Budapest, Prague, Fallujah?


 
 
 
A U.S. sources (which also claims copyright to this document which is proving beyond doubt that American military action has been undiscriminately targeting civilians in peacetime in an occupied country) described the above photo in this way:
" A tank fires a round into a building ... "
A tank fires a round into a building. Was it simply a building set aflame, a mass of steel and concrete shattered by the violence of the shells exploding? Were there no people inside? And if there were, who did tell the gunner inside the US tank that they were simply "terrorists"? Simply "rebels" he was told to "kill or capture" (kill, of course, if to capture proved impossible or difficult)? Who made him be so cock sure that the house was otherwise empty, that women, children, the aged, non-combattant males had been evacuated, that they had fled? But maybe he did't think they had... Maybe he was told not to care. Maybe he belonged to those who had only one thought about the Iraqi population:  "Kick a butt!" "Kill them!" "Nuke them!"

Seeing the tank fire into the buildings, images return in my mind.
Images that are horrible. Images of tanks rolling through the streets of Budapest, then, in '68, through Prague.
Blood was spilled. Young people were crushed by tanks. People in the street, not hundreds of them, but at any rate way to many.
And yet, a thought keeps recurring.
Who remembers having seen or heard that Soviet tanks,  intervening against popular rebellion in the capital of occupied Hungary or later on, in Prague, fired into city dwellings or office buildings?

They were bad, but not that bad.
It is the U.S. army which will be remembered for this.

Was there no concern for those who live in these bombed and shelled houses?
No way, it seems.
"Military" considerations came first,  in a peace-time attack on a "rebellious" civilian population which would live unharmed, had not American forces entered their native city, their native country.

Thinking of what happened in Fallujah, thinking of what once happened (in similar circumstances of rebellion) in Budapest, in Prague, we cannot fail to conclude that things have worsened. Or is it just that the lives of civilians in a non-European country are worth less to soldiers of a superpower than European lives....?
 

The commentary that accompanied this photo mentioned
not only that the tank was shelling the building we see
erupting into flames.

It also gives the date of the occurrence. The shelling took
place in Fallujah (Iraq) on Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004.
The US internet source also informs us about occupation force
soldiers "searching homes along the city's deserted,  narrow
passageways and using loudspeakers to try to goad
militants onto the streets." Goading them into the streets, does it
mean asking male inhabitants, 15 to 45, to come out into the street
because they will be shot if US soldiers enter their house and
suddenly find themselves confronted with them?
And if entering the streets in order to let themselves be
detained, will they be shot, too?

Copyright for the historical proof of a crime (not a crime committed
in a war, but still a "war crime") is claimed by AP
(AP Photo / APTN / Pool).