It is worth remembering that the US has slaughtered whole families and babies since Shock and Awe. There have been two instances in the last six months of slaughters in Iraq that have gotten a little attention in the US media. This one went totally unnoticed in the pro-war rah rah USA ferver at the beginning of the war.
Using Cluster Bombs on Civilians is a War Crime! From April 02, 2003
Children Killed and Maimed in Cluster Bomb Attack on Town
by Robert Fisk in Baghdad and Justin Huggler
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Reporters from the Reuters news agency said they counted the bodies of 11 civilians and two Iraqi fighters in the Babylon suburb, 50 miles south of Baghdad. Nine of the dead were children, one a baby. Hospital workers said as many as 33 civilians were killed.
Terrifying film of women and children later emerged after Reuters and the Associated Press were permitted by the Iraqi authorities to take their cameras into the town. Their pictures – the first by Western news agencies from the Iraqi side of the battlefront – showed babies cut in half and children with amputation wounds, apparently caused by American shellfire and cluster bombs.
Much of the videotape was too terrible to show on television and the agencies' Baghdad editors felt able to send only a few minutes of a 21-minute tape that included a father holding out pieces of his baby and screaming "cowards, cowards'' into the camera. Two lorryloads of bodies, including women in flowered dresses, could be seen outside the Hilla hospital.
Dr Nazem el-Adali, who was trained in Edinburgh, said almost all the patients were victims of cluster bombs dropped around Hella and in the neighboring village of Mazarak. One woman, Alia Mukhtaff, is seen lying wounded on a bed; she lost six of her children and her husband in the attacks. Another man is seen with an arm missing, and a second man, Majeed Djelil, whose wife and two of his children were killed, can be seen sitting next to his third and surviving child, whose foot is missing. The mortuary of the hospital, a butcher's shop of chopped up corpses, is seen briefly in the tape.
Razzaq Kazem al-Khafaj grieves over the bodies of his children in Hilla in the southern province of Babylon. Khafaj lost 15 members (including six children) of his family as his car was bombed by coalition helicopters while fleeing al-Haidariyeh towards Babylon.(AFP/Karim Sahib)