It’s Saturday night, and all over America, people are settling in to have some fun. Some say that that makes this a bad time to give a pop quiz. I say, given the subject matter, there is no more appropriate time.
After all, while we in America have a gay old time, some other people aren’t getting so much entertainment.
So, here it is, the Irregular Times Saturday Night Pop Quiz:
What happens under George W. Bush, America’s Pro-Life President?
A. The government introduces new laws to allow all couples to marry without interference
B. The government promotes stem cell research to save lives
C. ————–>
If you picked C, you’re correct! The dead bodies in this photograph are Iraqi children killed in a “raid” by American soldiers. A “raid” sounds so playful, so heroic, so daring, doesn’t it? Ah, but looking at what a “raid” creates doesn’t quite go along with the patriotic rat-a-tat-tat of a military drum roll, does it?
The next time you hear people say that George W. Bush is “Pro-Life” and values the sanctity of life, show them this picture.
The next time you hear Republicans say that they are pro-family, show them this picture
The next time you hear someone say that we shouldn’t leave Iraq until the job is done, show them this picture.
Show them this picture, and tell them about how you won a pop quiz last Saturday night.
I believe that the famous comedian, George Carlin, said it best:”They aren’t pro life, They’re ANTI-WOMEN!”
Peregrin,
This is one photo that should never have been published.
First of all, this is someone’s family. How would you feel if some stranger published photos of your dead children, your dead nieces and nephews, your dead bothers and sisters, or your own dead body. You know quite well that our taboo against photographing the dead is quite strong. Maybe since the photo is of someone in another culture, it’s doesn’t seem quite so insensitive and inhuman, but it SHOULD BE exactly the same as if it was a dead American family. We do respect the dead, and that respect should be extended to people of other cultures.
Second of all, it doesn’t tell the story you are trying to tell. They look like they fell asleep, maybe with ketchup on them, all cute and foreign and cuddly. I’ve seen plenty of dead people. Dead people are never cute.
Third, when you do show photographs of the dead, and I think there are times when it is a valid news story, they should not have the face showing or be recognizable. Think of someone in your own family, suddenly seeing a photograph and recognizing their deceased loved one.
Fourth, think of the way the Abu Gharib photos were presented on this forum. They were accessible and viewable, yes, but you knew what you were accessing before you opened the file. The above photo is sprinkled in much too casually. Is this how IT thinks of dead Iraqi children? A casual photo to be sprinkled into a story about, what? pro-life politics? You don’t even tell the story of the children. Who are they? What town is this? What is the official government statement? We aren’t given any of that. The photo is just being used to ‘sex up’ an editorial about something else. These children’s lives have been reduced to a ‘pop quiz’ game show trivia question. The casual use of this type of image desensitizes people to violent images.
Finally, you are using someone’s personal pain to score political points. This, to me is the most irresponsible and offensive, that someone would try to use human tragedy to manipulate my political viewpoints.
What is the difference between this and pornography? Between this and the fetus billboard industry? Take as much time as you need to think of an answer.
Alan, you spend a lot of time complaining about people showing pictures. You complained about Irregular Times showing a picture of a woman’s naked waist, and now you’re complaining about a photograph of two children killed by American soldiers.
I don’t share your attitude that photographs are offensive. What photographs show is sometimes offensive, but not the photographs themselves.
If you were to follow this logic to its natural extension, then it would also have to be offensive for me to write about the dead. What’s the difference between describing something with a picture, and describing it with words.
When I write about war, I’m just not concerned with issues of pornography.
What’s offensive here is that we are in a war where children are being killed as a matter of routine That’s the outrage, not that I put a picture of the outrage on a web site.
Yeah, they are human. She put the photo there because she remembers that, not because she forgot it.
And the dead can look awfully calm, considering…
People are dying, and you’d be surprised how willing, maybe desperate, people can be to push that to the back of their minds whilst they try to work out how justified it was.
Peregrin, I’m not complaining about the way Irregular Times shows pictures, I’m complaining about the depersonalizing pictures that somehow keep appearing under your byline. This photo is supposed to show that “children are being killed as a matter of routine”? Surely there isn’t anyone who really believes there has ever been a war in which no civilians were hurt. You mean the U.S. targets children as a matter of policy? The picture doesn’t show that.
Was it taken six months ago, as a photo published in a Wisconsin paper was? Or is it really a picture of chldren killed by insurgents’ bombs? They don’t look dead. Maybe it wasn’t even taken in Iraq. What is the source? A lot of questions left unanswered and the story undocumented.
I notice you’re still not publishing any pictures of yourself or your family. No doubt you respect their privacy.
What’s next? Beheadings? Pictures of dead US soldiers to show that “soldiers are being killed as a matter of routine”? Pictures of corpses from Katrina to show that Katrina victims were “killed as a matter of routine”? What about pictures from New York of 9/11 corpses? How about sneaking into morgues for those celebrity corpse photo ops? Otherwise how can we know they are really and sincerely dead and whether their deaths were justified??
The dead baby stunt has been played before. It used to be an old Palestinian trick to shove crumpled up pictures of dead babies under the noses of Westerners and say they were killed in the intifada. The westerners mostly concluded Arabs were barbaric and “not like us” for showing tasteless photos–and for using pictures of their own people for propaganda.
Israeli sources exposed the way children were being used in the intifada–adult males with weapons would place their own children in front of them to throw rocks, then fire at Israeli positions from behind the children. If the Israelis fired back to defend themselves they risked hitting the children. And then the Palestinians had a new child martyr with lots of propaganda potential. The Israelis don’t show pictures of their own dead babies, but they did name a brigade after one of them.
And don’t forget the good old capitalististic supply and demand curve either. Printing photos of dead babies creates a market for more of those pictures–and people ready to supply them. When it came out that some Haditha residents had been paid, as the US has paid out money for non-combatants killed, suddenly there was a new claim of an incident in Ishaqi–which turned out to be untrue.
No, I for one am not a ghoul, and I’m not going to play your Dead Baby Game.
So, Alan, let me get this straight:
You think that policies which create dead children should persist, but that the photos of them should not appear.
Does that capture it?
And which policies would those be?
They’re collectively called “warfare.”
Yes, those kids have been depersonalized all right. By American bullets. That’s kind of Peregrin’s point, I believe.
I don’t believe any of that has been established: who, what, where, when, none of it documented, and that’s part of the problem.
Hey, let’s just outlaw war. That was easy, wasn’t it.
Iroquois Honky, if you really believe that, then you haven’t been bothering to read the newspapers. Even the Pentagon admits that it’s been killing Iraqi children. Come back to reality.
Lot’s of assertions, no links. I wonder why.
dude Alan. If you can’t handle the truth (the picture) or too lazy to seek it why not just stop reading the news all together?
dude zombie,
I have indeed done several searches trying to put an identity on this picture. There are literally millions of images out there and we will not know the source unless the author decides to reveal it.
What is truth? I suspect this picture came from the town of Ishaqi and is related to the March 15 incident, since a lot of corpse photos have come out of there in the last several days. In which case the children were killed by a collapsed building and not ‘American bullets’, as is elsewhere asserted, and the US miltary was there looking for an al-Quaida leader and not participating in atrocities, as is implied. (You remember al-Quaida–the organization that launched the ‘preemptive attack’ on New York?) Irregular Times reported on the accusations against American miltary personnel at Ishaqi, but they did not report that the military personnel had been cleared of wrongdoing. This picture is not ‘the truth’. It is an attempt to manipulate by pushing emotional buttons.
This picture does not come up to Irregular Times’ usual journalistic standard. IT has a political bias, true, but has handled other difficult images, like the Abu Gareeb photos or the Mohammed pictures, responsibly and with courage. The word that comes to mind with this picture is ‘gratuitous’.
Here’s an interesting bit of statistical analysis I found:
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=sojomail.display&issue=041013#5
It seems that since Bush took office abortion rates in the US have actually reversed their downward trend and increased. This, the author concludes,is because Bush’s policies of cutting aid to poor families have actually made abortion a more attractive solution for poor families. They can’t afford another child.
As a matter of fact, Alan, the photograph is NOT of Iraqi kids killed by Americans at Ishaqi. I never said it was. In fact, it is a photograph of Iraqi kids killed by Americans somewhere else in Iraq.
Maybe, Alan, before you go blathering on about how I’m not up to standards, you ought to be a little bit more careful yourself.
Besides, Alan, the military investigtion of the Ishaqi incident is of just the same sort that found that the Iraqi civilians at Haditha had been killed by an insurgent attack – and just as trustworthy. It’s just as believable as the military investigation that found that another Iraqi civilian killed by Marines was an insurgent – though later we found out that the evidence was planted and it was a cold-blooded murder. Military investigations in Iraq have zero credibility these days.
I don’t see any links for these new assertions.
Alan, I think you need to learn to use search engines more effectively. I’m not going to provide a link to every thing I write about in a comment on every article. The information is out there, and easy to get to, if you just think for a second.
By the way, here’s the original caption to that picture – not describing Ishaqi:
“In this Wednesday, March 15, 2006 file photo, relatives mourn near the bodies of children, reportedly killed in a U.S. raid, as they arrive in a hospital in Tikrit, 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Baghdad in Iraq.”
If you’re not going to provide sources for what you write, Peregrin, then give me three good reasons, no, give me one good reason I should believe anything that has your byline on it.
But you have given me a challenge, so here is the link to the original photo:
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20060602/D8I04FU80.html
And here is the entire caption for the photo:
Gosh, the photo IS from the March 15 incident in Ishaqi, after all.
And here is a link to the Knight Ridder report that lists names of the victims:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/14138980.htm
So the most likely identities for your generic dead babies is:
Hawra Harat Khalaf, 5 years
Asma Yousef Maruf, 5 years
You lied to me, Peregrin. So now go play with your Dead Baby Game and leave me alone. I’m going to go play with my official Irregular Times “Ignorance is Strength” paper airplane.
Allow me to cut and paste another few paragraphs from the first source you cite, above.
“The U.S. military had no additional comment Friday on the accusations stemming from a raid March 15 in the village of Ishaqi, about 50 miles north of Baghdad.
In March, the U.S. military said four people died when they attacked from the ground and air a house suspected of holding an al-Qaida operative. The house was destroyed.
But video shot by an AP Television News cameraman at the time and previously unaired shows at least five children dead. The video shows at least one adult male and four young children with obvious entry wounds to the head. One child has an obvious entry wound to the side caused by a bullet.”
If your first source above is credible, the children at Ishaqi were not killed in a collapsing building, but shot–which contradicts a number of your claims:
(Post 13) “…the children were killed by a collapsed building and not ‘American bullets’, as is elsewhere asserted…”
(Post 5) “…suddenly there was a new claim of an incident in Ishaqi–which turned out to be untrue.”
If your first source above is not credible, there’s still no evidence these children were killed at Ishaqi.
So, which is it?
Alan, read the caption again, carefully.
There are two separate statements.
1. The children in the FILE photograph were reportedly killed in a U.S. raid.
2. Residents in the village of Ishaqi said that at least five children were killed in a U.S. raid on the same day.
The caption does not say it’s the same raid.
Now, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I read that caption the wrong way.
But, either the photograph is from another raid, or the US military lied to us.
The US military says one dead child from Ishaqi. The photograph shows two…
and there could be more not shown in this particular photograph…
…and those two kids don’t look like they had a building fall on them… but then again, I’m not a doctor, and I can’t diagnose on videotape.
The more I look at reports about Ishaqi, the less clear it gets to me what actually happened there. It’s understandable for both Alan and Peregrin to disagree on the details or be confused. I’m still not sure, but I think we’re not looking multiple raids at Ishaqi, but multiple accounts of the same raid. Here’s a few paragraphs from Yahoo News, June 3:
“The investigation of the attack in Ishaqi concluded that the U.S. troops followed normal procedures in raising the level of force after they came under fire while approaching a building where they believed was an al-Qaida terrorist was hiding, said Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S military spokesman.
“Caldwell also acknowledged there were “possibly up to nine collateral deaths” in addition to the four Iraqi deaths that the military announced at the time of the Ishaqi raid. The results of the investigation were released amid questions about the original U.S. report as television stations aired AP Television News footage of a row of dead children in the aftermath of the raid.”
As far as I can tell, here’s what happened:
1. The U.S. military reports four dead.
2. Pictures and eyewitness reports come out of up to thirteen dead, including five children with apparent bullet wounds.
3. The U.S. military responds very quickly, admitting nine more civilians than they first acknowledged might have been killed after all. But it clears the soldiers, saying they “followed normal procedures in raising the level of force.”
The latest military response sounds like a whitewash to me. If it turns out that there is evidence of five dead children with bullet entry wounds, as there appears to be, it simply does not square with the military’s claim that there was appropriate use of force.
A lot of news reports include the claim that “the building was destroyed,” which seems to have been issued by the army–presumably implying the “collateral damage” (civilian casualties) resulted from the collapse of the building. But that doesn’t square with the bullet wounds on the children. Was the building destroyed before or after the children were shot? If it was after, we’ve clearly got a cover-up here, perhaps worse than Haditha.
I’m sure autopsies could reveal whether these children died in a building collapse or died of gunshot wounds–I can’t tell from a photograph, and neither can Peregrin. Will there be autopsies? It seems like something that’s worth calling for if it will clear our soldiers of wrongful accusations. Will there be autopsies? I haven’t heard.
The violence-porn issue is an interesting issue, but it’s another one altogether. Our media is absolutely flooded with positive, sanitized images of soldiers and the military–think Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” with all the spit-shined handsome young soldiers as backdrop for Bush’s propaganda, or all the “Army of One” ads for the military. But they suppress the pictures of dead bodies, both flag-draped coffins and Iraqi children. Sometimes I wonder what’s more destructive, the air-brushed porn that conveys images and creates expectations of something impossible and idealized, or the hard-core stuff, with its graphic and realistic depictions of violated bodies. George Romero has some interesting things to say about this in the context of violence in the movies–maybe depictions of killing SHOULD be disgusting (e.g. Dawn of the Dead rather than Rambo: First Blood II). Besides, they showed PLENTY of pictures of the planes hitting the towers on 9/11–over and over again. If that wasn’t violence porn, I don’t know what is. Did you object to that, Alan.
Everyone agrees on several basic point regarding the March 15 raid in Ishaqi.
1)an al-Quaeda person was visiting and present in the house that was raided.
2)there was an air strike by helicopter on the house
3)people died
The U.S. says soldiers came under fire when they tried to carry out a pre-dawn raid on the house and called in an air strike. The air strike knocked down part of the house. After the air strike the military then went in and saw 4 dead people and their al-Quaeda guy alive. They took the al-Quaeda guy and left.
The brother of the dead guy–and this brother was sleeping in a different house–says the U.S. military tied the hands of the civilians with tie-wraps and executed them with bullets to the head before the air strike. Photos of the dead do not show any hands bound and do not show head wounds consistant with bullets.
The military does not dispute the number of people killed. They just say how many they saw.
My understanding of the video is that it shows dead people laid out on a blanket, and some of the same people in the back of a pickup later when they were taken to a hospital in Tikrit. It doesn’t show how they died.
It makes total sense to me that someone could die in a room that was not seen by the U.S. military. If the al-Quaeda person was not related to the family, he would not be sleeping in the same room with the wives and daughters–they would have to cover with scarves if they even went into the same room with him, say to serve him tea. The front room of a house–or even the most humble apartment–can usually be closed off from the rest of the family for visiting strangers and often has a separate toilet. There is often a room in back where the women can be comfortable away from the men they are not related to and not have to wear their scarves all the time.
Here’s another story from the BBC that lays out the conflicting reports on Ishaqi a little more clearly:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5044244.stm
The U.S. military admitted killing up to nine more people than it originally admitted killing, AND cleared soldiers of wrongdoing in those nine deaths, ONE DAY after evidence of those additional deaths emerged.
Iraqi police report that the Americans rounded up 11 people, shot them in cold blood, and blew up the house.
The Iraqi government has rejected the U.S. military’s findings, and is continuing with its own investigation.
Hold onto your hats, folks. This one’s getting interesting.
The BBC should be read cautiously as it is a British source. Although the Brits are publicly our allies, they have a longstanding grudge against the U.S. in the Middle East, since they had already divided up the pie with other European countries when the U.S. came in (via Standard oil), demanded, and got a piece of the action. During the Cold War, the Arabs often said the real enemies of America were not the Russians but the Brits. I would trust BBC more than Fox, I suppose, but I liked the Knight Ridder link since they have a reputation for being willing to publish things the adminstration does not want to see in print. It’s a bit gory, but try this link:
http://sourcedreporting.blogspot.com/2006/05/ishaqi-massacre-who-are-witnesses.html
The above comment was Alan.
So what do you make of the evidence at that Sourced Reporting site you linked to?
Seems to me we’ve got a police report, several eyewitnesses, several journalists, and an autopsy report all indicating that the victims were shot, and the house was destroyed as the soldiers left.
That Sourced Reporting site hasn’t been updated since May 30, so it does not deal with the events of the news cycles from June 1 to June 3, which interest me.
From what I gather, the U.S. military said in March that they would investigate, then we don’t hear anything until June 1, when more images including video surface–apparently corroborating police, eyewitness, and autopsy reports. The U.S. military immediately responds that an investigation is ongoing. Within about 24 hours, they conclude that up to nine more people may have died after all, but there is no evidence the soldiers did anything wrong.
If the U.S. military is right, it means the Associated Press, the BBC, and the Iraqi police are all conspiring with the insurgents to frame American troops for murder.
Well, first of all, the U.S. has been paying cash for deaths when not linked to insurgents, so there is an advantage to having the U.S. decide there has been a wrongful death. Apparently these claims are quite common but rarely found to be true.
Second, if you look carefuly, all the news sources do not claim the execution story, they just show dead people, something the military does not deny. None of the photos back up the Iraqi story. All the reports that claim the shots to the head depend on the one witness, a brother to the guy who was killed who was in another house when it happened. But how is this one guy influential enough to get the police to write up his story in the official report? I smell wasta, some kind of powerful political influence. The family is sunni, so maybe that’s where to look.
I think the original military report said 4 dead and the Iraqis said eleven dead. If I had just been shot at from a house and called in an air strike that damaged the house, and I had my al-Quaida guy in custody, I sure wouldn’t hang around to dig in the rubble and make sure how many bodies there really were. Of course I do believe the U.S. government is quite capable of making up anything they want, and can probably get away with it as long as it is on a small scale, but somehow I don’t smell anything here.
The reason for this story reappearing at this time might be the Haditha story, which appears to be true. If you will notice when there is a plane crash, all of the sudden, every plane that has a close call is in the newspaper, when ordinarily it would not be important enough to make the news. But now we have four investigations ongoing: the Haditha story, the Ishaqi story, a story about an old man killed and evidence planted which will likely result in charges filed against U.S. soldiers, and the story of the pregnant woman killed after failing to stop at a checkpoint. The Ishaqi story and the pregnant checkpoint story might also be smokescreen to take publicity away from the other two apparently true incidents.
There seems to be some delay in posting some of the comments. I’d like to respond to Greg’s post #21:
I didn’t own a television at the time so I depended for the initial report on a Palestinian friend who had CNN. I started watching right after the first tower was hit. It appeared to be hard cold news, the film clear enough, but taken at a distance, the mood in the barbar shop where I watched was somber, even shocked, confused, people were trying to figure out what had happened. After seeing the same footage so many times, and reading the same crawl that seemed to repeat at 20 minute intervals, which they couldn’t read because it was in English, everyone got bored and went back to what they were doing before.
In the weeks following, I watched mainly two sources, al-Jazeera and Jordan television 2. Both stations had devoloped a trademark film sequence from 9/11 footage to introduce the continuing story. Odly enough, al-Jazeera’s footage was the least offensive. They showed the towers hit briefly, then focused on the faces of emergency personnel rushing to the scene. The unspoken message was definately one of the bravery of the responders.
The Jordan station used slow motion closeups of the planes hitting the twin towers and the towers burning. I watched this with Palestinians who evidently derived a great deal of porn-type satisfaction from watching the buildings burn. These were the same people who knew how to pick out of the Koran all the passages about Jews burning. Porn is, of course, in the mind of the beholder, but it seems this station’s footage was able to trigger and encourage something frightening in my friends that I had not been aware of before. Perhaps I am more tuned to the ‘porn’ effects of this type of visual now since I have seen it at work.
Videotape of five people. Shot.
Military says it just didn’t happen.
Videotape. You don’t seem to be acknowledging this point by Greg, Alan. Why?
First Peregrin says “I’m not a doctor, and I can’t diagnose on videotape,” then says the people in the videotape have definately been “shot”. So which is it Peregrin, ‘shot’ or ‘can’t tell’?
First it’s two people, then it’s five people. Which is it, Peregrin, two or five?
First the military says an al-Qaeda insurgent was taken into custody after an air strike, now according to Peregrin the military says “it just didn’t happen”. Of course there is no link to Peregrin’s assertion of a new statement by the military, probably becasue there isn’t one.
In post #11, Peregrin says “the photograph is NOT of Iraqi kids killed by Americans at Ishaqi. I never said it was.” Then after I find the exact same photo from the March 15 Ishaqi raid and provide a link to it, Petregrin says there might be two March 15 raids in Ishaqi. So which is it Peregrin, Ishaqi or not Ishaqi?
Peregrin’s statements keep changing. We have yet to see even one link that backs up what Peregrin says. Instead we’re told that “the information is out there.” Then, a few simple searches turns up a lot of information contrary to Peregrin’s assertions. It looks like Peregrin is the one who is “out there.”
Your speculation about a conspiracy between the brother of the man whose house was attacked and Iraqi police is certainly possible. But how does Hassan Kurdi Mahassen, and the other villagers who dug the bodies out of the rubble, fit into all of this? How about the coroner in Tikrit? And how do you explain the collusion of the Associated Press and the BBC in what would presumably be a local plot to scam the Americans for reparations? Why is there such consistency in the (fake, you say?) images of the victims? Did the Associated Press reporter hire a special-effects wizard, and plant spent American cartriges at the site? Perhaps, but you’ve got a massive conspiracy theory on your hands.
What’s more likely? That all these people, from the neighbors to American-trained police colonels to coroners to journalists for international news agencies, somehow managed to coordinate their stories and phony evidence with remarkable consistency? Or that the U.S., whose story suddenly changed from 4 dead to up to 13 dead but no wrongdoing, is not painting an accurate picture?
Here’s my theory: The June 2 report clearing the soldiers of wrongdoing was a knee-jerk damage control response to new video evidence and accusations that emerged the previous day. Explain to me why that is less plausible than a massive coordination of family, neighbors, police, coroners and international journalists.
Now, I’m not a doctor, and I’m not examining those bodies first hand. But can you explain to me why Blogspot entry number six reads “No Apparent Head Wounds–Photographic Evidence”? The photographic evidence includes three pictures. In the second photograph, one child’s brains are quite visibly spilling out onto the blanket she’s lying on. I simply have no idea how anyone could look at the third picture and say there was “no apparent head wound.” The Blogspot goes on to say that the evidence “doesn’t corroborate” the “single gunshot to the head accusation.” Did anyone MAKE a “single gunshot to the head” accusation? The police, eyewitnesses who found the bodies, and the coroner all say the victims were shot in the head–but did anybody say “single gunshot to the head?” Why is that Blogspot refuting accusations that no one has made?
Were these people killed by the building collapsing? All of them? Were they crushed by falling rubble? Did they suffocate? If so, it’s still a scandal that the U.S. military left seven civilians to die slowly, trapped under the rubble. Why didn’t they check for survivors trapped in the rubble when they demolished a family house in the middle of the night, and try to save them? Could it be that they didn’t try to rescue survivors from the rubble because they knew very well there weren’t any?
The gunshot to the head statement was made by local police Colonel Farouq Hussein. He said autopsies had found that all the victims were shot in the head and the bodies, their hands bound, had been dumped in one room before the house was destroyed.
The official military statement on March 15th, 2006: referred to the incident:
Initial US Army reports quoted Major Tim Keefe, a US military spokesperson:
I don’t see any piture of a child with brains spilling out. The only wound I see in the whole bunch of photos is the child with the gash in the forehead. I don’t know where you got the number 13. Eveything I read says 11 dead.
I haven’t seen bullet wounds although I have seen scars from healed wounds. My understanding is that a bullet leaves a small wound when it enters the body but a larger wound when it leaves the body. The photos of the JFK assassination come to mind. I don’t see anything like that in these pictures.
I don’t think it’s reasonable that troops whose mission is to get an al-Qaeda suspect into custody that comes under fire in a hostile village would actually be equipped to do some sort of search and rescue and would abandon their mission while exposing themselves to additional risk. If I had a relative or neighbor in that helicopter, I would want them to take their prisoner and get out of dodge.
There is no reason to believe that both stories are not basically true. It seems reasonable to believe there were more casualties than the military was initially aware of. The assertions of gunshots to the head and bound hands are not being corraborated.
Farouq Hussain said “shot in the head and bodies.” He did not say “single gun shot to the head.”
Tim Keefe is useless as a source. He is not a coroner, and he is doing armchair autopsies based on photographs.
Initial U.S. military report said four dead. On June 2, this was modified with an admission of up to 9 additional possible collateral deaths. 4 plus 9 = 13. That’s where I get thirteen.
Look closely at the second picture. There is something that at least appears to be brains on the blanket to the upper right corner of head of the child on the right (the childrens’ right, not the viewer’s as you face the photograph).
The infant’s head is cracked open, and there is a deep wound above the left eye. Is it impossible for a point-blank round from an assault rifle cause a infant’s skull to crack open? If that’s impossible, we can rule out a gunshot wound.
You know, I think it’s plenty “reasonable” to save the lives of dying civilians our troops accidentally mortally wound, rather than leaving them to die. Is it really our policy to leave old women and children to die, because we’re afraid to stay around and save them? Isn’t the whole supposed purpose of us being over there to HELP the Iraqis?
There are not two stories here. There are three. So “both stories” can not “basically be true”:
1. The story reported by Iraqi police: 11 dead, U.S. troops enter house before it collapses, victims shot and placed in one room. That’s corroborated by several eyewitnesses, coroners, the BBC and AP.
2. The first story reported by the U.S. military: 4 dead, investigation ongoing.
3. The second story reported by the U.S. military: maybe up to 13 dead, but no wrongdoing on the part of U.S. troops (within 24 hours of new evidence emerging).
Do you believe 1, 2, or 3?
Now, there are a lot of details I haven’t found yet.
Did all 11 of the victims live in the same house? Why were 11 people, with five different surnames, sleeping in the same house? Two families sharing a house, with three guests? It’s not impossible, but where did these people originally live, and how did they all end up there at 2:30 am?
Is there any evidence for or against slain livestock, as there is in the accusations?
Where did the U.S. troops find the four bodies they originally reported? What rooms? Where were the other seven? How did they miss them?
The U.S. military changed it’s story from 2 to 3. Who do you believe, the ones who changed their story, or the ones who didn’t? The only thing backing up the U.S. military’s latest version of their story is military statements and unqualified photo-based autopsies. EVERYTHING else points to story #1.
The version of events set out by Iraqi police IS “corroborated,” by eyewitnesses, neighbors, police, coroners, the AP, and the BBC.
The version of events set out by the U.S. military is corroborated by–NO EVIDENCE and NO WITNESSES. Have statements been taken by ANY soldiers that were at the scene? Has the U.S. military collected ANY material or photographic evidence of its own that refutes the account put forward by the Iraqi police? No. The U.S. military is just sitting back issuing vague statements with ambiguous, disjointed timelines of the event, and trying to poke holes in the work of police and coroners.
Look, I know you’re inclinded to believe U.S. troops didn’t massacre children execution-style at Ishaqi. I hope to hell it’s not true, too. But you’re ignoring ALL the evidence that comes from Iraqis or journalists, which leaves only the U.S. forces. We’ve heard from the U.S. military. Let’s continue this debate after the Iraqi government completes its own investigation of the incident, but first let me make one prediction: The U.S. military’s story will change at least one more time before this is all done.
Tim Keefe is a military spokeperson and a major. If he says he saw the autospy photos and there were no handcuffs I would say there were no handcuffs in the photos. I’m not a coroner either, and I could probably determine if there were any handcuffs in a photo. Seeing handcuffs in a photo is not rocket science. You don’t appear to be reading the statements very carefully.
Where is the initial military report for the number thirteen dead? What is your source on this?
How did the troops miss bodies? Easy. This is a culture where the women are afraid of the men. They hide from the men and the houses are often built with a guest toilet in the front to keep guests away from the women and children. Bedouins routinely sleep in rooms with large numbers of people from extended families, but the women would not be sleeping in the same room with the al-Qaeda person, assuming it was male and not a family member, so they would also be hidden from any troops that came in contact with this al-Qaeda person.
I don’t see any brains in any photo. The second picture has something that looks to me like part of the blanket next to the child. One of the photo captions of this child says it is a girl with a pink ribbon in her hair. Maybe that’s what you see. It doesn’t look like any brain I ever dissected in any biology class. I don’t think the photo is clear enough to say what it is or if there is any gunshot wounds to the head. In fact, none of the photos shows this. You would expect a bullet in the brain to be fairly obvious, like the JFK assassination photo that shows the back of his head blown off.
Where do you get different surnames? Arabs don’t use western surnames.
Where does the BBC corroborate US troop entiering house and victims shot? Did BBC arrive before the raid?
Where does AP corrobarate US troops entering house and victims shot. Did AP arrive before the raid?
Where is the coroner’s report that you cite? I understood the coroner report was not released and the coroner made no statement.
What police corraborates the report? Were the police there before the raid? Did they see the raid?
I think you will find that all of these reports circle back to the statements of this Farouq Hussein. Where did his info come from? If there were witnesses to the alleged handcuffs and shots to the head, why were these witnesses not killed as well?
I understand the raid that killed al-Zarkawi and his spiritual advisor also killed five other people including a woman and child. Guess the military didn’t risk their own safety to rescue them either. They got a good film of the thing, though, this time.
There are too many people who have an advantage to this story continuing. The villagers who want to collect the $2500 death benefit for non-combatants. The sunni who want to take back political power. The US military who wouldn’t mind if Haditha faded from the spotlight. It would be even better if people vaguely remembered some story about a raid that turned out later not to be true. Greg, I do believe you’re helping along their PR efforts.
Well, how about that raid that killed Zarqawi? For once, we see a picture of a dead body from the Iraq War all over the American press. What we don’t see is you mentioning anything about the press suddenly violating its so-called taboo on showing dead bodies, and no complaints from you about blood porn. Because there IS no taboo against showing dead bodies in the American press. There’s a taboo against showing graphic bad news from Iraq. But if a dead body from war is is GOOD news, it’s right there on the front page of the paper, it’s the first thing you see on the evening news, no warnings that you might want to look away. Remember Aday and Kusay? Same exact thing–photographs of dead bodies all over the American press, and not a peep from you about “blood porn.”
Where do I get five different surnames? From this list of victims from the source YOU linked to:
Turkiya Muhammed Ali, 75 years
Faiza Harat Khalaf, 30 years
Faiz Harat Khalaf, 28 years
Um Ahmad, 23 years
Sumaya Abdulrazak, 22 years
Aziz Khalil Jarmoot, 22 years
Hawra Harat Khalaf, 5 years
Asma Yousef Maruf, 5 years
Osama Yousef Maruf, 3 years
Aisha Harat Khalaf, 3 years
Husam Harat Khalaf, 6 months
Count the surnames yourself. There are five (5), roman numeral V.
Arabs don’t use western surnames? Of course not. What is that supposed to mean? You seem to be inserting nonsense to cloud the issue, which I think is your intent.
Where’s the initial military report for 13 dead?
The INITIAL U.S. military report was four (4) dead. On June 2, the military CHANGED THEIR STORY, and admitted there may have been up to nine (9) collateral casualties. I am not going to do the arithmetic for you again.
What’s the source for the autopsies?
“A local police commander, Lt. Col. Farooq Hussain, interviewed by a Knight Ridder special correspondent in Ishaqi, said autopsies at the hospital in Tikrit ‘revealed that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed.’”
I never said there was a coroner’s report–that’s something I’d like to see. But there was an official statement regarding the results of autopsies.
What police corroborates the Iraqi police report?
“The report filed by the Joint Coordination Center, which was based on a report filed by local police, said U.S. forces entered the house while it was still standing.”
“The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men,” the report said. “Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals.” (Source: Knight Ridder, 3/19/06)
Police at all levels have stood by this report.
Did the press corroborate the Iraqi police report?
“Hassan Kurdi Mahassen, who was also woken by the sound of helicopters and saw soldiers entering Fayez’s home after spraying it with such heavy fire that walls crumbled.”
“Mahassen said that once the soldiers had left — after apparently dropping several grenades that caused part of the house to collapse — villagers searched under the rubble “and found them all buried in one roomâ€.
“Women and even the children were blindfolded and their hands bound. Some of their faces were totally disfigured. A lot of blood was on the floors and the walls.†(Source: Times Online, 3/21/06)
Is Tim Keefe a credible source?
Tim Keefe did not even know which unit conducted the raid. He made some judgements based on photographs. Can you conclude anything from the photographs in this case? You say no. Then you say yes.
Accusing me of helping the PR efforts of Sunni insurgents is just beyond the pale. It was obviously intended to infuriate me to the point that I say something outrageous and damage my own credibility. That is one effective way to win an argument, or appear to, but it is a tactic of arguing that shows a real lack of integrity.
I will not respond in kind, because I take accusations of aiding the enemy seriously. But I will not continue this discussion either. You have demonstrated that you are willing to use the most vicious kind of baseless insult to “win” a debate. That is what you have turned this debate into. You “win.”
Congratulations.
“Why were 11 people, with five different surnames, sleeping in the same house?”
This would be odd in the U.S. but very normal among Arabs. It is not unusual for couples in the country to have 10 or 12 children, more when there are multiple wives. Many times I have seen the families of several brothers live together under one roof, and have myself slept in rooms with many more than 11 people. Sometimes the children, unmarried women and widows all sleep in one room on individual two-inch foam pads rolled out on the concrete floor. Believe me, if you can’t afford central heat, and in the country they can’t, in March it’s much warmer to sleep in a room full of people, maybe heat it up with a kerosene or propane space heater first if you’re lucky. In the summer months they switch to roofs and balconies because of the heat. Also the Arabs are never alone and consider ‘privacy’ to be either a great misfortune or an opportunity for the devil.
I don’t recognize any specific surnames from the list. My students would use up to four names strung together consisting of the first names of their father, grandfather, great grandfather, etc. If they were asked for a “family name” often they would give the name of a tribe–al-Something–quite large families, tribes. If you know the family name, a local person can also tell you what town they are from and what religion they are. The first name in the list “Turkiya” means Turk or Turkish, maybe it is a nickname. The name Um Ahmad means mother of Ahmad (a boy’s name)and is a title of respect that does not give any family name information.
BTW, the name al-Zarkawi just means ‘from Zarka’, a town I have never liked.
The dead Arab gangsters are a bit freaky, aren’t they. The first time they did that, I wondered why. After all we have been through the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK and countless public figures without the need to show their bodies. Even with the publication of Zarkawi’s photo, there is still some rumor he is alive or that there was more than one of him.
I think, Greg that you just made the point I was trying to make. Taken at face value, there appeared to be many different news sources reporting the same thing, apparently coming to the same conclusions independently. But after examining the evidence, it appears that every single one of them used the same source: this local police guy Farouq Hussein. The regional police report was based entirely on this guy, likewise the reports of what was in the autopsies. There is no photographic or other evidence to back up this local police guy, especially in his claims of all the bodies having bullet shots to the brain and handcuffs.
The military spokesman, Keefe is talking about seeing the autopsy photos, not the press video made in the village. He did not try to diagnose the cause of death, he just said the autopsy photos didn’t show any handcuffs. I myself do not have access to the autopsy photos, so I can’t give any firsthand information about them. But how hard can it be for a military guy to identify handcuffs in an autopsy photo? It would be pretty easy for the right person to check his statement.
I would not go so far as to say believing the military PR is aiding the enemy–I’m sure the military is doing what they think is best–but it sure looks like a convenient red herring. The military doesn’t pay me, so I can think whatever I want. My concern as a citizen is not so much to “win” as to avoid being fooled by a very press-savvy administration.