Satan hides in a hospital - Asia Times

[bloom]

THE ROVING EYE
Satan hides in a hospital
By Pepe Escobar

"Everything one needed to know about the true, unspinnable foreign policy of the second George W Bush administration is represented by the "capture" of the first strategic target in the assault on Fallujah: the general hospital, on the left bank of the Euphrates, now totally cut off from the city. According to the Bush administration world view, this is the house where Satan lives.

Bush-installed interim Iraqi Prime Minster Iyad Allawi announced with a smile of victory that he personally ordered the capture of the hospital. So maybe it was not the Pentagon: it was an unelected politician asking a foreign occupation army to attack a hospital in his own country and preventing doctors and ambulances from entering a city under siege.

The assault, dubbed Operation Phantom Fury, perversely started on Laylat e-Qadr, the most important and holy night of the year for the Islamic world.

In terms of the information war, the hospital was indeed the most strategic of targets. During the first siege of Fallujah in April, doctors told independent media the real story about the suffering of civilian victims. So this time the Pentagon took no chances: no gory, disturbing photos of the elderly, women and children - the thousands unable to leave Fallujah in advance of this week's offensive, the civilian victims of the relentless bombing.

But this did not prevent the world from seeing doctors and patients at the hospital handcuffed to the floor - as if they were terrorists. Hospital director Dr Salih al-Issawi told Agence France-Presse that the Americans blocked him and other doctors from going to the center of Fallujah to help another clinic in distress; he also said an ambulance that tried to leave the hospital was shot at by the Americans - just like in April, when all ambulances were targeted. The Geneva Convention is explicit: in a war situation, hospitals and ambulances are neutral. "<more>

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FK11Ak03.html

[Go_andbe]

1. another Asian newspaper afraid after the election

It is a small world after all.
Paying attention, Karl Rove?

[teryang]

2. Stirring up a hornet's nest

<Asia Times Online sources close to the resistance say the talk in the streets of Baghdad is that the bulk of the estimated 2,500 mujahideen in Fallujah have already left to Baghdad, Ramadi, Samarra, Haditha, Khaldiya, and even Mosul in the north. Even before the assault on Fallujah, there were more than 100 resistance attacks a day all over the country. The main story playing in the Arab world in the past 24 hours is that of Mohammed Abboud - who saw his nine-year-old son bleed to death of shrapnel wounds when his house in Fallujah was hit because he could not venture out to go to a hospital. Abboud had to bury his son in his own garden.>

The military attacks on hospitals, ambulances and doctors is an international disgrace.

[Ardee]

3. Perhaps not

Desperately needing to show Iraqi governmental actions in this guerilla war we chose a simple and defenseless target for the remnants of the Iraqi forces who hadnt yet deserted. A show, plain and simple.
Most Iraqi hospitals havent had medicines or supplies of any kind for many years thanks to the sanctions......