U.S. Marine Videotaped Shooting Dead Unarmed Iraqi

[Dangerman]

Link here:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/16/1610252

[justinsb]

1. I think you meant wounded , unarmed iraqi

It was on cbc last night, one marine said something like 'this one is only pretending to be dead' and one of the others walked over and shot the wounded man still lying on the ground.

[Surikat]

2. Wasn't dead...

Uh, that Iraqi wasn't dead. OTOH, the shooter had been hit in the face by a spent sniper bullet the day before and was still in the field. That struck me as pretty weird.

I heard they were having a lot of trouble with people pretending to be injured or wanting to surrender who were doing so to ambush the Coalition troops. BBC radio was talking about that.

What was interesting was that the Marines had been in that Mosque the day before and seen the wounded and then came back the next day, which was when the wounded Marine finished off the one Iraqi. Seems a bit odd that no arrangements were made to evacuate the Iraqi wounded.

[damntexdem]

3. Big deal:

for a year and a half, the US has been taped bombing unarmed Iraqis, thousands of them. This has PR impact because it's face-to-face -- but the biggest war crimes go by as 'regular war footage.'

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. Yes it has an efffect

Child fleeing Napalm

Police Chief shooting prisoner in Saigon

Those two IMAGES helped to turn otherwise blase Americans against the war.

Images matter...

[mike_c]

5. that's why the Pentagon is expending so much effort trying...

...to control the public perception of the occupation of Iraq. Individual, potent images do indeed become icons. The orchestrated defacing of public statues and monuments in Iraq early on was an attempt to create patriotic images that people in the U.S. would feel good about.