Al Jazeera Reporters Give Bloody First Hand Account of April ’04 U.S. Siege of Fallujah

"In April 2004, the United States launched its first assault on Fallujah, the Sunni town west of Baghdad that had come to symbolize Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation. The offensive came a few days after four American military contractors from the private security firm Blackwater were brutally killed in the city."

"The siege was one of the bloodiest assaults of the US occupation. In two weeks that April, thirty marines were killed as local guerillas resisted U.S. attempts to capture the city. Some 600 Iraqis died and over 1,000 were wounded. While the U.S. military claimed at the time that the vast majority of those killed were members of the resistance, media reports from within Fallujah indicated a large number of civilians were among the dead."

This page gives a transcript of the interview broadcast yesterday on Democracy Now. You can listen to the audio as well, but if you can, I suggest you view the video stream, as it includes some of the photos taken during the assault. This is important because if you only pay attention to the officially sanctioned reports coming from agencies that were told at the start of the war that if they report negatively, their access will be prevented, you will never get close to the truth.

Don't concern yourself with the nonsense coming from our administration about Al Jazeera being "with the terrorists", they only make that claim because they can't control the information it puts out. Most all Arab governments hate them for the same reason, which, in my mind, is to be applauded. When governments get along with the media, that's when the truth gets hidden. I won't go as far as to say that everything Al Jazeera reports is true, just that it's important to hear more than one side.

Fallujah happened some time ago, but it shouldn't be forgotten. What's usually bypassed in the story of that city is the fact that the assault was forced upon the U.S. troops as a result of having little control over private contractors, who aren't looked upon favorably by our troops. They pretty much do as they please, with little coordination with the military, and in this case, got themselves killed. It was their deaths that created political pressure that forced our military to abandon (supposedly) more effective plans for dealing with the area, and launch a retaliatory assault that these reporters found themselves witness to.

In case you missed it in an earlier post, here's a link to a page that gives a little background on the contractors killed, without much detail:

Ambushed Contractors

This is from the same site, with links to information on contractors, along with a link at it's top, to a video documentary:

Private Contractors

That video also discusses the deaths of the contractors. In the rest of the links, notice just how profitable war is these days, to corporations. The fact that they're so extensively used, means they have way too much influence on events during conlicts. If we have to outsource anything to conduct a war, we shouldn't be in one. Not to meantion all the other reasons.