"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine." - - - William Blum

October 18, 2005

Ridding the world of 11-year-old terrorists, Bush-war style

From IRIN (intro):

BAGHDAD, 18 Oct 2005 (IRIN) - Two days of US air attacks against insurgents in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi have caused heavy casualties among the city’s civilian population, a doctor and a senior Iraqi government official in Ramadi said.

“We have received the bodies of 38 people in our hospital and among them were four children and five women,” Ahmed al-Kubaissy, a senior doctor at Ramadi hospital, said on Monday night. “The relatives said they had been killed by air attacks in their homes and in the street.”

Al-Kubaissy said his hospital had also treated 42 people injured in the air strikes on Ramadi, a stronghold of the Islamist insurgents, 110 km west of Baghdad.

A senior Iraqi government official in the city, said three houses had been totally destroyed in the air attacks on Sunday and Monday and 14 dead civilians had been found inside them. A further 12 civilians had been critically injured in the same air strikes, he added.

“I wish I could tell you everything I know, but I cannot,” said the angry official, who asked that his name be withheld for security reasons.

“What I can say is that it was a cowardly action and that if any insurgents have been killed, many more civilians have been buried with them over the past two days.”

The US armed forces said in a statement that jet bombers and helicopter gunships had killed about 70 suspected militants in the attacks on Ramadi, a stronghold of Iraq’s Sunni Arab community, which is bitterly opposed to the US-led military occupation of the country.

A US military spokesman played down independent reports of heavy civilian casualties in the air raids, but did not deny them outright.

“There are no civilian casualties that we are aware of,” Lt Col Steven Boylan, a spokesman for the US-led Coalition forces in Iraq, told IRIN on Tuesday.

The US military statement said at least 20 suspected militants were killed when a US Air Force F-15 jet bombed a group of men suspected of burying a roadside bomb on Sunday, but Reuters quoted an Iraqi police officer in Ramadi as saying that those who died in that incident included children as young as 11....

No, no, no... I'm sure those murdered women and children were Al Qaeda-backed insurgent terrorists. The price of democracy, Bush-war-neocon-style, is death. So wipe away those crocodile tears and stiffen that upper lip, because if our beloved President Bush-war is going to save the world from terrorism and give everyone their freedoms, then he's going to have to kill everyone to succeed. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Right?

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