'Why did they shoot? We have no weapons' - GI's shoot up car of children

[Indie Media Magazine]

By Chris Hondros in Tal Afar, Iraq

20 January 2005

It was a routine foot patrol. As we made our way up a broad boulevard, in the distance I could see a car making its way toward us. As a defence against potential car bombs, it is now standard practice for foot patrols to stop oncoming vehicles, particularly after dark.

*snip

"Civilians!" someone shouted, and soldiers ran up. More children - it ended up being six all told - started emerging, crying, their faces mottled with blood in long streaks. The troops carried them all off to a nearby sidewalk.

'Why did they shoot? We have no weapons'

[rooboy]

1. Question for military types here...

since this is a dangerous situation and a fairly common problem, why can't spikes be deployed 50 meters from the checkpoint if a car refuses to stop? It seems a little extreme to just unload straight into the windscreen...couldn't they shoot the tires out first?

[Indie Media Magazine]

3. 5 years active duty Army Medic here......

All I can say is that I'm appauled. I weep for those kids. I weep for those guys who had to shoot up that car. This is the kind of SHIT, B*S* has gotten us into. That good men have to do such terrible things. Those guys will never be able to live with themselves after this carnage.

[mordarlar]

10. I agree with you. We have victims on both sides of Bush's war.

And we need to remember this. I blame Bush and those that continue to stand behind him even though they KNOW the truths about what he has done. So many people will never recover. :`(

[vpigrad]

2. Well...

when you take the type of thug that will swear to kill for Bushie and give them a gun, what do you expect to happen? Also, this probably happens 20 times for each time that it makes it into the news in this country.

[Karenina]

12. Recipe for disaster:

Racist teenies from buttfuck USA who have few options
Season with more racism and lies
pour liquid of proper training and equipment down the drain
heat up skillet with "shock and awe"
form into balls and drop onto skillet seasoned with depleted uranium and the blood of ordinary folks who just want to live their lives
FRY AT HIGH TEMPERATURE TILL THEY ALL DIE.

[xchrom]

4. iraqis = 9/11

bush set the tone for this conflict.
it was his language re: weapons of mass destruction, axis of evil, etc that has set up our soldiers for tragedies like this.
who is the enemy?
you cannot invade a country -- set up an insurgency -- and ask the occupying forces to distinguish between the good guy and the bad guy.
there's no way to tell.
bush is the only one with these kids blood on his hands.

[pompano dem]

5. Do you people read what you write before you post

This was a terrible mistake but please don't accuse our soldiers of intentionally do this. Actually, their professionalism and restraint saved the children. In the past we were shooting until nothing moved inside the car. These people were morons; you have armed soldiers with twitchy trigger fingers surrounding your car and you continue to drive through a checkpoint.

Yes, Bush is a jerk and irresponsible for having us their in the first place but the soldiers fighting must continue to do their job until we pull them out. If that means shooting up a group of unarmed morons to protect themselves then so be it.

[Cocoa]

6. speaking of morons (sic)

you don't know if these people are morans.

And it should be "having us there." not their.

[HamdenRice]

8. Let me try to be diplomatic -- you are completely, utterly wrong

"Our" soldiers are in fact engaged in war crimes, and at this point the only principled thing for a soldier to do is to become a conscientious objector. Granted, shrub got them into this, but US troops are showing a shocking level of incompetence and murderousness. It starts with the officers who have devised idiotic tactics. One is aggressive patrolling. Do you know why so many troops are being ambushed in convoys? Because the tactic is to patrol, and draw fire, and then respond with massive overwhelming counterfire. Given that the vast majority of Iraqis are armed and don't want US troops there, this is a recipe for turning spontaneous potshots into massacres.

Another idiotic tactic is "reconnaissance by fire." US troops fire randomly down streets, using heavy weapons like 50 cal machine guns, to see whether they draw any counter fire. If they do, they "light up" the block. If there is not counter fire, if there are no "terrrrissts" on that block, oh well, they have shot up many families huddled in their apartments. The reconnaissance by fire mentality is what caused this horror in the original post: shoot first, ask questions later.

The logic is like medieval witch dipping. Take an accused witch, hog tie her, throw her in the river. If she sinks and drowns, she was innocent. If she floats and lives, she is a witch and is then burned at stake.

Finally US troops are mostly insular, ignorant yokels from red states who have never been overseas. Sorry to say this but it is true. They scream at Iraqis in English and use western hand signals that have completely different meaning in Iraq. For example, the American hand signal to stop (palm out) does not mean stop in Iraq. The Iraqis are not being idiots for coming forward in their cars. (Wherever I have travelled in the Third World, the universal signal to stop has been a policeman with his palm down, raising it up and down, like he is petting a dog.)

Contrast this to the British soldiers. NPR reported this morning how rare this kind of thing is in the south, which is controlled by the British. British soldiers face mandatory cultural and linguistic training before they are deployed. They call the US troops aggressive and "trigger happy."

[Selatius]

11. I find it incredibly offensive you call the dead "morons"

Often times Iraqis simply don't know what the hell US troops are saying. There's a language barrier that makes things more complicated. This could easily be a case where they simply didn't understand what US troops wanted, and as a result, they died. I'm not saying this is the case, but unless there's enough evidence to come to a conclusion, we shouldn't be passing any judgment. You are in no position to judge given that a) you weren't fucking there and that b) you don't know the damn details of what exactly happened to come to any judgment of anybody there being morons.

[Cocoa]

7. CNN once featured an Iraqi man

whose whole family, wife and five or six kids, were killed at a checkpoint by accident.

The twist was, this Iraqi guy wasn't "bitter" about it, he still supported the invasion. Jane Arraf interviewed this happy Iraqi, and interviewed some U.S. soldiers who praised this guy for being so forgiving, and said they wished all Iraqis were as forgiving as this guy.

[Indie Media Magazine]

13. Hmmmm, Ironic.

[HamdenRice]

9. Can I hijack this thread???

Everyday I read about these horrible events. I read the list of US troops killed and it is becoming common place. This war has to be stopped by the people of the US and the non-violent people of Iraq.

I am sick of posting about the war and reading about the war. This war is the great moral outrage of our age -- like segregation in the south in the 1950s, the Vietnam War of the 1960s, apartheid of the 1970s and 1980s.

Can we stop talking about how pointless, idiotic, murderous and genocidal the shrub administration is and start figuring out how to just end it? The Johnson and Nixon administration did not end the Vietnam war. Apartheid South Africa did not just decide to release Nelson Mandela. Vast numbers of people organized around these purposes caused these atrocities to end.

Let's start using our imaginations: How do we end the war despite the shrub administration?

How to we link up to the non-violent resistance in Iraq? Who are their leaders and spokesmen? How do we bring Iraqi speakers to tour the US, the way ANC and UDF anti-apartheid campaigners toured the US in the 70s and 80s?

How do we get more images out of Iraq?

How do we create anti-war organizations on every US campus and in every liberal mainstream Christian church in North America?

How do we organize a flow of refugees from Iraq to US ports to press for recognition of a "well founded fear of persecution" in Iraq under US occupation? How do we create an underground railroad out of Iraq for Iraqi children?

How do we press US universities to begin giving full scholarships to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi students -- a popular tactic that had a huge impact on the anti-apartheid movement?

How do we organize million-person, multi-city demonstrations whenever the US decides to flatten a city like Fallujah? Why aren't we even as effective as Israel's Peace Now during that government's Jenin campaign -- which is operating under a much more unpopular context than us? Speaking of Israel's opposition, where is our West Bank Data Project, tracking and documenting the US theft of Iraqi resources?

And where is our equivalent of anti-apartheid white South Africa's Black Sash, or white South Africa's soldier conscientious objector movement?

Where is our divestment movement pressuring universities and non-profits and church endowments to disinvest from all companies doing business in Iraq, like Halliburton and Carlyle?

When are we going to stop waiting for the end of the shrub administration to stop the killing? Why are we expecting some heroic figure like the 1969 John Kerry to save us, when we know that the 2004 John Kerry -- I voted for it before I voted against it -- long ago murdered the 1969 Kerry and entombed him in his deadened soul?

[truth2power]

14. Brilliant post, Hamden.

I am so frustrated, I can hardly stand it. In my neck of the woods Creepy Freepers are everywhere. Those who oppose the carnage are silenced. There is no way and no forum to find out where like-minded people are.

If you speak out about even the most benign issue, you're slapped down by some poker faced freeper type, as I was recently by someone who opined that 100%....let me say that again....100% of the troops support Bush. My response noting some of the groups of military and vets opposed was met with a set jaw and vacant stare and robotic repetition of the original statement.

Brainwashed. Creepy. Cultlike. Scary. Mark my words...the people I've described will go on a rampage of killing their own neighbors if given the word by Rush.