Thursday, March 22, 2012

Chris Busby on Fallujah: A Lost Generation


The video with Chris Busby is accompanied by a transcript. Here is a brief excerpt from the transcript:

[excerpted] "Worst of all, since 2004 there has been a dramatic increase in birth defects, infant mortality, mental retardation, and cancers of all sorts in Fallujah. The birth defects are truly horrifying. Babies have been born with six fingers on each hand, scaly skin, missing limbs, two heads, and there has been one case of a child born with a single eye in the center of his forehead. Experts blame chemical weapons used by the U.S. during the 2004 sieges, like white phosphorous and possibly depleted uranium..." 

Majia here: In my book, Governing Childhood: Biopolitical Strategies... (2010) I wrote about the treatment of children in Fallujah and other areas of the Middle East:


Xenophobic attitudes about foreign terrorists transform understandings of childhood, erasing any sense of childhood innocence and vulnerability and precluding any form of special protections.
This policy of treating children as enemy combatants has tragic consequences, as elaborated upon in this passage:
In the 2004 assault by US Marines on the city of Fallujah, things were even worse. Dexter Filkins, a reporter for the New York Times, reported that before that invasion, some 20,000 Marines encircled the doomed city, which the White House had decided to level because it harbored a bunch of insurgents and had angered the American public by capturing, killing and mutilating the bodies of four mercenaries working for US forces. The residents of the 300,000-population city were warned of the coming all-out attack. Women and children and old people were allowed to flee the city and pass through the cordon of troops. But Filkins reported that males determined to be “of combat age,” which in this case was established as 12 and up, were barred from leaving, and sent back into the city to await their fate. Young boys were ripped from their screaming mothers and sent trudging back to the city to face death. In the ensuing slaughter, as the US dumped bombs, napalm, phosphorus, anti-personnel fragmentation weapons and an unimaginable quantity of machine gun and small arms fire on the city, it is clear that many of those young boys died. (Lindorff)
Although Lindorff’s claim that boys were turned back by U.S. soldiers cannot be authenticated with certainty, the record is clear that the U.S. deliberately used phosphorus against human populations, including children, in the attack on Fallujah.[i] In 2009 the U.S. was accused of using white phosphorus against civilian populations in Afghanistan after Afghan doctors confronted patients with severe and unusual burns (Straziuso and Faiez A4). Unmanned drones used to combat “terrorists” in Afghanistan have also produced large numbers of child casualties.
In 2007 UNICEF asserted that hundreds of Iraqi children were killed in violence and 1,350 were detained by authorities (cited in “Iraq Children”). Many more, upwards of 2 million, face poor nutrition, lack of education, disease, and violence in Iraq due to the war unleashed by the U.S. invasion. Yet, the plight of Iraqi children is less visible in the mainstream U.S. press than are articles about the loss of childhood innocence illustrated in The New York Times articles about child terrorists cited above. Children in these accounts are represented as potential terrorists threatening U.S. security, their innocence subject to lethal perversion.
The dehumanization of children as enemy combatants also occurred recently in the context of Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Half the population of Gaza is under the age of 16 years. Gaza children, already facing malnutrition as a result of the Israeli embargo, were subject to Israel’s January 2009 retaliation against Hamas. More than 400 children were killed in the Israeli assault, some by bullets and some by air assaults (Fraser). The children who survived are traumatized:
Even the children who escaped physical injury face the psychological consequences of having lived under near-constant bombardment for 22 days and nights. A week into a fragile cease-fire, mental health experts, human rights advocates and parents say they worry that this generation of Palestinian children will suffer the effects of the war for decades to come. (Witte A5)
Israel’s disproportionate retaliation against Hamas produced a spectacle of death and misery that led the Pope to describe the Gaza as a “big concentration camp” (“Vatican Deplores”). Israel’s response that it had the right to defend itself against terrorist attacks had the practical effect of erasing any distinctions among Gaza’s inhabitants: all were cast as potential enemy combatants. By February 2009, two-thirds of Gaza’s residents lacked power and a third lacked running water; nearly all lacked basic supplies and faced overwhelmed medical facilities (“Gaza Humanitarian”). In June 2009 former U.S. President Carter claimed "Never before in history has a large community been savaged by bombs and missiles and then deprived of the means to repair itself" (cited in Schneider A1).

5 comments:

  1. A professor at a large public university is expected to know the difference between fact and fiction. Your hero Busby is a total fraud. I will bet your followers don't know about Busby's Japanese scam - http://tinyurl.com/8yer3oj

    ReplyDelete
  2. Busby also knows that his usual horror of horrors scam weapon, depleted uranium kinetic energy penetrators, was not used in Fallujah. His Cancer and Birth Defects Foundation is also a misleading name for a private company. It is not a charity. Anyone can check that out with the UK's Companies House. I am in process of vetting his claims to be reviewer of a number of prestigious publications like The Lancet (he wasn't) and the only mention of him in their multi-year on-line index was a letter from his retired musician friend lackey Richard Bramhall. Busby's Green Audit and Low Level Radiation Campaign entities are also private companies, meaning that all the donations go to Busby, not to some worthy cause. He got the frightened mothers of Fukushima to donate him 750,000 Yen (a little less than $10K) for research that he probably never performed since he is really not much of a scientist. He does charm people on YouTube and make it look like he is a courageous teller of the truth. He is a scam artist, pure and simple. Write me and I will keep you informed of my research. I expect more replies in the next week.

    ReplyDelete
  3. http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/other_comments/269012/depleted_uranium_an_untold_story.html

    From the Ecologist: "Depleted uranium - an untold story"

    [Excerpted] "Lieutenant Colonel Roger Helbig, USAF, Rtd (it appears) is one of a small Pentagon-inspired group devoted to denigrating and undermining the efforts of those drawing attention to the dangers of DU, which three UN Sub-Committees have designated a weapon of mass destruction. Rokke is just the latest in a long line of Helbig targets. Journalist Bob Nichols, Project Censored award winner for his DU coverage, writes, ‘Individuals on web sites throughout the United States have complained about the abusive and aggressive actions of an Air Force Lieut. Colonel named Roger Helbig’."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Roger Helbig is a Pentagon shill - just google roger helbig pentagon shill to see what this man is. Roger trolls chat rooms, blogs, youtube, etc. where he goes by purchaser47, Rog47, DUStory hyphen owner at yahoogroups dot com etc.

    Roger tries to indoctrinate people with DU safety. He operates on the web during every waking hour, trying in vain to give DU a good name.

    ReplyDelete
  5. There is a Busby video documentary on Fallujah. Roger claims no DU was used in Fallujah, but if you google deformed babies Fallujah you will see what Roger Helbig is hiding. Roger hides the truth from the light of day.

    Google Chris Busby: Video Censord On YT – Fallujah And Depleted Uranium

    This video is censored on youtube, youtube keeps taking it down. The government does not want you to see Busby's video.

    ReplyDelete

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