Chomsky vergelijkt Falluja met Srebrenica

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20041217.htm

..And in fact, it's not exactly correct that the media
haven't reported the war crimes. They often report them and
celebrate  them. So take for example the invasion of
Fallujah, which is one of the - it's a major war crime, it's
very similar to the Russian destruction of Grozny 10 years
earlier, a city of approximately the same size, bombed to
rubble, people driven out.

Alam: They herded all the males, I think, they didn't let
them escape the corridor.

Chomsky: Which incidentally is very much like Srebrenica -
which is universally condemned as genocide -- Srebrenica was
an enclave, lightly protected by UN forces, which was being
used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages. It was
known that there's going to be retaliation. When there was a
retaliation, it was vicious. They trucked out all the women
and children, they kept the men inside, and apparently
slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people
slaughtered.

Well, with Fallujah, the US didn't truck out the women and
children, it bombed them out. There was about a month of
bombing, bombed out of the city, if they could get out
somehow, a couple hundred thousand people fled, or somehow
got out, and as you say men were kept in and we don't know
what happened after that, we don't estimate [the casualties
for which we are responsible].

But what was dramatic about Fallujah was that it was not
kept secret. So you could see on the front page of the New
York Times, a big picture of the first major…step in the
offensive, namely the capture of the Fallujah general
hospital. And there's a picture of people lying on the
ground, soldier guarding them, and then there's a story that
tells that patients and doctors were taken from - patients
were taken from their beds, patients and doctors were forced
to lie on the floor and manacled, under guard, and the
picture described it.

--> The president of the United States is subject to death
penalty under US law for that crime - alone. I mean that's a
grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, Geneva Conventions
say explicitly and unambiguously that hospitals must be
protected, hospitals and medical staff and patients must be
protected by all combatants in any conflict. You couldn't
have a more grave breach of the Geneva Conventions than that.

There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a
Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches
of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty.
And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them, that
means the commanders. They weren't thinking about the United
States of course, but take it literally, that's what it means.

And then they went onto explain why they carried out this
war crime in the general hospital. New York Times explained
calmly that it was done because the US command described the
Fallujah general hospital as a propaganda outlet for the
guerrillas because they were reporting casualties. I --
don't know if the Nazis produced things like that. Of course
the Times said it was "inflated" casualties - how do we know
it was inflated?

Alam: We don't even count'em.

Chomsky: Well our Dear Leader said it was inflated, so that
means that since we're like North Korea, it has to be
inflated. But suppose it was. I mean the idea of carrying
out a major war crime, explicit, because the hospital was a
propaganda weapon by distributing casualty figures, I mean
you really have to work to find an analog to that.

And then it went on, destroying the whole city. Finally they
end up saying well the Marines are going to face a serious
challenge of regaining the confidence of the people of
Fallujah after having destroyed their city. Yeah, it's going
to be a pretty serious challenge. It's also described how
they're going to do it - by instituting a police state.

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