BBC News: US strike ‘kills Iraqi civilians’
Eight civilians have been killed in an air strike by US military helicopters north of Baghdad, Iraqi police say.
Two children were among those who died in the attack on Wednesday evening near the town of Baiji, the police said.
Baiji’s police chief said the attack targeted a group of shepherds in a farming area. The US military said the incident was under investigation.
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A local man, Ghafil Rashed, told Reuters that his brother and son had been killed in the attack: “The Americans raided our houses… People started fleeing with their children, then the aircraft started bombing people in a street along the farm.”
Baiji’s police chief, Col Mudher Qaisi, told Reuters news agency that the attack was a criminal act, and would make relations between Iraqi citizens and the US forces tense.
“This will negatively affect security improvements,” he said.
Gee, ya think?
This is what the wingnuts’ mantra of “protecting our freedoms” translates to in Iraq: killing shepherds and children.
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May 25th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
cranialoutlet
This is the sickening price of a war. Mistakes are made. My brother is an Apache pilot. Apaches are the helicopters doing a lions share of the attacking in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you know anything about the Apache, you know that it’s one of the most difficult aircraft in the sky to fly. Although my brother went to West Point and was near the top of his flight school classes in skills, there are kids flying Apaches who are 21 years old. Imagine a 21 year old kid flying a 38 million dollar helicopter at 2:00am local time, and he is asked to fire at small white images on night vision, whose position is being relayed from soldiers on the ground, before the pilot finally sees his target? All of this while flying and communicating and staying out of harms way themselves, these kids are looking through a rubber monocle at fuzzy infared images. No wonder there are horrible mistakes made. Do you make similar posts when the military has a “friendly fire” mishap? I sure hope so. I also hope you make posts with similarly energetic language when our military does good things to help people. I will not for a minute make believe that our military hasn’t on occasion made horrible errors costing innocents their lives and that on occasion some military members have even acted with calculated malice and anger. But I’ve also been privy to conversations, pictures, emails and phone calls with almost a dozen young,bright soldiers from out Army who have been in Iraq for 15 month chunks doing things day in and day out to bring smiles to peoples faces, cars across bridges they fixed (were bombed, and they fixed it again) helped to open stoors, helped to paint schools, helped to pave roads, helped to blow up 30 soccer balls… the list of good goes on. Please give things a fair shake, otherwise you are just adding to the white noise of the blogosphere. Media is increasingly becoming a way for like minded people to exchange like minded hot air. We should all be trying to find the truth and to get the truth out there for more people to understand. If you won’t cover both sides of the greatest military in the history of civilization, then I can’t take you seriously.
I hope that after making this comment with my brother and his friends in harms way, I can honestly look at my own blog and make it more fair and more accurate on both sides of all arguments. It’s my duty as a breathing human being in this country that is in such dire times.
May 25th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
meatbrain
Certainly mistakes are made. I am quite certain that in the vast majority of cases, civilian deaths occur because mistakes are made, not because the soldiers involved are coldblooded, reckless killers. But these deadly mistakes are being made in Iraq because we are in Iraq — and we are in Iraq because the Bush administration put us there under false pretenses, employing distortions and lies to drum up support for the war.
I wish your brother a safe tour and a speedy return.