4/14/2010

Iraq Death Squad

As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad's poor Shiite district of more than 2 million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded.

At first he couldn't tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn't move like any Iraqi forces he'd ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade," Hassan recalls them saying. Full Story Here.

3 comments:

  1. More and more will start to leak out.
    These guys are assassins in the night, with no over sight what so ever.
    Al Sadr will have a lot to say in this new GOVT.
    EXIT STAGE RIGHT

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  2. Yes. And the exit will be very messy. Watch out for more of 'Mission Accomplished' B/S.

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  3. Judderman3:47 PM

    When dozens of US veterans of the hostilities in Iraq testified in March 2008 at an event called Winter Soldier, they presented documented evidence that suggested the killing of unarmed civilians was frequent, systemic, pervasive, and a result of official policy. They also testified that the rules of engagement, which the soldiers in the leaked video apparently followed, were contradictory, often changed, and loosely enforced.So it’s not surprising that the indiscriminate shooting of civilians sounds like just another day’s work. You can hear how routine it is in the voices of the gunship crew as they prepare to shoot and then survey their handiwork. The video comes with a warning that the images might be disturbing, but what is really disturbing is how distant and surgical — how commonplace — such actions have come to seem.

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