The Independent claims to have proof that the US military bombed a wedding and not a “smuggler safe house on a rat line:”
Fresh allegations of American abuse of prisoners continue to appall the world. But now ‘The Independent on Sunday’ has uncovered proof of US troops deliberately and indiscriminately shooting civilians. Here we examine new evidence that suggests the lawlessness in the American military was never confined to the prison camps and torture rooms but extended to the streets and homes of Iraq.
Amid the welter of ugly pictures from Iraq last week were images worse than those of the humiliation and torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. These show chunks of flesh and hanks of women’s hair scattered across a scene of devastation. Among the few recognisable objects are musical instruments.
This is the scene of an incident that has divided Iraqis from their occupiers like few others. It has highlighted an issue more significant, yet far less discussed, than mistreatment in prisons: the degree to which indiscriminate use of American firepower has made enemies of the Iraqi population. According to independent estimates – none are available from the coalition – about 11,500 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the start of the war in March last year.
The footage of flesh, hair and musical instruments was filmed by a video crew that reached the location of what local people say was a wedding party attacked without warning by the Americans, killing women and children. The instruments belonged to the band of Hussein Ali, one of Iraq’s most famous wedding singers, whose relatives buried him in Baghdad last week.
Despite this evidence – and earlier pictures filmed by al-Arabiya television, showing two dead babies wrapped side by side in a blanket, and a headless child lying next to the body of his or her mother – American commanders continue to insist that their strike, on a remote village in the desert close to the Syrian border, was against foreign fighters crossing into Iraq..
As Juan Cole said, “Can’t they just say that they are deeply sorry for the Iraqis’ loss, and that they are not sure what went wrong, and will investigate? If they did kill so many women and children, surely that is a mistake no matter how you parse it, and they may as well admit it. It is this arrogance and instistence that the US is always right that has caused almost 90% of the Iraqis to come to view the Americans as occupiers rather than liberators.
Update 5/20: I just saw Gen. Kimmit on television denying that US forces saw any children at the site that was hit. But video and Arab television and press reports clearly show women and children casualties! This way lies a further erosion of the credibility of the US military in Iraq.“