US troops turn botched Saddam raid into a massacre

[plurality]

have to pay to get the full article, but I'll include a link to another site that has the whole thing.

28 July 2003


Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to 11, including two children, their mother and crippled father. At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants.

*more*

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=428199

here's the other site

*continued where other left off*

The vehicle carrying the two children and their mother and father was riddled by bullets as it approached a razor-wired checkpoint outside the house.

Amid the fury generated among the largely middle-class residents of Mansur - by ghastly coincidence, the killings were scarcely 40 metres from the houses in which 16 civilians died when the Americans tried to kill Saddam towards the end of the war in April - whatever political advantages were gained by the killing of Saddam's sons have been squandered. A doctor at the Yarmouk hospital, which received four of the dead, turned on me angrily last night, shouting: "If an American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him."

Two civilians, both believed to have been driving with their families, were brought to the Yarmouk, one with abdominal wounds and the other with "his brain outside of his head", according to another doctor.

At the scene of the killings, there was pandemonium. While US troops were loading the bullet-shattered cars on trucks - and trying to stop cameramen filming the carnage - crowds screamed abuse at them. One American soldier a few feet from me climbed into the seat of his
Humvee, threw his helmet on the floor of the vehicle and shouted: "Shit! Shit!"

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4245.htm

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

1. "Shit! Shit!"

I have had enough of this crap from my own people. I am sorry, but this country is no longer the country I pledged my alliegence to. IT HAS TO STOP NOW.

If a personal apology to the Iraquis would even begin to help, I would offer it. But it's far too late. There is a black spot on the heart and soul of The United States Of America, and it's plain at last it will never be washed clean in my lifetime.

I am so ashamed to be an American after reading this.

Shit! Shit!

:mad:

[MyDogSpot]

2. Blaming the troops? Why not blame Bush?

He was the one who illegally sent US troops to Iraq in the first place.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

4. The troops pulled the trigger.

There is the concept of an illegal order within the military. If shooting those people was not soldiers blindly following an illegal order, then I do not know what is. There was NO EXCUSE. Blame who you will, it did not have to happen. There was no reason for it to happen. It should NOT HAVE HAPPENED.

Get those cocksuckers OUT OF OUR WHITE HOUSE. THERE HAS TO BE A LEGAL WAY.

[otohara]

3. Dupe

Please continue dicussion here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=37069&mesg_id=37069&page=2