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The latest such incident goes a step further – and not just the MSM are playing along – Huffington Post jumped on board as well.
Here’s what happened.
US forces were driving through the Ras Al-Jadda neighborhood of Mosul when someone threw a hand grenade at them. There were no US injuries reported. The US forces then opened fire:
Aswat Al Iraq reports: “’the U.S. military opened random fire at pedestrians,” a security source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.”
Reuters reports: “U.S. forces responded by firing at several people”
One person was killed – a 12 year old boy.
While officially the US command has opened an investigation into “the incident,” a “military spokesman” emailed McClatchy reporters that "’We have every reason to believe that insurgents are paying children to conduct these attacks or assist the attackers in some capacity, undoubtedly placing the children in harm’s way," a U. S. military spokesman wrote in an email on Saturday.” And then claimed that they shot at "two of three people positively identified" as involved in tossing the single grenade.
McClatchy headlined their article:
U.S. soldiers, attacked, kill a 12-year-old Iraqi boy
And provides detailed accounts from multiple witnesses that point to the boy being an innocent bystander.
But Huffington Post – while linking to the McClatchy story has a big headline that reads:
Iraq Insurgents Paying Children To Conduct Attacks On US Troops
And then quotes only the sections from the McClatchy article supplied by US spinners:
American soldiers opened fire and killed a 12-year old boy after a grenade hit their convoy in Mosul on Thursday.
The boy was found with ten thousand Iraqi dinars in his hand – worth less than $9. U.S. officials said the money is evidence of a disturbing new trend.
No mention that all local witnesses quoted in the McClatchy article say the boy had nothing to do with the attack:
But eyewitnesses said the boy, identified as Omar Musa Salih, was standing by the side of the road selling fruit juice – a common practice in Iraq — and had nothing to do with the attack.
A friend, Ahmed Jassim, 15, said he was selling cans of Pepsi nearby when he heard the grenade explode. He dove behind a parked car, then heard the roar of machine gun fire. "When the shooting was over and the patrol went away, I stood and I saw Omar on the ground covered with blood," Jassim said.
Another witness, Ahmed IzAldeen, 56, said he saw the person who threw the grenade. It wasn’t the boy, but a man in his twenties, he said. IzAldeen said he saw the man standing behind a truck holding the grenade as the American patrol approached.
(snip)
"When attacked, the Americans just open fire, whether on the gunman or just randomly," said Usama Al Nujaifi, a member of Parliament from Mosul. "The American presence in the cities is wrong, we urged them to stay outside from the beginning."
(snip)
Friends of the Salih family said he was the oldest of 6 children. He quit school in the first grade, when he was six or seven years old.
He was well-known in the Ras Al-Jadda neighborhood, where the attack took place.
Digging out the two paragraphs of DOD spin to headline after all we know about the US SOP following the killing of civilians may give you a hot headline but it certainly does not tell the real story.
Update 8:05 PM – Huffington Post has now changed the headline to match McClatchy’s and substituted a basic descriptive paragraph for the summary.
Video: A short film made by four Iraqi children with help from Unicef – read more here.
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“’We have every reason to believe that insurgents are paying children to conduct these attacks or assist the attackers in some capacity, undoubtedly placing the children in harm’s way,”
They just are not shy about bringing Viet Nam back into the picture, are they?
If only all the bad U S soldiers had died from the grenade attack, they wouldn’t have decided to murder this child.
Maybe the kid had sold 9 dollars worth of juice. Maybe somebody planted nine dollars on the kid’s body. The reports by professional news orgs are as speculative as my speculation herein, yet they are treated as solid and factual. This type of unfounded speculation in news reporting should not be tolerated.
Why ask the Pentagon anything… unless you intend to print it as what did not happen?
We know from all too many past incidents that the response of US forces is to put down “suppressive fire.” And some kid, selling juice to support his family – like so many Iraqi kids whose lives have been so devastated – dies.
Perhaps if the DOD had taken responsibility in any of the earlier similar incidents and did not consistently respond with lies until someone’s cellphone video, etc proves what really happened, I’d be more sympathetic to this latest story.
IT IS KOREA, VIETNAM ALL OVER AGAIN.
and obombya is just another homicidal stooge. killing the “wogs” is quite all right with him. putting him into that cesspool of presidents[truman,kennedy, johnson,nixon, bush1&2 - for the public genocidal thrusts of amerika].
they like to label the results of their bloodlust as “collateral damage”.
a euphemism that has the same meaning as the third reich’s assault on the warsaw ghetto.
shorthand, “we, the great amerikan imperium, led by a white mulatto or a darker mulatto, have hitler’s/stalin’s rights to kill anyone we damn well please. and because no other country has the cojones to stand up to our bullying, we cannot be subject to a trial at den Haag.”
democratic party. republican party. at the end of the day, they are all the homicidal party.
So why did our friends at HuffPo run with that headline?
Boggles the mind.
Even more amazing, it remains 24 hours later.
Yep .. I had hoped it was just an overnight slip and that someone would reconsider … no such luck.
Over time I’ve noticed a lot of misleading headlines at HuffPo, no doubt intended to grab attention. In this case the headline was an accurate summation of a misleading story. Shame on everyone disseminating rationalizations for this senseless and tragic act.
You’re probably already on top of this story Siun but just in case. From The Guardian.
I found the McClatchy article much more nuanced … it did not read like they took the US claim very seriously. What do other folks think?
yep, if Aswat Al Iraq said it then that’s “what happened”. Have fun.
Thanks – I’ve been working on it all day but it got to me … we’ll have something tomorrow on it.
You’re right. My bad, I should have read it BEFORE referring to it as misleading. They didn’t accept the official version at face value and sought eyewitness accounts. Can’t really fault McClatchy. The HuffPo teaser is pretty bad but at least anyone who follows the link will get a bigger picture.
I stopped visiting HuffPo because they were becoming way too … something, but not good – besides being infested with trolls.
Welcome to Obama’s war.
I never go there unless it’s a link someone recommends which I feel I must read.
I think I read a quote by General Odierno this week… he said something along the lines of, I have no idea how many soldiers are patrolling Iraqi cities right now.
At HuffPo you sort of have to wade through the infotainment and I find it best to ignore the comments sections but some of the original editorial posts are worthwhile.
Wasn’t that charming …
Siun mentioned that in her post yesterday.
It was a BS statement. Perhaps technically true, he might not know precisely how many but he must have a rough idea.
charming’s a good word for it.
wtf? disgusting.
what if we spent all the money we’re spending in iraq/afghanistan/pakistan on developing sustainable non-polluting energy sources and transmission lines for our electric grid?
what if we also got the benefit of not killing, injuring and displacing people who have never harmed us?
what if we also got the benefit of not having our own military people dying, injured or coming back with ptsd?
that’s the kind of sane decision making i’d like to see around our policies in the middle east.
I’m with you 1000%. Really.
Whoops.. probably where I read it…)
The Fed has spent three trillion off the books. Nobody knows or will say who got the money or why they got the money. Nobody knows why Lehman was allowed to tank, while others were invigorated.
Gee, throw a grenade at some guys, and they start shooting their guns to suppress further attempts to kill them?
No wonder, if they’re going to do stuff like that, that you have no sympathy.
I no longer frequent the “Huffington Post”. It has become a part of the ‘mainstream media’ (and all that label implies).
yes, that disappeared money and to whom it went is another big disturbance. this too is money that could easily have been spent on the problems of ordinary people.
we need funding for The People’s Lobby.
good question re lehman. the sacrificial lamb to create the panic? the not-goldman sachs?
if iraqis (or anyone) was occupying our country, how would you feel about people throwing grenades at the occupyers?
Not the point. Whoever threw the grenade at the soldiers is responsible for what happened. Either all the soldiers will be killed or, if living, the soldiers are going to do what they think will keep them alive.
You don’t start a fire in a crowded theater.
You don’t start a fire in a crowded theater.
that is exactly my point. us being there in the first place is starting a fire in a crowded theater.
You ignore – as our forces seem to do so often – the obligation of armed forces under international law to protect civilians. Suppressive fire on a crowded city street does not meet that standard.
We agree on that, but, again, not the point.
If you’re nuts enough to think that throwing a grenade at soldiers patrolling some neighborhood is justified, good for you.
Even then, you shouldn’t be blind to the obvious consequences of throwing the grenade.
Show me the obligation that requires soldiers to refrain from returning fire in self-defense.
(And before we argue further, I hope you had a good M’s D).
Huffington Post has now changed the headline to that of McClatchy and changed the summary as well. It’s good to see this addressed.
Thanks – it was relaxing.
I actually have no desire to play debate this evening – the news from Iraq and Afghanistan leave me with little spirit for it.
Good with me , also. Be well.
i’m very glad to see that. i wonder if this article had something to do with it.
“Puff Post” on my bookmark bar…
I’ve read that in the Swat Valley of Pakistan the Taliban are using locals as human shields and then there’s the story from Western Afghanistan where a family were blown up and U.S. troops were blamed and now this story from Iraq. There have been stories like this “forever” from the West Bank.
I can only assume this is a tactic unifying Al Qaeda type groups across the Middle East.
Is the local media in cahoots with them or just reporting ‘juicy’ stories?
As was said, this is too similar to Vietnam to ignore. Kids can be very dangerous, consider Somalia for example, and yet their deaths win ‘hearts and minds’ for those who identify with the dead kids.
American strategy, one would immediately think, is to back off and avoid such incidents. But, there are many places where that’s the opposite of our current engagements. Still, I think we can do more than a one-size-fits-all strategy in Afghanistan, Pakistan & Iraq.
I can’t for the life of me figure why we would’ve been engaged in any kind of military fight in Western Afghanistan. Maybe we weren’t even there? Who knows the truth of these things?
Since our focus on military activity is mostly in border areas of Pakistan it would seem we could afford to pull back to some extent in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t know the specific approaches being used in Iraq, so it’s too easy to casually comment, but there should at least be some consideration given to altering our approach in less critical areas so we can continue full force in some other areas.
Talk about such unholy cherrypicking.
Huffpo won’t post any comment I make if I refer to Gaza within it. It just disappears into the ether. Troubling.
I’m still giving Obama a lot of slack in this business. Given the interests involved in the Iraq misadventure, he has had to tread carefully until he’s got his people in place. He may be President, but he is still vulnerable to insider attacks, just like Clinton was. My guess is that he is as disgusted by this story as we are. I think one of the reasons for leaking the torture stuff and linking it with Cheney’s effort to squeeze a casus belli out of the tortured prisoners is to deligetimize the war. The public — not us — need something to get themselves off the hook. The more they are persuaded that they were deliberately lied to, and that the previous administration tortured people to manufacture the lies, the easier it will be to get out of Iraq. As it stands, Obama has to go against the military brass, whose careers are wrapped up in that mess. He is not yet in a position to do that until the case for Iraq is utterly destroyed. In the mean time, more dead kids on the streets of Mosul.
Our new boss is still killing folks for their oil and it doesn’t look like he is going to stop. He listens to a pair of fourth rate generals that weren’t man enough to quit the military when they learned they were being ordered to torture civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. Dirty little cowards that their fellow generals view as scum. Second rate human beings that the troops are sick of and would probably like to frag.
but no, they are still listened to as though they know what they are doing. They have proven time and time again that they do not know what they are doing, unless mayhem is the operative word? Perhaps.