I SMELL A SALE . . .
BY KATE ROGERS GESSERT
Undercovered #33
More war stories from the world press.
www.eugeneweekly.com
suffering and injury in areas with a civilian
population” (S. F. Chronicle).
• Doctors at a Baghdad mental hospital
said U.S. tanks knocked down their walls and
did nothing as the hospital was looted. Only
one patient, an insane killer, remains. “I hate
the world and the world hates me,” he ex-
plained (Harper’s Weekly Review).
• The World Health Organization
warns of an imminent cholera out-
break in southern Iraq, where
many people still lack safe
drinking water (Guardian).
U.N. Food and Agriculture
Organization fears the col-
lapse of Iraqi agriculture and
widespread hunger. Although
Jessica
grains
are ripe, harvest and
Lynch
storage systems have broken
down. Looters have raided gov-
ernment warehouses of seeds, fertil-
izers, and pesticides, just when farmers
must plant summer crops. Poultry feed, live-
stock medicines, and veterinary clinics have
also been looted, and livestock raising is in
jeopardy (Observer).
• Christian Science Monitor reporters vis-
ited Baghdad with a geiger counter, getting
readings of up to 1,900 times background
levels from U.S. depleted uranium weapons.
Reporters encountered children playing on
burned-out tanks with DU bullets, a woman
selling vegetables nearby, bullets littering the
ground near the residence of U.S. and British
officials reconstructing Iraq, and only one
warning sign. According to Michael Sigmon,
U.S. army surgeon, children playing with
spent tank shells “would have to eat them and
practically choke on DU residue to cause
harm.” The U.N. Environmental Program has
asked to do DU field tests in Iraq.
Washington Congressman Jim McDermott, a
doctor who has visited Iraq, states “science
and common sense dictate it is unwise to use
a weapon that distributes large quantities of a
toxic waste in areas where people live, work,
grow food, or draw water.” He has introduced
HR1483, a bill requiring health and environ-
mental studies, and clean up of DU contami-
nation in the U.S. (http://thomas.loc.gov) The
bill’s 14 co-sponsors include Congressman
Peter DeFazio.
• Since early April, seven Iraq nuclear
sites have been raided and damaged by loot-
ers. Technical papers, equipment, and ra-
dioactive materials may be gone. U.S. forces
left sites unprotected and/or sparsely pro-
tected. U.N. nuclear inspectors have asked to
inspect the facilities, with no answer from the
U.S. (Washington Post). Iraqi scientists say
partially enriched uranium from one site is
missing. “I saw empty uranium-oxide barrels
lying around,” said a scientist. “We saw peo-
ple using them for milking cows and carrying
drinking water” (Harper’s Weekly Review).
• President Bush has asked Congress to
fund nuclear bunker buster bombs and to re-
peal a ban on research and development of
“mini-nukes;” low-yield nuclear weapons.
Senators Smith and Wyden are expected to
vote on these two provisions of the defense
authorization bill.
ew
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R
ecent articles in the usually re-
strained N.Y. Review of Books char-
acterized U.S. coverage of the Iraq
war as “disgusting” and “cravenly submis-
sive to the Pentagon and the White House.”
Many reporters in Iraq were handicapped by
embeddedness and/or a lack of Arabic and
knowledge of the Middle East. CNN
fielded two reporting teams,
one for American audi-
ences, another, harder-
hitting team broad-
casting to interna-
tional audiences.
Former Pentagon
spokesman
Kenneth Bacon
wrote in the Wall
Street Journal, “You
couldn’t hire actors to
do as good a job as the
press has done.”
• BBC gave an alternative version of the
rescue of Private Jessica Lynch from
Nasiriya hospital. Nasiriya doctors say Iraqi
soldiers had left the hospital days before, and
local people report that the American res-
cuers knew this. Still, they came at night with
helicopters. “They cried ‘Go! Go! Go!’,” the
doctors remember, “with guns and blanks
and the sound of explosions. They made a
show, like Sylvester Stallone and Jackie
Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking
down doors — while night-vision cameras
rolled. They handcuffed doctors and a patient
with an abdominal wound. They sliced open
Lynch’s special bed, stuffed with sand to pre-
vent bedsores — the only one in the hospital
— and carried Lynch to the helicopter. Iraqi
doctors recall that in a hospital filled with
war-wounded, they had given Lynch one of
two nurses on the floor, donated their own
blood because there wasn’t any, comforted
and befriended her, and found special food
for her. They tried once to take her to the
Americans, but as their ambulance ap-
proached the U.S. checkpoint, American sol-
diers opened fire and the ambulance re-
treated. Lynch does not remember anything
that happened (Guardian, Toronto Star).
• The recently approved Iraq War
Supplemental Appropriations Act requires
the U.S. to pay “assistance” to relatives of
dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, but the
U.S. military finds casualties “not worth try-
ing to characterize by numbers” (Guardian).
Iraq Body Count estimates 4,065 to 5,223
deaths so far. Hospital records document up
to 2,100 dead and 8,000 wounded in
Baghdad
(www.iraqbodycount.org,
L.A.Times). The Pentagon admits one civilian
death from cluster bombs, while Iraq Body
Count numbers 200 to 372, with new casual-
ties still occurring, many of them children at-
tracted by bomblets lying in Iraq’s streets and
gardens. Although U.S. troops have cleared
600, many thousands remain. Cluster bombs
and other U.S. weapons figure in a Belgian
lawsuit filed by 17 Iraqi and two Jordanian
civilians accusing U.S. commander Tommy
Franks and a Marine colonel of war crimes
for using “ammunition that causes severe
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EUGENE WEEKLY MMAY 22, 2003 9