Sunday, April 11, 2010

collateral murder

I have been waiting for a while now for this site to come up : and it is finally here (http://www.collateralmurder.org/) - a couple of weeks back.
It is pretty chilling to watch the video ... for a variety of reasons - which I dont want to get into.
What is more shocking was the coverage which happened in the aftermath (and it was scarey to see the initial complete silence of the US media about it !) ... the reports, media attention, etc unearthed a lot more.

One of the links in particular which I found disturbing was this : http://www.politicaltheatrics.net/2010/04/iraq-war-vet-we-were-told-to-just-shoot-people-and-the-officers-would-take-care-of-us/ ... not sure how much in propaganda, and how much is true : but it still makes for very very worried reading.
A snippet in particular which shocked me (Indian's will see the eerie parallel from our own past - Not in terms of the 'intensity' of the killing, but the event itself) :

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When this Truthout reporter was in Baghdad in November 2004, my Iraqi interpreter was in the Abu Hanifa mosque that was raided by US and Iraqi soldiers during Friday prayers.

“Everyone was there for Friday prayers, when five Humvees and several trucks carrying [US soldiers and] Iraqi National Guards entered,” Abu Talat told Truthout on the phone from within the mosque while the raid was in progress. “Everyone starting yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is the greatest) because they were frightened. Then the soldiers started shooting the people praying!”

“They have just shot and killed at least four of the people praying,” he said in a panicked voice, “At least 10 other people are wounded now. We are on our bellies and in a very bad situation.”

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Wikileaks, which out'ed this video, has been continuing the coverage on twitter : for the first time I actually think it was a good idea to have started using twitter !

Note: it is important to separate slightly extremist left or right wing reactions to this, and keep a level head - and also remember that it is easy to be an armchair general while the soldiers are out there risking their lives and so might be a bit more jittery .... but boy, I still dont find the video defensible ...

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

How is it going

-Biplab

6/16/2010 11:27:00 PM  

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