From uucp Thu Mar 4 11:49 EST 1993 >From jad Thu Mar 4 11:36 EST 1993 remote from ckuxb.att.com From: jad@ckuxb.att.com Date: Thu, 4 Mar 93 11:36 EST To: jad@hopper.acs.virginia.edu Received: from ckuxb.att.com by hopper.acs.virginia.edu.ACS.Virginia.EDU; Thu, 4 Mar 1993 11:49 EST Content-Type: text Content-Length: 6566 Status: OR Article 5474 of alt.desert-storm: Xref: cbnewsl alt.desert-storm:5474 talk.politics.mideast:26518 talk.politics.misc:45600 misc.headlines:19190 soc.rights.human:4840 alt.activism:10192 Newsgroups: alt.desert-storm,talk.politics.mideast,talk.politics.misc,misc.headlines,soc.rights.human,alt.activism Path: cbnewsl!jad From: jad@cbnewsl.att.com (john.a.dinardo) Subj: CARNAGE IN IRAQ: Analogue From Eyewitness Accounts of Beirut Blitzkrieg Part III -- Crispy Critters Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Distribution: na Date: Wed, 6 Feb 91 17:37:13 GMT Message-ID: <1991Feb6.173713.14079@cbnewsl.att.com> Followup-To: any except alt.activism Keywords: See what's being deducted from your salary. Lines: 69 The following eyewitness testimony from the past paints a vivid portrait of the annihilation that is now being inflicted upon a civilian populace -- men, women, children, old people: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * DR. TERJE LUND, Physician, Norway ----------------------------------- I WAS ASTONISHED TO SEE THE PRECISION WITH WHICH THE ISRAELI AIR ROCKETS HAD HIT CELLARS AND SHELTERS UNDER HIGH BUILDINGS WITHOUT HITTING THE BUILDINGS. ------------------------------------------------------------------ I am going to concentrate on the item of bomb shelters since the time schedule is pressing. I am referring mainly to the heavy bombing on 12 August, the last day with heavy air raids which lasted from 6 o'clock in the morning until 7 o'clock in the evening. The aeroplanes were supported by artillery as we have heard before. All parts of the town were hit and, due to the heavy bombardment, no transport of wounded people was possible in the areas. So we did not receive many patients until 6 o'clock in the evening. Then we got a message that we should receive 40 burnt patients from a shelter which was hit. I was not at the emergency entrance according to our plan for catastrophe situations. I was on my part of the ward with special care for the critically ill patients and I was told by those who were in the entrance that we received about 30 patients in 15 minutes. I saw that day only the patients who came to my ward and my special responsibility was to take care of six critically ill burnt patients and two patients with serious head injuries. Among the burnt patients were a woman of 20 years old, a boy, who was her brother aged 12, and three ladies between 50 and 60 years old. These persons had burns of between 30 and 60 percent of the skin surface, second degree burns. In addition to these patients we received many with less serious injuries. I mean crush injuries, from small stones hitting them. All these patients were civilians. They all came from the same shelter. First let me describe the kinds of burns. They were special kinds of burns I had not seen before this war. As I said, they were second degree burns. That means that the skin makes big blisters and the outer layer of skin loosens from the body. For instance, on some of the patients, you could pull off the skin of the fingers with the nails on it -- just like a glove. All the areas which had been bare, that is, not covered with several layers of clothes, were burnt. The hair was still on their heads, but it changed into a fragile material which could be crushed when it was touched; it went into little pieces. At that time, it was not possible to say what was the cause of these burns, but we heard that they had all stayed in a shelter which was hit by three or four rockets from aeroplanes. When the cease-fire was stable a few days later, I went out with other medical personnel to see this specific shelter, to find out the situation, and on the way there we also stopped at other places. I was astonished to see the precision with which the Israeli air rockets had hit cellars and shelters under high buildings without hitting the buildings. I saw at least seven examples of this which was a hole, let us say two metres away from where the wall or building goes down to the ground, through which the rockets had gone down into the cellars and blown up the contents, whatever they were. In this specific case, with all these patients mentioned above, there were between eighty and one hundred and twenty civilians in the shelter which was hit by three or four rockets. These numbers are according to the French anaesthetist who was working in the medical first-aid station and who first received these patients. In one street I saw three high blocks with exactly similar rocket holes going down into the basements. Akka Hospital must, I think, have been hit by a similar kind of rocket a few weeks earlier, which had penetrated into the basement and into the surgical ward. I do not know if the shelter from which we received all those patients was constructed as a shelter or as an underground parking lot, but it was placed between two high buidings and was used by a lot of civilians. There were no military persons in this shelter at all according to those who received patients from the shelter. According to the French anaesthetist, 56 persons were taken out alive from these ruins. When I arrived there, I could tell from the smell that there were certainly still corpses buried under the concrete. They did not have the machines to dig them out at that time. The explanation why all these people had these kinds of burns was that they had been located in a part of the shelter which did not collapse. It was under one of the high blocks. The walls and the roof were black and my conclusion, after seeing this and after discussing it with people who are more experienced with weapons than I, was that it must have been a thermal flash, a special very high heat generated during the explosion from one or several of the rockets. So that the people who were staying in here were not hit by concrete or shrapnel, but were heated for a short second to such a point that they later died. Five of these six patients died after four days. In addition to those, we had old people with head injuries whose skulls had to be operated on immediately. We were working with those people very concentratedly for some days. My conclusion is that from the precision with which I have seen the basements hit, I find it very hard to believe that this was a coincidence. It is obvious that we have here very advanced weapons which are able to hit these kinds of targets, but I am not a military expert. I do not know how this functions, but it was said to be rockets.