nuggets

blessed britons

The clock sounds five. Then follows the catastrophe, brutal, horrible, implacable. A deluge of steel and fire descended on Royan; a wave of 350 planes lets go 800 tons of bombs on the town. Some seconds later, the survivors are calling for aid to the wounded. Cries, death rattles... A woman appeals for help, her head appears alone, her body crushed under an enormous beam.

A whole family is imprisoned in a cave, the water mounts. The rescuers lift their heads - this humming, yet, it is another wave of planes. This achieves the complete destruction of Royan and its inhabitants. Royan has gone down with the civilised world, by the error, the bestiality, the folly of man.

— A Royan citizen, quoted in Howard Zinn's 'The Bombing of Royan' (in On War) According to Zinn, about 2,000 people died that night under British bombs.

mad world

To say that the civilian deaths from aerial bombardment are unintentional is sophistry, because if there is a probability that the bombs will hit civilian targets, then ipso facto the civilian deaths are not unintentional. This is tantamount to saying that a drunk driver who did not intend to kill someone in an "accident" should be set free for good motives; US law prosecutes drunk drivers regardless of whether they have been in an accident, because it recognizes that drunk driving is an inevitable accident. The same must be said of aerial bombardment. It always already intends to kill civilians, despite the best intentions of the military planners.

— Vijay Prashad, in Aerial Bombardment in the Racist Contemporary

iraq

- Since the camp at Guantanamo Bay opened in 2002, a total of 775 men have been held there.

- Out of the 430 prisoners that remain (late 2006), only 10 detainees have been charged for trial by military commissions. These were then ruled unlawful by the US Supreme Court.

- Most of the prisoners held at Guantanamo were not captured on the battlefield but were sold to the US.

— From the National Guantanamo Coalition

HUMANITARIAN DISASTER

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Submitted by antarchi on August 2, 2007 - 08:50.

"The terrible violence in Iraq has masked the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Malnutrition amongst children has dramatically increased and basic services, ruined by years of war and sanctions, cannot meet the needs of the Iraqi people. Millions of Iraqis have been forced to flee the violence, either to another part of Iraq or abroad. Many of those are living in dire poverty."

Jeremy Hobbs, director of Oxfam International

* * *

A recent report by Oxfam and other aid organisations working in Iraq claims that:

43% of Iraqis suffer from 'absolute poverty'
Four million Iraqis – 15% - regularly cannot buy enough to eat.
70% are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50% in 2003.
28% of children are malnourished, compared to 19% before the 2003 invasion.
92% of Iraqi children suffer learning problems, mostly due to the climate of fear.
More than two million people – mostly women and children - have been displaced inside Iraq.
A further two million Iraqis have become refugees, mainly in Syria and Jordan.

You can find further facts and figures here on the humanitarian disaster in Iraq that is now everyday life.