Kill Fallouja: My Letter Of Resignation

September 8, 2010 by admin

I started Linux Users Los Angeles [Lula] eight years ago when Linux was a baby and needed all the friends it could get. I saw in Linux and it's "free as in 'beer', and free as in 'speech' philosophy" a tool with vast potential for the liberation of humanity. I have been the president of LULA for all of those years and have helped it grow and strive. My one regret is that more and more it has become an insular collection of geeks that can get along just fine without me.

I need someone to chair the next Lula meeting. I won't be there because I will be showing my new video 'Oops: A Tragedy Of Errors - News Clips From The Iraq War' to the LA Answer Coalition. I personally feel this is more important because most likely while the two groups are having their simultaneous meetings the United States of America will be committing mass murder in Fallouja.

The U.S. Marines are doing it now. And Linux is their little helper. Linux was embedded with the troops before the media ever knew what the word meant. There is no cease-fire. We keep helicopters, drones and aircraft over Fallouja 24/7. U.S. Marine snipers shoot anything that moves. Hospitals are bombed, ambulances are shot up. Children are shot in the back. Men who try to leave Fallouja are turned back

Cease-Fire American Style

"But the cease-fire allows the Marines to carry out defensive operations within the city, which they define as, among other things, allowing fire on insurgents who display weapons, break the curfew or move their forces toward U.S. troops." LA Times, 4/17/04 p. A6.

So these are the "cease-fire" rules of engagement. Let's even allow that as we are bringing them democracy, all Iraqi's lose any right to bear arms on pain summary execution. And it's a given that even though we don't yet control Fallouja, we intend to enforce a curfew by shooting on sight. But please tell me Mr. United States Marine how can you tell whether it's an unarmed insurgent or an innocent civilian that is breaking the curfew? And since you have the city completely encircled, how can the citizens of Fallouja move at all without moving towards U.S. troops? I guess they can hop up and down and call it 'Freedom'.

Read the paper. Read between the lines.

"Sniping experts - there are several here with the Marines - say there may not have been such a 'target-rich' battlefield since the World War II battle for Stalingrad." LA Times again. So if from behind the riflescope Fallouja looks like Stalingrad while the Nazi's lay siege to it, who does that make the U.S. Marine look like that uses the sniper rifle?

21 year old Marine says of Fallouja "It's a sniper's dream." LA. Times again.

Despicable, just despicable!

"The US Marines have undertaken to subdue Fallujah, west of Baghdad, apparently without regard for civilian casualties." The Independent, 4/15/04

Cease-fire American style just means they aren't using the artillery; they aren't dropping cluster bombs and using Gatling guns from AC-130 gunships. Yet.

Hachim Hassani, an Internet entrepreneur from Culver City, CA and member of the Iraqi Governing Council has been in Fallouja all week trying to negotiate a peace. [I wonder if he ever came to a Lula meeting.] He's afraid the Americans are just letting him hold the meetings so they can say they tried everything before the slaughter. LA Times, 4/15/04, A9. His fears are justified.

The truth is that Bush and his Crew were as wrong about the Iraqi people Greeting Us as Liberators as they were about Weapons of Mass Destruction. But that doesn't mean we can just pick up and leave from where we aren't wanted.

There's no WMD and there's no more Saddam Hussein but the whole of Iraq is in revolt against the occupation. Don't believe the story that it is only 6,000 or so of Sadr's Mahdi Army and "a couple thousand" "terrorists" "foreign fighters" and "Baathist Loyalists" in Fallouja that somehow have our well armed force of over 130,000 so over extended that leaves are cancelled. Don't believe the lies! See what the new game plan is.

If they Don't Want Us To Liberate them, We Can Rule Through Terror

Even if we can't get their telephone system back up and running a year after we bombed it into oblivion, we can rule Iraq through fear and terror. So to get the situation under control before the U.S. presidential elections somebody has to be made an example of. And that somebody is Fallouja, a city of 300,000 people.

The CentCom media blitz about the four contractors killed in Fallouja is just the cover story to prepare the American public to accept the mass murder they have decided is necessary. They say they just want the terrorists who killed and mutilated the bodies of the four armed civilian contractors, i.e. mercenary soldiers. This is a damn lie.

The Iraqi's who killed and those that mutilated are two separate groups. The four mercenaries were killed by resistance fighters and left on the field. Others mutilated the bodies. Not that anything can justify such behavior, but it could be more easily understood had the press reported on the massacre of 15 Iraqis by the new sheriff in town, the U.S. Marines, on that very same street the week before.

The Marines say they just want a handful of 'bad guys' and for this so far they have killed over 600 people including at least 46 children under 5 . But wait. The real slaughter has not yet begun.

Today the 'cease-fire' still holds but we Americans are an impatient lot. The Marines warn that this situation can't go on much longer. Soon negotiations will break down and the Marines will be 'forced' to go in, guns a blazing. And they will do it with your tax dollars and your technology and your acquiescence. You will meet and discuss "Setting up a compile cluster with distcc" at 7:00PM Tuesday. It will be morning in Fallouja. They'll be picking up their dead again.

A lot of people have been making comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam as of late. According to Robert F. McNamara, who as Secretary of Defense from 1960 to 1967 was in a good position to know, 3,400,000 people died in the Vietnam War . So this is the question the comparison poses for me:

How many this time? How many this time?

I once had high hopes for Linux. I felt sure it could make a real contribution to the success of humanity, now more and more I have my doubts. I have a real and growing fear that if the Mr. Smith's of Linux have their way, in the future they will look back and say "Wasn't it nice that so many smart people worked to hard for free to forge their own chains."

I feel that Lula no longer reflects the vision I have had for it and has in fact belittled itself as an organization for change and progress. I cannot attend Tuesday night's meeting, in fact I would be ashamed to in view of what our country is doing in Iraq. Therefore I am resigning as the president of Linux Users Los Angeles effective 7:00PM April 20, 2004.

On Rights and the Mailing List

Rights. You have rights. But you have responsibilities too. And you have no right to sit on your ass while your country commits atrocities.

Today we remember the Holocaust. The real shame of the Germans was that they allowed a bad leader to hijack the very considerable resources of their country to do some really horrible things while they when on with user group meetings and such as usual.

Clay Claiborne
April 19, 2004

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