How would you feel if the Empire’s Army murdered an innocent member of your family and then offered you $10,000 for the trouble?
U.S. acknowledges Baghdad victims were law-abiding, not insurgents
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers
Sun Jul 27, 7:40 PM ET
BAGHDAD — The U.S. military said Sunday that the three people killed last month after U.S. soldiers shot at their car in one of the most secured areas of Iraq were civilians, not criminals as the military initially reported.
The correction came more than a month after a bank manager at a branch inside the airport, Hafeth Aboud Mahdi , and two female bank employees were shot at by U.S. soldiers as they sped to work on a road within the secured airport compound. The road is used only by people with high-level security clearance badges. The car veered off the road, hit a concrete blast wall and burst into flames.
The original statement said that Mahdi and the two women were “criminals” and that an American convoy on the side of the secured road came under small-arms fire from the vehicle. Soldiers said they shot back. A weapon was found in the debris and two U.S. military vehicles were struck by bullets from the attack, the statement on June 25 said.
“When we are attacked, we will defend ourselves and will use deadly force if necessary,” said Maj. Joey Sullinger , a spokesman for 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, said at the time. “Such attacks endanger not only U.S. soldiers but also innocent civilians, including women and children, traveling the roadways of Baghdad .”
On Sunday the story changed and the tone was apologetic. A military statement said that neither the civilians who were killed nor the soldiers were at fault for the deaths. An investigation found that “the driver and passengers were law-abiding citizens of Iraq .”
Soldiers had pulled off the road because one of the vehicles in the convoy was having maintenance problems. As they worked on the vehicle they saw Mahdi’s car and thought it was moving too quickly toward them, the statement said. Believing they might be in danger, the soldiers warned the car. When the driver ignored the signals they shot at the vehicle, the statement said.
The alleged attack and the weapon that was said to have been recovered from the burned vehicle were misunderstandings, the statement said.
“This was an extremely unfortunate and tragic incident,” said Col. Allen Batschelet , chief of staff, MND-B and 4th Infantry Division, in a statement. “Our deepest regrets of sympathy and condolences go out to the family. We are taking several corrective measures to amend and eliminate the possibility of such situations happening in the future.”
Mahdi’s son, Mohammed Hafeth, said the statement was insufficient.
He said the image of his father’s burning vehicle haunts him. He’d waited in his father’s office that morning surprised that he wasn’t there yet. They’d left at nearly the same time that morning.
Hafeth drives bank employees to work. That morning his father offered to take one of Hafeth’s passengers and picked up another female bank employee who lived nearby their central Baghdad home.
As he sat in the office a colleague walked in and told Hafeth his father’s car was broken down on the airport road. Hafeth reached for his car keys.
“I’ll drive,” he recalled his colleague saying.
As they approached his father’s car he saw the flames. He jumped from the car and started to run toward the burning vehicle, but U.S. soldiers blocked his way.
“Go,” he recalled them ordering. But he said he couldn’t move. He dropped to the ground and wept as his father burned inside the vehicle.
“Why did they kill him like this?” Mohammed Hafeth said Sunday in a phone interview. “We demand that they send those soldiers to an Iraqi and American court.”
Mahdi was the father of six, including Hafeth. Hafeth said he now shoulders the financial responsibility for his family on his approximately $100 -a-month salary.
“I was shocked that my father was killed by the Americans,” he said. “Supposedly we move in a secured area … we used to wave at them and they waved at us.”
Hafeth said he didn’t accept the compensation offered by the U.S. military. They offered $10,000 , he said, and that wasn’t enough for his father’s car let alone his father’s life.
“My father was a peaceful man,” he said. “He never did anything wrong. Everybody knew his good reputation and everybody liked him.”
McClatchy Special Correspondent Laith Hammoudi contributed to this report.
Related posts:
- A man was murdered down the street from my house last night… Two others were wounded. During an evening that promised...
- Yes We Can…End Iraq War! Rebuild America! March 19, 2009 marks six years of the Iraq...
- The Abortionist Dies and The Devil Laughs Stories of violence in church make national news quite...
- John Allen Muhammad: Gulf War Veteran, D.C. Sniper, & Scapegoat for The State Through violence you may murder a liar but you...
- Rain of Fire in Gaza Photo Credit: (c) 2009 Getty Images Human Rights Watch,...
We ought to pose this same question to the family of Scott Tillman? I pray that the day will come when Americans, particularly, those who claim to know God will wake up and consider what the American enterprise killing machine has been doing around the glove for decades now. Again the late Dr. Martin Luther King said that it was America, not Iraq, Iran, Cuba, the DPRK, the ROC, the Soviets at the time…, that was the number one purveyor of violence in the world.
The fact is that America picked up where NAZI Germany left off, in its quest for worldwide domination with a racist tinge to it. Many black soldiers who fought about NAZI Germany, returned home to be subjugated by the NAZI American government and citizens back home.
Recently, I saw a documentary where a Muslim was praying to Allah. He asked Allah to save he and his family from (Christian) America. Why are God’s people in America so silent about this travesty? Isn’t it because too many have settled into the world themselves (America) and are chasing after America’s promises of wealth and the good life at the expense of their brothers and sisters around the world? Christians will have to recognize, that white supremacy and white hegemony is the driving force behind American foreign policy!
Dr. Rice admitted recently that America’s negotiation style differs from most other nations. She said that we pretty much tell other nations what they will get, if they do what the United States tells them to do. In order words we make you an offer that you had better not refuse.
Someday, our people will realize that Jesus was a revolutioanry, and that he brought with him the spirit of revolutionary change to the world. He recognized that the world order at that time which was headed by a Republic, of the kind that our Republic came from was venal and evil – he avoided becoming involved with the status quo, even the religious status quo.
Jesus did not seek to become a part of the system or to be coronated as many who followed him initially, hoped that he would do by establishing a new kingdom on earth at the time. All of us ought to be reminded that he that warreth does not entangle himself in the affairs of this life (in this instance America hegemony and its desire and its efforts to dominate the world as it has been doing for over nearly a century now). And now we are moving forward with our plans to militarize space, having refused to sign the treaty that prohibits the militarization of space. Israel and the United States refused to sign such a pact! Can you say Star Wars, because that is what is coming next.
Church people need to become revolutionaries, those who haven’t done so in order to help lift the impregnable American foot off of the necks of so many other people and nations in the world, the same foot that has been on our necks!
And George Bush, a man who stole an election here in the USA, is pushing the movement to sanction Mugabe in Zimbabwe? And George Bush, a man who is responsible for the invasion and illegal occupation in Iraq wants to tell the DPRK, Pakistan, Iran, Darfur, Zimbabwe…, what they should do. The man has zero moral authority, and that is why ambassadors of other nations laugh at him at him during United Nation’s General Assemblies, or refer to him as Diablo!
The USA, a nation that tells other nations that they cannot have nuclear weapons, has destroyed 75,000 of its older nuclear warheards since it created its first fission bomb. Get it the USA has had 75,000 nuclear warheads? Problem solved, now that the USA has destroyed that many nuclear warheads?
Sorry, America has withdrawn from ballistic treaties, and has begun adding to its current nuclear arsenal, a whole new more sophisticated generation of nuclear weapons. Why do other nations of the world desire nuclear weapons? It is so that they can protect themselves? And who are they trying to protect themselves from, Russia, Iraq, Iran, the DPRK, Cuba? Nyat, all of them are concerned about protecting themselves, having witnessed what we just did to Iraq, from the Empire of the USA (which includes its Satellite in the Middle-East, Israel).
I do not believe that the 1947 Israel that was created and populated with mostly European Jews, is the Israel of the Bible. The mostly secular political-Israel of today represents an extension of the military policies of the USA, and is represents a United States military division in the M-E. We must never forget that after Israel was created, it was aligned with the Soviet-Union prior to becoming a satrap of the USA! God’s plan is for a new world over, we need to get to work and help to make it happen!