat. I deliberately stood down, because I didn’t want to be part of a government that was conducting an illegal and bloody war against people who had done us no harm whatsoever…. Well, the United States, of course, do that. They go around lecturing the rest of the world on their rights and responsibilities and have taken note of what the U.N. said. Of course, they had a lot to say to the Iraqi government about obeying United Nations resolutions."
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