"I saw the houses fly"

From an observer in Lebanon:

"Doctors in hospitals in the south have testified on television that they a number of bodies that have reached them have an unusual, unfamiliar skin color. Some of surviving injured exhibit a pattern of burns that doctors have also never seen before. The question is beginning to get attention for the world community of physicians and human rights organization. Israel is suspected of loading its
missiles with toxic chemicals. The fear, in addition to their toxicity being immediately lethal on its victims, is that the waters and earth may now be poisoned. The inhabitants of the south may have to suffer from Israel's wrath for a very, very long time, in chilling cold blood.

"The as-Safir newspaper, the second largest running daily in Lebanon, has taken up the task to investigate the question.

"Beyond the crime of toxic poisoning, the type of shells and bombs used is also astounding. I met a woman who was displaced from the bordering village of Yater. She is a native American, blue blood and apple pie, but with a hijab. She, her husband, her three babies and her husband's family, a total of 14 people were trapped in one room in their house in Yater. On the 6th or 7th day of shelling, she cracked and her kids could not longer handle the violence. Risking their lives, they jumped into their car, and decided to take their chance. They drove straight without stopping, taking circuitous ways when the main roads were impossible to tread. They expected to die on the road. After 14 hours of driving they made their way to the US
embassy in the northeastern suburbs of Beirut. They were not aware of evacuations. They were lost on the way, and someone stole her husband's wallet with the 400$ in cash they carried (the totality of their fortune), his green card and her US passport. I came across her at the US embassy compound. She was trembling. She could barely tell her story coherently. She repeated over and over that she had seen
houses fly, that the shells made the houses fly in the air and then collapse on the ground. She repeated that she ought not to have gone to the window, but she could not help it, she was curious, and she saw the houses fly.

"As a holder of US passport (and real native) she had been allowed into the embassy. Her husband, only a green card holder, was not. The US embassy changed their policy, I was later told by people and journalists, but at various stages in the evacuation, green-card holders were not included in the evacuations plan. Pardon me, in the plans for 'assisted departures'.

"I don't know what happened to the American mother from Portland, Oregon and Yater south Lebanon. I know her babies are lactose intolerant and their only food was the stock of soy milk she had with her. She was very young, a face earnest, her skin translucent white. In her pale blue eyes there was despair and fright that she will not recover from for a very long time."



The entire piece is well worth your time.

Four hundred deaths resulting from three thousand sorties is extraordinarily mild by the standards of the trade. The general rate from random bombing runs is in the neighborhood of three to five deaths per ton of bombs dropped, and figuring a minimum of one ton employed per sortie as an ilustration, deaths could be expected to run as high as five thousand. Even supposing there are un-reported deaths, as there dounbtless are, particularly in the south, it is unlikely the standard figures have even been approached, which indicates the actions of the Israelis fall far short of being an unrestrained assault intended to kill non-combatants on a wide scale.

using your standards, and that more than half of the Israeli casualties have been soldiers (surely legitimate military "targets), what kind of fury would rain down upon my head?

The rocket attacks are quite mild, indeed, they are ineffectual by any conventional military standards. They may well be intolerable, as a political matter, to a government whose populace is subjected to them, but that is a seperate question. The Israeli attacks in Lebanon, outside the actual zone of engagement in the south of the country, are certainly intolerable to the Lebanese government, as a political matter, and are very likely by now quite counter-productive even from the Israeli point of view.

It's counter-productive, and not even working out terribly well, either, in terms of the stated goals.

"unrestrained assault intended to kill non-combatants on a focused scale"

Would doubtless kill tremendously greater numbers of them. There are many people camped out in the parklands of Beirut, for instance, and it would be quite simple to kill great quantities of them by aiming fragmentation loads at them; there are people sheltered in parking garages in Tyre, that could be readily rendered into tombs by penetrative bombs.

I just cannot fathom rationalizing this carnage and bloodlust. God help us.

If you and your family happened to be in the bomber's drop zone
Ill bet you would not see it as "mild"

and even, a tiny bit, with those who do -- they can't help it, anymore than the gung-ho Iraq War supporters in the U.S. can help it that they lack critical faculties and empathy.

that are being lobbed into Lebanon. I would feel the same identical way if the Lebanese were using toxic chemicals also.

I am hoping that this is not the case, but I will not be surprised to find that it is true.

Are for from being sustained here. My inclination is always to regard initial claims of it with a jaundiced eye, as it is a staple of propaganda, and has been for many decades.

The detonation of ordinary high explosives produces toxic fumes and particles, as well as a great deal of heat.

that the the government (like that of Israel) has custody and control of the rockets being lobbed into Israel.

rockets going into Israel.

I just strongly hope that some of those so-called leaders have not included poisonous toxins into the rockets they are sending to each other, because then the area just might be made useless for eons to come and the people therein cruelly disfigured and destroyed.

I put nothing past the insane men who make up such organizations as the neocons and neolibs and pnac-ers and believers and perpetrators of torture for these men fight to keep their power, not for the sake of their people.

Those who support such men and women are supporting the criminally insane and I say that to include Americans as well.

although I just heard on Democracy Now that the U.S. is greenlighting at least another 2 weeks of this assault.

So much for the role of "the honest broker." That is irreparably destroyed.

I read paragraphs like this:

There are no gaping holes
in the ground, just an entire neighborhood flattened into rubble. Mounds, and mounds of smoldering rubble. Blocks of concrete, metal rods, mixed with furnishings, and the stuff that made up the lives of residents: photographs, clothes, dishes, CD-roms, computer monitors, knives and forks, books, notebooks, tapes, alarm clocks.

And I think of my street and my neighborhood in this condition. What would I do and how would I feel if this had been done to my home?

Does anybody else read these accounts like that?

All the more painful is to see these incompetent frauds in the White House as our "representatives." To think that I have to pay taxes for this kind of representation galls me to no end.




Cher

and imagined similar scenes in my neighborhood, too.

The feelings of powerlessness are hard to erase. Magnify that by a billion and it probably wouldn't measure up to what the Lebanese are feeling. At least I had the cold comfort of knowing the burglar just wanted some stuff to fence for a fix, but this is unprovoked vengeance.