TBR News.org – October 23, 2006
“Your
story about the Iraqi Resistance attack on Forward Base Falcon on 10/11 October is causing spastic colon at the DoD, and certainly here. The Pentagon has rushed out a sort of “rebuttal” to Harring’s charges, excerpts of which I will include here. Off the record, this attack, which destroyed tons of badly-needed small arms ammunition and badly damaged many vehicles and several helicopters, not to mention inflicting significant casualties on the troops, is certainly known to have happened. Pentagon brass, in conjunction with the White House, ordered a complete blackout on any news until they could make an “evaluation” of the mess. Our campaign to take over complete military control over Baghdad and stop the religious and political massacres before the mid terms has completely collapsed and this Falcon business is the final straw. The Pentagon’s Lincoln Group types have put out pages of the silliest nonsense I have ever seen and sent it around to “friendly blogs” (i.e., the Government pays them off.. There are more of these paid finks lurking on the Internet than you realize) and many foreign newspapers. (They don’t want a
word about this to appear anywhere in the U.S. media BTW)
These are not “official” U.S. rebuttals but are written so as to appear to be outraged “corrections” from GIs at the scene. In reality, most of the writers are fat-assed punks whose checks should be gift wrapped. The odious Lincoln Group people were recently cleared of charges they looted the cash box of many millions. We know this must be true because the body that cleared them of sticky fingers and gross incompetence was the office of the Inspector General himself!
You can’t get much more reliable than that, can you?
First, here are the Pentagon excuses, in digest form, and then the actual facts:
‘The so-called “rocket attack” on Forward Base Falcon has been blow up out of all proportions. First, Falcon is a very small base, supposed to be closed next month because no one uses it. What happened is that some Iraqi criminals lobbed a few mortar shells into a nearly abandoned base and accidentally ignited some pyrotechnic materials such a Fourth of July type rockets and some old small arms ammunition. It is true that set a small fire but it was soon put out. There were only ten soldiers at the base at the time and none of them were either injured or killed. The only damage was to a small holding area and a nearby empty storage shed. Falcon was not a “staging area” in any sense and was just a maintenance center for vehicles, only one of which was slightly scorched. Army firefighters put out the blaze in twenty minutes with very little trouble. In spite of rumors, there is no airfield nearby and there is no such hospital as mentioned in one negative report. Since no one was killed or injured, there was no evacuation of anyone. This was just a casual shelling, which happens all the time, and investigations have shown that a stray shell accidentally fell into the small area involved, causing a minor fire, soon extinguished”
First of all, Falcon is a mile square so it is not a “very small base.” It has been in the process of construction for three years. Surrounded by a stone wall and guarded by towers manned with troops, it was built to hold ca 5,000 troops. The mess hall is designed to feed 3,000 men at a sitting. On the base was an artillery park, a tank storage area, a soft-skinned vehicle part and maintenance area over a hundred barracks or living areas, ( sixty of which were burnt down) a fuel depot, a bunkered small arms, and other ammunition, storage. There were about 3,000 troops at the base at the time of the attack and many fled to shelter areas.
There has been some misconception over the nature of the so-called “casualty list” you published. In military parlance, “casualty” is a soldier either wounded or killed, who is unable to fight. This is not a “death list” at all . There is indeed a major hospital complex west of Baghdad, recently completed to be able to handle the soaring number of badly injured which it was felt could not be airlifted out of the country. There is an airfield adjacent to Falcon that can handle both helicopter and large cargo aircraft.
Every bit of this information comes, not from secret Pentagon reports but from Google. I checked all of this out myself as can anyone else with reasonable skills and a computer. You don’t need “secret informants,” so beloved by the bloggers, for this one, children.
The size of the base, the number of troops it can hold (in this case, the 4th Infantry Division was at least partially housed there), the hospital complex, the airfield and, most especially, the duration of the attack –caused blazes (at least nine hours in duration) is well covered on that search engine. More can be found on official U.S. government sites so the stories of a tiny old storage area, small and unimportant fires, soon extinguished and, most especially, no casualties of any kind, is typical head-in-the-sand Pentagon crap.
There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that redoubled efforts on the part of the well-armed (mostly armed with weapons from Iran via Russia) resistance in advance of the mid terms is deliberate. The official U.S. death tolls have shot up this month and will certainly not go down. The U.S. military plan to control, by force, all of Baghdad before the election has failed miserably.
Believe me, there are no new troops to throw into the battle and the ones now engaged are worn out, very short of ammunition, working with tanks and armored personnel carriers badly crippled by the constant sand storms which wreak havoc on tank, truck and helicopter engines, designed for temperate climates.
Never mind the wholesale corruption, the faggotry in the White House and on the Hill, Iraq is going to be, and in fact is, the Achilles heel of the Bush administration and its far-right friends and helpers.
The Falcon disaster is real and more than symptomatic of the whole shabby program of U.S. political and military domination, accompanied by a great bodyguard of lies.
The problem is that while Bush and his crime partners can eventually retire in great comfort with their loot, there are many tens of thousands who are either very dead or badly and permanently crippled.
Who cares, Cheney would say, as long as my Halliburton stock keeps its value?
And please remember me saying that Bush will never withdraw a single soldier from Iraq as long as he is in office. He will not budge an inch, even if Congress changes hands and he is ordered to do so. (See
new AP story in Harring section Ed.) This might be an interesting, and domestically violent, two years until the end of his term.
www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a2549.htm
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www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/category.asp?id=41
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Last updated 27/10/2006
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