OBSCENELY ABSURD!
This is going to be short and sweet this last day in May. Just saw that U.S. troops killed two women who did not stop their car at a checkpoint. Apparently they were in a big hurry to get to a maternity hospital where one of the women was ready to give birth.
The presence of the United States in Iraq is not only absurd, but it is obscenely absurd. There is nothing else one can say about a situation that grows worse with each passing day. Democracy? Freedom? What do those words mean?
Pray, work, plead, implore, cajole, counsel, argue, for an end to this criminal war. President Bush is responsible — the man at the top of the chain of command — and he should be in prison, preferably in Leavenworth or Abu Ghraib. Geneva rules do not apply, he argues; ok, let’s impeach, convict, and imprison the president. Nothing less at this juncture will end the madness.
Have a good week.
2 Iraqi Women Killed by Coalition Troops
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer Wednesday, May 31, 2006
(05-31) 07:09 PDT BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) –
Two Iraqi women were shot to death north of Baghdad after coalition forces fired on a vehicle that failed to stop at an observation post, the U.S. military said Wednesday. Iraqi police and relatives said one of the women was about to give birth.
A car entered a clearly marked prohibited area near coalition troops at an observation post but failed to stop despite repeated visual and auditory warnings, the U.S. military said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.
“Shots were fired to disable the vehicle,” the statement said. “Coalition forces later received reports from Iraqi police that two women had died from gunshot wounds … and one of the females may have been pregnant.”
The statement said the incident was being investigated.
“The loss of life is regrettable and coalition forces go to great lengths to prevent them,” the military said.
The statement was issued after Iraqi police said a pregnant woman and her cousin were killed by American troops while driving to a maternity hospital in Samarra, a predominantly Sunni city 60 miles north of Baghdad.
The shooting deaths occurred in the wake of an investigation into allegations that U.S. Marines killed unarmed civilians in the western city of Haditha.
AP Television News footage showed the women’s bodies wrapped in sheets and lying on stretchers outside the Samarra General Hospital, while residents pointed to bullet holes on the windshield of a car and a pool of blood on the seat.
“I was with the victims, one of them was pregnant and about to give birth,” said a woman who did not give her name but said she was a relative of the victims.
Samarra was the site of a Feb. 22 bombing that heavily damaged a revered Shiite shrine, triggering a wave of reprisal attacks against Sunnis and dramatically escalating sectarian tensions, pushing the country to the brink of civil war.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2006/05/31/international/i054946D63.DTL
©2006 Associated Press
And more–the awful story at Haditha, which the Los Angeles Times editorializes as “the Iraqi My Lai”…
From the Los Angeles Times
EDITORIAL
What happened at the Iraqi My Lai?
The military needs to speed up its investigation into why civilians were killed last fall in Haditha.
May 31, 2006
IF IT IS ESTABLISHED THAT U.S. Marines wantonly killed as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians last November and then tried to cover up the massacre, expect commentators of the left, right and center to discern “larger lessons” from the affair. Actually, some pundits already have. They cite the alleged atrocity as one more reason to bring the troops home, or proof that the war in Iraq has dragged on too long, or that too few service members have been forced to shoulder its burdens, or that atrocities are inevitable in a conflict in which combatants are hard to distinguish from civilians.
First things first. If Marines “avenged” the killing of a comrade by terrorizing and killing innocent Iraqis, they disgraced their uniform and must be punished. The same is true of anyone higher in the chain of command who helped conceal what happened on Nov. 19, 2005, in Haditha in western Iraq. Villagers have told journalists that Marines incensed by the killing of a lance corporal went house to house and shot men, women and children at close range.
“They ranged from little babies to adult males and females,” Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones of Hanford, Calif., told a reporter for The Times. “I’ll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart.” Briones said he took digital photographs of the victims that he later erased, assuming that they had been downloaded.
Initially, a Marine spokesman described the dead Iraqis as victims of a roadside bomb or an exchange of gunfire. That story began to come unstuck in January, however, when Time magazine supplied military officials in Baghdad with contrary accounts of the incident from Iraqis. The carnage in Haditha is being investigated by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell and will be the subject of hearings by the House Armed Services Committee and possibly other congressional panels.
If the allegations of a massacre are corroborated — and a full disclosure is overdue — the debate about the wisdom of the U.S. mission in Iraq inevitably will become even more inflamed. But in Iraq, as in Vietnam, larger “explanations” for atrocities cannot be regarded as excuses. Even Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), the leading advocate in Congress for disengagement from Iraq, is adamant that service members must be held accountable.
“I understand the fog of war and the confusion of battle,” Murtha, a decorated combat veteran, said the other day. But no amount of fog, and no level of confusion, can obscure the fact that this is a nation of laws, and when the U.S. condones the deliberate murder of civilians it becomes, as Murtha said, no better than its enemy.
A later wire story…..
U.S. Troops Kill Pregnant Woman in Iraq
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer Wednesday, May 31, 2006 (05-31) 12:23 PDT BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) –
U.S. forces killed two Iraqi women — one of them about to give birth — when the troops shot at a car that failed to stop at an observation post in a city north of Baghdad, Iraqi officials and relatives said Wednesday. Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, 35, was being raced to the maternity hospital in Samarra by her brother when the shooting occurred Tuesday.
Jassim, the mother of two children, and her 57-year-old cousin, Saliha Mohammed Hassan, were killed by the U.S. forces, according to police Capt. Laith Mohammed and witnesses.
The U.S. military said coalition troops fired at a car after it entered a clearly marked prohibited area near an observation post but failed to stop despite repeated visual and auditory warnings.
“Shots were fired to disable the vehicle,” the military said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. “Coalition forces later received reports from Iraqi police that two women had died from gunshot wounds … and one of the females may have been pregnant.”
Jassim’s brother, who was wounded by broken glass, said he did not see any warnings as he sped his sister to the hospital. Her husband was waiting for her there.
“I was driving my car at full speed because I did not see any sign or warning from the Americans. It was not until they shot the two bullets that killed my sister and cousin that I stopped,” he said. “God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here. They have no regard for our lives.”
He said doctors tried but failed to save the baby after his sister was brought to the hospital.
The shooting deaths occurred in the wake of an investigation into allegations that U.S. Marines killed unarmed civilians in the western city of Haditha.
The U.S. military said the incident in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, was being investigated. The city is in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle and has in the past seen heavy insurgent activity.
“The loss of life is regrettable and coalition forces go to great lengths to prevent them,” the military said.
The women’s bodies were wrapped in sheets and lying on stretchers outside the Samarra General Hospital before being taken to the morgue, while residents pointed to bullet holes on the windshield of a car and a pool of blood on the seat.
Khalid Nisaif Jassim, the pregnant woman’s brother, said American forces had blocked off the side road only two weeks ago and news about the observation post had been slow to filter out to rural areas.
He said the killings, like those in Haditha, were examples of random killings faced by Iraqis every day.
The killings at Haditha, a city that has been plagued by insurgents, came after a bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated war veteran who has been briefed by military officials, has said Marines shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot others.
Military investigators have evidence that points toward unprovoked murders by Marines, a senior defense official said last week.
In his first public comments on the incident, President Bush said he was troubled by the allegations, and that, “If in fact laws were broken, there will be punishment.”
Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi told the BBC that the allegations have “created a feeling of great shock and sadness and I believe that if what is alleged is true — and I have no reason to believe it’s not — then I think something very drastic has to be done.”
“There must be a level of discipline imposed on the American troops and change of mentality which seems to think that Iraqi lives are expendable,” said Pachachi, a member of parliament.
If confirmed as unjustified killings, the episode could be the most serious case of criminal misconduct by U.S. troops during three years of combat in Iraq. Until now the most infamous occurrence was the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse involving Army soldiers, which came to light in April 2004 and which Bush said he considered to be the worst U.S. mistake of the entire war.
Once the military investigation is completed, perhaps in June, it will be up to a senior Marine commander in Iraq to decide whether to press charges of murder or other violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The incident has sparked two investigations — one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.
“People in Samarra are very angry with the Americans not only because of Haditha case but because the Americans kill people randomly specially recently,” Khalid Nisaif Jassim said.
©2006 Associated Press