they speeded up to us, and we shot them.
reading this whole story, you slowly get the sickening sense that our guys are terrified and isolated and that checkpoint carnage happens all the time in Iraq, just not to rescued Italian hostages.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12507-2005Mar6.html
[....] Military officials in Iraq ... have declined to estimate how many civilians such as Calipari have been killed accidentally by U.S. forces -- at checkpoints or elsewhere in Iraq.
But Army documents indicate that the 3rd Infantry Division -- the military unit that includes the troops responsible for shooting Calipari -- was involved in other shootings of civilians at checkpoints. In April 2004, Army criminal investigators asked a sergeant serving in the division if he and his fellow soldiers had shot at women and children in cars, and the soldier answered, "Yes." Asked why, he replied, "They didn't respond to the signs [we gave], the presence of troops or warning shots."
The soldier, whose name was redacted in documents released by the Army on Friday in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, went on to say: "We fired warning shots at everyone, they would speed up to come at us, and we would shoot them. You couldn't tell who was in the car from where we were, we found that out later. . . . We didn't go through the cars digging around for stuff, we would just look in and see they were dead and could see there were women inside."
Another member of the division told investigators that he also saw women and children shot while approaching checkpoints.
"Basically, we were at a checkpoint, we had two Arabic signs that said to turn around or be shot. Once [they passed] . . . the first sign, they fired a warning shot. If they passed the second sign, they shot the vehicle. Sometimes there would be women and children in the car, but usually it was soldiers."
"Sometimes it bothers me," the man said. "What if they couldn't read the signs? But then what if they had a bomb in the car? We fired warning shots and they kept coming, so I think we did the right thing."
A third man in the unit separately told investigators that a colleague shot his weapon at "a hostile vehicle and it missed and hit a truck behind it, which housed a group of people."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12507-2005Mar6.html
[....] Military officials in Iraq ... have declined to estimate how many civilians such as Calipari have been killed accidentally by U.S. forces -- at checkpoints or elsewhere in Iraq.
But Army documents indicate that the 3rd Infantry Division -- the military unit that includes the troops responsible for shooting Calipari -- was involved in other shootings of civilians at checkpoints. In April 2004, Army criminal investigators asked a sergeant serving in the division if he and his fellow soldiers had shot at women and children in cars, and the soldier answered, "Yes." Asked why, he replied, "They didn't respond to the signs [we gave], the presence of troops or warning shots."
The soldier, whose name was redacted in documents released by the Army on Friday in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, went on to say: "We fired warning shots at everyone, they would speed up to come at us, and we would shoot them. You couldn't tell who was in the car from where we were, we found that out later. . . . We didn't go through the cars digging around for stuff, we would just look in and see they were dead and could see there were women inside."
Another member of the division told investigators that he also saw women and children shot while approaching checkpoints.
"Basically, we were at a checkpoint, we had two Arabic signs that said to turn around or be shot. Once [they passed] . . . the first sign, they fired a warning shot. If they passed the second sign, they shot the vehicle. Sometimes there would be women and children in the car, but usually it was soldiers."
"Sometimes it bothers me," the man said. "What if they couldn't read the signs? But then what if they had a bomb in the car? We fired warning shots and they kept coming, so I think we did the right thing."
A third man in the unit separately told investigators that a colleague shot his weapon at "a hostile vehicle and it missed and hit a truck behind it, which housed a group of people."
posted by Will @ 3/08/2005 02:46:00 AM
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