Antiwar.com Blog

Kevin Sites speaks out: Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1

To Devil Dogs of the 3.1:

Since the shooting in the Mosque, I’ve been haunted that I have not been able to tell you directly what I saw or explain the process by which the world came to see it as well. As you know, I’m not some war zone tourist with a camera who doesn’t understand that ugly things happen in combat. I’ve spent most of the last five years covering global conflict. But I have never in my career been a ‘gotcha’ reporter — hoping for people to commit wrongdoings so I can catch them at it.

This week I’ve even been shocked to see myself painted as some kind of anti-war activist. Anyone who has seen my reporting on television or has read the dispatches on this website is fully aware of the lengths I’ve gone to play it straight down the middle — not to become a tool of propaganda for the left or the right.

But I find myself a lightning rod for controversy in reporting what I saw occur in front of me, camera rolling.

It’s time you to have the facts from me, in my own words, about what I saw — without imposing on that Marine — guilt or innocence or anything in between. I want you to read my account and make up your own minds about whether you think what I did was right or wrong. All the other armchair analysts don’t mean a damn to me.

Here it goes.

via boing boing

“Israel Hit by Worst Locust Plague Since 1950s”
Israeli agriculture officials sent crop dusters into the air to spray against the locusts that swept in from North Africa in the first such invasion since 1959.

Crop dusters? Israel can do better than that. Here’s my recommendation, based on Israel’s proud history of dealing with such pests. Assassinate their leaders with rocket attacks, detain their ambulances at check points for several hours (long enough for the patients to die), bulldoze their houses, steal their land, shoot them in the back, launch several unprovoked wars against them, strap their kids to your Hummers as human shields, construct a secret nuclear arsenal to keep surrounding nations who might sympathize with the locusts in check, surround the locusts with a segregation wall, effectively interning them in concentration camps, cut off their supply of water, fire unprovoked into crowds of protesting locusts, and have your PMs deny their existence in the first place.
And the sweetest thing is, you should be able to get a few billion dollars from the US to fund all of this.

“We feel right now that we have, as I mentioned, broken the back of the insurgency. We’ve taken away this safe haven,” Lt. Gen. John Sattler told reporters at the Pentagon in a video teleconference from Fallujah.

GUNMEN ambushed a convoy of Iraqi National Guards in Ramadi, killing nine soldiers and wounding 17, local hospital officials said today.

Rocket-wielding guerrillas ordered the men from their vehicles and then gunned them down after holding them up on a main street in broad daylight and forcing them to drive to the outskirts of the city, wounded survivors said.

The attackers then torched the Guards’ two trucks.

Mmmmkay, then.

Yesterday the death toll for GIs in Iraq hit 100 for the month of November (1221 total since the war began). With only two-thirds of the month over, Americans in Iraq are on track to exceed the previous high of 135 deaths in April of this year.

This is an average of 5 Americans killed every day in Iraq. While the media has acknowledged some major milestones, they have largely ignored the alarming level of US casualties in Iraq.

The tragedy of the death of each individual American, as well as the death of each individual Iraqi are not reflected by mere numbers. But the numbers must be reported loudly so that Americans realize the rising costs of this disaster.

Scott Horton’s one-hour interview with the courageous Dahr Jamail, reporting from Iraq, is now available on WeekendInterviewShow.com. Among the highlights: Iraq’s shortages of water, fuel and electricity, the situation on the ground being so dangerous that Jamail cannot go outside every day, dogs eating corpses in the streets, 70% unemployment, rampant kidnappings, media suppression, US war crimes too numerous to count, and the upcoming “election”, where there is only one candidate.

If you can listen to this and still be pro-Iraq war, there is something genetically wrong with you.

Today (Saturday), at 4PM central time, Scott Horton will be interviewing Dahr Jamail, who’s near-daily reports from Iraq, as well as hard-news articles make for the most indispensible reading on the occupation. From his Nov. 19 entry;

Later Abu Talat comes to my hotel to see me. He is distraught, crying while he recounts the story. After listening to the tape he recorded inside the mosque during the atrocity, he says…

“I am in a very sad position. I do not see any freedom or any democracy. If this could lead into a freedom, it is a freedom with blood. It is a freedom of emotions of sadness. It is a freedom of killing. You cannot gain democracy through blood or killing. You do not find the freedom that way. People are going to pray to God and they were killed and wounded. There were 1,500 people praying to God and they went on a holiday were people go every Friday for prayers. And they were shot and killed. There were so many women and kids lying on the ground. This is not democracy, neither freedom.”

Listen to the show live on the internet, from 3-5 PM central time.
Don’t miss this one!