World Forums

Leonid wrote:I, and others, find the coverage quite objectionable, but it's hard to say why.

Your neighbour is being more generous per capita. However, the help that the US and Australia are giving is REAL.

Leonid wrote:Well, dear friends, we're now into the tenth day of the tsunami crisis and in this battered corner of Asia, the UN is nowhere to be seen -- unless you count at meetings, in five-star hotels, and holding press conferences.

Aussies and Yanks continue to carry the overwhelming bulk of the burden, but some other fine folks also have jumped in: e.g., the New Zealanders...

The UN continues to send its best product, bureaucrats. ...

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Ok, enough with the UN; you get the picture. Now to the EU.
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A former Jordanian government minister has told The New Yorker that an American official confirmed to him that the Iraqi interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, executed six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station last year.

The claim is in an extensive profile of Dr Allawi written for this week's issue of the magazine by an American journalist, Jon Lee Anderson, the author of The Fall of Baghdad and a regular Baghdad correspondent for The New Yorker.

Writing about his research in Jordan in December, Anderson says: "A well-known former government minister told me that an American official had confirmed that the killings took place, saying to him, 'What a mess we're in - we got rid of one son of a bitch only to get another one'."

The New Yorker also revealed that Anderson was present during an interview conducted by the Herald's chief correspondent, Paul McGeough, in late June, with a man who said he witnessed the executions by Dr Allawi.

Dr Allawi denied the allegations when they were published in the Herald last July.

Anderson writes: "The man ... described how Allawi had been taken to seven suspects, who were made to stand against a wall in a courtyard of the police station, their faces covered. After being told of their alleged crimes by a police official, Allawi had asked for a pistol, and then shot each prisoner in the head. [One of the men survived.] Afterward, the witness said, Allawi had declared to those present, 'This is how we must deal with the terrorists.' The witness said he approved of Allawi's act, adding that, in any case, the terrorists were better off dead, for they had been tortured for days."

Dead-Check in Falluja

Embedded with the Marines in Iraq

In April 9, 2003, the day the statue of Saddam Hussein was being toppled in Baghdad, symbolizing the promised liberation of Iraq, I was embedded with a Marine unit engaged in fierce combat about 30 miles north of the city, on the outskirts of Baquba. Late that afternoon, the Humvee I was in was following about 50 feet behind a Marine Light Armored Vehicle when it pulled alongside a Toyota pickup pushed to the side of the road, its doors riddled with bullet holes. The head of at least one occupant was visible in the truck, but I couldn't determine if he was moving or not. Nor did I see any weapons. As our Humvee stopped behind the truck, a Marine in the vehicle ahead of us leapt out, pointed his rifle into the window of the pickup and sprayed it with gunfire. It was a cold-blooded execution.

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I greeted the sight of dead Iraqis in the pickup with a sense of numb relief. At least they would not be trying to kill us that day. In the preceding two-and-a-half weeks, the unit I was embedded with had come under frequent enemy attack, with three Marines wounded. There were 23 bullet holes in the Humvee I rode in—miraculously, none of the five of us inside had been hit. I had developed a strange relationship with the sight of dead Iraqis. I felt safer when I saw them.

I felt especially comforted when I saw dead men by the road still clutching weapons in their hands, a common sight. Unfortunately, of the hundreds of dead people I saw on the roads leading from the Kuwait border to Baghdad, perhaps 20 percent or more were obviously civilians. I will never forget the three or four women I saw fatally shot and partially burned, still seated in a bus on the road north of Nasiriyah. Or the little girl, about four, lying by the side of the road in a pretty dress, her legs neatly and inexplicably chopped off at the knees. Mercifully, I remember thinking at the time, she was dead like all the others.

Since my return from Iraq, I have continued to watch the horror unfold on television. It's different seeing the violence decontextualized from the battlefield, now playing out in discrete video clips that run between ads for Chevys and the Olive Garden. Videos of militants staging beheadings against dungeon-like backdrops, with the perpetrators wearing masks and the victims in colorful jumpsuits, seem almost like grotesque TV shows.

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One thing military officials are not saying is that the behavior of the Marine in the video closely conforms to training that is fairly standard in some units. Marines call executing wounded combatants "dead-checking."

"They teach us to do dead-checking when we're clearing rooms," an enlisted Marine recently returned from Iraq told me. "You put two bullets into the guy's chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a room where guys are wounded you might not know if they're alive or dead. So they teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye with your boot, because generally a person, even if he's faking being dead, will flinch if you poke him there. If he moves, you put a bullet in the brain. You do this to keep the momentum going when you're flowing through a building. You don't want a guy popping up behind you and shooting you."

What I'd seen on that road outside of Baquba on April 9 was a dead-check.

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In fact, commanders in the Marine Corps during the period I was embedded with them in the spring of 2003 repeatedly emphasized that the men's actions would not be questioned. As one of the officers in the unit I followed used to tell his men, "You will be held accountable for the facts not as they are in hindsight but as they appeared to you at the time. If, in your mind, you fire to protect yourself or your men, you are doing the right thing. It doesn't matter if later on we find out you wiped out a family of unarmed civilians."

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Despite their concern, terrible mistakes were made. I was standing next to a 22-year-old Marine from the Humvee I rode in when he fired his machine gun prematurely at a civilian car approaching a roadblock, striking the driver, an unarmed man, in the eye. The unit was subsequently ordered to drive past the car without rendering aid. I sat next to the gunner as we crept past, listening to the dying man gasp for breath. The gunner didn't talk for the next three days. A few days earlier, the youngest Marine on the team had shot a 12-year-old boy four times in the chest with his machine gun, mistakenly thinking a stick the boy had been carrying was a weapon. When the mother and grandmother of the boy later dragged him to the Marines' lines seeking medical aid, the sergeant who led the team dropped down in front of the mother and cried.

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When his battalion commander praised the unit for "slaying dragons" on the way to Baghdad, the sergeant later told his men, "If we did half the shit back home we've done here, we'd be in prison." By then, the sergeant told me, he'd reconsidered what his priest had told him about killing. "Where the fuck did Jesus say it's OK to kill people for your government? Any priest who tells me that has got no credibility."

He and several other Marines recently returned from Iraq (many from their second tours) whom I've talked to about the Falluja shooting say they are not sure they would have dead-checked the wounded man in the mosque had they been in the same position. Most say they probably would have, even though the mosque had already been cleared once. "What does the American public think happens when they tell us to assault a city?" one of them said. "Marines don't shoot rainbows out of our asses. We fucking kill people."

Another Marine in the unit I followed—a Democrat's dream, he returned home from fighting in Falluja in time to vote for Kerry—added, "Americans celebrate war in their movies. We like to see visions of evil being defeated by good. When the people at home glimpse the reality of war, that it's a bloodbath, they freak out. We are a subculture they created and programmed to fight their wars. You have to become a psycho to kill like we do. To most Marines that guy in the mosque was just someone who didn't get hit in the right place the first time we shot him. I probably would have put a bullet in his brain if I'd been there. If the American public doesn't like the violence of war, maybe before they start the next war they shouldn't rush so much."

Leonid wrote:I found it interesting that Falc never suggested that Italians, Irish, Russians, Chinese and Indians living in the United States and caring much about events in countries of their birth should return to their homelands.

surnami wrote:They are Americans. Most of m. They just have dual citizenship.

That is what I have been told

I found it interesting to see Iraqi citizens living in the U.S. jumping for joy about celebrating their freedom and being able to vote in the Iraqi elections.

I can't believe the media! All they can talk about is the "happy" Iraqis, how high turnout was, and how "freedom" has spread to Iraq. I had to turn off CNNazi because they kept focusing on the so-called "voters" and barely mentioned the brave brothers of the resistance. Where are the freedom fighters today??? Are their voices silenced because some American puppets cast a few ballots?

Pull your head out, Femergy! Can't you see the right-wing media's complicity in this conspiracy to present the people of Iraq with a Trojan Horse they call "freedom"? Believe me, once the gates of Troy they call "polling places" have closed, the colonial invasion forces of Amerikkka will complete their imperial occupation by installing a Kapitalist puppet regime led by Cheney's cronies at Halliburton.

surnami wrote:...And if they vote they better not be jubilant, or do anything that would make a positive case for President Bush.

Cause that is just going too far.

I found it interesting to see Iraqi citizens living in the U.S. jumping for joy about celebrating their freedom and being able to vote in the Iraqi elections.

They can vote, but they should not be jumping for joy. They should realize that Bush is a huge failure, his Iraq policy is a huge failure and them jumping for joy brings my Iraq is failure arguement to a screeching halt.

So SHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhh.

:P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P

Leonid wrote:Falc

Forgive me for feeling that you're acting sour-grapishly. I don't recall you being so nitpicky when people of different geographical backgrounds residing in the United States were voting.

Be consistent or state your dislikes without using ridiculous arguments as a cover.

Leonid wrote:Falc

Perhaps your ancestors should have fought for democracy in Italy, instead of coming to America, which was already safely democratic, no? I would never say that they should have, but your double standard is rather too nakedly apparent.

Saddam, an eligible voter, didn't cast ballot
Updated: 8:31 a.m. ET Feb. 1, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein did not vote in Iraq’s historic election but he could have done if he had turned up at a polling station, officials said on Tuesday.

The former dictator was eligible to vote as an Iraqi citizen with no criminal record. Despite being accused of crimes against humanity and genocide, he has not been convicted.

“If Saddam had wanted to vote he would have been entitled to do so but he would have had to go to a polling station in person,” said Farid Ayar, spokesman for Iraq’s Electoral Commission.

There was no system for absentee voting in Iraq in Sunday’s election, though many Iraqis living abroad cast ballots.

The U.S. military, which is holding Saddam in a camp near Baghdad airport, confirmed that the ousted ruler had not voted.