From WIKILEAKS:-
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld launched the failed April 2004 assault on the Iraqi town of Fallujah before marines were ready because it had become "a symbol of resistance that dominated international headlines", according to a leaked U.S.intelligence report on the operation.
Coalition air strikes were conducted during the cease-fire, which
was a "bit of a misnomer" and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal
contributed to the politically driven peace settlement, which left
Coalition Provisional Chief Paul Bremmer "furious".
By the end of April 600-700 Iraqis and 18 marines had been killed
inside the town with 62 marines killed in the broarder operational
area and 565 wounded in action.
Fallujah's 2,000 defenders were diverse but united to oppose the
U.S. offensive. They included former regime soldiers, "nationalists,
local Islamic extremists, foreign fighters and criminals." together
comprising not so much a military organization as "an evil Rotary club".
The revelations come from a highly classified report on the attack
released today by the open government group Wikileaks, which usually
concentrates on non-western corruption, but which has in the past
month released a number of sensitive U.S. documents, including
manuals for Guantanamo bay and rendition operations.
The report was penned last year by the U.S Army National Ground
Intelligence Center and is classified "SECRET/NOFORN" -- meaning
the report was not to be shared with coalition partners.
The Fallujah assault was initiated when on March 31 2004 four private
military personnel from the U.S firm Blackwater were killed in the
town and photos of their burnt bodies received international coverage.
The report said the coverage had prompted Rumsfeld, General Abizai
and the then Coalition Provisional Authority Chief Paul Bremmer to
order an "immediate military response".
The report not only blames media driven political pressures for
launching the Marine Expediary Force before it was ready, but states
similar political considerations led to a cease-fire 5 days later.
"During the first week of April, insurgents invited a reporter from
Al Jazeera, Ahmed Mansour, and his film crew into Fallujah where
they filmed scenes of dead babies from the hospital, presumably
killed by Coalition air strikes. Comparisons were made to the
Palestinian Intifada. Children were shown bespattered with blood;
mothers were shown screaming and mourning day after day."
The three week official cease-fire was "a bit of a misnomer", with
coalition air strikes continuing and snipers on both sides making
movement hazardous. On the town's resistance, the report claims the
number one "enemey strategy" was "to gain media attention and
sympathy" in order to build political pressure "to a boiling point."
Contributing to the peace settlement at the end of the month were
British opposition to the battle, an Iraqi Shia uprising over the
forced closure of the newspaper "al-Hawza" and Abu Ghraib.
Paul Bremer was "furious when he found out about it, but he was in
little position to overturn it since he had insisted on the cease-fire
in the first place. Complicating matters was the fact that the Abu
Ghraib scandal broke on 29 April, consuming the attention of senior
leaders in the U.S. government. Bremer could not organize a consensus
to overturn the Fallujah decision."
During the battle U.S. psychological operations loud speakers
"blasted rock music or taunted the insurgents into attacking with
insults about their marksmanship."
Marines used the M1A1 Abrhams tank as bait, to lure defenders out
into the open, however this ruse didn't work for long as "The
enemey.. would initiate an ambush with small-arms fire on one side
of a tank in order to get the tank crew to turn its armor in the
direction of fire. They would then fire a coordinated 5 or 6 RPG
[rocket propelled grenade] salvo into the exposed rear of the tank".
The report states "Approximately 150 air strikes destroyed 75
buildings, including two mosques." and that the operation "stirred
up a hornets nest across the Al Anbar provence".
The report also makes clear that, in the military’s opinion, the Western press is part of the U.S.’s propaganda operation. This process was facilitated by the embedding of Western reporters in U.S. military units. The U.S. failure in this battle was largely attributable, the authors claim, to the absence of embedded reporters to convey the military’s story.
ReplyDelete“The absence of Western media in Fallujah allowed the insurgents greater control of information coming out of Fallujah. Because Western reporters were at risk of capture and beheading, they stayed out and were forced to pool video shot by Arab cameramen and played on Al Jazeera. This led to further reinforcement of anti-Coalition propaganda. For example, false allegations of up to 600 dead and 1000 wounded civilians could not be countered by Western reporters because they did not have access to the battlefield.
“Western reporters were also not embedded in Marine units fighting in Fallujah. In the absence of countervailing visual evidence presented by military authorities, Al Jazeera shaped the world’s understanding of Fallujah.”
This account, however, is false. There were at least two “Western reporters,” as well as other Western civilians, inside Fallujah giving detailed information on the effects of the fighting on civilians. While briefly detained by rebels, they were quickly released, rather than beheaded. The report ignores these reporters as they were independents, neither embedded with the U.S. military nor bound by the implicit rules of the mainstream media to give special consideration to U.S. military claims and perspectives. Further, the accounts of these reporters and observers contradicted American military claims.