Fallujah and the coming cataclysm

Fallujah_terrorist

There will be international condemnation, as there was the first time; but our government won’t listen to it; aside from the resistance, all the people of Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to avert or mitigate the horror will be us, the antiwar movement.

We have a responsibility, that we didn’t meet in April and we didn’t meet in August when Najaf was similarly attacked; will we meet it this time?

Rahul Mahajan

Fallujah and the coming cataclysm.

Spiraling into Iraq

From Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches, Spiraling into Occupied Iraq

Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles are perched along the road, with their weapons aimed directly at us and other cars as we pass…this is occupied Iraq. We drive perilously close to a huge Bradley with its growling treads and I point to it thinking Abu Talat may not see how close he is. He laughs and says, “This is our daily life…you know this. How do you think Americans would like to have tanks on their streets aiming guns at them? For us, this is normal.”

A “mercy killing” in Baghdad

This has to be one of the saddest and most maddening of stories to be produced by the American Occupation of Iraq to date:

Two U.S. soldiers could face murder charges in a military trial in Baghdad for shooting and killing a severely wounded Iraqi teenager who had been mistaken for an insurgent by American troops, The Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site.

The newspaper said on Thursday that the two army staff sergeants had admitted that they had shot the Iraqi boy as he lay moaning on the ground but that they had said they did so out of mercy.

A total of seven Iraqis were killed in the incident in August in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, in which U.S. troops fired on a garbage truck on Aug. 18 after mistakenly concluding that it was planting roadside bombs, the newspaper said, quoting Iraqi witnesses and U.S. military officials.

The two soldiers told U.S. officials that they had killed the teenager to “put him out of his misery,” the paper said.

But Iraqi witnesses, including a relative of the boy who had pleaded for U.S. troops to help him, were said to be enraged by the killing.

The teenager was shot as U.S. medics rushed to treat a half dozen or so of those wounded on Aug. 18 when the garbage truck was fired upon and bust into flames.

Staff Sergeant Cardenas Alban, 29, of Carson, California, and Staff Sergeant Johnny Horne Jr., 30, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, both of 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, face military court proceedings in Baghdad to determine if there is enough evidence for court martial, the newspaper reported.

If convicted, they could receive the death penalty.

The army said it was unable to identify the boy who was killed. But citing Iraqi witnesses, The Los Angeles Times identified him as Qassim Hassan, 16, who had been working the night shift on the garbage truck with his brother and several cousins.

They shot him “out of mercy” to “put him out of his misery” in front of his screaming family and medics who could have helped him. This, after they fired on his garbage truck “by mistake.”