Mohammed Barkir Al-Mohari said in a translated videotape that the incident outside Najaf in southern Iraq on Monday was purposely set up to give Saddam's regime grist for criticizing the United States.
I don't implicitly trust anything from Joseph Farrah's 'The-UN-Troops-Are-Coming-To-Confiscate-Our-Guns-And-Enslave-Us-In-The-New-World-Order'
World Net Daily, but this would not surprise me to learn it from a credible publication. In fact, I would be shocked to learn this kind of thing has not been happening. We already have reports of Fedayeen militia and Republican Guard forcing Iraqi men to fight against the US by threatening to kill their wives and children. We saw it in Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban militia.
There is more than enough reason to believe that the Hussein regime will attempt to manipulate international and Iraqi opinion through inflating civilian casualties (as the Taliban did) and ploys designed to put civilians in the line of fire. Anyone who believes Hussein's minions wouldn't deliberately send a car load of women and children racing up to a military check-point as a publicity stunt is either stupid, brain damaged, or both.
In fact, the last 10 years of Iraqi history could be defined as a heated contest between those who are all-too willing to be manipulated by Saddam Hussein's masterful ploys exploiting the suffering of his people in order to turn international opinion against the United States and those who are smart enough to know a [murderous] con artist when they see one.
I won't speculate about the motives of those who, by consequence of their actions, give comfort and support to a murderous dictator. I am content to just explain them all as exceptionally stupid, and thus, unwitting puppets for Hussein. But I realize that is terribly naive, many are not by any means stupid, they actually support Hussein's murderous regime, which would make them evil, not stupid.
Meanwhile it has emerged - as a result of detective work on the internet by a Guardian reader - that the explosion in a Baghdad market which killed more than 60 people last Friday was indeed caused by a cruise missile and not an Iraqi anti-aircraft rocket as the US has suggested.
lol! How in the hell do you perform a full investigation of a market bombing in downtown Baghdad from your living room?
And you might be interested in a reporters version of this:
"A journalist's account of the killing of a car full of Iraqi civilians by US soldiers differs widely from the official military version, says Brian Whitaker"
This is a pretty good example of a hack job. The
only discrepancy between the journalist's account and the official military account is the timing of the warning shots. That hardly qualifies as 'differing widely'.
There are a number of discrepancies that would qualify as 'differing widely'. Among those would be, warning shots fired vs. no warning shots fired. Another would be, no attempt at all was made to warn or stop the vehicle before opening up with machine guns vs. all reasonable and necessary attempts were made to warn or stop the vehicle before opening up with machine guns. Those are 'widely differing' versions.
A dispute over the 'timing' of the warning shots doesn't remotely qualify.
In these extremely tense situations, it is not at all unreasonable that a commander would, upon seeing that the vehicle was loaded with women and children, unload or vent extreme frustration upon his men, even if misplaced. I've seen people misplace frustration over very trivial things, hell I have misplaced frustration over trivial things. I cannot begin to imagine the kind of extreme and traumatic emotions that would follow the realization that the car in which men under your command just filled with bullets contained, not suicide bombers, but women and children.
But 98% of the people in this forum will never find themselves having to make such a choice - kill or be killed - so its easy to pass judgement while 'snapping-in' to a Slim Jim and drinking Mountain Dew from the extreme safety and comfort of your living room.
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