Just Cocky said:GMCarter said:
Just Cocky said:On 17 Feb 2006 09:36:53 -0800, "TC" <[email hidden]> wrote:
>
>Did y'all notice that we still do not have a clear explanation of
>exactly how the accidental shooting occurred.
>
Who cares?
Clinton gets a blow job
Good for him. But, still, who cares?
LOL...a lot of people do. A lot of people in the United STates and
around the world are sick of the lies, the deception, the secrecy
about what OUR purblic SERVANTS (I know, it's a joke) are doing. The
spying, the destruction of the environment, the extraordinary
renditions, the murdering of people in Iraq, the destruction of civil
liberties, the inflaming of hatred, the exacerbated geopolitical
instahbility, Katrina, sucking up to the rich, stealing from the poor,
dismal healthcare, 46 million uninsured, pensions flying away, huge
domestic and trade deficits....
George M. Carter
**
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021706D.shtml
Iraq: What Cheney Truly Has to Answer For
By Greg Mitchell
Editor & Publisher
Thursday 16 February 2006
Tom Lasseter, intrepid war correspondent for Knight Ridder, has an
appointment in Samarra. In this city, "re-taken" by the US, death,
devastation and cries of "Why? Why?" come from both Iraqis and
Americans.
We'd like to give Vice President Cheney a break from the
wall-the-wall coverage of the face-shooting incident of this past
week, so let's turn to his war in the Middle East, which continues
maiming (and creating more terrorists) every day. Over there, the
warriors on each side are not using birdshot.
My favorite editorial cartoon of the week comes from my local
paper here in the Hudson Valley, The Journal News, which happens to
employ recent Pulitzer winner, Matt Davies. He pictured a barren
landscape, looking much like Iraq, with buckshot-riddled bodies strewn
across the field, Cheney with his shotgun still smoking, and flying
harmlessly overhead a duck labeled "WMDs." Cheney looks up at the
honking duck, says, "Damn. Missed."
Well, that pretty much says it all. Yet one of the top American
correspondents in Iraq, Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder, still manages
to say quite a bit more, in a gripping, and depressing, article
distributed today and posted at the www.krwashington.com site.
E&P has profiled Lasseter and his work numerous times in the past
two years, and last we heard he was supposed to be back home in the
USA, but there he is, still risking life, limb and, no doubt, sanity
in Iraq.
Based in Baghdad, Lasseter often gets embedded with US or Iraqi
troops out in the hellish beyond. Inevitably he gets ordinary grunts
to speak honest truths. His latest piece focuses strictly on Samarra,
a city that has lost half of its population of 200,000 since the US
supposedly pacified the area more than a year ago. Lasseter reveals
the true costs - and the real chance that the death and destruction
will go for naught.
Lasseter opens by observing that more than a year after some 5,000
Iraqi and US soldiers re-took the city from the enemy, "American
troops still are battling insurgents in Samarra. Bloodshed is
destroying the city and driving a wedge between the Iraqis who live
there and the US troops who are trying to keep order.
"Violence, police corruption and the blurry lines of guerrilla
warfare are clouding any hopes of victory. 'It's apocalyptic out
there. Life has definitely gotten worse for' Iraqis, said Maj. Curtis
Strange, 36, of Mobile, Ala., who works with Iraqi troops in Samarra.
'You see Samarra and you almost want to build a new city and move all
these people there.'
"Soldiers such as Sgt. Powell desperately want to reach out to the
community, but they're mired in daily skirmishes. Residents have fled,
and a 7-mile-long, 5-foot-high earthen wall that US soldiers built
around the city last August has failed to keep out the insurgents.
"Many of the American troops who patrol the city say they don't
see much hope for Samarra. Some officers privately worry that the city
will fall to insurgents as American troops withdraw." Already,
roadside bomb attacks are increasing, with at least 15 going off in
January.
And it's hard to tell who is in the enemy. US military officials
suspect that many of the Iraqi soldiers, including a company
commander, are on the insurgents' payroll, possibly in league with
terror master Zargawi. Yet the 101st Airborne plans to hand over the
town to the Iraqi police and army by July 1.
One recent day, which Lasseter describes in vivid detail, a
..50-caliber machine gun, on the roof of a schoolhouse, manned by a
21-year-old Texan name Michael Pena blasted an unarmed man on the
street into oblivion. Horrified soldiers rushed to the Iraqi, or what
was left of him - his organs were now slithering out - and watched him
die, as he praised god and muttered, "Why? Why?"
"Haji, I don't know," an American soldier replied.
A few days later, Lasseter finds the gunner, Pena, still manning
the machine gun on the same roof. Pena doesn't say a word about the
man he killed but he is boiling with frustration.
"No one told me why I'm putting my life on the line in Samarra,
and you know why they didn't?" Pena asks. "Because there is no f------
reason."
Perhaps Vice President Cheney, or his new press secretary,
Katharine Armstrong, can explain that to him.
-------