US Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, Deputy Director of Operations, said in a Central Command news conference on Wednesday that Coalition forces had checked the explosion which killed and wounded dozens of civilians in a busy Baghdad market last week, and had concluded that it was not the result of a coalition attack. General Brooks said that all of the weapons fired at Baghdad have been 'smart bombs': "precision-guided munitions that can find their own way to the target". Following the devastating explosion in the market, Brooks indicated that the coalition had checked each of the weapons launched against Baghdad at that time, and found that there were no American or British weapons that could have caused the blast.
Having cleared the coalition weapons and the people who fired them from the blame for the innocent lives lost at the market, Brooks went on to hint that the mass killing was actually the work of Saddam Hussein, by claiming that an examination of photos of the devastated market showed no evidence of coalition bombings. Because the crater and damage from a cruise missile dropping from above is very different from the damage caused by a bomb placed on the ground, for example in a car bomb, Brooks was in effect claiming that Saddam Hussein's regime had placed a bomb in the market, creating an atrocity against its own people in order to blame the coalition.
General Brooks also gave several other examples of what he claimed were deliberate attempts by the Iraqi forces to bring about coalition atrocities against the Iraqi people. He claimed that at the first hospital the coalition encountered on the outskirts of Nasiriyah "there was a T-55 tank parked right outside of it, we believe likely to try to trigger a coalition response and then turn that into something that says we're attacking hospitals".
Moreover, he accused the Iraqi military of using holy places as firing positions, in order to draw American fire against these sacred places. Brooks said: "Fifth Corps units ... attacked to clear paramilitary forces in An Najaf. The attacking unit was welcomed ... by fire from regime forces who had positioned themselves inside the Ali mosque, one of the most important religious shrines to all of Shi'a Islam throughout the world." He added: "The regime's use of the Ali mosque for military purposes to trigger a coalition response is just the latest detestable example of the regime's strategy of deliberately putting sacred sites in danger"
The Arab street remained unconvinced. "For the Americans to claim they know where every single bomb they sent against Baghdad landed, or for them to expect us to believe that they never fail, is a bit too much", said one Amman driver. A government employee in Cairo was even less believing, claiming: "They are invading an Arab country and killing innocent people, but then they try to say to us that there is no blood on their hands, that these people were all killed by their own (Iraqi) soldiers. It is ridiculous". (www.albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
