Friday, March 18, 2005
If This is True, It's EXPLOSIVE
If true, this is extremely disturbing.
To their credit, the Free Internet Press site qualifies this report as not being substantiated. My thinking is that it's not so far-fetched to seem just simple propoganda. However, I would like to see some verification from news sources other than Al Jazeera or sources within the military itself.
As I've said many times, I believe the vast majority of our military are people of conscience and I would welcome a soldier or soldiers stepping bravely up to admit that yes, this is indeed going on.
Had the Right not been so eager to spread rumor and innuendo - getting a lie out there without any basis in fact only to rescind the story after the damage is done - I would not be posting this at all. However, in this climate of attack politics and sadly aware at how effective those tactics have been, I have no compunction with posting this and waiting for independent verification later.
And as I said, this story seems too real to be in the tin-hat domain.
(Thanks to Skippy for the heads up)
All is quiet in Falluja, or at least that is how it seems, given that the mainstream media has largely forgotten about the Iraqi city. But independent journalists are risking life and limb to bring out a very different story.
The picture they are painting is of US soldiers killing whole families, including children, attacks on hospitals and doctors, the use of napalm-like weapons and sections of the city destroyed.
One of the few reporters who has reached Falluja is American Dahr Jamail of the Inter Press Service. He interviewed a doctor who had filmed the testimony of a 16-year-old girl.
"She stayed for three days with the bodies of her family who were killed in their home. When the soldiers entered she was in her home with her father, mother, 12 year-old brother and two sisters.
She watched the soldiers enter and shoot her mother and father directly, without saying anything. They beat her two sisters, then shot them in the head. After this her brother was enraged and ran at the soldiers while shouting at them, so they shot him dead," Jamail relates.
To their credit, the Free Internet Press site qualifies this report as not being substantiated. My thinking is that it's not so far-fetched to seem just simple propoganda. However, I would like to see some verification from news sources other than Al Jazeera or sources within the military itself.
As I've said many times, I believe the vast majority of our military are people of conscience and I would welcome a soldier or soldiers stepping bravely up to admit that yes, this is indeed going on.
Had the Right not been so eager to spread rumor and innuendo - getting a lie out there without any basis in fact only to rescind the story after the damage is done - I would not be posting this at all. However, in this climate of attack politics and sadly aware at how effective those tactics have been, I have no compunction with posting this and waiting for independent verification later.
And as I said, this story seems too real to be in the tin-hat domain.
(Thanks to Skippy for the heads up)
