WikiLeaks: Iraqi Children in U.S. Raid Shot in Head, U.N. Says

Matthew Schofield

McClatchy Newspapers

August 31, 2011.

This cell phone photo was shot by a resident of Ishaqi on March 15, 2006, of bodies Iraqi police said were of children executed by U.S. troops after a night raid there. Here, the bodies of the five children are wrapped in blankets and laid in a pickup bed to be taken for burial. A State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks quotes the U.N. investigator of extrajudicial killings as saying an autopsy showed the residents of the house had been handcuffed and shot in the head, including children under the age of 5. McClatchy obtained the photo from a resident when the incident occurred.

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A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Read the rest of the article here.

See also "The Price" by Kathleen Wallace Peine for a discussion of the incident above.

Comment: Just when you thought you could not be more disgusted by the US and its massacre of innocents in the so called Middle East there is more - and probably a lot more than this tragedy.

How do the folks behind this kind of inhumane killing sleep at night? How do those Americans and their lackeys who think what the US is doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and elsewhere is about human rights and democracy live with this kind of revelation?

In just a few days the world will be called on by every media outlet and patriot in the US to remember 9/11 a decade on - who remembers the innocents in the picture above?

Has the US answered their own question posed after 9/11: "Why do they hate us so much?"

Take another look at the picture above if you still not sure.

Onward!