2002, on the eve of the US led invasion, Baghdad was full of booming businesses, restaurants were full, & families walked freely along well-lit parks. Iraq had clean water, hydro, food [LIFE];

compare & contrast that image with the reality of Baghdad today. in less than week this war crime, 7/24 U.S. bombardment of Iraq, Baghdad, a city of three million people, resulted in no running water, no sanitation & no electricity; food processing, storage & distribution facilities were destroyed; the city bridges were bombed & the telephone network destroyed. This was not a hidden dimension of the war. A large number of these attacks were direct violations of international law & are considered war crimes.[fear of aerial destruction & kill; poor hydro, starvation, water crises; disease throughout; full destruction of properties, towns & cities - DEATH]

Is the coalition doing to Iraq what Israel is doing to the Palestinians - what was being done to Israelis in the 1930's'

Bush invaded a country regarded as the second holiest place in Islam & now Bin Laden's warnings to Fellow Arabs are being steadily heeded.

NO DECLARATION OF WAR, BUT THE USA LED TERRORIST ACTS AGAINST INNOCENT & THEIR PARENTS.  SUFFERING AMERICAN AIR BOMBING - OVERLOOKED BY NATO IN THE SAME MANNER ISRAELI ATTACKS ON ARAB COUNTRIES ARE OVERLOOKED

In the many hundreds of hours of extensive news coverage and commentary on the war, the provisions of the Nuremberg, Hague and Geneva Conventions on war were never even discussed in the context of U.S. bombing targets.

Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, 1977, on the conduct of war states quite explicitly: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away or for any other motive." This Protocol stipulates that civilian populations must be protected against the dangers arising from military operations and that civilian populations must not be the object of attack. The U.S. and every one of its major allies against Iraq are signatories to this document and other well known conventions described in this book.

The U.S. enforced blockade of Iraq and the international sanctions which continue to this day are also an explicit violation of Article 54 of the Geneva Conventions-"starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited."

The graphic and detailed eyewitness testimony to the devastation documented in this work shows the painful human dimension to the casualty figures so carelessly estimated, depending on who is doing the counting, of between 100,000 to 250,000 Iraqi deaths. The United Nations Security Council-the international body that through open and publicly revealed U.S. bribery' authorized the war-sent its own investigating commission to Iraq to measure the destruction at the end of the war. The UN Mission, headed by Under Secretary General Martti Ahtisaari and comprising representatives of various UN Agencies, visited Iraq from March 10 to 17, 1991. Their report alone is damning evidence of war crimes committed against the civilian population.

To quote, "It should be said at once that nothing we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country. The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the infrastructure of what had been until January 1991, a highly urbanized and mechanized society. Now most means of modem life have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology".

Equally well publicized but also robbed of its moral context are other blatant violations of these international conventions. The crimes include the bombing of an air raid shelter, the use of certain types of prohibited weapons such as napalm and the killing of defenseless soldiers such as the systematic bombing of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians fleeing Kuwait City. These are not facts which are in dispute; there are hundreds of photos published in newspapers around the world which document this conduct. But all too often it is only presented as a grisly by-product of war.

"War is hell," was Defense Department spokesman Pete Williams' comment confirming that huge U.S. Army earth movers had buried alive up to 8,000 Iraqi soldiers. By Army accounts they were in trenches and desperately trying to surrender and incapable of mounting any resistance. This revelation, recently reported-as these lines were written-by Patrick Sloyan in the New York Newsday [September 12, 1991], demonstrates yet another violation of international conventions on combat. The resulting mass graves violate even the responsibility of the commanding officer to attempt to provide an accounting for the dead among enemy soldiers. The Pentagon has refused even to notify the Red Cross about the location of these mass graves.

The most serious charges are the Crimes Against Peace. The Nuremberg Charter, which is the law under which the Nazis were tried by the same allies who made war on Iraq, clearly defines the charge of planning, preparation and initiation of a war of aggression. This is the real indictment of the U.S. role.