BuzzFlash Reviews

February 14, 2006

Caught in the Crossfire: The Untold Story of Falluja (DVD)

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This is a short, devastating documentary by an American who risked his life, along with those of his Iraqi crew, to document the Dresden-like devastation that the Bush Administration brought to the Iraqi City of Falluja.

Mark Manning, a California-based camera man who was primarily responsible for "Caught in the Crossfire," provides a haunting, devastating 18-minute record of how the city of Falluja and its residents suffered the fate of Guernica.

After the second U.S. military siege of Falluja, Manning -- at great risk to himself -- returned to the city with some of the refugees who had fled. He and his Iraqi colleagues recorded these images of a lunar urban landscape caused by U.S. bombing and gunfire that appears indiscriminate. Whatever "insurgents" -- and whichever of the many groups fighting the U.S. in Iraq -- may have been there, the clear goal of the attack on Falluja was to decimate a city as an example that the Bush Administration has no scruples about killing anyone who happens to be in its way in Iraq.

With appropriately lamenting music, Manning shows footage that the American networks are too obsequious to show or too lacking in personal courage to pursue.

A few months back, talk of Manning's short documentary buzzed around the net. Now, you can watch it yourself, along with some other short pieces on the DVD.

It is profoundly troubling and disturbing to know that this sort of "scorched earth" policy in which any Iraqi death is described as that of an insurgent is carried out in our nation's name. How then is a dead toddler killed by a bomb or machine gun fire counted as an "insurgent"? In the same way that children were included in Viet Cong death counts by the U.S. military in the ill-conceived, ill-fated war.

Manning writes of this shocking, short compilation of actual Falluja footage: "Falluja, an ancient city comparable to the size of Cincinnati, Ohio, has been largely destroyed by the November 2004 military action called Operation Phantom Fury. According to conservative estimates, there were 250,000 civilians living in the city of Falluja who were forced to leave their homes during the fighting, most without being given a place to go. The Pentagon has stated that up to 20% of the civilians of Falluja were left in the city during the fighting, yet there are no accounts of what happened to these people or how many survived. To this date, the majority of the city is in rubble; very little infrastructure has survived, and almost no aid is getting within the city walls.

"The American attack on Falluja, and the subsequent costs to the people there, has been a humanitarian, social, moral and ethical disaster; yet the American government and media, and in turn the American public, has largely ignored the plight of the innocent victims."

One of the most astonishing aspects of this amazing footage is that it took a former deep sea diver underwater cameraman to make it. The billions of dollars spent by news corporations weren't interested in telling us this story.

That is the tragedy of Falluja compounded.

The people of Iraq -- all of them we whom we were supposed to liberate, are now on Bush's target list -- because it's long been a war to use as a domestic political cudgel of fear, the deaths and injuries of the civilians of Iraq be damned.

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