Massacres are inevitable with AG who says anything short of death or major organ failure isn't torture, only a handful are slapped on the wrist for Abu Ghraib or Afghan prisoner killings, and soldiers blast unknown cars on the "principle" that it might be a terrorist. Almost every time troops riddled a car of innocents, it was a war crime. When you hear one of the Canada deserters say, "Hey, I'm a hero- I did crazy stuff over there... but they wanted me to shoot women and children,", he is talking about these roadside ambushes. One reporter said US soldiers were hiding invisibly by the road while they were shooting up their car. (below)
HIGHWAYMEN SOLDIERS + TRIAL BY FIRE
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An further examples of the moral corrosiveness of Iraq War madness, our soldiers are hiding in the bushes and blasting random cars. Think these guys may cause problems when they come back and become cops (or airmarshalls)?
From Nov 27 Hartford Courant interview of NPR's superb Anne Garrels:
"On election day there will be no traffic between provinces ... [and] there will be no traffic in the city itself. ... If you're moving around by car, it's too dangerous. I got shot at last time."
Q: Who shot at you?
Americans and Iraqis, in January. It was a joint checkpoint, except that they were hiding in the bushes and I couldn't see the checkpoint. It was the day before the elections, and traffic actually that day was allowed. This is the sort of thing we face all the time. There are supposed to be checkpoints, but there was no visible checkpoint, they were hiding in the bushes."
Q: How would you know to stop?
"You don't, until you're shot."
Q: Did they shoot at every car that drove by?
"They said they had orders to shoot every car that went by. Now, we survived that episode, and I went on to the next checkpoint and there was an extremely good captain there, and I explained to him what had just happened. He got on the radio, because these were not the orders, it was just complete chaos on the streets. He was very good and actually helped me negotiate several checkpoints."
If you run a "checkpoint" that people can't see, shooting and killing innocent people without warning from cover, aren't you .. ah... a terrorist ??
I do have much sympathy for the incredible strain that soldiers must be under with the specter of instant mutilation and death from IED's, constant hatred and risk of ambush from the populace. And they aren't even ever allowed to get drunk and blow off some steam. We will be paying for this war in shattered psychis for the next 25 years. Massacres happen in any and every guerilla war, but the Iraq War has almost been managed to create them, with soldiers not even taught how to say, STOP, GET OUT, or HANDS UP in Arabic.
The VICTIM and the KILLER
Salon has an agonizing Rashomon-ish look at the (site-pass allows several hours of viewing after watching a 20 second ad) killing of Knight Ridder reporter/Iraqi doctor Yasser Salihee by an American sniper as he drove around another car before an unblockaded American checkpoint. Incredibly, reporter Phillip Robertson, a close friend of Salihee, who was the brother of Robertson's interpreter, managed to surreptitiously be embedded with the same unit and track down and interview the sniper who killed him.
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