"There is an ongoing investigation. ... And once we've gotten to closure on that, I think we will be able to say one way or another what role we may have played, or not."
—US Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks
"[When] the review is completed, we'll make that available."
—US Gen. Victor Renuart
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Promise to investigate war bombing
of Baghdad market was a lieSubsequent comments on 'progress'
of investigation were additional lies
To unravel this lie, begin with this excerpt
from an Associated Press article, June 11, 2003:
(Entire article is below)
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... The reasons for some high-casualty incidents have yet to be fully resolved. For instance, on March 28 a missile landed on a sidewalk in a crowded marketplace in the Baghdad district of al-Shoala. Iraqi officials said 58 civilians were killed by a U.S. airstrike. Central Command said at the time that it was investigating, but spokesman Capt. John Morgan now says no inquiry was conducted. And so, all the statements in the articles reproduced below — where high-ranking US military officers repeatedly told reporters an investigation was underway — were simply lies.
Dozens of innocent people were killed, but every time a US official mouthed any concern, he was only pretending to give a damn.This page tracks a long-term news item, chronologically.
Click or scroll down for the most recent coverage:
March 29, 2003
April 1
June 11
June 13
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From the archives, March 29 —
'Many dead' in Baghdad blast
At least 50 civilians are believed to have been killed during an air raid on a Baghdad market, Iraqi authorities say.
Graphic television pictures showed people scrabbling through rubble to reach the dead and injured amid the wreckage of al-Nasser market in the Shula residential area of the city.
Reports of the blast came as coalition forces renewed night-time bombing across the Iraqi capital and the northern city of Mosul.
Correspondents in Baghdad say there is no clear information yet on what may have caused the destruction of the market.
From the archives, April 1 —
Deaths in Iraqi marketplace were caused by American missile
by Cahal Milmo, The Independent [London, UK]
April 1, 2003
An American missile, identified from the remains of its serial number, was pinpointed yesterday as the cause of the explosion at a Baghdad market on Friday night that killed at least 62 Iraqis.
The codes on the foot-long shrapnel shard, seen by the Independent correspondent Robert Fisk at the scene of the bombing in the Shu'ale district, came from a weapon manufactured in Texas by Raytheon, the world's biggest producer of "smart" armaments.
The identification of the missile as American is an embarrassing blow to Washington and London as they try to match their promises of minimal civilian casualties with the reality of precision bombing.
Both governments have suggested the Shu'ale bombing — and the explosion at another Baghdad market that killed at least 14 people last Wednesday — were caused by ageing Iraqi anti-aircraft missiles. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said yesterday it was "increasingly probable" the first explosion was down to the Iraqis and Peter Hain, the Welsh Secretary, suggested on BBC's Newsnight last night that President Saddam sacked his head of air defences because they were not working properly.
But investigations by The Independent show that the missile — thought to be either a Harm (High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile) device, or a Paveway laser-guided bomb — was sold by Raytheon to the procurement arm of the US Navy. The American military has confirmed that a navy EA-6B "Prowler" jet, based on the USS Kittyhawk, was in action over the Iraqi capital on Friday and fired at least one Harm missile to protect two American fighters from a surface-to-air missile battery.
The Pentagon and Raytheon, which last year had sales of $16.8bn (£10.6bn), declined to comment on the serial number evidence last night. A US Defence Department spokeswoman said: "Our investigations are continuing. We cannot comment on serial numbers which may or may not have been found at the scene."
An official Washington source went further, claiming that the shrapnel could have been planted at the scene by the Iraqi regime.
On Saturday, Downing Street disclosed intelligence that linked the Wednesday attack — and by implication Friday's killings — on Iraqi missiles being fired without radar guidance and falling back to earth. The Prime Minister's spokesman said: "A large number of surface-to-air missiles have been malfunctioning and many have failed to hit their targets and have fallen back on to Baghdad. We are not saying definitively that these explosions were caused by Iraqi missiles but people should approach this with due scepticism."
The Anglo-American claims were undermined by the series of 25 digits and letters on the piece of fuselage shown to Mr Fisk by an elderly resident of Shu'ale who lived 100 yards from the site of the 6ft crater made by the explosion.
The numbers on the fragment — retrieved from the scene and not shown to the Iraqi authorities — read: "30003-704ASB7492". The letter "B" was partially obscured by scratches and may be an "H". It was followed by a second code: "MFR 96214 09."
An online database of suppliers maintained by the Defence Logistics Information Service, part of the Department of Defence, showed that the reference MFR 96214 was the identification or "cage" number of a Raytheon plant in the city of McKinney, Texas.
The 30003 reference refers to the Naval Air Systems Command, the procurement agency responsible for furnishing the US Navy's air force with its weaponry.
The Pentagon refused to disclose which weapon was designated by the remaining letters and numbers, although defence experts said the information could be found within seconds from the Nato database of all items of military hardware operated across the Alliance, "from a nuclear bomb to a bath plug", as one put it.
Raytheon, which also produces the Patriot anti-missile system and the Tomahawk cruise missile, lists its Harms and its latest Paveway III laser-guided bombs, marketed with the slogan "One bomb, one target", as among its most accurate weaponry.
The company's sales description for its anti-radar missile says: "Harm was designed with performance and quality in mind. In actual field usage, Harm now demonstrates reliability four times better than specification. No modern weapons arsenal is complete without Harm in its inventory."
Faced with apparent proof that one of its missiles had been less accurate than specification, Raytheon was more coy on the capabilities of its products. A spokeswoman at the company's headquarters in Tucson, Arizona, said: "All questions relating to the use of our products in the field are to be handled by the appropriate military authority."
Defence experts said the damage caused at Shu'ale was consistent with that of Paveway or, more probably, a Harm weapon, which carries a warhead designed to explode into thousands of aluminium fragments and has a range of 80km.
Despite its manufacturer's claims, it also has a record of unreliability when fired at a target which "disappears" if, as the Iraqi forces do, the target's operators switch their radar signal rapidly on and off. Nick Cook, of Jane's Defence Weekly, said: "The problem with Harms is that they can be seduced away from their targets by any sort of curious transmission. They are meant to have corrected that but there have been problems." During the Kosovo conflict four years ago, a farmer and his daughter were badly injured when a missile exploded in their village. A shard of the casing was found near by with a reference very similar to that found in Baghdad: "30003 704AS4829 MFP 96214."
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From the archives, June 13 —
Burying the number of
civilian deaths in Iraq
by Derrick Z. Jackson
The Boston Globe
June 13, 2003
In late March, after an American missile hit a marketplace in Baghdad and killed plenty of people — Iraqi officials said 58 — Major General Victor Renuart of Central Command said: "With every one of those circumstances, we ask the component ... who may have had forces involved, whether it's land, sea, or air, to do an investigation [That's a lie.], and that takes a number of days to do that. The air component in this case is completing his review. [That's a lie.] We think that will be complete within the next day or so. [That's a lie.] And as soon as ... the review is completed, we'll make that available. [That's a lie.]
"As to what do we determine to be the cause, I think certainly there are a number of possibilities. We want to make sure that if in fact there was an error on our part, that we found that out and made that available." [That's a lie.]
A couple of days later, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, the deputy director of operations for Central Command, said: "There is an ongoing investigation [That's a lie.]; still I think we are starting to come to a high degree of closure on it. We are still accounting for every weapon system that we released into the Baghdad area. [That's a lie.] And once we've gotten to closure on that, I think we will be able to say one way or another what role we may have played, or not." [That's a lie.]
On April 1, Brooks was asked by a reporter if he could give a date to give the results of the investigation. Brooks responded by saying: "Well, I can't give you a date. I mean, it takes as long as it takes. And it ought to be thorough. We're not going to waste time with them, but we are going to be thorough about the work that's being done.... [That's a lie.] Our designs are to minimize the casualties to civilians as much as we can. We'd like to see that be zero. That is not something that's ever been achieved in warfare. We believe our efforts have driven it as low as it has ever been driven in warfare."
Two and a half months after the prattle, we now have the terrible truth. There never was an investigation. That fact was embedded (pun intended) in an Associated Press report this week that it has so far counted 3,240 Iraqi civilians killed in the invasion, including nearly 1,900 in Baghdad. The AP quoted Central Command spokesman John Morgan confirming the nonexistence of an investigation.
Americans should be shocked that journalists are piecing together a history of the war that our military is trying to bury with the bodies.
The AP report said it took pains to exclude from its count all records of hospital deaths that did not distinguish between civilians and soldiers. It also noted that many other victims didn't die in hospitals but were lost in the rubble or buried immediately, according to Islamic custom. As a result, it said, "hundreds, possibly thousands of victims in the largest cities and most intense battles aren't reflected in the total."
The numbers are ominous, since in the 1991 Gulf War, 3,500 civilians died in the fighting, and in the months after, 111,000 Iraqis died from the destruction of the nation's health care and transportation infrastructure, according to Beth Osborne Daponte, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
On Monday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked whether he personally felt any remorse over the mounting number of civilian deaths given that no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found. Fleischer did not speak about the people killed by American missiles. All he said was: "I think when you take a look at all the mass graves that have been discovered all around Iraq, I think the world breathes a sigh of relief that a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein, who had no regard for human rights, has been removed from power so that the Iraqi people can at long last have a life and build a future that's based on freedom and opportunity, not on tyranny."
Fleischer said that even before the AP figures were widely known. This is a White House in clear denial. The world and even many Iraqis may breathe sighs of relief right now, but things will change dramatically if the White House and the Pentagon keep choking on lies and deceptions.
Americans were outraged when 3,000 people were killed in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Now, between Afghanistan and Iraq, our vengeance has killed way more than that. We rightly demanded that the world care about our innocent dead. Now we wrongly ignore the people we killed. We not only bombed innocent people, we bombed our own innocence.
Published by
The Boston Globe
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The American navy confirmed that one of its Prowler jets, which is used to jam enemy radar, had been over an unspecified area of Baghdad on Friday night. A pool reporter on the carrier USS Kittyhawk was told that the Prowler squadron had fired its first Harm on Friday evening in response to an air-defence unit that was threatening two F/A-18 Hornet jets. Lieutenant Rob Fluck told the journalist that the crew had not seen where their missile had landed.
Published by
The Independent [London, UK]
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From the archives, June 11 —
Exact count for civilian death toll proves elusive
Associated Press June 11, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Some pages are bathed in dried, reddish-brown blood, their letters smeared and unintelligible. Someone has taped together the shredded binding.
The frantic scribblings and bloody handprints are a record of war.
This ledger at Kadhamiya General Hospital is one of dozens of documents reviewed by the Associated Press over five weeks in an effort to count the civilian casualty toll from a month of fighting in Iraq.
The AP's finding: At least 3,240 civilians died throughout the country, including 1,896 in Baghdad. The count is still fragmentary, and the complete number — if it is ever tallied — is sure to be significantly higher.
Several surveys have looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but the AP's is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south.
The AP count is based on records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals — including almost all of the large ones — and covers March 20, when the war began, to April 20, when fighting was dying down. AP journalists visited all those hospitals, studying their logs, examining death certificates where available and interviewing officials.
Many of the 64 other hospitals are in small towns and were not visited because they are in dangerous or inaccessible areas. Some hospitals that were visited had incomplete or war-damaged casualty records.
Even if hospital records were complete, they would not tell the full story for this nation of 24-million people. Many dead were never taken to hospitals. They were either buried quickly by their families in accordance with Islamic custom, or lost under rubble.
The AP excluded all counts done by hospitals whose written records did not distinguish between civilian and military dead, which means hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims in Iraq's largest cities and most intense battles aren't reflected in the total.
Lt. Col. Jim Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday that the U.S. military did not count civilian casualties. "Our efforts focus on destroying the enemy's capabilities, so we never target civilians and have no reason to try to count such unintended deaths," he said.
The British Defense Ministry said it didn't count casualties either.
In the 1991 Persian Gulf War an estimated 2,278 civilians were killed, according to Iraqi civil defense authorities. No official U.S. count is known to have been made. That war consisted of seven weeks of bombing and 100 hours of ground war, and did not take U.S. forces into any Iraqi cities.
This time it was very different. In a war in which Saddam Hussein's soldiers melted away into crowded cities, changed into plain clothes or wore no uniform to begin with, separating civilian and military casualties was often impossible.
Adding to the civilian toll was the regime's tactic of parking its troops and weapons in residential neighborhoods, creating targets for U.S. bombs that increased the casualties among noncombatants.
The reasons for some high-casualty incidents have yet to be fully resolved. For instance, on March 28 a missile landed on a sidewalk in a crowded marketplace in the Baghdad district of al-Shoala. Iraqi officials said 58 civilians were killed by a U.S. airstrike. Central Command said at the time that it was investigating, but a spokesman, Capt. John Morgan, now says no inquiry was conducted.
Centcom never confirmed or denied firing the missile*.
While the great majority of civilian deaths appear to have been caused by U.S. and British attacks, witnesses say some — even a rough estimate is impossible — were caused by the Iraqis themselves: by exploding Iraqi ammunition stored in residential neighborhoods, by falling Iraqi anti-aircraft rounds aimed at coalition warplanes or by Iraqi fire directed at coalition troops.
The United States said its sophisticated weaponry minimized the toll, and around the country are sites that, to look at them, bolster the claim: missiles that tore deep into government buildings but left the surrounding houses untouched.
"Did the Americans bomb civilians? Yes. But one should be realistic," said Dr. Hameed Hussein al-Aaraji, new director of Baghdad's al-Kindi Hospital. "Saddam ran a dirty war. He put weapons inside schools, inside mosques. What could they do?"
Like the register at Kadhamiya General Hospital, other ledgers across the country record the names, ages and addresses of patients, the diagnoses and operations, the recoveries and the deaths. They also list professions: butcher, carpenter, soldier, student, policeman . . .
Some of the best record-keeping was in Baghdad, where AP journalists visited all 24 hospitals that took in war casualties. Their logs provided a count of 1,896 civilians killed. There were certainly more civilians dead; a few hospitals lost count as fighting intensified.
In some parts of the country, records are more spotty. The three civilian hospitals in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, recorded the deaths of 413 people. But while doctors estimate 85 percent were civilian, they have no evidence, so AP didn't include numbers from Basra in its count.
Some hospitals that began the war keeping records had to stop. The fighting came to them — in some cases, inside their front doors.
Doctors at Nasiriyah's Republic Hospital said seven patients were killed in their beds when a shell hit the building April 7. At Baghdad's Yarmouk Hospital, doctors fled when U.S. tanks shelled a hospital building seized by Iraqi fighters. When they returned five days later, 26 patients were dead.
It will take months or more before anything like a final count emerges. One survey is being done by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, another by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which hopes to win U.S. compensation for victims or their relatives.
Meanwhile, from city to city, block to block, house to house, Iraqis are trying to come to terms with their losses. For them, it matters little whether the casualty count is 3,000 or more.
"If they didn't want to kill civilians, why did they fire into civilian areas?" asked Ayad Jassim Ibrahim, a 32-year-old Basra firefighter who said his brother, Alaa, was killed by shrapnel from a U.S. missile that tore into his living room.
Al-Aaraji, at al-Kindi hospital in Baghdad, saw things differently.
"It was a war," he said. "This is the price of liberty."
Published by
Associated Press
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