US targets civilians. posted by Richard Seymour

That the US invaded and occupied Iraq and is therefore responsible for the deaths caused by that is a truism. That they also bear responsibility for the death squads (Special Police Commandos) that they created and dispatched is so straightforward that any controversy supposedly aroused by the proposition is entirely contrived. And that when the US sends drones into bomb civilian neighbourhoods and buildings, when it seals off cities and devastates what remains inside, when it attacks hospitals, destroys water and electricity and uses banned chemical weapons, war crime tribunals beckon.

Tonight, C4 complements the series of reports about US massacres that have been coming out of late, with some footage of its own. Doctors for Iraqi Society (now Doctors for Iraq) have been reporting much of this for months, but Western journalists often difficult - even where there is a will - to report these attacks. Some of the evidence is now becoming available. First, The Guardian notes that Iraqi policemen have reported a US murder of eleven civilians (referred to as an execution):

Iraqi police have accused American soldiers of executing 11 Iraqi civilians, including four children and a six-month-old baby, in a raid on Wednesday near the city of Balad, it was reported yesterday.
The allegations are contained in an Iraqi police report on the killings, obtained and published by the Knight Ridder news agency

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An Iraqi police report. One assumes that it was not intended for this to be made public by the police, who are after all dependent on the US and work with them.

This comes as Time magazine has obtained footage showing fifteen bodies killed after a US attack, apparently shot to death by American troops in 'revenge' for an insurgent attack. The US initially tried to claim that the fifteen had been killed by a resistance bomb, but have been obliged to admit that this was not the case. The video footage shows that all of them were killed by gunfire.

C4 has its own footage from a hospital in Haditha which doctors there say was attacked by US troops. The hospital was blood-pattered and perforated with bullet-holes. Of course, Iraqi doctors and eyewitnesses have said for some time that hospitals and ambulances come under fire from US troops, and a number of these attacks have been brazenly admitted to - not least the Nazzal Emergency Hospital, which was bombed because it was supposed to be a "centre of propaganda" that "inflated casualty estimates". As I've pointed out before, the overrunning of another hospital in Fallujah was reported directly on the front page of the New York Times when it happened - but not as a war crime, which it is under the Geneva Conventions, and under the US War Crimes Act would lead to executions for all those who participated in the actions from top to bottom.

If the US openly admits to war crimes, the media doesn't feel like confronting that awkward fact. They'd much rather minimise it or displace responsibility. Hence, Time says of its revelations that the main question is whether the "Marines killing of 15 non-combatants was an act of legitimate self-defence or negligent homicide". That the question should be posed in this way - that there should even be a question - is a rough guide to how willing the Western media is to accurately report atrocities commited by 'our' side.