Hey Hey USA, how many journalists did you kill today?

[MarkG]

Again, thats no excuse for these deaths, but it does make it more understandable in battle conditions.

an apology has yet to come from what i've seen
the characterization i heard was "unfortunate incident" (not even an accident).....

[Master Zen]

I'm sure the reporters would be the first to know if there was firing going on. Especially since many of them were outside watching the tanks on the bridge.

[red_mustard]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Whose DL are you anyway?

Hey assface? You like calling people DL's? What makes you think Im a double login

[Ben Kenobi]

How do you know what DL stands for?

[Kramerman]

oh, i dunno, the fact that you are a settler, brand new, and you have only posted in the OT forum (thus your 0 PC in your profile). Furthermore many of your posts have been offensive to many (not me tho, as i dont take offense as easily as some of these otehr weenies ), which is another tell-tale trait of a DL. That is why you are suspect, it doesnt mean that you are tho... just answering your question about why people think your a DL (tho you still might be )

[KrazyHorse]

His first post started with "Islam is a ****ed-up religion".

They've been downhill since. He's also almost been restricted be MtG...

[Master Zen]

dorks, lame brains, lame****ingbrains, jerkwads, dinks, and now assfaces? And we're only on page 7! (and all but one of these coming from those who proudly show the stars and stripes below their names)

You people are pathetic, stop calling people names and start arguing the issues, or are you too thick-headed to do that? It's people like you who give your country a bad rep.

[red_mustard]

"His first post started with "Islam is a ****ed-up religion".

What? Its true


"He's also almost been restricted be MtG..."

Aye


I know what a DL is. And yes you could consider me a DL. I was on here back in 99 when Civ2 was around for a few weeks then left and forgot my PW. Sometimes I check the forums during boredom. So I just re-registered one day. You cant really call it a DL cause I couldnt reset my PW cause I didnt have that old email. So hah!

[KrazyHorse]

You should have asked first...[/modmode]

What was your old login?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Frogger
His first post started with "Islam is a ****ed-up religion".

They've been downhill since. He's also almost been restricted be MtG...

No "almost" about it.

Hey mustard - that "assface" remark just got you a week off. See ya.

[Master Zen]

and red_mustard wisely removes his flag...

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by red_mustard
"His first post started with "Islam is a ****ed-up religion".

What? Its true

I never saw that one. Thanks for repeating it.

That'll be a total of two weeks for you.

[Rogan Josh]

No matter how "difficult" it is to operate in a war zone, an armoured column who calls up air-support should not have to worry about their own planes bombing them instead of the enemy. (Which is what happened in northern Iraq the other day.)

It seems like some of the pilots/troops are just not well enough trained, which is fairly amazing considering the amount of money that is spent on them.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by MarkG

the soldiers believed they were being fired upon from the building, so they returned fire

how can you believe to be fired without being fired?

If you're in a warzone, where lots of people shoot at you, and you see what looks like muzzle flashes from a building, and see someone aiming an odd looking item at you that resembles an anti-tank weapon, you're not going to sit around and debate what to do, or wait for some ******* to kill you. Success and survival in war generally comes down to getting on your weapon first and delivering accurate fire before the other guy has a chance to do the same. So you don't wait around and see what happens.

I was being sarcastic

you were being sarcastic with the deaths of journalists while dont like any kind of comment on the saving of private lynch?

I don't like trolling comments wrt any of the POWs.

"We're after people who use too many on-peak minutes, you know?"

I was being sarcastic about the targeting. It is a bit of "if it moves, shoot it, and if it doesn't, shoot it and see if it moves, then shoot it again if it does."

I'm not blaming the troops in the slightest. Urban combat is as intense as it gets, especially with irregular forces.

Rogan - a good part of it may be attributable to schedule and fatigue. A lot of these people are working 18-20 hours a day, and having to make split-second choices in combat situations. Same with the vehicle accidents.

[Alexander's Horse]

Its just very sad, all of it

Missile kills nine in one family: 'Why was this done?'
April 9 2003, 11:00 AM




The warplane's missile had just killed his wife, a daughter, a son and seven grandchildren.

Then, Abid Al-Hussan Hamoodi, 72, heard hope - a child's muffled call for help from under a metre of rubble in a storage room of his home, where he and his family had been sleeping since the war began more than two weeks ago.

"I heard a noise crying 'Baba, Baba!' (father) and I kept digging until a head came up," Al-Hussan said. "We were never expecting that a rocket would hit the rear of the house."

He dug out two of his grandchildren, ages five and six months, and a daughter-in-law. She lost four of her five children in the aerial assault on Saturday morning, the day before the British stormed Basra.

"Why was this done?" Al-Hussan asked. "What mistake have we committed? None. We have never created a problem. If the coalition people knew something (about the intended target), why didn't they tell us" so that residents could flee?

"I'm finished and I'm losing control of myself and I can't cry any more. ... To me, my life is finished."

One of the hidden stories of the war in Iraq is the number of civilian casualties. In Basra, the death toll has been estimated at a few hundred people, according to doctors and employees at two of the city's hospitals.

But the absence of law and order in invaded cities such as Basra makes an official count nearly impossible.

Physicians and employees at local hospitals have not tallied the number of injured and fatally wounded civilians. Many doctors and hospital managers have not shown up for work because of the war, exacerbating the confusion.

"We don't have exact numbers," said Dr Uday Abdel Hussein at Tahrir Hospital in northern Basra.

In the capital of Baghdad, precise numbers of casualties also are unavailable. In the past week, the government stopped updating numbers of civilian dead and wounded.

The air strike on Saturday near Al-Hussan's home was one of the last allied sorties before the British tank and troop invasion of Basra on Sunday. His house was near the apparent target, the Iraqi intelligence headquarters and its residential compound a block away.

Al-Hussan had not left the house since the war began. He made sure everyone in his two-story corner house slept in the two metre by three metre storage room, far from the windows and courtyard. Food was stockpiled in freezers to last three months and surplus water was stored in a garden well.

The first missile struck the street, jolting everyone awake, and then the plane fired again. A nearby home was obliterated; two neighbour families lost eight relatives.

But Al-Hussan's loss was even more staggering: his wife, Khayeria Mahmoud, 67; his son Wessan Abid Hassan, 40, who was an engineer; daughter Eahab Abi Hassan, 35, who was a doctor; grandson Zain Al Abideen Akram, 16; grandson Moustafa Akram, 15; granddaughter Zina Akram Abid Hassan, 13; granddaughter Hassan Ayed Abd, 10; grandson Ammar Mohammed, 2; grandson Zainab Akram Abid, 18 months; and granddaughter Noor Saad, 6 months.

Yesterday afternoon, Al-Hussan sat in a panelled parlour of the home of his son, who lost four of his five children. The fifth child, a boy, was one of the four survivors. Al-Hussan's son, Akram Abid Al Hassan, director of a local teaching hospital, was at work at the time of the attack.

About 100 men also sat in the parlour and on a patio as part of the three-day Muslim period of mourning, in which an imam's prayer filtered through the palm trees and over the walls.

As Al-Hussan mourned yesterday, he also pondered the British invasion of Basra. Three of Al-Hussan's sons are British citizens who live in Manchester. He began working for the British in 1945 for the Basra Oil Co, which was renamed the South Oil Co after Iraq nationalised its vast oil wealth. He retired in 1992.

His children and their spouses work as doctors, a neurosurgeon, a computer engineer, a pharmacist, and a businessman in Basra, southern Iraq's largest city.

"I was feeling like the luckiest person in the world until this happened," Al-Hussan said.

Although he is a Shi'ite Muslim - most of who oppose Saddam Hussein - Al-Hussan said he avoids politics.

Shi'ites bury their dead in Najaf in southern Iraq, but because the war has made travel to that city difficult, the patriarch buried his wife and nine members of his family in temporary graves in Basra.

"Do we deserve this? I don't think so," Al-Hussan said. "No one has come to apologise. ... I lost my family. I lost my house."

The heart-wrenching local accounts of casualties - as well as the looting and lawlessness in Basra - is turning some public opinion against the British troops.

Andres Kruesi of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Basra said there is a "total lack of authority" in the city of about 1.3 million people. British troops, he said, "are not a police force, but they have to establish a police force as the occupying power".

British military leaders have dispatched foot patrols and stationed tanks and armoured vehicles at hospitals and major intersections in an effort to deter criminals.

Some residents said the city was better when Saddam was in control.

"We felt safety with Saddam Hussein. He was controlling the situation very well," said Ammar Mohammed, 32, a marine engineer.

KRT