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June 28, 2005
Only the Grief of the Children
Under the Same Sun reader Pesic asked for pictures of the banner that was unfurled inside the courtroom. It was not composed of, as it was sometimes reported, pictures only of Fallujah, but a compilation from around Iraq. I have some pictures of it, as well as a video of it being circled around the room. It's pretty hard stuff to look at, but there it is:
It was later placed on the street right outside the courtroom:
And the video can be found here. (It may be a bit slow in loading.)
Brendan Smith and I co-wrote a piece for Truthout about the Tribunal which can be found here. Here's how we described the moment the banner was brought in, as well as testimonies from that same panel:
Former US Air Force combat veteran Tim Goodrich stunned the jury by revealing his role in the "softening up" of Iraq months before the US declaration of war. "We were dropping bombs then, and I saw bombing intensify," Goodrich explained to a hushed room. "All the documents coming out now, the Downing Street memo and others, confirm what I had witnessed in Iraq. The war had already begun while our leaders were telling us that they were going to try all diplomatic options first."...
Goodrich's testimony had just begun when a 75-foot banner prepared by the Iraqi delegation and composed of harrowing pictures of Iraqi child victims of the war was carried into the courtroom. In the presence of the father of one of the victims shown on the banner, Goodrich and others stood and a moment of silence spread through the room while the banner was carried through the hall. The teeming press contingent rushed to photograph the scene as some members of the audience cried.
While the first day of the trial had concentrated on moral and political issues, emotional testimony from Iraqi witnesses dominated the second day of proceedings. Fadil al Bedrani, an Iraqi journalist who survived the siege of Fallujah, told the audience that he watched as "20-25 persons were running barefoot when an American warplane bombed, killing and wounding them; only one elderly woman and 2 children stayed safe ... the doctors and the staff of the Fallujah hospital were detained; the warplanes bombed the alternative hospital in downtown ... and bombed the medicine warehouses in Nazzal area, killing 4 doctors, and 8 medical workers."
Dahr Jamail, an unembedded journalist who had been reporting from Iraq during the past year, narrated the story told to him by Ali Shalal Abbas from Baghdad. While detained at Abu Ghraib and tortured, Abbas was approached by two men, "one a foreigner and one a translator," who asked him who he was. "I said I'm a human being. They told me, 'We are going to cut your head off and send you to hell, we will take you to Guantánamo.'" Abbas questioned why only Saddam Hussein, who also had people tortured, was put on trial while the Americans were not.
Richard Falk gave what I thought was an extremely important closing speech about the right and the obligation of global civil society to protect, enforce and expand moral law. I will write more when I get full text of it in order to be able to write about it. I thought it was very important, especially the way it formulated a sense of the law apart from the state but not in a pre-legal sense. For now, however, the title this post comes from a poem he read at the end of what I thought was brilliant legal analysis, which ended with the line "nothing matters except the grief of the children."
The closing press conference drew 200+ journalists in a standing-room only hall, with many cameras and live feeds. More on all that later.
Posted by zeynep at June 28, 2005 06:51 PM