A Rare Look at a Civilian Casualty In Iraq

[RamboLiberal]

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But a recent episode involving a single casualty has drawn unusual attention – only because the youth happened to be the son of a Los Angeles Times employee in Baghdad.

Tina Susman told the story last Tuesday in the L.A. Times. The boy was 17, but she did not name him, nor identify the father.

Susman, the paper’s Baghdad bureau chief, wrote, “U.S. military officials say troops are trained to avoid civilian casualties and do not fire wildly. Iraqis, however, say the shootings happen frequently and that even if troops are firing at suspected attackers, they often do so on city streets where bystanders are likely to be hit. Rarely is it possible to confirm such incidents. In this case, the boy was the son of a Los Angeles Times employee, which provided reporters knowledge of the incident in time to examine it. Witness and military accounts of the shooting offered a rare look into how such killings can occur.”

She revealed that since February, stringers for the newspaper across Iraq have reported at least 18 incidents of American troops firing wildly with at least 22 noncombatants killed. Surely this only scratches the surface, as Walter Pincus observed yesterday in a Washington Post article on the “solatia” or condolence payments that I have often written about. Thousands of such payments have been made by the U.S.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003600630

[Briar]

1. Excellent article

though sadly most people will just want to make excuses for the troops. They just accuse us of being "ultra-liberals and failing to comprehend the reality of what soldiers face." Thank goodness for people like Chris Hedges, who has the moral courage to state: "The reality of the war—the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis—is not transmitted to the American public. The press chronicles the physical and emotional wounds visited on those who kill in our name. The Iraqis, those we kill, are largely nameless, faceless dead."