‘Shoot first, ask question later!’

When Bush (Snr,) obtained Congressional approval to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991, a leading US media tried to test the general knowledge of the ordinary Americans on the street.

A world map was shown to them and they were asked to spot where Kuwait is. It was reported that more than sixty percent of them pointed at France, which is in fact in Europe.

They didn’t know the simple fact that Kuwait and France are in two different continents. My question now is; whether will these people know, if one were to ask them where Haditha is?

This is a place not even the Arabs in the Middle East knew until 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were mercilessly butchered by the US marines, sent in by Bush junior during his invasion of Iraq in 2003. Exactly 12 years after his father’s adventure in the region.

This tragedy took place in 2005, in a place called Haditha on the banks of Euphrates north-west of Baghdad. The order given to the marines was ‘shoot first, ask questions later’.

What question you can ask from a dead person and what answer you will get from the corpse? Among the dead were women, children and elderly people – all were unarmed and had nothing to do with any kind of insurgency.

Eight US marines were charged over the killing in Haditha in the US, the charges against the six were dropped, one was acquitted and the eighth one, Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who admitted the charges linked to the killing of 24 innocent Iraqi civilians, faced a maximum of three months after admitting dereliction of duty in a plea deal.

However, a judge has recommended that he should face no time in detention! Military judge Lt. Col. David Jones has said that his hands had been tied by the terms of the plea agreement.

An Iraqi survivor in this brutal massacre, Awis Fahmi Hussein, who had been shot in the back has responded with disappointment: ‘I was expecting that the American judiciary would sentence this person to life in prison and that he would appear and confess in front of the whole world that he committed this brutal crime, so that America could show itself as democratic and fair’.

- Asian Tribune –

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