American and Canadian aircraft and ground forces attacked retreating Iraqi military personnel and others attempting to leave Kuwait on the night of February 26–27, 1991,
Photojournalist Peter Turnley published photographs of mass burials at the scene. Turnley wrote:."I flew from my home in Paris to Riyadh when the ground war began and arrived at the “mile of death” very early in the morning on the day the war stopped. Few other journalists were there when I arrived at this incredible scene, with carnage that was strewn all over. On this mile stretch were cars and trucks with wheels still turning and radios still playing. Bodies were scattered along the road. Many have asked how many people died during the war with Iraq, and the question has never been well answered. That first morning, I saw and photographed a U.S. military “graves detail” burying many bodies in large graves. I don't recall seeing many television images of these human consequences. "
A mass grave filled by American troops. Guts and butts and arms just chunks of bodies are hard to correlate in the mind as having once been human.
It was a War Crime. We attacked and killed troops withdrawing as agreed upon. Looting yes, they were also accompanied by citizens from other countries (mostly Palestinians) who had been indentured servants and slaves to Kuwaitis. How many civilians did we kill?
""Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic," said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. This one-sided carnage, this racist mass murder... occurred while White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater promised that the U.S. and its coalition partners would not attack Iraqi forces leaving Kuwait. This is surely one of the most heinous war crimes in contemporary history."
'The massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Common Article III, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who are out of combat. The point of contention involves the Bush administration's claim that the Iraqi troops were retreating to regroup and fight again. Such a claim is the only way that the massacre which occurred could be considered legal under international law. But in fact the claim is false and obviously so. The troops were withdrawing and removing themselves from combat under direct orders from Baghdad that the war was over and that Iraq had quit and would fully comply with UN resolutions. To attack the soldiers returning home under these circumstances is a war crime." http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-death.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/
'The incinerated man stared back at Jarecke through the camera’s viewfinder, his blackened arm reaching over the edge of the truck’s windshield. Jarecke recalls that he could “see clearly how precious life was to this guy, because he was fighting for it. He was fighting to save his life to the very end, till he was completely burned up. He was trying to get out of that truck.”' The body count never seems to have been determined, although the BBC puts it in the “thousands.”
How many really? Well the low count by the U.S. Army was 200-300. However there were over a thousand vehicles. Army says everybody ran out into the desert and escaped. The highest number claimed was 25,000. Back home, in America the liberals cried war crime and the conservatives said it was just part of war.
"Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the future Secretary of State, said the "shooting gallery" scenes carnage was the reason to end the Persian Gulf War hostilities after the Liberation of Kuwait campaign. Powell wrote later in his autobiography My American Journey that "the television coverage was starting to make it look as if we were engaged in slaughter for slaughter's sake.""
So the pictures stopped the American advance into Iraq. It left the war unfinished and the President's son who became President took it up again a decade latter.
So the father George H. Bush President of the United States is war criminal. In order to finish the work started by daddy President George W. Bush by collaborating with the British Prime Minster and then lying about his intent to Congress, committed treason. In 2016 George H's third son ran for President.
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