Anyone watching 60 Minutes reporting on what caused the Iraq mass graves?

George Bush Sr. was just fingered for causing the slaughter.

Don

but thanks for the heads up :hi:

I took my parents out for dinner today for my moms (Republican) birthday, and because Iraq has become a sore spot I don't bring it up to them. Today they did. They are disgusted with Bush. But they were both holding on to the mass grave propaganda to ease their minds. I explained what really led to the Iraq cival war and hence the mass graves in 1992 and all I got was raised eyebrows and they both agreed that I was talking out of my rear end. I just got a call from my mother who never misses 60 Minutes, and her first words were "Donnie, you were right about the mass graves in Iraq". She said both old man Bush and Junior deserve to be in prison for murder right now. I about fell out of my chair and I did not rub it in that I had been right. We only had a meeting of the minds. She stated that she will not be working for the Republican party next election as she has done since I was a little kid. One more nail in Juniors coffin.

Don

I pray for the day I hear something similar from my mom. I misses it, anyone know if 60 minutes archives streaming video??

36 M quicktime from the first 60 Minutes broadcast on Ayatollah Al-Hakim. A little different than what was broadcast tonight. I'll post tonight's later.

Here's a transcript I found of tonight's broadcast. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/28/60minutes/main546624.shtml

You are a treasure!!

I'm away from broadband until Tuesday.

...with crystal ball precision! And al-Hakim was still "the devil we didn't know"--a man who commanded 15,000 Iraqi troops, trained and waiting in Iran, and a man who could unite Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and Chaldeans against the occupation forces. Did Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest want al-Hakim out of the picture?

yes, his brother is on the council, and was willing to try to work within the american system for the moment,

but Al-Hakim also faced resistance from other Shi'ite factions, and the Shi'ites and Sunni have no love for each other.

I don't know who killed him, but it could just as easily been Al Qaeda, or Wahabbists, or another, more rabid Shia faction, or Sunnis...I think the issue is that his death may well be the thing which causes the break down to civil war...which the military and intel in America also predicted, btw...but BushCo didn't listen to them on this point either.

Iraq is a British construct, and we may well see it break apart like Yugoslavia, after a civil war. who knows.

Wonk, I just have to say a great big Thank-you!! There are always great stories I miss and without fail you are there.....

You are such a great contributor here. Thanks so much for all you do!

:toast:

Julie

I am glad they finally figure out you were right. Doesn't it kind of piss you off that they had to see it on TV before they would believe it?

...did in Iraq was the right thing to do. It is a defensive mechanism to ease ones soul. I can understand that. It only works for a short time. We all do it some time or another. I too hate to think of my country as an agressor nation. I take no comfort knowing that is exactly what we are. I guess that is just part of my own built in defensive mechanism? We have become what we hate and I don't like it at all.

Don

even people here on DU. Congratulations on the parental conversion, at least you will able to talk about these things now.

Also, your mother will be likelier to believe you in the future. It's encouraging to hear that more people are beginning to understand what is going on.

...for the Republican party next election as she has done since I was a little kid."

Wow. It things like this that give me hope that enough people will come to their senses in time to dump Bush.

I'm proud to use my 200th post to salute your mom. :toast:

Excellent, er, Donnie! ;-)

Julie

Most of the people in those mass graves were there from Iran/Iraq war and Desert Storm!

Sounds very good tonight.

I read that when the GWI ground invasion started, bulldozers were in the lead, and would just run over the trenches of soldiers, burying them alive.

...and throw out Saddam after the Gulf war, and said he would support them with our military if they did. They did rise up. Old man Bush didn't help. And Saddam wiped them out. That is why we are digging up mass graves today.

Don

Bulldozers did bury the soldiers in trenches alive. I read an en passant reference in a Chomsky book and a causatory search on the internet comfirmed it.

War is horrible.

directly related to bush-encouraged uprisings. How freaky is it that NO one knows this, or bothers to look into it... I've been saying it since before bush invaded iraq.

Swartskoff called bushI and told him it had to stop it was like "shooting fish in a barrell" and it was overkill and the US ran the risk of looking very bad to the rest of the world.

It wasn't until late in the afternoon of Feb. 25 that the press pool was permitted to see where the attack occurred. There were groups of Iraqi prisoners. About 2,000 had surrendered. But there were no bodies, no stench of feces that hovers on a battlefield, no blood stains, no bits of human beings. "You get a little firefight in Vietnam and the bodies would be stacked up like cordwood," Daniel said. Finally, Daniel found the Division public affairs officer, an Army major.


"Where the hell are all the bodies?" Daniel said.


"What bodies?" the officer replied.


Daniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench line, came M2 Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi troops.


"I came through right after the lead company," said Army Col. Anthony Moreno, who commanded the lead brigade during the 1st Mech's assault. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

more at

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14633

As in the guy tagged with the Oklahoma bombing.

One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone on those two days were the ACEs. It stands for Armored Combat Earth movers and they came behind the armored burial brigade leveling the ground and smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and equipment.


PFC Joe Queen of the 1st Engineers was impervious to small arms fire inside the cockpit of the massive earth mover. He remained cool and professional as he smoothed away all signs of the carnage. Queen won the Bronze Star for his efforts. "A lot of guys were scared," Queen said, "but I enjoyed it." Col. Moreno estimated more than 70 miles of trenches and earthen bunkers were attacked, filled in and smoothed over on Feb. 24-25.

personally i think mr. queen is more messed up than timothy mcveigh - at least it's understandable (to me) that such an experience would (should?) leave cause some serious psychological damage, such as that apparently experience by mr. mcveigh.

Does CBS have videos for later viewing of each segment? I can't remember.

There were a half million killed from each country, doesn't it stand to reason there are some mass graves of Iranians in certain parts of the country?

From the same reason Iraq has theirs. A cival war. The west has them too. From when Americans felt the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Though most of the time we didn't even bother to bury them. We just let them lie where they were to be eaten by the vultures.

Don

I am sure there are some mass graves in that country.
Why did we not invade it? Rhetorical statement, of course.

Congo, bloodiest war since WWII and France is the only nation that really has done much about it.

Suddamn was blamed for all the mass graves by bushco, I was trying to point out that we were responsible for most and the Iraq-Iran war may been another reason for them.

contributed to Saddam's nuclear program,

armed both Saddam AND Iran,

and the media has been complicit in covering up these truths, as well as the truth that Poppy is responsible for those mass graves.

however, if you can find a copy of Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq, it's worth the read.

The book is by Alan Friedman, who was a correspondent for the Financial Times of London, and a four time winner of the British Press Awards, the British equivalent of the Pulitzer.

Ted Koppel knows these things, too, because he worked with Friedman concerning this whole Iraqgate scandal.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/28/60minutes/main546624.shtml

The one with al-Hakim?


On edit: never mind, it is not the one.

the links are not saying anything about mass graves...am I missing something here...?

I don't even see sixty minutes in my program schedual...?

Hmmmm....

The last time the Shiites tried to make Saddam pay ended in betrayal and disaster. It was February 1991, the Gulf War was winding down and the first President Bush had an important message for the people of Iraq: "There's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside."

Bush's message was heard, and the Iraqis rose up against Saddam. Their rallying cry: Ayatollah al-Hakim. It was a classic popular uprising and it was succeeding. The rebels took over 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces, and they killed scores of Saddam's Ba'ath party officials.

But when they turned to Washington for help, Bush turned them down.

(snip)

The Americans gave Saddam the green light to use helicopter gunships to crush the rebellion. Saddam leveled the Shiite's holiest cities and shrines and summary executions became the order of the day.

The Shiites had expected nothing less from Saddam, but they'd expected much more from the Americans. "There is a deep-rooted mistrust of the United States of America by the Iraqi people," says Al-Rubaie. "The United States committed a major mistake. Iraqi people paid with their blood."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/28/60minutes/main546624.shtml

:bounce:

?

Its OK though, We are the US and the low life non-Christians need to understand that we will pull support out from under them when larger geo-economic interests prevail and they need to understand and expect this and smile while we are doing it.

This expose has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the American public. It has no idea of what is going on and doesn't care; they have already subhumanized Arabs. Sixty minutes just rambled along at how we led these people to their slaughter like it was just another twist of fate, just another thing that happened

The US deserves all of the shit coming down on it, every goddamn bit! At some point we have to pay for our ignorance and callousness and the longer we wait the higher the price is going to be.