 One of their demands was that the Al Jazeera camera crew leave the city. So on April 9th, hearing about these atrocities, I had the chance to go into the city. There was an Iraqi NGO in Baghdad that had arranged for a bus carrying humanitarian supplies. And me and a British woman named Joe Wilding and David Martinez, an American independent filmmaker, and a few other folks decided to go into the city on this bus because we were just carrying in literally, we had a couple of stacks of blankets and then boxes of some basic antibiotics, things like gauze and rubber gloves. And we basically flew a white flag out the window and drove the bus into the city. And we chose April 9th because according to the U.S. military, and of course then repeated by a complicit corporate media, most of the corporate media, April 9th was a ceasefire because this truce negotiation was ongoing. But when we went into the city, we were watching, I saw with my own eyes, F-16s bombing parts of the city, helicopters strafing other parts. And when we got into the clinic in the middle of the city, that's essentially the context for this next bit that I'd like to read. We rolled toward the one small clinic where we were to deliver our medical supplies. The small clinic was managed by Maki Al-Nazal, who was hired just four days ago. He was not a doctor. The other makeshift clinic in Fallujah was in a mechanics garage. He had barely slept in the past week, nor had any of the doctors at the small clinic. Originally, the clinic had just three doctors, but since the U.S. military bombed one of the hospitals and were currently sniping at people as they attempted to enter or exit the main hospital, effectively there were only these two small clinics treating the entire city of 350,000 people. The boxes of medical supplies we brought into the clinic were torn open immediately by the desperate doctors. A woman entered, slapping her chest in face, and wailing as her husband carried in the dying body of her little boy. Blood was trickling off one of his arms, which dangled out of his father's arms. Thus began my witnessing of an endless stream of women and children who had been shot by U.S. soldiers and were now being raced into the dirty clinic. The cars speeding over the curb out front, and weeping family members carrying in their wounded. One 18-year-old girl had been shot through the neck. She was making breathy, gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amid her muffled moaning. Lies dodged the working hands of doctors to return to the patches of her vomit that stained her black abiot. Her younger brother, a small child of ten with a gunshot wound in his head from a marine sniper, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life while family members cried behind me. The Americans cut our electricity days ago so we cannot vacuum the vomit from his throat, a furious doctor tells me. They were both loaded into an ambulance and rushed toward Baghdad, only to die in route. Another small child lay on a blood-spattered bed also shot by a sniper. The boy's grandmother lay nearby, shot as she was attempting to carry children from their home and flee the city. She lay on a bed dying and still clutching a bloody white surrender flag. Hundreds of families were trapped in their homes, terrorized by U.S. snipers shooting from rooftops and the minarets of Maas whenever they saw someone move past the window. Blood bags were being kept in a food refrigerator, warmed under running water before it being given to patients. There were no anesthetics. The lights went out as the generator ran dry of fuel so the doctors who had been working for days on end worked by light provided by men holding up cigarette lighters or flashlights as the sun set. Needless to say, there was no air conditioning inside the steaming clinic. One victim of the U.S. military aggression after another was brought in to the clinic, nearly all of them women and children, carried by weeping family members. Those who had not been hit by bombs from warplanes had been shot by U.S. snipers. The one functioning ambulance left at this clinic sat outside with bullet holes in the sides and a small group of shots right on the driver's side of the windshield. The driver, his head bandaged from being grazed by the bullet of the sniper, refused to go collect any more of the dead and wounded. Standing near the ambulance in frustration, Maki told us they shot the ambulance and they shot the driver after they checked his car, inspected his car and knew that he was carrying nothing. Then they shot and then they shot the ambulance. Now I have no ambulance to evacuate more than 20 wounded people. I don't know who is doing this and why he is doing this. This is terrible. This has never happened before and I don't know who to call because it seems that nobody is listening. The stream of patients slid to a sporadic influx this night fell. Maki sat with me as we shared cigarettes in a small office in the rear of the clinic. For all my life I believed in American democracy. He told me with an exhausted voice. For 47 years I had accepted the illusion of Europe and the United States being good for the world, the carriers of democracy and freedom. Now I see that it took me 47 years to wake up to the horrible truth. They are not here to bring anything like democracy or freedom. Now I see it has all been lies. The Americans don't give a damn about democracy or human rights. They are worse than even sat down. I asked him if he minded if I quoted him with his name. What are they going to do to me that they haven't already done here? He said. Now I'd like to talk briefly about the aftermath and I touched earlier of what happened after that. The Americans failed to take the city as that siege continued. 736 people were killed. 60% of them civilians according to doctors at Fallujah General. And that set the stage for the November siege which destroyed 70% of the city. 5,000 people were killed. The vast majority of those civilians as well. And of course illegal weapons like white phosphorus incendiary weapons and cluster bombs were used heavily during the siege. To this day the US military maintains a security cordon around the city, an Israeli style security cordon where they're using file metrics, things like retina scans and fingerprinting people with all 10 fingerprints giving them a barcode to establish that they're residents in the city and severely restricting movement in and out of the city. And that's the situation today. 80% of employment in Fallujah. Entire neighborhoods remain to this day since the November 04 siege without water and electricity. It's basically a ghost town. And there's been a vehicle ban either total or partial vehicle ban in Fallujah since this last May. And that continues to this day. I have an Iraqi colleague that I'm working with in Depress Service for he's sending me information and he's based in Fallujah today. So we're still getting updated information on that. I want to talk briefly about going back to why the war happened and basically what is generating this and what's perpetuating the occupation. When we have people like Abizade coming out and talking about we may well be another 50 years in the Middle East and the leading three so-called Democratic presidential candidates in the United States, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, all three of them theoretically opposed to the war by their party affiliation. That's kind of a joke. I have all three already come out and taken the idea of discussing immediate unconditional withdrawal of all occupation forces from the country. They've taken it off the table until after their first term and one of them comes into power. So they won't even talk about it until 2013. So why is this? I want to read another short bit from the book that I think illustrates it as good as anything and on this week there are countless topics we could discuss but I want to talk about Halliburton and the brief context I'll give for this is it was in December 2003 and again so we're talking seven months into the occupation not long and already we have gas crises that are exacerbated by lack of electricity because there was no reconstruction happening to the benefit of the Iraqis. There was a lot of reconstruction on bases, military bases, but there was no electrical infrastructure, water, medical, nothing like this happening. So one reason a gas crisis is so critical in Iraq when you don't have electricity and then you're buying gasoline power generators and if you run a van or a light at night or maybe a refrigerator to store food it makes living a bit more complicated and difficult. So that's why particularly in Iraq where gasoline, you know, you could say a lot of bad things about Saddam Hussein but one thing you can't ever be critical of was that there was always plenty of gasoline and it was always extremely cheap but not so under the occupation so that's where the next couple of pages I'd like to read and it's just me and my interpreter at the time we were walking back to our hotel we passed a small decrepit petrol station excuse me with two lines of cars stretching as far as we could see waiting for gas there was a separate line for black marketeers who were lined up with jerry cans and plastic jugs the black market was burgeoning those who could afford the extra costs were less willing to wait in the ever-lengthening lines as the gas crazed the source the black marketeers