Killing and maiming

Women and children were not spared

Among the grisly tales President Bush spun in Cleveland Monday was one of a child murdered by terrorists who then used his body as a booby trap bomb. Beyond just general skepticism, at this point I have no information leading me to believe the incidents in Tal Afar, Iraq the president spoke of are not true. I just have a problem with the example the US itself is setting in Iraq. In many, many cases, our own military and its allies seem to be no better than the kind of atrocities the president rightly decries.

On Friday, I noted the slaughter at the hands of US forces of at least 11 members of a family 16 kilometers north of Balad, Iraq. Thanks to Knight-Ridder, more information has become available:

The villagers were killed after American troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers' animals and blew up the house, the document said.

The whole document is reproduced in the Knight-Ridder story.

Highly organized death squads
The US is behaving as if it is powerless to stop brutality by Iranian-trained Badr corps militias. In fact, the US military is enabling and assisting them.

Christopher Allbritton writes for Time Magazine this week that following ``...the distinct and disturbing possibility that the U.S. is in fact training and arming one side in a conflict seeming to grow worse by the day,'' outrageous atrocities are being committed by the Badrs that are controlled by the ostensible US allies:

The most gruesome discovery was an 18-by-24-foot mass grave in the Shi’ite slum of Kamaliyah in east Baghdad containing the bodies of 29 men, clad only in their underwear with their hands bound and their mouths covered with tape. Local residents only found it because the ground was oozing blood. In all, 87 bodies were found over two days in Baghdad.

Marines in al Anbar
Also in Time Magazine comes this disturbing story by Aparisim Ghosh, chief international correspondent for Time magazine:

On the morning of Nov. 19, 2005, a roadside bomb struck a humvee carrying Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, on a road near Haditha, a restive town in western Iraq. The bomb killed Lance Corporal Miguel (T.J.) Terrazas, 20, from El Paso, Texas. The next day a Marine communique from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi reported that Terrazas and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the blast and that "gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire," prompting the Marines to return fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding one other...

But,

According to eyewitnesses and local officials interviewed over the past 10 weeks, the civilians who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside bomb but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children.

The latter seems just about right for Haditha, in light of the hard-to-uncover truth about the al Anbar offensives the US has conducted over the last several months. Back in October, I posted this from deep within a Washington Post story:

Mohammed Hadithi, the head of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society in Haditha, charged the U.S. troops violated the rights of residents during the assault. The Marines ``neglected the humanitarian standards,'' he said. ``If the American people come and see the army they are proud of doing that to unarmed women and children, they would have disowned the army because those they are looking for have escaped hours before they came and attacked.''

Looking back over that post, I see that the US ``rampage'' actually extended to the bridges and entire infrastructure of the region.

Speaking of Tal Afar, President Bush made a big point yesterday of how the ``terrorists and the insurgents'' controlled ``the only hospital in town''. Why? I think that the since US destroyed Falluja in November 2004, it has had to create rhetorical cover for the blatant war crime of attacking and destroying those very hospitals itself--not because terrorists use them, but rather because hospitals have been a source of truth about the heavy civilian casualties the US is causing.

We hurt 'em, we heal 'em
Finally, America has a generous, concerned spirit outside of its War Party. Here is an exchange with a father whose daughter was hit in the face with shrapnel in a US attack from a heartbreaking story on Democracy Now!:

Amy: Are you afraid to return to al Qaim now?

Translator for Khalid Hamdan Abd: It is kind of scary to go back, because even if you're just driving your car peacefully in the streets, you might be shot by the American troops for no reason. So it is not easy to live there...

...

Amy: How do you feel that it's an American bomb that killed your children, and an American ... doctors that're helping your surviving child heal?

Translator for Khalid Hamdan Abd: When he was first told by this Iraqi doctor that he's gonna, they're gonna try and get him out of the country for treatment, he thought it's going to be an Arab country, so it's okay, but when they told him it's America, he refused. They told him again for three times, he told them he doesn't want to go, until somebody told him the people--the population--are different from the Army, they're not the same. So, on that basis, he accepted to come here...

The whole extensive segment should be required viewing in the White House, the Congress, and on the mainstream media.

When President Bush talks about the ``killers’’ who attack innocents, painting America as needed in Iraq as some sort of chivalrous knight on a white horse against them, its a delusion of the worst order. Iraq clearly, most certainly, would be better off without us.