Democracy Now! April 7, 2003

9:00-9:01 Billboard 9:01-9:10 Headlines 9:10-9:11 One Minute Music Break 9:15-9:25: The International Committee of the Red Cross said yesterday the number of casualties in Baghdad is so high that hospitals have stopped counting. ICRC staff in the capital said that during the fiercest fighting, hospitals were receiving around 100 casualties per hour. The ICRC also said hospitals urgently need more water supplies. Given the general power outage in Baghdad, most hospitals and water installations are now being powered by backup generators. In town after town in the Iraq war zone, hospitals trying to cope with hundreds of wounded are cut off from medical resupply, aid officials reported Sunday. An aid convoy destined for one overwhelmed hospital south of Baghdad was canceled because of U.S. military operations. * Nada Doumani, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross. 9:20-9:21 One Minute Music Break 9:25-9:53 Roundtable on Iraq: Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch, Michael Albert of Z Magazine and AFP reporter Nayla Razzouk in Baghdad discuss the first 20 days of the invasion of Iraq. A US F-16 warplane yesterday bombed a Kurdish convoy travelling with US special forces in Northern Iraq, killing at least 18 people. The bomb fell only meters from where the BBC world affairs editor John Simpson was standing He said it was a "scene from hell." Bodies burned around him; pieces of bodies were strewn around; vehicles were on fire. The BBC's translator, Kamran Abdurazaq Mohammed, was killed, and the BBC s driver lost a leg. Witness said at least five of the vehicles in the convoy had blaze-orange markings on their roofs meant to warn US pilots, according to the New York Times. The three white BBC vehicles had the letters TV spelled out on their hoods. The commander of the special forces of the peshmerga Kurdish fighters, Wajih Barzani, was critically injured. He is the brother of Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic party. Reporting nearby was Patrick Cockburn, reporter of the Independent of London and brother of Counterpunch s Alexander Cockburn, one of our guests today on a roundtable of magazine editors. We are also joined by Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Michael Albert of Z Magazine. * Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, www.thenation.com * Alexander Cockburn, editor of the journal Counterpunch and website Counterpunch.org, www.counterpunch.org * Michael Albert, founder and staff member of Z Magazine, www.zmag.org * Nayla Razzouk, AFP reporter in Baghdad 9:40-9:41 One Minute Music Break 9:41-9:58 Roundtable Cont d 9:58-9:59 Outro and Credits Democracy Now! is produced by Kris Abrams, Mike Burke, Angie Karran, Ana Nogueira and Elizabeth Press. Mike Di Filippo is our music maestro and engineer.