The Relentless Slaughter & Rape Of Iraq By The Countrymen Of George Bush - US Occupation Forces
By Sanjay Sharma, Section News
Posted on Sun Apr 24, 2005 at 12:15:47 PM EST
An American patrol roared past us with the soldiers gesturing furiously with their guns for traffic to keep back on an overpass in central Baghdad.
- A black car with three young men in it did not stop in time and a soldier fired several shots from his machine gun into its engine.
- The driver and his friends were not hit, but many Iraqis do not survive casual encounters with US soldiers.
- It is very easy to be accidentally killed in Iraq.
Every Iraqi has stories of friends or relatives killed by US troops for no adequate reason. Often they do not know if they were shot by regular soldiers or by members of western security companies whose burly employees, usually ex-soldiers, are everywhere in Iraq.
It was obvious to many American officers from an early stage in the conflict that the Pentagon's claim that it did not count civilian casualties was seen by many Iraqis as proof that the US did not care about how many of them were killed. The failure to take Iraqi civilian dead into account was particularly foolish in a culture where relatives of the slain are obligated by custom to seek revenge.
US soldiers treat everybody as a potential suicide bomber, and for what they are doing in Iraq under the direct orders of their now re-elected President George Bush, deservedly so.
- But, If they are right they have saved their lives
- and
- if they are wrong they face no penalty. Remember Abu Ghraib? The goons under the lunatic Donald Rumsfeld have "cleared" all officers of Abu Ghraib from wrong-doing in a white-wash of a report.
"We should end the immunity of US soldiers here," says Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Kurdish politician who argues that the failure to prosecute American soldiers who have killed civilians is one of the reasons why the occupation became so unpopular so fast. He admits, however, that this is extremely unlikely to happen given the US attitude to any sanctions against its own forces.
