London Times Calls Fallujans Psychiatric Patients

By Fintan Dunne, Editor, BreakForNews.com

There are soome pretty strange views in a new feature article by Richard Beeston on the plight of blitzed former residents of Fallujah.

Writing for the Times of London, he equates the U.S. slaughter and destruction of the city with a clinical lobotomy, and describes the former residents as 'violent psychiatric' patients.

Beeston also implies that the 'lobotomy has been a success. He writes how the once "arrogant citizens" of Fallujah now "stop meekly" to let the US military pass.

Here's a key extract from the article [our emphasis]:

"Now a tour of Fallujah, once feared by foreigners as the headquarters of the most militant of the Islamic insurgents, is akin to visiting a violent psychiatric patient after a lobotomy. Children wave, shopkeepers smile, and it is even possible at dusk to walk through a residential neighbourhood with only the odd crack of distant gunfire punctuating an otherwise calm evening.

By the standards of Iraq today, Fallujah is peaceful. Where other cities are subjected to suicide car bombs, Fallujans stop meekly to allow US military convoys to overtake or wait for hours in long queues to be searched and checked before entering the municipal boundaries...."

The 'psychiatric Iraqis' theme of the article continues with this allusion:

"Yet, with the controls in place, it is not clear that the city will ever recover properly."

Beeston's account of the destruction of Fallujah descends further into banal propaganda by completely ignoring credible evidence that at least 5,000 civillians were slain -many of them women and children. And that weapons of mass destruction were employed by US forces. He merely writes:

"In the three-week battle, more than 1,000 insurgents and 38 Americans
were killed, the city was left in ruins and the population homeless."

That propaganda bias is confirmed by a reference to returned residents having a "drawn, defeated look."

However, in one sense the psychiatric lens Beeston uses to view events in Fallujah is actually quite appropriate, albeit blindly misdirected.

Many people around the world regard the U.S. attack on the town as the work of violently dreanged military commanders, who in a saner America would be pacing padded cells -where their capacity for mass slaughter could no longer be visited on innocent women, children and the elderly.

See also
by Fintan Dunne :
'Fallujah's 9/11:
U.S. Used Weapons of Mass Destruction'
The relevant US commanders should be immediately detained and interrogated --so we can determine on whose orders they acted, that others may also face justice.