Robert Fisk: How can the US ever win, when Iraqi children die like this?

[Barrett808]

How can the US ever win, when Iraqi children die like this?
By Robert Fisk

08/14/05 "The Independent" -- -- There’s the wreckage of a car bomb that killed seven Americans on the corner of a neighbouring street. Close by stands the shuttered shop of a phone supplier who put pictures of Saddam on a donkey on his mobiles. He was shot three days ago, along with two other men who had committed the same sin. In the al-Jamia neighbourhood, a US Humvee was purring up the road so we gingerly backed off and took a side street. In this part of Baghdad, you avoid both the insurgents and the Americans - if you are lucky.

Yassin al-Sammerai was not. On 14 July, the second grade schoolboy had gone to spend the night with two college friends and - this being a city without electricity in the hottest month of the year - they decided to spend the night sleeping in the front garden. Let his broken 65 year-old father Selim take up the story, for he’s the one who still cannot believe his son is dead - or what the Americans told him afterwards.

"It was three-thirty in the morning and they were all asleep, Yassin and his friends Fahed and Walid Khaled. There was an American patrol outside and then suddenly, a Bradley armoured vehicle burst through the gate and wall and drove over Yassin. You know how heavy these things are. He died instantly. But the Americans didn’t know what they’d done. He was lying crushed under the vehicle for 17 minutes. Um Khaled, his friends’ mother, kept shouting in Arabic: "There is a boy under this vehicle."

According to Selim al-Sammerai, the Americans’ first reaction was to put handcuffs on the two other boys. But a Lebanese Arabic interpreter working for the Americans arrived to explain that it was all a mistake. "We don’t have anything against you,’’she said. The Americans produced a laminated paper in English and Arabic entitled "Iraqi Claims Pocket Card" which tells them how to claim compensation.

The unit whose Bradley drove over Yassin is listed as "256 BCT A/156 AR, Mortars". Under "Type of Incident", an American had written: "Raid destroyed gate and doors." No one told the family there had been a raid. And nowhere - but nowhere - on the form does it suggest that the "raid’’ destroyed the life of the football-loving Yassin al-Sammerai.

Inside Yassin’s father’s home yesterday, Selim shakes with anger and then weeps softly, wiping his eyes. "He is surely in heaven," one of his surviving seven sons replies. And the old man looks at me and says: "He liked swimming too. "

(more)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9761.htm

[Dhalgren]

1. God...just, god...

[mike_c]

2. and yet so many here take exception when the actions of "the troops..."

...are criticized. These must have been more of those rare "bad apples." :puke:

[kestrel91316]

3. Unfortunately, the brutality of war makes bad apples out of

formerly honerable people, I am convinced.

[Maraya1969]

4. The problem is most Americans don't KNOW ABOUT THESE THINGS

Every time I see something like this I send it around to people on my email list and to some editors and right winged talk show creeps. I just hope others are doing the same.

[Karenina]

6. This is exactly why

the Abu Ghraib pictures MUST be released to the general public. Most Americans are not yet willing to deal with what their loved ones in the military are being used to do in Iraq. It is a DAILY ATROCITY and its effects will FOREVER change your society (if enough of them return ALIVE and in "one piece") as the deployment of those troops in Iraq has DEVASTATED that country. FOR LIES. They are AMERICANS and only the most racist and criminal elements will be able to live with what is a FRONTAL ASSAULT to every precept Americans hold dear. Those nasty pictures being withheld are but the TIP OF THE ICEBERG. The only ones in the world ignorant of that truth are American.

[Barrett808]

7. Unfortunately, conservatives dismiss Fisk

Fried Green Tomatoes even has an "award" called the "Fiskie."

[Southpaw Bookworm]

12. Even if they knew

I don't think many would care. They don't see the Iraqis as human, just as they don't see the homeless families in their community until they lose their house because their baby needs a heart transplant.

[Kipling]

5. Horrific. In so many ways.

[sintax]

8. Thanx hope more will nominate- Choir of Despair

Iraq’s Children: Choir of Despair
US deeply involved in the gravest of international crimes


by Ghali Hassan

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is a wide range of specific rights and protection measures to protect children worldwide. It is also the most ratified international human rights treaty ever. It strictly prohibits the abuse and torture of children. In most Western countries, including the US, the abuse of children is a criminal offensive. However, this is not the case when the crimes are committed against Iraqi children by Western forces. It is part of the destructive policy brought into Iraq by the US Occupation of the country.

Contrary to Western politicians, Western media and Western "progressives" who welcomed the illegal war of aggression against Iraq, the plight of Iraqi children under Occupation is worsening. On all levels – human rights abuse, healthcare, medical, educational, and psychological – the Iraqi children are enduring immense hardship and suffering. It is a cover-up of crimes against humanity.

A recent investigation by Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald, has revealed that US-British forces are holding more than 100 children in jails such as Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca in the south. Witnesses claim that the detainees – some of the children as young as 8 years old – are also being subjected to rape and torture. The investigation is based on classified UNICEF report written in June titled Children in Conflict with the Law or With Coalition Forces and on reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Many Iraqi children were detained indefinitely without access to their family or to lawyers.

The UNICEF report has not been released, because UNICEF is no longer in the humanitarian business of criticising US power and its criminal practices of torture. UNICEF current Executive Director Ann M. Veneman, a member of the Bush cabal and former US secretary of Agriculture, is not likely to offend the Bush administration by releasing the report.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HAS20050809&articleId=822

[tgnyc]

9. How about this one...

http://english.people.com.cn/200508/16/eng20050816_202829.html

In a separate incident, the US forces fired at a group of bricklayers at about 5:30 a.m. (0130 GMT) in Alawi district in central Baghdad, wounding 26 of them, the source said.

The US troops told the Iraqi police that they had shot at "terrorists".

"But when our patrols reached the scene they discovered the wounded people were bricklayers who left home early looking for work," the source said.

[Barrett808]

10. This does seem like a pattern, eh? n/t

[porkrind]

11. Kick

This is a fucking outrage. How long can this shit go on?!