Waco Siege – A Town in Texas
“A fifty-one-day siege by Federal Agents of the Branch Davidian religious group’s commune headquarters outside Waco, Texas, in early 1993. The siege, which began after a botched and bloody attempt on 28 February 1993 to arrest the group’s leader, David Koresh, on a weapons charge, ended in the deaths of four federal agents and seventy-eight Branch Davidians. The stalemate ended when U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the use of force on 19 April. Soon after Federal Agents moved in, fire engulfed the compound, killing 72 (including 20 children), provoking controversy over the use of force in dealing with dissident sects. Although some surviving members of the sect were acquitted of manslaughter, they received harsh sentences when convicted on lesser charges. In August 1999, new documents surfaced indicating that the FBI had fired three flammable tear gas canisters during the raid on the compound. Following a ten- month investigation, Senator John C. Danforth released a report concluding that although Federal Agents had mishandled evidence, they had neither started the fire nor improperly employed force.”
The Trial of Saddam Hussein, p. 359
Amiriya Shelter:
A civilian shelter in Baghdad built by the Finnish Company Perusyhtymä which had passed over the details of its design and built to the USA long before the 199 attack.
“In the early hours of 14 February 1991 precision bombs dropped by US planes hit the Amiriya civilian shelter. At that time Baghdad was without electricity and the shelter was relying on its emergency generator. The first bomb hit the ventilation shaft and started fires inside. The attack, as intended in the design, caused the doors of the shelter to close immediately. While the firemen were trying desperately to unlock the doors and put out the fires, the second precision attack took place. This time it was more hideous and devastating. The bombs used were special penetrating bombs very probably unknown to the Finnish designer of the shelters.
The bombs penetrated the meter-deep layer of earth, passed through one meter of reinforced concrete slab, through the top floor and through another meter of reinforced concrete floor slab to the lower floor. The impact of the bomb caused all the water, fuel tanks and boiler to explode, filling the lower floor with a mixture of boiling water and fuel to a depth of two meters. All the medical staff were killed instantly and the emergency power supply was destroyed, rendering all life-supporting systems inoperative. On the top floor the bomb generated a tremendous heat estimated to have reached some 4000 degrees. The people were incinerated. At the time of the attack there were over 1500 civilians in the shelter. Out of those people only 11 persons are known to have survived after suffering different degrees of wounds, burns and psychological trauma. Whole families were wiped out, as could be seen afterwards from their locked houses in Amiriya. The bodies of the medical staff were found floating in the water-fuel mixture of the lower floor. The caretakers of the shelter claim that the black, burnt walls still have human skin and flesh stuck to them.”
Genocide in Iraq, pp. 124-125
Odessa – A City in Ukraine
“On 2 May 2014, demonstrators from among people calling for autonomy of their region following the coup in Kiev, which ousted the democratically elected President and brought a Western linked group to power, marched in Odessa. Soon these demonstrators found themselves surrounded by crowds supporting the new Government in Kiev. They took refuge in the House of Trade Unions. Suddenly the building was set on fire and exits of the building were blocked preventing people from escaping the massacre. There were reports about the few who managed to escape being beaten to death by a blood-thirsty bat-wielding mob while the police watched passively. When the fire fighters arrived, it was too late for the tens (as there are no official figures of the number killed) who were burnt alive or suffocated for no crime except voicing their views on their future.”
These are three examples of incidents that took place in different parts of the world and in different times, which seem to have some common factors that require some consideration.
– In the three incidents above, the perpetrators were people of the same political orientation, namely people who claim to represent Western Democracy.
– None of the above atrocities received more than a fleeting comment in the majority of mainstream Western media. So none of the persistent BBC reminders that you would be subjected to had such an incident taken place in Saddam’s Iraq, Assad’s Syria, Castro’s Cuba or even Putin’s Russia! In the case of Amiriya, CNN’s Peter Arnett was called a traitor for reporting the Massacre!
– None of the above atrocities or similar crimes in the last three decades has given rise to the familiar outcry among the academia and intelligentsia in the West which used to be very active in blackening pages in petitions seeking the release of one single dissident when arrested in Soviet Russia, as happened in the famous case of Solzhenitsyn.
– None of the above incidents has ever been investigated by an independent international body to unravel the truth about it.
– No one has ever been indicted, and I doubt if anyone ever will, in any of the above atrocities.
– The legal profession in the West has been the dumb devil that it usually is when it comes to crimes outside its border, as it lives the duplicitous illusion about the “nationality of the crime”, which seems to make it a crime to kill a child in London but tolerable to kill four million children in Iraq through starvation. Have you heard of a single Barrister in England attempting to initiate a process to indict Tony Blair for his genocidal crimes in Iraq contrary to the Geneva Convention Act or the International Criminal Court Act?
There is something more than sinister about our values which fact that even if not clear to us are transparent to outsiders.
The message is clear to people outside our Western world and the people in the world understood it. It was summed up by George Bush when he stated that if you are not with us then you are with the enemy. Of course he did not bother to elaborate on who is the enemy as it is clear that anyone who is not with us is, by definition, an enemy.
The manifestation of that principle comes in the sample of the above three incidents. If you are not with us you are with the enemy and we burn our enemies alive. So heed that!
Abdul-Haq Al-Ani
21 June 2014