Arab Jabour

Media reports indicate that US warplanes have dropped tonnes of bombs on Arab Jabour, a built up area that was widely parroted by a servile media as an 'Al-Qaeda safe haven'. Baghdad Dweller points out that the same military was earlier claiming that Arab Jabour had been cleared of the alleged Al-Qaeda threat. American Third Infantry Division Captain Joseph Inge is quoted as saying:

We cleared the Area Arab Jabour from Al Qaeda threat, with the help of the citizens [Awakening Council]

Leaving aside from the fact that this was an outrageous act of terrorism on a civilian target containing god knows how many families, it does not even occur to our stupid media to question why the military is contradicting itself and why it is bombing civilian areas. Perhaps as mere Arabs they do not merit the kind of attention focused upon a single missing child who dominates the headlines seemingly every other day. Officially there were no civilian casualties....it would seem that people had vanished into thin air. The scale of the crime is revealed here:

Despite the massive size of the airstrikes, Donnelly said that to the military's knowledge, no civilians were killed.

Maj. Alayne Conway, a spokeswoman for troops in central Iraq, said the amount of ordnance dropped in 10 minutes nearly exceeded what had been used in that region in any month since last June.

Conway said the air attack "was one of the largest airstrikes since the onset of the war" in March 2003.

An AP reporter in Zambaraniyah observed that the bombing continued until Thursday evening.

Even before Thursday's massive attack, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Mark Solomon told a small group of reporters in Zambaraniyah that residents were returning to their homes and that stores and schools were reopening.

So it appears that they invited the resident to return and then started the massive aerial assault involving 40000 lbs of high explosives. That is what I call a cold blooded massacre of innocents and yet another war crime.

One also wonders how in the rather conspicuous absence of reporting of number of dead and wounded from the area (some of whom were likely to have been completely obliterated), how certain organisations who count Iraqi casualties by counting reported deaths can possibly factor in the resulting inaccuracy in their counts. The media continue to spout military propaganda whilst admitting that there is no independent confirmation of how many civilians were killed. They do however report the number of 'insurgents' killed as quoted by military spokesmen. Is this propaganda taken at face value, if reported independently in at least three media outlets?