Us shooting 'Liberated' civilians in Baghdad

national | miscellaneous | news report

Friday April 11, 2003 09:36

by James McKenna

Nervous US soldiers shot at a car that got too close to their checkpoint: inside the car, another dead man who had been rushing his wife, who had been shot in the head , to hospital. Another car with a badly hurt woman on the back seat, whose blood ran onto the road turned around and sought an alternatine route to hospital

At least five and possibly as many as 20 US soldiers were reported on Abu dabai TV as having been killed in an attempt to storm a mosque. Another four were killed in a suicide attack. In Najaf their puppets are being hacked to bits with swords. This the day after the regime fell. So, if the regime has fallen, who are the US fighting, Surely not the Iraqi people?

I saw TV pictures of terrified Iraqis in the Palestine hotel, where the day before the US had murdered two journalists. Women cried and little girls held thier hands in the air out of fear of being shot. They were delerious with fear and the rent-a-mob outside danced on for the cameras.

RTE didn't focus on this or the looted hospitals and homes but chose to focus on a small band of US thugs waving American flags in Tahrir Sq and outside Trinity college.

When will the pro-war people admit they got it wrong ? This is not victory or liberation, or do they think it is?

We know that refuelling US war planes in Shannon makes us complicit in this series of war-crimes but a good question is, at what stage does a strongly biased and unfair media coverage of this make the media also responsible for war crimes?

If RTE had reported the invasion of Poland as a "liberation" , as the German Nazi media did, how would we feel about them? Would the Director General and news editors have been brought to the Nuremburg Trials?

We can always claim ignorance or that we were misinformed but at some stage I'm sure a war crimes tribunal will look into how knowingly media serives co-operated with the dissemination of black propaganda .