WP: Medics Testify to Fallujah's Horrors

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8612-2004Nov23.html

The first time Jose Ramirez saw a human body ripped apart by a rocket, it took hours for him to regain his composure. Nothing in his training as a Navy medical corpsman had prepared him for the sight of the dead Marine brought in September to the military field hospital outside Fallujah.

"I walked around in shock," said Ramirez, 26, of San Antonio, a Navy petty officer third-class attached to Bravo Surgical Company. "I've seen people die before on the emergency room table. But what I was trying not to do, what I was trained not to do, is look at the patient with tunnel vision. It reminded me that I had to get prepared."

<snip>

Medics at the Bravo Surgical Company's field hospital, where all the battlefield dead and wounded are brought, said the injuries that troops sustained in the Fallujah fight were unusually devastating, most of them the result of close-range explosions.

"They're just horrific injuries," said Chief Petty Officer Damon Sanders, head of the shock stabilization team. "We saw an increasing amount of shrapnel wounds. Typically there are one or two people who take the brunt of the blast, and the rest of the guys take shrapnel."

like the moulange you used to trian with Chief, or the injury cards....

Welcome to war Chief.

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded, who cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror."

I wish bush would go to hell. Then let him "cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance."

wake the fuck up AmeriKa!

Ah, yes. The messy side of war. The messy side of war that is to be kept from the American public at all costs. The very images banned by "patriotic" TV stations like Sinclair (although they're up for broadcasting a smearfest against JK).

Who are we kidding. Some Republicans really dig this stuff. They're just too chickenshit to sign up and see it up close. But they've been punked because more than likely the draft will be instituted in the next four years.

My marine nephew spoke of picking up the pieces of the dead. He was 18 when Bushco sent him there, he's now sounding like a fatigued old man.

sending children to fight for the Bushole businessmen and their quests. omg. I have a daughter a year older... imagining her in that bushmade hellhole... I am stricken with grief and pain and a huge frustrated anger.

why war is entered into only as a last resort and in self-defense. Bush may think that the lack of finding WMD in Iraq is funny(yes he joked about it at a nationally televised dinner), but it has lead to our friends, brothers, sisters, fathers, and neighbors being blown to bit. Let everyone in the next generation to take power remember the lessons we have learned over and over again, and actually apply them this time.

Alex Hamilton
Impeachment by the People
Read my latest article: The Media is Finally Outraged

,...for a power-grabbing game played by those who falsely claim an oath to "democracy" rather than honestly reveal their allegiance to a "free market" which vastly advances the few.

:cry:

the image of that poor doctor on the verge of puking from seeing so much carnage. and for WHAT?!?

They are a Marine's best friend. In fact, they are pretty much Marines when they serve with Marines. My hat will always be off to the "docs" that take care of the morons that are my brohams (Marines, that is).

http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000136.php#more
“Doctors in Fallujah are reporting there are patients in the hospital there who were forced out by the Americans,” said Mehdi Abdulla, a 33 year-old ambulance driver at a hospital in Baghdad, “Some doctors there told me they had a major operation going, but the soldiers took the doctors away and left the patient to die.” He looks at the ground, then away to the distance.

Abu Hammad continues, “Most of the innocent people there stayed in mosques to be closer to God for safety. Even the wounded people were killed. Old ladies with white flags were killed by the Americans! The Americans announced for people to come to a certain mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were killed!”

One of the men standing with us, a large man named Mohammad Ali is crying; his large body shuddering with each bit of new information revealed by Abu Hammad.

“There was no food, no electricity, no water,” continues Abu Hammad, “We couldn’t even light a candle because the Americans would see it and kill us.”


http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/hard_news/000129.php#more

Obviously, the ongoing occupation and heightening resistance to it are a major focus for all Iraqis. "What I said during Saddam's time I say now, that this is a political issue and not a military issue," said Dr. Wamidh Omar Nadhmi, a senior political scientist at Baghdad University and a long-time secular activist.

Nadhmi was an outspoken critic of Saddam Hussein's government, and he sees ominous parallels today. Accepting the risks of standing up against Ba'athist rule in the 1990s, he and other dissidents offered a solution. "We raised these slogans: Political dialogue, national reconciliation, and transformation to democracy," he said during a recent interview at his home in Baghdad. "And now I find myself repeating the same solutions."

The professor is also the official spokesman for the Iraqi National Foundation Congress, a council of intellectuals, community leaders and clerics whose goal is to create an alliance of political parties that work for the betterment of Iraq. The group boasts a diverse membership that includes prominent Shi'ite leaders and Muslim scholars. Also participating are Christian, Turkmen and Kurdish Iraqis and even pre-Saddam era Ba'athists.

"We suggested to the occupation forces and Iraqi government four requirements for an Iraqi election: an international committee of oversight; an immediate ceasefire because we cannot have elections under bombardment and rockets; withdrawal of American troops from the major cities one month before the election…" Nadhmi paused before adding the fourth requirement: "We even gave this international committee the right to delete any name from the list of people running for office if they didn't like it."
Instead of accepting the suggestions of his council, which Nadhmi described as prerequisites for a free and democratic election, the interim government declared martial law.

In a telephone conversation with al-Jazeera satellite TV
on Saturday, Shaykh ‘Abd as-Salam al-Kubaysi, the Chief of
the Public Relations Department of the Board of Muslim
‘Ulama’ Scholars in Iraq said that “until now, more than half
of al-Fallujah is in the hands of the al-Fallujah
Resistance.”

Shaykh al-Kubaysi ridiculed US boasts about their “wiping
out” Resistance in the city, telling al-Jazeera that the US now
is in “difficult straits” in the city. “At the beginning they
were attacking,” al-Kubaysi said, “but now they are on
the defensive.” He said that the Americans are entrenched
in al-Fallujah, “but cannot get out and onto any street or alley
in more than half the city, whether that be in al-Jawlan,
or ash-Shuhada’, or the industrial zone, or the an-
Nazal neighborhood, or in many
places.”

IRR112704

After the American evacuation of their command posts on
those above-mentioned roads, those routes have now
become open again, and it is obvious that the groups that
are coming into the city are Resistance fighters
carrying weapons, and they are pouring in from the
west.

On Saturday Iraqi Resistance forces cleared the new bridge
that links al-Fallujah with al-Habbaniyah of all US presence.
The Resistance had already cleared the bridge of Americans
on Friday, but during the night other US forces came in and
took up positions there in order to cover the retreat of US
units from the city. But these too have been cleared
away.

The Mafkarat al-Islam correspondent notes that the
American invader units that are leaving al-Fallujah are not
being replaced by other military units. This indicates that this is
a real retreat that comes as a result of relentless
Resistance attacks inside and outside the city, and not
simply some kind of a tactical withdrawal of the sort US
forces did five days ago and previously from time to
time.

When was the last time anyone saw live tv from
liberated Fallujah.

The question is: How will Centcom break this news to
the USHoliday shoppers.

The other side lives in cities, and has no tanks, planes, etc.

His testimony will surely be used against him .They will say he was a traitor, who spoke out against our armed forces, while our guys where in harms way ! It seems something simular to that has happen recently to a politician running for office ?

90,000 Pell Grants now gone with new bill
1,000,000 will receive cuts to their existing Pell Grants.

Need more people available for draft, so need to cut # of students.

I'm hoping there won't be a draft, by making student loans less available, the administration may be hoping more people volunteer to get education benefits. In either case a refection of an administration that is clueless in foreign and domestic policy.