Thread: Obama lied about Churchill and torture. Maybe he meant Ward Churchill.

Churchill's campaigns in the Boer War have been cited as including the first implementation of concentration camps, and in 1919 he wrote in a memo that "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes" to "spread a lively terror".

The specific targets were the Kurds, in what was then Mesopotamia.

Gas may not have been used in the end, but either way it was a grim foreshadowing of Saddam's appalling barbarism in Halabja.


Much later, as Prime Minister for the second time, he ordered the repression of the 1952 Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.

The ensuing torture caught up many uninvolved Kenyans, and just like many modern "anti-terror" campaigns, radicalised them and their friends and family too.

Good doggy.

BRITISH USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS IN IRAQ

"Bomber" Sir Arthur Harris, the British commander noted below, is now blamed by civilian authorities as the commander responsable for ordering the the phosphorus fire bombing of Dresden.

From 150,000 to 250,000 refugees, mainly women, children and old men fleeing the invading Russian Army, some 80 miles away, were immolated some two months before the end of the Second World War.

These were far more deaths than at Hiroshima (80,000) or Nagasaki.

The raids were carried out by British bombers, together with the United States 8th Air Force, first with explosive bombs to break open the roof tops of buildings. and followed with phosphorous bombs to successfully set off a (planned) devastating firestorm.

While the use of poison gas is now "outlawed" by the Geneva convention, the oft repeated accusation that Saddam gassed his own people neglects an important fact.

Halabaja, the town where it took place, was at the time occupied by invading Iranian forces, and, according to MSNBC Internet Home News, hundreds of Iranians and civilians were killed.

How the British bombed Iraq in the 1920s
By Henry Michaels
1 April 2003

The US and British governments, and most Western media pundits, have tried to explain the determined resistance of the Iraqi people to the US-led assault by referring to the first Bush administration’s 1991 betrayal of the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south.

Once Iraqis are confident that the Allies are serious about occupying the country, the argument goes, they will rise up and welcome them as liberators.

These assertions ignore the deeply-felt hostility to decades of colonial and semi-colonial rule by the Western powers, who long plundered Iraq’s oil reserves.

During World War I, Mesopotamia was occupied by British forces, and it became a British mandated territory in 1920. In 1921, a kingdom was established under Faisal I, son of King Hussein of Hejaz and leader of the Arab Army in World War I. Britain withdrew from Iraq in 1932, but British and American oil companies retained their grip over the country.

One of the most bitter chapters in this history, one with direct parallels to the current military campaign, occurred during the 1920s.

In many respects, the air war now being employed in Iraq is an offshoot of a military policy developed by Britain as it clung to its Iraqi colony 80 years ago.

Confronting a financial crisis after World War I, in mid-February 1920 Minister of War and Air Winston Churchill asked Chief of the Air Staff Hugh Trenchard to draw up a plan whereby Mesopotamia could be cheaply policed by aircraft armed with gas bombs, supported by as few as 4,000 British and 10,000 Indian troops.

Several months later, a widespread uprising broke out, which was only put down through months of heavy aerial bombardment, including the use of mustard gas. At the height of the suppression, both Churchill and Trenchard tried to put the most flattering light upon actions of the Royal Air Force.

British historian David Omissi, author of Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939, records: “During the first week of July there was fierce fighting around Samawa and Rumaitha on the Euphrates but, Churchill told the Cabinet on 7 July, ‘our attack was successful.... The enemy were bombed and machine-gunned with effect by aeroplanes which cooperated with the troops’.”

The order issued by one RAF wing commander, J.A. Chamier, specified: “The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle.”

Arthur “Bomber” Harris, a young RAF squadron commander, reported after a mission in 1924: “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage: They know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.”

The RAF sent a report to the British Parliament outlining the steps that its pilots had taken to avoid civilian casualties. The air war was less brutal than other forms of military control, it stated, concluding that “the main purpose is to bring about submission with the minimum of destruction and loss of life.”

Knowing the truth, at least one military officer resigned.

Air Commander Lionel Charlton sent a letter of protest and resigned in 1923 over what he considered the “policy of intimidation by bomb” after visiting a local hospital full of injured civilians.

The methods pioneered in Iraq were applied throughout the Middle East.

Omissi writes: “The policing role of most political moment carried out by the Royal Air Force during the 1920s was to maintain the power of the Arab kingdoms in Transjordan and Iraq; but aeroplanes also helped to dominate other populations under British sway.

“Schemes of air control similar to that practiced in Mesopotamia were set up in the Palestine Mandate in 1922 and in the Aden Protectorate six years later. Bombers were active at various times against rioters in Egypt, tribesmen on the Frontier, pastoralists in the Southern Sudan and nomads in the Somali hinterland.”

This dummy can't even remember what was ghost written for him in his book, "Dreams of my Father".

"Mr Obama refers briefly to his grandfather’s imprisonment in his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, but states that his grandfather was “found innocent” and held only for “more than six months”.

The family speaks more about the Churchill torture, that Obama claimed never happened.

Churchill ‘Tortured’ Obama’s Grandfather | Sweetness & Light

This turd will say anything that will make the case against the nation he leads. Even if he has to dismiss the truth when it involves his own family. Yet the drones will still give this cocksucker a pass. The idiots they are. So long as he is trashing America, the drones who follow are willing and happy travelers.

Originally Posted by kudzu

While the use of poison gas is now "outlawed" by the Geneva convention, the oft repeated accusation that Saddam gassed his own people neglects an important fact.

Halabaja, the town where it took place, was at the time occupied by invading Iranian forces, and, according to MSNBC Internet Home News, hundreds of Iranians and civilians were killed.

i don't think we need to apologise for or excuse saddam hussein, thank you very much!

halabja was what made me a lot more political, i wasn't really before then..

VX nerve gas, wasn't it?

donald "DUCK!" rumsfeld sold it to him wasn't it?


nice americans, enabling a dictator-tyrant to murder innocent civilians!

Halabja poison gas attack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by bigearth

i don't think we need to apologise for or excuse saddam hussein, thank you very much!

halabja was what made me a lot more political, i wasn't really before then..

VX nerve gas, wasn't it?

donald "DUCK!" rumsfeld sold it to him wasn't it?


nice americans, enabling a dictator-tyrant to murder innocent civilians!

Halabja poison gas attack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The reports from outside medical investigators can't say for sure who gassed whom... Could have been that the Iranians used gas or also used gas..

Anyway, the US was manufacturing ALL the gas.... and evidently the Israelis were involved.. Remember when that El Al plane went down in Holland (1992)and killed ALL those Dutch people on the ground? They were hauling sarin.