Thursday, March 16, 2006

Another Collateral Killing




Precise Collateral Damage .... المحتلون الأمريكان يـَفنون عائلة كاملة مع أطفالهم



This news item is now reported by the Associated Press:

"An unidentified relative mourns over the bodies of children, reportedly killed during a U.S. raid, as they arrive in a hospital in Tikrit, 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Wednesday, March 15, 2006. Eleven people, most of them women and children were killed when a house was bombed during a U.S. raid north of Baghdad early Wednesday, police and relatives said. The U.S. military acknowledged four deaths in the raid that they said netted an insurgent suspect (emphasis added) in the rural Isahaqi area, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of the capital. (AP Photo/Bassim Daham)
Iraqis Say U.S. Raid Kills 11 People March 15, 2006

This news item has a picture gallery of this massacre. Can the U.S. military count? or are they in their usual low level mode of 'counting' killed U.S. soldiers, instead of declaring the true figures of dead soldiers?
.
يـُعرض مع هذا الخبر بالإنكليزية عدة صور للضحايا الأطفال. يقول الجيش الأمريكي بأن عدد الضحايا هو أربعة فقط، بضمنهم "المشتبه" فيه. ألا تستطيع قوات الإحتلال الأمريكية العــدّ بالنظر المـُجرّد الى هذه الصور؟ أم أنها على سجيتها في "التقليل" من العدد المـُعلن لضحايا جنودها الذين يـُقتلون على أيدي المقاومة؟"ـ
.
The Iraqi version:

"Amer Fiadh, the Councillor of Al-Ishaqi (pronounced Al Is-haqi) District in Salah Al-Din province said that the American forces have executed eleven people belonging to one family, including a six-months old baby and four children who were less than eleven years old.
Fiadh further stated today that these people were executed in front of their home, after having their hands tied behind their back and summarily shot. After their execution, American helicopters then strafed the family's home levelling it to the ground."
The Councillor of Al-Ishaqi District claims that the American forces have executed eleven members of one family (In Arabic) March 15, 2006
.
ـ" قال عامر الفياض مدير ناحية الاسحاقى فى محافظة صلاح الدين العراقية ان القوات الامريكية اعدمت أحد عشر شخصا من عائلة واحدة من بينهم طفل عمره ستة اشهر واربعة اطفال لا تتجاوز اعمارهم 11 سنة.ـ
وقال الفياض فى تصريح اليوم ان الاشخاص اعدموا امام منزلهم بعد ان اوثقت القوات الامريكية ايديهم واطلقت النار عليهم مضيفا ان المروحيات الامريكية قصفت بيت العائلة بعد عملية الاعدام ودمرته تدميرا كاملا ."ـ
مدير ناحية الاسحاقي يقول ان القوات الامريكية اعدمت 11 شخصا من عائلة واحدة
ـ15 آذار، 2006





Iraqis Say U.S. Raid Kills 11 People

By STEVEN R. HURST, Associated Press WritersWed Mar 15, 6:30 PM ET

A U.S. raid north of the capital Wednesday killed 11 people — most of them women and children, said police and relatives of the victims. The American military confirmed the attack but said only four people died — a man, two women and a child.

Police Capt. Laith Mohammed said the attack near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, involved U.S. warplanes and armor that flattened a house in the village of Isahaqi.

An Associated Press reporter at the scene said the roof of the house had collapsed, three cars were destroyed and two cows were killed.

The 11 victims were wrapped in blankets and driven in three pickup trucks to the Tikrit General Hospital, about 45 miles to the north, relatives said.

AP photographs showed the bodies of two men, five children and four other covered figures arriving at the hospital accompanied by grief-stricken relatives. The victims were covered in dust with bits of rubble tangled in their hair.

The U.S. military said the target of the raid was a man suspected of supporting foreign fighters of the al-Qaida in Iraq terror network, and he was captured.

"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," said Tech. Sgt. Stacy Simon, a military spokeswoman. "Coalition forces returned fire utilizing both air and ground assets."

Riyadh Majid, who identified himself as the nephew of Faez Khalaf, the head of the household who was killed, told AP at the hospital that U.S. forces landed in helicopters and raided the home early Wednesday.

Khalaf's brother, Ahmed, said nine of the victims were family members who lived at the house and two were visitors.

"The dead family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children," he said. "The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death."

25 comments:

Bruno said...

This sort of thing happens so often, one gets kind of numbe after a while.

We know the routine:

US bombs 'insurgents'.

People find out they were civilians.

US denies they were civilians.

Pictures of dead children are shown.

US says that they were 'insurgent' children.

News agencies find out they had nothing to do with insurgents.

US says it bombed wrong house because of 'bad info' which was the fault of the 'insurgents'...

And all the while this charade continues, other people are being killed elsewhere. When will it stop?

Anonymous said...

Well goodness me, Truthteller, I don't know why you've posted this.
There was a "suspected" insurgent in the house, so it was perfectly in order for the US forces to destroy the house and everyone in it. Suspected is as good as guilty. Better safe than sorry.
(Same as you and your uncle being shot at. You both probably looked rather Arabic. Better safe than sorry.)
Anyway, according to the Army there were only 4 people killed, not 11, so that's ok. (It's not clear where the extra dead kids in the photos came from. And they would probably have grown up to be insurgents anyway. Better safe than sorry.)

Like I said before, chickenshit Army, I reckon.
Johninnz

Anonymous said...

Actually, just to rein in the criticism of the Army a bit, I think this guy makes a fair bit of sense (for an Australian.)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12323.htm

Excerpts:
"The conventional view is that a brilliantly successful invasion was followed by a hopelessly ill-planned and mismanaged occupation ... The failure in Iraq is not a failure of execution; it's a failure of conception. The occupation and political reconstruction of Iraq was not a good idea badly implemented. It was a bad idea that no amount of administrative skill, political savvy, cultural sensitivity or military firepower could have made work ... We can all be glad that Saddam no longer rules Iraq. But we all know that none of the leaders who conceived and drove the invasion would have done so had they been able to foresee how things stand in Iraq today ... These leaders misunderstood the costs and risks they were running in setting out to reshape Iraq ... This misconception was powered by a misunderstanding of the nature and limits of armed force. Armies are very good at fighting other armies, but they are of very limited use for anything else ... (Actually I disagree there, they're also good for disaster relief. But not when THEY are the disaster.) ... A force of 180,000 troops - and the expenditure of billions of dollars a month - gives the coalition very little influence over what happens in Iraq today, or over the shape of its future ... We had the power to destroy Saddam's regime, but not to build a new one. Only the Iraqis can do that. ... Only they can make the compromises, build the trust, contain their fears and curb their rage enough to generate the sense of shared interests necessary to make Iraq work as a democratic political entity. All we can do is watch."
In other words, the Army was given an impossible job, maybe it could have done it a lot better, but it probably still would have been impossible.
Not much consolation to that family in Al-Ishaqi, though.
Johninnz

Anonymous said...

"MOSUL - Four college students were shot dead by gunmen in Mosul 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said."

TT could you comment which group is killing secular students and professors?

Who is against democracy and secularism?

Which country wants Mahdi Army to take over the government by force? Which group receives weapons and money from across the borders?

Peter Attwood said...

What Mo Javad calls a mistake is called in American law "criminal negligence," acting with a wanton disregard for consequences. This had brought about the deaths of no less than 100,000 civilians by November 2004 according to the peer-reviewed study published by The Lancet - not including Fallujah that month. Those killed by death squads of the Badr Organization and others under American sponsorship and direction, in just the same way it was done in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, are in fact completely intentional victims of American state terrorism (applying the DOD definition of terrorism) - nothing accidental about it. The hundreds of thousands killed by embargo as deliberate American policy are also in no way accidental.

People who regard themselves as ubermenschen, qualified to dominate and coerce the lesser breeds, will bring forth the fruit of their beliefs, because as the proverb says, "As a man thinks in his heart, so is he." And that's why all who consider themselves the light of the world and the vanguard of progress, whether Nazis, Leninists, or American exceptionalists do the same deeds, and with the same fatuous denials and justifications.

Truth teller said...

mo javad

The only thing made me publish your nonsense, is the fact that I want my reader to realise how ignorant and ridiculous some warmongers are.

Truth teller said...

anon
"TT could you comment which group is killing secular students and professors?"

The only group which have the motive to kill Iraqis is Iraq enemies. I know who are Iraq enemies very well and hope you know them also.
They are those who encourage the chaos and anarchy, who saw the killers wandering in the streets and keep watching, are those who shoot innocent civilians on daily bases.......etc .. etc
Even if they didn't do it directly, they are who pay for it to be done.

Peter Attwood said...

It is worth pointing out that Iraqi academics assassinated in this way have been always outspoken opponents of the occupation. A year ago the United States stoutly denied a report in Newsweek that it was intending to do the "Salvador option," organizing and financing death squads to terrorize opponents of the American-sponsored regime through rape, murder, torture and disappearnaces - which as you'll remember the US denied doing at the time in El Salvador but acknowledges today.

Now here's a thought experiment. Put these questions together: who's getting killed, what did the US do in El Salvador and Nicaragua while denying it at the time, and why did they appoint John Negroponte, the overseer as American Ambassador to Honduras of those death squads, to be "ambassador" in Baghdad?

Now, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, based on these details, who do you suppose the criminals might be?

Anonymous said...

Follow-up:

03/16/06 - TIKRIT, Iraq, March 15 (Reuters) - Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house.

A senior Iraqi police officer said autopsies on the bodies, which included five children, showed each had been shot in the head. Community leaders said they were outraged at the killings and demanded an explanation from the U.S. military.

Television footage showed the bodies in the Tikrit morgue -- five children, two men and four women. Their wounds were not clear though one infant had a gaping head wound.

A freelance photographer later saw them being buried by weeping men in Ishaqi, the town 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad where the raid took place.

The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi early on Wednesday to capture a "foreign fighter facilitator for the al Qaeda in Iraq network".

"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.

"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."

Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned.

Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said U.S. forces had landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including the five children.

"After they left the house they blew it up," he said.

Another policeman, Colonel Farouq Hussein, said autopsies had been carried out at Tikrit hospital and found "all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head".

The bodies, their hands bound, had been dumped in one room before the house was destroyed, Hussein said. Police had found spent American-issue cartridges in the rubble.

"It's a clear and perfect crime without any doubt," he said.

Police in Salahaddin province, a heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the home region of Saddam Hussein, have frequently criticised U.S. military tactics in the area.

Police officers said the U.S. military had asked for a meeting with local tribal leaders. The Joint Co-ordination Centre in Tikrit which coordinates between U.S. and Iraqi security forces said later the meeting would happen on Friday.

Ishaqi's town administrator, Rasheed Shather, said the town was shocked: "Everyone went to the funeral. We want the Americans to give us an explanation for this horrible crime."

Photographs of the funeral showed men crying as five children, who all looked under the age of five, were wrapped in blankets and then lined up in a row. One man who described himself as a relative said one was just seven months old.

"They killed these innocent children. Are these considered terrorists? Is a seven-month-old child a terrorist?" he said angrily, speaking close to the remains of the house.

Comment:
Five years ago, despite Vietnam and My Lai, if you had told me that regular US troops could commit apparent atrocities like this, I would have laughed at you.
Now, I don't know who to believe.
But I'm beginning to think that there's more Truthtellers in Iraq than there are in the USA.
Johninnz

Anonymous said...

Truthteller--was the comment about 'usual low level mode of 'counting' killed U.S. soldiers, instead of declaring the true figures of dead soldiers?', yours? Do you have information about US killed being higher than is reported? How much higher to you think the true number is? Could you give us that source? If true, this would big big news and would help to end this war.

Karen C

Anonymous said...

Those clues are less damning then someone within a compound shooting a weapon at investigating soldiers. The US is not innocent of atrocities, but it usually takes both sides to instigate an incident such as this.

Peace unto you and yours.

Truth teller said...

Karen

"the comment about 'usual low level mode of 'counting' killed U.S. soldiers, instead of declaring the true figures of dead soldiers"

This comment is from an Iraqi blogger Free Iraq . He is an excellent writer and have very good political background, his blog is worth reading and so is the comment section.

Truth teller said...

Another follow-up:

Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said U.S. forces had landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including the five children.

"After they left the house they blew it up," he said.

Another policeman, Colonel Farouq Hussein, said autopsies had been carried out at Tikrit hospital and found "all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head".

The bodies, their hands bound, had been dumped in one room before the house was destroyed, Hussein said. Police had found spent American-issue cartridges in the rubble.

"It's a clear and perfect crime without any doubt," he said.

Police in Salahaddin province, a heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the home region of Saddam Hussein, have frequently criticised U.S. military tactics in the area.

Police officers said the U.S. military had asked for a meeting with local tribal leaders. The Joint Co-ordination Centre in Tikrit which coordinates between U.S. and Iraqi security forces said later the meeting would happen on Friday.

Ishaqi's town administrator, Rasheed Shather, said the town was shocked: "Everyone went to the funeral. We want the Americans to give us an explanation for this horrible crime."

Photographs of the funeral showed men crying as five children, who all looked under the age of five, were wrapped in blankets and then lined up in a row. One man who described himself as a relative said one was just seven months old.

"They killed these innocent children. Are these considered terrorists? Is a seven-month-old child a terrorist?" he said angrily, speaking close to the remains of the house.

Local teacher Faeq Nsaef was also outraged: ""An entire family was killed. It's a barbarian act."

Truth teller said...

The source of the above follow-up is Reuters AlertNet

Peter Attwood said...

The Lancet study was actually done by researchers at Johns Hopkins by interviewing people in selected neighborhoods in the same fashion that epidemiological studies are always done. Name any reputable medical researcher who has criticized the study - the purveyors of denial that you read don't count.

The majority of deaths in Iraq have been inflicted by bombing and artillery fire, not by ground forces. The massive use of cluster bombs in civilian areas, undisputed by anyone, with their bright colors that attract little children, demonstrates the contempt of the US military for those same children, apart from any other evidence.

The Badr Organization has been used by the Americans and their fighters have been integrated into the Iraqi forces trained and supported by the Americans. These and militias like them are who the Americans brought with them to Fallujah in order to sow discord between Shi'a and Sunni in order to divide and rule. Such militias, since they fight under American sponsorship with American advisers, are consequently American sponsored militias. They certainly have their own loyalties, and they could easily turn on their American sponsors if they attack Iran, just as Kim Young Sam warned the Americans the South Koreans would do if they attacked North Korea. But that doesn't mean they're fighting the Americans now or that the Americans don't sponsor them, as they do the South Korean army.

Division on sectarian lines was the policy of the Americans from the moment they appointed the "Governing Council" on those lines, as no one can deny.

Morgues have been under considerable pressure NOT to report casualties, precisely because the Americans and their Iraqi government wish to minimize the casualties as you do - in the same manner that the japanese today wish to minimize the casualties in the Nanking massacre. Moreover, many never get to the morgue, because Islam calls for burials to be prompt, and in many cases people have to be buried at home because they will be shot trying to take them elsewhere.

In fact, the 400,000 figure for Saddam Hussein is the more fictional. So far, mass graves have been unearthed connected to somewhat less than 10,000 victims of Saddam Hussein, a lot like the WMD. I have no doubt that Saddam Hussein killed lots more than have been found, for the same reasons the Americans have killed a lot more than can be accounted for in the morgues - mass murderers don't generally try hard to ensure that all the corpses are accounted for!

Undoubtedly Saddam Hussein stole a lot of money, but through oil smuggling. That didn't take away from the money openly spent to buy food under the program. Two directors resigned in outrage when they saw that its purpose was to cover up the genocide, rather than to prevent it. In an unguarded moment of candor, Madeleine Albright acknowledged with approval on "60 Minutes" the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children because of the embargo, back in 1996 - and the meter kept running.

The continued embargo was by no means supported by the rest of the world. They just couldn't get rid of it because of the US veto in the Security Council - and I'm not denying that the other Security Council governments really didn't care, just as no one cared about the Jews and no one cared about Rwanda. How often does anybody care about genocides enough to do anything about them, unless they can use them as a pretext to do evil on their own account?

The French paratrooper Pierre Leulliette, writing of his experience in Algeria, described you well as follows:

Despite strict orders, I escape to Algiers as often as I possibly can. I have been silent among jailers so long I feel myself becoming vile, and what is more serious, I feel that in my mind the scandal of all these crimes that make up our day-to-day war is daily losing a little of its virulence.

To civilians capable of talking calmly about the army - there aren't many, but they do exist even in Algiers in 1957 - I tell about what I see every day. They have always had a lofty idea of the greatness of France. They listen politely. But I sense their disbelief. They are thinking: "This isn't possible. We'd have known about it." Will they ever know about it? The German people, after the war, never stopped saying, and it was probably true: "We didn't know . . ." Have they ever really believed in the crimes of Dachau and of Auschwitz? Have they ever realized that not knowing is also a way of being guilty?

waldschrat said...

Truth is a precious commodity in this world, what little there is of it. I wish it sprang naturally from the earth like the grass and fell from the sky like rain, shone like the sun and the stars, surrounded us like the wind. It does not. What do you believe, Truth Teller? What do you doubt?

Truth teller said...

mo javad
"But the rest is nonsense made up for the media."

If you want to know the real nonsence? read your comment. It is nothing but a shit.

Truth teller said...

Karen C

Yesterday a bombed car exploded near an American military vehicle, eye witnesses said, all the passengers are either killed or deeply injured. This happened at the road to the "Sada & Ba'aweza" district near hay al Hadba in Mosul.
This news is never published in any local or US media.

Anonymous said...

Someone asked , when will it end ?

It won't end. Iran is next, and yes, the U.S. will be bombing them too. It's out of the control of us pawns. The U.S. will be killing people in the Middle East for the rest of our lives. - ezeen

Anonymous said...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12404.htm

Killing Women and Children: The “My Lai Phase” Of The Iraq War

By Mike Whitney

03/20/06 "ICH" -- -- What goes through George Bush’s mind when he sees the dead bodies of Iraqi women and children loaded on the back of a pickup truck like garbage?

Is there ever a flicker of remorse; a split-second when he fully grasps the magnitude of the horror he has created?

March 15 was another defining moment in America’s downward moral-spiral in Iraq. Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a wanton act of slaughter executed by American occupiers. Photos taken at the scene show the lifeless bodies of young children, barely old enough to walk, lying motionless in the back of a flatbed truck while their fathers moan inconsolably at their side.

What parent can look at these photographs and not be consumed with rage?

The US military openly admits it attacked the house in Ishaqi where the incident took place. Reuters reports that, “Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said US forces landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including five children.”

“After they left the house they blew it up”, he said. “The bodies, their hands bound, had been dumped in one room before the house was destroyed,” (policeman) Hussein said. Police had found spent American issue cartridges in the rubble.” (Reuters)

The autopsy report at the Tikrit hospital said, “All the victims had gunshot wounds to the head”.

Iraqi policeman Farouq Hussein noted, “It is a clear and perfect crime without any doubt”.

The evidence provided by Reuters suggests that we have entered the “My Lai phase” of the Iraq war, where the pretensions about democracy and liberation are stripped-away and replaced with the gratuitous butchery of women and children. The carnage in Ishaqi illustrates the growing recklessness and desperation of Washington’s failed crusade.

Military spokesman Major Tim O’ Keefe justified the attack saying they were searching for “a foreign fighter facilitator” for Al Qaida in Iraq. He added, “Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building. Coalition Forces returned fire utilizing both air and ground assets….Two women and one child were killed. The building was destroyed.”

In fact, 11 women and children were killed and there’s no evidence to verify that the house was being used as an Al Qaida safe-house.

The US military made similar claims after bombing raids in January and December when a total of 17 family members were killed.

The grim fact is that is that the lives of Iraqi women and children are of no real consequence to US officials. As General Tommy Franks boasted, “We don’t do body counts”. The victims of American aggression are simply dismissed as collateral damage undeserving of any further acknowledgement.

The story has received scant attention in the establishment media, which prefers to highlight the stumbling oratory of our Dear Leader as he reaffirms our commitment to western “pro-life” values.

In truth, George Bush is as responsible for the deaths of those children as if he had put a gun to their heads himself and shot them one by one.

At present, we have no way of knowing how frequently these attacks on civilians are taking place. The Pentagon strategy of removing independent journalists from the battlefield has created a news-vacuum that makes it impossible to know with confidence the extent of the casualties or the level of the devastation. The few incidents like this that find their way into the mainstream create a troubling picture of military adventurism and brutality that is no longer anchored to any identifiable moral principle or vision of resolution. It is simply violence randomly dispersed on a massive scale; traumatizing the Iraqi people and bringing the United States into greater disrepute.

There were no Al Qaida fighters in the home in Ishaqi. The attack was just another lethal blunder by a blinkered military fighting an invisible enemy.

“The killed family was not part of the resistance; they were women and children,” said Ahmed Khalaf. “The Americans promised us a better life, but we only get death.”

johninnz

Anonymous said...

BTW, set of 18 photos with above Informationclearinghouse article.

Anonymous said...

More follow-up:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12409.htm

03/20/06 " Seattle Times" -- -- BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi police have accused U.S. troops of executing 11 people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant, in the aftermath of a raid Wednesday on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The villagers were killed after U.S. 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.

Accusations that U.S. troops have killed civilians are commonplace in Iraq, though most are judged later to be unfounded or exaggerated.

A U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Tim Keefe, said that the U.S. military has no information to support the allegations and that he had not heard of them before.

"We're concerned to hear accusations like that, but it's also highly unlikely that they're true," he said. He added that U.S. forces "take every precaution to keep civilians out of harm's way. The loss of innocent life, especially children, is regrettable."

Navy investigators announced last week that they were looking into whether Marines intentionally killed 15 Iraqi civilians — four of them women and five of them children — during fighting in November.

Report is unusual

But the report of the recent killings in the Abu Sifa area of Ishaqi, eight miles north of the city of Balad, is unusual because it originated with Iraqi police and because Iraqi police were willing to attach their names to it.

The report was compiled by the Joint Coordination Center in Tikrit, a regional security center set up with U.S. military assistance. An Iraqi police colonel signed the report, which was based on communications from local police.

Brig. Gen. Issa al-Juboori, who heads the center, said his office assembled the report on Thursday and that it accurately reflects the direction of the current police investigation.

He also said he knows the officer heading the investigation. "He's a dedicated policeman, and a good cop," he said. "I trust him."

The case involves a U.S. raid conducted, according to the official U.S. account, in response to a tip that a member of al-Qaida in Iraq was at the house.

Neighbors agreed in interviews that the al-Qaida member was at the house. They said he was visiting the home's owner, a relative. The neighbors said the homeowner was a schoolteacher.

According to police, military and eyewitness accounts, U.S. forces approached the house at around 2:30 a.m. and a firefight ensued. By all accounts, in addition to exchanging gunfire with someone inside the house, U.S. troops were supported by helicopter gunships, which fired on the house.

But the accounts differ on what took place after the firefight.

According to the U.S. account, the house collapsed because of the heavy fire. When U.S. forces searched the rubble they found one man, the al-Qaida suspect, alive. He was arrested. They also found a dead man they believed to be connected to al-Qaida, two dead women and a dead child.

But the report filed by the Joint Coordination Center, which was based on a report filed by local police, said U.S. forces entered the house while it still was standing.

"The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men," the report said. "Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals."

The report identified the dead by name, giving their ages. The two men killed were 22 and 28. Of the women, one was 22, another was 23, a third was 30 and the fourth was 75. Two of the children were 5 years old, two were 3, and the fifth was 6 months old, the document said.

The report was signed by Col. Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf, who was described in the document as the assistant chief of the Joint Coordination Center.

A local police commander, Lt. Col. Farooq Hussain, interviewed by a Knight Ridder special correspondent in Ishaqi, said autopsies at the hospital in Tikrit "revealed that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed." Efforts to reach hospital spokesmen Sunday were unsuccessful.

Keefe, the U.S. military spokesman, said that he had seen photographs of the victims and had not seen handcuffs, which caused him to doubt the validity of the report.

Who to believe? What to believe?
These Iraqi policemen seem to be "standing up so the US forces can stand down." They sound like reasonably responsible men.
Not so sure about Major Keefe.
johninnz

Anonymous said...

Not sure either about the Marine massacre mentioned in this article above. See:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1174682-1,00.html

According to this Time aticle, "The probe concluded that the civilians were in fact killed by Marines and not by an insurgent's bomb and that no insurgents appeared to be in the first two houses raided by the Marines. The probe found, however, that the deaths were the result of "collateral damage" rather than malicious intent by the Marines, investigators say."
When a grown man with a gun calmly and deliberately shoots women and children, that's not "malicious intent."
That's just being a US Marine.
"From the halls of Montezuma ..."

Johninnz

Bruno said...

[mo javad] “Why do some women take hostage their own children for the purpose of their nefarious anti-democracy agendas and are willing to sacrifice them?”

The classic “I hate democracy so I’ll blow myself up” tripe that gets recycled straight from the offal bin as ‘commentary’. The stupidity of this comment speaks for itself; no need to add to it.

[mo javad] “Of the 10,000 innocent civilians dead in the past 12 months, not more than 100 can be attributed to US military actions.”

You have any sources for this, or is this a case of the classic thumb-suck statistic?

[mo javad] “Peter Atwood - The Lancet study WAS NOT PEER reviewed.”

Really? You know this for a FACT? Perhaps you might mention this to Gilbert Burnham, then:


The New Republic Online – 14 Dec 2004 – Interview with G. Burnham

“Earlier today I spoke with Gilbert Burnham, co-author of the Johns Hopkins-Columbia-Mustansiriya [Lancet-published] study on Iraqi civilian casualties […]

IRAQ'D: Was this study peer reviewed?

BURNHAM: Oh, my goodness, was it ever. [Laughs] First off, nothing, nothing ever gets in the Lancet without a vigorous peer review. It's heavily peer-reviewed. And in the case of this article, it went through the full editorial review board several times and they sent it out for multiple reviews. I've written a few papers for the Lancet over the years and I've never had anything like the scrutiny that this one had. “ //end excerpt



[mo javad] “So a bunch of ignorants went and averegad [sic] the number, assuming it was a normal distribution - which it was not.”

Heh, so you are quite the statistician, then. Perhaps your great skills could be of use to the Economist, who is under a different impression to you as to what conclusions can be drawn from the Lancet study:


The Iraqi war - Counting the casualties
Nov 4th 2004 - From The Economist print edition

“It does not, however, mean, as some commentators have argued in response to this study, that figures of 8,000 or 194,000 are as likely as one of 98,000. Quite the contrary. The farther one goes from 98,000, the less likely the figure is.”

A statistical result which is most likely at the centre of the curve, and less likely the further one goes to the extremes? Crumbs, sounds like a bell curve to me. But hey, you could be right and the Economist could be wrong … GUFFAW!


[mo javad] “No death certificates was requested in this study.”

That’s not what Mr. Burnham had to say … and HE WAS THERE. You really are not too well acquainted with this study, are you?

The New Republic Online – 14 Dec 2004 – Interview with G. Burnham

BURNHAM : For a certain percentage of households, we said, "By the way, just before we leave, can we see a death certificate?" You don't want to ask that up front; we asked that at the end. Amazingly, four out of five households could produce death certificates.

IRAQ'D: Why did you only ask a certain percentage of them for death certificates?

BURNHAM: We originally planned to do all of them, but our Iraqi colleagues said, "Culturally this will be a bit of a problem. We can see some really hostile reactions from the family because suddenly we don't believe them and we want to see the evidence." So we reached a compromise and said we'll just do this for a certain number of them as a validity check. It turned out that in the end asking for death certificates didn't cause that much trouble than we anticipated. However, doing any kind of thing in the current environment in Iraq, you want to err on the side of caution.” //end excerpt

Bruno said...

[mo javad] “How come the morgues and hospitals have NOT reported 100,000 killed?”

Quite simply, not all the dead may transit through the morgues and hospitals. Iraq, you may have noticed, is a country in the process of breakdown thanks to this invasion. Secondly, news of the Iraqi death toll is largely suppressed by your wonderful ‘coalition’ aka USA and it’s collaborators. Is it only me that remembers US forces denouncing hospitals as “centres for enemy propaganda”? Given that this is the base attitude of the occupation forces, there is little wonder that news of Iraqi casualties is suppressed.


[mo javad] “Besides, these Iraqis are 80% killed by Badr army and Mahdi army and al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents.”

The real question here is whether you are just ignorant or simply a liar. Here are some reality-based statistics, which show your statement for the bilge it is:

New Calls for Coalition Forces to Count Iraqi Casualties
Abid Aslam - OneWorld US - Jul. 29, 2005

"The IBC, in its 28-page dossier, said nearly half the deaths in the two years through March 2005 were in Baghdad, where one-fifth of Iraq's 25 million people live. U.S.-led forces killed nearly 37 percent of the total, it said.
[...]
Criminals, accounting for 36 percent of civilian deaths, came a close second to U.S.-led forces. Insurgents, however, accounted for a surprisingly small 9.5 percent. ''Unknown agents'' were responsible for 11 percent of deaths, according to IBC. //end excerpt


[mo javad] “The sanctions imposed on Saddam was by the United Nations and backed by almost every country and all the people of the world.”

The entire purpose of the sanctions was to provide some means of enforcing arms control. The US, however, as a veto-wielding member of the review process, turned the sanctions into a tool for punishing the Iraqi people by denying the import of even basic goods such as children’s pencils. Why do you think the UN overseers of the process repeatedly spoke out against it? Furthermore, the US stated that it was shifting the goalposts for the removal of sanctions; it stated that no longer would it be satisfied with the original arms control requirements, but only the removal of Saddam Hussein would cause it to remove sanctions. The entire process began with legitimate concerns and was mutated by the US into a monster. The blood of those children is on YOUR hands.

Now, consider yourself chastised and dismissed, javad.