Has there been an Iraq version of My Lai?

[Tansy_Gold]

To support an ongoing discussion with a wavering Repuke, I am trying to find out if there has been any reporting of any specific incidents of atrocities committed against civilians in Iraq. I understand that the entire US/coalition engagement in Iraq is an atrocity, but I am looking for localized incidents. The nature and scope, i.e. body count, isn't important so long as it is relatively "small scale," at least in comparison to full-scale carpet bombing or urban-area invasion.

I would prefer (ugh) that the perpetrators be American rather than coalition forces, but it really doesn't matter. Links will be gratefully appreciated.


Tansy Gold, never giving up, never surrendering

[Fixated]

1. .....

Nothing big has been reported that wasn't an airstrike....but bashing the soldiers probably won't get you anywhere.

[Tansy_Gold]

9. Well, first off, I wasn't "bashing" the soldiers.

My Lai happened. Do we forgive and forget and excuse? See, there's a real fine line between 'supporting the troops' and saying that anything they do is a-okay with the folks back home.

Part of my argument -- which you never asked about, you just "assumed" I was bashing the soldiers -- is that the horror of war makes ordinary human beings do horrible things.

When I said my preference would be for Americans to be the perpetrators, I *meant* that if it were Brits or Italians or Turks, my respondent would be able to dismiss them as "heathen furriners," when the argument would be more effective if I can show him that even good ol' all-american kids can be driven to do unspeakable things under the unspeakable conditions of war.

I, on the other hand, would much rather have


peace

Tansy Gold

[SlavesandBulldozers]

2. not that i know of, and not yet

but you do know about the Afghanistan massacre, no? The one where Taliban fighters were locked in containers and driven hundreds of miles, all of them winding up dead.

[Tansy_Gold]

10. Yes, I knew of the Taliban massacre

but I am looking for a comparable civilian event.

Don't get me wrong -- if there hasn't been one, I'm glad!!!

[Snow]

3. Distance makes a difference, eh?

Why else was My Lai a crime while the B-52 pilots were just doing their jobs? Or launchers of cruise missles on Iraq? The firebombers of Dresden or Tokyo? The horror I suppose is to look at local people, see their faces, and kill them. Not sure why......

[Racenut20]

5. Somehow/someway

Someone always wants to bring it back to the evils of the GI in Vietnam. YaHaddaOuttaBenDere and you might not do that.

[Zero Gravitas]

4. *IF* there is

we won't know about it for years, if ever.

[Racenut20]

7. 9-0

I ammmmmmmm impressed. (former KC resident currently dying with Da Bucs)

[DuctapeFatwa]

6. try a google

I think you will have no trouble finding what you are looking for.

However, most atrocities are not likely to be reported by news orgs with regime ties.

[dutchdemocrat]

8. Here's your My Lai

"Because by the end of that Sunday, 29 American service men and women would be dead, the worst US losses of the Iraq war."

**** This was worse than Somalia and it seems the story was buried. I guess only Clinton can only get blamed for shit like this, right?

"Many of the Iraqis were dressed in civilian clothes.”Found it hard to work out who the enemy was," said Corporal Josh McCall. "They'd fire at us, then put down their weapon and take off walking like a civilian."

**** Why would a guy fire a weapon at a well armed us soldier, then drop it and act like a civilian. Hello? "Here I am, I shoot at you, I drop gun, I run away - here hit me in the back!" ummm... Ok.

"When I returned to the city, medical staff in the main hospital - where Jessica Lynch was treated - estimated that over 1,000 Iraqis had died during the fighting. Many were military personnel, but they believe the majority were civilians. Thousands more had been maimed and injured."

**** Smells like Mogadishu at best. My Lai at worst. Fucking fire at anything that moves. The reporter saw it, believe him or don't - your choice.



---------------

The other side of the Lynch story

By Andrew North
BBC correspondent

It's the main highway through eastern Nasiriya, but otherwise an unremarkable, two-mile stretch of road. Grey, low-built houses on either side, there are no particular landmarks, or sights as you drive along it.

Only if you look closely at the buildings and see the clusters of bullets holes do you get a clue to what took place here on Sunday 23 March 2003.

It was along this road that the US army convoy carrying Jessica Lynch was ambushed. But a lot more happened that day, in a story that rarely gets told.

Because by the end of that Sunday, 29 American service men and women would be dead, the worst US losses of the Iraq war.

Nasiriya was the scene of bloody close-quarter fighting

I remember first reports of the ambush coming in. Frantic radio traffic. American soldiers caught in heavy Iraqi fire. Several killed, others missing.

Soon after, more reports of casualties, from the US marine battalion sent to help the soldiers. "We got three KIAs confirmed," I heard amid the bursts of static. The numbers kept rising.

I was an embedded reporter with the marines, at their command post just outside Nasiriya at the time. They were part of a unit known as Task Force Tarawa, sent to the city with orders to take bridges.

SNIP

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3260473.stm

[Tansy_Gold]

13. Good report, but it's an engagement, not a My Lai style

massacre of civilians.

Again, I'm not HOPING to find something. I'd be much much happier if there hasn't been anything comparable.

And to reply to another post in this thread, yes, I'm looking for something different from the bombing runs and cruise missiles and all that other high-tech distance stuff. It's not that they're any more excusable or less atrocious, but for the purpose of particular direction my discussion is going, I need comparables. Rest assured that if I don't find comparables, I will be very pleasantly relieved and will find another direction.

The person with whom I am having this discussion has taken the tack that war is a normal facet of life and no one should get too upset about it or about losing a few soldiers' lives so everyone else can live free -- and that no one cares about "enemy" lives at all. I wanted to show that the My Lai massacre did have an impact not only on the individual lives of the soldiers involved but on the attitude of the country at large, and that it affected much of the way we learned to think of "the enemy" as a human being (even though it took us a lot longer to achieve any kind of peace with Vietnam than we did with Germany or even Japan, but I guess that's because we actually "won" those wars. . . . )

[dutchdemocrat]

15. Close. Too many civilians nailed for sure

More like Somalia I suppose.

[NormanConquest]

11. I think the statement today that

"The destruction of this structure will deny enemy forces any use of it in the future"

ranks right up (or down) there with

"We had to destroy the village to save it."

[Brotherjohn]

12. Whole families have been killed "mistakenly" at checkpoints and such.

One of the first and most notorious cases was the checkpoint killing at Najaf:
http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/04/1595305.php
Someone posted a heart-wrenching account of that families experience at DU yesterday.

Then there's this current DU Post:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=698310

Civilians dying is a daily occurrence in Iraq, and it happens with far greater frequency than Coalition soldiers dying. That may not be equatable with My Lai, but it is significant.

[Tansy_Gold]

14. Thank you, Brotherjohn

That one is close enough to what I want, as if I really "wanted" it. Ugh.

I think the fear and frenzy that war creates is very evident in this incident, and that's the kind of argument I wanted to make. Not bashing the troops -- bashing the war.

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. another, disputed, incident is al-Falluja

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/iraqfalluja/Iraqfalluja.htm#P50_591

"The key turning point came five days later, on April 28, when a demonstration calling for the soldiers to leave turned violent. According to protesters, U.S. soldiers fired on them without provocation, killing seventeen people and wounding more than seventy. According to the U.S. military, the soldiers returned precision fire on gunmen in the crowd who were shooting at them.

At a protest in town two days later, a U.S. military convoy opened fire killing three persons and wounding another sixteen. Again the military said it had come under armed attack, which the protesters denied. That same night, grenades were thrown into a U.S. base in al-Falluja, injuring seven U.S. soldiers. An attack a month later, on May 28, killed two U.S. soldiers and wounded nine. This and other attacks in late May and early June killed four U.S. soldiers and wounded twenty-one.

This report documents these first two violent incidents of April 28 and 30, the facts of which continue to be deeply contested by both sides. The conclusions of Human Rights Watch's investigation challenge some of the assertions made by the U.S. military. Significantly, Human Rights Watch did not find conclusive evidence of bullet damage on the school where U.S. soldiers were based during the first incident, placing into serious question the assertion that they had come under fire from individuals in the crowd. In contrast, the buildings across the street facing the school had extensive evidence of multi-caliber bullet impacts that were wider and more sustained than would have been caused by the "precision fire" with which the soldiers maintain they responded, leading to the civilian casualties that day. Witness testimony and ballistics evidence suggest that U.S. troops responded with excessive force to a perceived threat.

In the second incident on April 30, protesters admitted throwing rocks, and one broke the window of a U.S. military vehicle, injuring a soldier. But there was no clear evidence of shooting from the crowd, again suggesting that U.S. forces responded with disproportionate force."