i NEVER thought this would happen

blackwater indictments. wow. they're NOT tried nor judged yet but man, i really NEVER thought it would get this far. good news in that perhaps justice WILL be served (my fingers are crossed)

now if only they would charge king george and his band of merry good ol' white boys........

Sources: 5 Blackwater guards charged in shooting
By MATT APUZZO and LARA JAKES JORDAN

WASHINGTON -- Five Blackwater Worldwide security guards have been indicted and a sixth was negotiating a plea with prosecutors for a 2007 shooting that left 17 Iraqis dead and became an anti-American rallying cry for insurgents, people close to the case said Friday.

Prosecutors obtained the indictment late Thursday and had it put under seal until it is made public, perhaps as early as Monday. All who discussed the case did so on condition of anonymity because the matters remain sealed.

Six guards have been under investigation since a convoy of heavily armed Blackwater contractors opened fire in a crowded Baghdad intersection on Sept. 16, 2007. Witnesses say the shooting was unprovoked but Blackwater, hired by the State Department to guard U.S. diplomats, says its guards were ambushed by insurgents while responding to a car bombing......

we just can't be doing this

we can't. we shouldn't be there. we NEVER should have been there. iraq NEVER attacked us nor were they going to. (i agree saddam had to go, he was an evil despot as are a TON of others). we CANNOT and MUST not torture NOR must we kill innocents. we're doing both

U.S. Strike Kills 8 Iraqi Civilians, Police Say

By REUTERS

BAIJI, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi police said on Thursday a U.S. helicopter airstrike killed eight civilians, including two children, but U.S. forces said the six adults killed were militants suspected of links to a bombing network.

News of Wednesday's incident north of Baghdad broke on a day when the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, said he expected to make further troop cuts by September.

The U.S. Senate approved a further $165 billion to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan for another year after rejecting proposed timetables for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

The speed of drawing down the 155,000 U.S. troops in Iraq is a central issue in the November U.S. presidential election.

An Iraqi television station accused U.S. troops of shooting dead one of its cameramen as he walked to his Baghdad home. The U.S. military denied it had killed any civilians in the area.

The body of a second journalist, a reporter for al-Sharq newspaper, was found dumped in a field with nine other corpses in Diyala province, police and colleagues said...........

In Iraq, a Surge in U.S. Airstrikes

Military Says Attacks Save Troops' Lives, but Civilian Casualties Elicit Criticism

By Ernesto Londoño and Amit R. Paley

Washington Post Foreign Service

CAMP TAJI, Iraq -- From an Apache helicopter, Capt. Ben Katzenberger's battlefield resembles a vast mosaic of tiny brown boxes.

"The city looks like a bucket of Legos dumped out on the ground," the 26-year-old pilot said. "It's brown Legos, no color. It's really dense and hard to pick things out because everything looks the same."

He uses a powerful lens to zoom in on tiny silhouettes, trying to identify people with "hostile intent" among hundreds of ordinary citizens in Baghdad.

In recent weeks, Katzenberger and other pilots have dramatically increased their use of helicopter-fired missiles against enemy fighters, often in densely populated areas. Since late March, the military has fired more than 200 Hellfire missiles in the capital, compared with just six missiles fired in the previous three months.

The military says the tactic has saved the lives of ground troops and prevented attacks, but the strikes have also killed and wounded civilians, provoking criticism from Iraqis....

(NOTE: we wouldn't have to worry about our ground troops OR ANY OTHER OF OUR TROOPS in iraq IF THEY WEREN'T IN IRAQ TO BEGIN WITH)

makes TOTAL sense to me

if you don't count 'em, THEY DON'T COUNT

What is the real death toll in Iraq?
The Americans learned one lesson from Vietnam: don't count the civilian dead. As a result, no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed in the five years since the invasion. Estimates put the toll at between 100,000 and one million, and now a bitter war of numbers is raging. Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg reportInteractive: Iraq - five years on
Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian,
Wednesday March 19 2008

Lieutenant General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan during his time as head of US Central Command, once announced, "We don't do body counts." This blunt response to a question about civilian casualties was an attempt to distance George Bush's wars from the disaster of Vietnam. One of the rituals of that earlier conflict was the daily announcement of how many Vietnamese fighters US forces had killed. It was supposed to convince a sceptical American public that victory was coming. But the "body count" concept sounded callous - and never more so than when it emerged that many of the alleged guerrilla dead were in fact women, children and other unarmed civilians.
Iraq was going to be different. The US would count its own dead (now close to 4,000), but the toll the war was taking on Iraqis was not a matter the Pentagon or any other US government department intended to quantify. Especially once Bush had declared "mission accomplished" on May 1 2003 - after that, every new Iraqi who died by violence would be a signal that the president was wrong, and would show that a war conducted in the name of humanitarian intervention was exacting a mounting humanitarian toll of its own.
But even though the Americans were not counting, people were dying, and every victim had a name and a family. Wedding parties were bombed by US planes, couples driving home at night were shot at checkpoints because they missed a flashlight warning them to stop, and hundreds of other unarmed civilians were killed for no legitimate cause. In just the last three weeks of April 2003, after Saddam's statue and his regime were toppled, US forces killed at least 266 civilians - a pattern of overeager resort to fire which has continued to this day. .......

phantom dead

there were nine women and one child who were being buried. the iraqis said they died when a bus was bombed (NOT by the us i want to add). HOWEVER, the us military said NO ONE WAS KILLED ON THE BUS. sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, the actual casualty figures of iraqi citizens are being altered by the military. NO WONDER THE SURGE IS WORKING!

perhaps they can use the logic in the us cities with the highest murder (and other crimes) rates? sounds like a plan to me!
Iraqis bury 10 after blast U.S. says killed no one
Source: Reuters
By Ahmed Rasheed
BAGHDAD, March 12 (Reuters) - It was an incident that aptly summed up the fog of war in Iraq -- relatives burying nine women and a child they said were victims of a bomb attack on a bus in which the U.S. military said no one died.
In Iraq, acts of violence are almost always accompanied by multiple accounts from witnesses, police, health officials and U.S. forces. But even by Iraqi standards Tuesday's attack on a bus full of mourners was a puzzle.
The U.S. military said in a statement on Wednesday the bus was hit by an explosively formed penetrator, a particularly deadly type of roadside bomb normally used against U.S. armoured vehicles. A nearby U.S. convoy was also caught in the blast.
"Operational reports confirm one U.S. soldier and one civilian were wounded in the convoy," the military said in a statement that came after a day of conflicting casualty reports.,,..........