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Us shooting 'Liberated' civilians in Baghdad national |
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news report
 Friday April 11, 2003 09:36 by James McKenna jimmymac61 at hotmail dot com
 Nervous US soldiers shot at a car that got too close to their checkpoint: inside the car, another dead man who had been rushing his wife, who had been shot in the head , to hospital. Another car with a badly hurt woman on the back seat, whose blood ran onto the road turned around and sought an alternatine route to hospital
I saw TV pictures of terrified Iraqis in the Palestine hotel, where the day before the US had murdered two journalists. Women cried and little girls held thier hands in the air out of fear of being shot. They were delerious with fear and the rent-a-mob outside danced on for the cameras. RTE didn't focus on this or the looted hospitals and homes but chose to focus on a small band of US thugs waving American flags in Tahrir Sq and outside Trinity college. When will the pro-war people admit they got it wrong ? This is not victory or liberation, or do they think it is? We know that refuelling US war planes in Shannon makes us complicit in this series of war-crimes but a good question is, at what stage does a strongly biased and unfair media coverage of this make the media also responsible for war crimes? If RTE had reported the invasion of Poland as a "liberation" , as the German Nazi media did, how would we feel about them? Would the Director General and news editors have been brought to the Nuremburg Trials? We can always claim ignorance or that we were misinformed but at some stage I'm sure a war crimes tribunal will look into how knowingly media serives co-operated with the dissemination of black propaganda .
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4In past wars often those who collaborated and wish to distance themselves from the outgoing regieme protest the loudest and most visibly. This certainly happened in East Germany and Romania and helped many people survive the immediate social upheaval.
A good example of this is the tribal chief being apparently used by the British in Basra. How can this individual have remained in a position of any authority if he did not collaborate with the regieme?
Personally I take all of these staged "protests/celebrations" with a large grain of salt. I think most ordinary Iraqis will be using their newfound freedom to find food and water, not hanging around in public places for photo opportunities.
From Robert Fisk
"And already America's army of "liberation" is beginning to seem an army of occupation. I watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a motorway bridge at Daura yesterday morning, each man ordered by US soldiers to raise his shirt and lower his trousers ? in front of other civilians, including women ? to prove they were not suicide bombers.
After a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American Marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt ? then shot and killed a man who had walked on to his balcony to discover the source of the firing. Within minutes, the sniper also shot dead the driver of another car and wounded two more passengers in that vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was present when the killings took place."
BBC24 reporting two more children shot by US marines in Najaraf
--- The Americans looked down the street from the roof and saw an Iraqi man sprinting for cover, an RPG in his arms. RPGs are devastating in urban fighting and much dreaded. The Americans opened fire and cut him down. The enemy soldier lay dead in the street.
Then, darting out from an alley, came two boys, soldiers with Boggs recounted later. They were no older than 10.
"I got my gun up. I had my sights on it," Boggs said. His machine gun is an especially devastating tool. It spits out 600 rounds a minute. At that range, a few hundred feet, he knew he wouldn't miss. Boggs had his finger on the trigger.
"I didn't shoot. I didn't shoot," he said.
Then one child reached down and grabbed the rocket-propelled grenade.
"That's when I took him out," Boggs said. "I laid down quite a few bursts."
When the smoke cleared, both small boys lay in the street, clearly dead. ----
there was a much better description on associated press, but i can't find it again.
"I think they thought we wouldn't shoot kids. But we showed them we don't care. We are going to do what we have to do to stay alive and keep ourselves safe."
Boggs, a softly spoken 21-year-old former hunting guide from Alaska, says he knew when he joined the army 18 months ago he might someday have to make a decision like that.
He hoped it would never come and, although he has no regrets about opening fire, it is clear he'd rather it wasn't a child he killed.
"I did what I had to do. I don't have a big problem with it but anyone who shoots a little kid has to feel something," he said.
Many are innocent civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time and military officers concede that some have may have been killed in artillery or mortar fire, or shot down by soldiers whose judgment is impaired in the "fog of war".