Fallujah & The West

When I blasted the media in one of my first posts, I brought up Fallujah as example:

Or more recently, had they asked some (real, not AEI) Iraq expert or read up in some book, or just re-read newspaper reports from the area from April 2003, the now solid myth of Fallujah as the city especially loyal to Saddam wouldn't be there. (Instead, the token reminder at the end of articles would include references on one hand to Fallujah the filthy city, the city of hundred minarets and base of Salafism persecuted by Saddam; on the other hand to the 1991 US bomb on the marketplace and its 150 casualties, still sympathy for the US upon its arrival in 2003, the harrassments in April, the two protests shot up and followed up by changing lies, the many civilian casualties in the following anti-insurgency operations, the officially indiscriminate killing in 'Operation Iron Hammer', the ceasement of activity upon the 82nd Airborne's withdrawal from Fallujah in February and the disastrous Marine demonstration of force before the mercenary slayings.)

Recently, Whatever It Is, I'm Against It also wrote about media amnesia regarding Fallujah, later returning with a recent example and giving his own recap-links, and returned to the issue after I emailed him/her about events preceding the two shootings at protesters - adding his apparent own research to the scant info I gave on the 1991 event, which I recalled from memory.

I made my own Googling in the meantime, here are the results:

It happened on 14 February 1991, 3pm local time, just 12 hours after the USAF bunker-busted the Ameriya bomb shelter with 400 dead (lying about it for the next couple of days and roasting Peter Arnett of CNN for correct reporting). Tough I found several pages claiming so, the Fallujah marketplace boming was not by a USAF plane - on this I trust people more who visited the place in the nineties, Voices In the Wilderness UK. They write it was an RAF plane allegedly targeting a bridge, missing it and killing 137 civilians at a central marketplace. The claim that the target was a bridge and that it was missed is called into doubt by a different account, one that says the planes returned for a second strike, killing people who rushed in to rescue those trapped in the rubble of the first hit.

(UPDATE 28/09: WIIIAI finally found a quote in an 1992 Ramsey Clark book that tells of over 200 casualties in two separate strikes allegedly targeting but missing Fallujah bridges, the second hitting a housing complex [we see the marketplace and housing complex contracted into one in my link for the second account].)

Also, I mention here that similar victims of the second bombing of the bridge of Varvarin, Serbia that was already destroyed in the first flightover - a bridge that was unfit (too weak) for military vehicles and hence not a legitimate military target, and which was on a B list to unload bombs upon when no primary target could be found or approached - last year lost a compensation claim against NATO at a German court. The despicable cowardy decision was based on the arguments was that 1) the intervention was in accordance with the Geneva Conventions (heh - this one was based on nil evidence, that is NATO's own claims!...); 2) compensations can only be requested by and paid to states, not individuals; 3) Germany only participated with reconnaisance planes, so wasn't party to the crime (heh, heh).