You won’t see this reporting in a U.S. newspaper
Since George W. Bush congratulated troops on their job well done in his infamous photo op aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier on May 1, American soldiers are facing an average of 13 ambushes and attacks per day. Seventy have died, 27 from enemy fire.
The long Independence Day weekend opened here with television images of jubilant Iraqis jumping on the roof of a burned-out U.S. Humvee and a threatening audiotape from Saddam Hussein. That wasn’t supposed to be happening.
The Taliban is regrouping in Afghanistan. No one here talks much about Afghanistan any more, but the job is not finished.
07/07/2003
Troops
U.S. troops vandalized and looted the Iraqi airport and now we get to pay for it. Not only was it a needless waste of millions of dollars, but it’s probably not the only example of U.S. troops behaving disrespectfully. Of course disrespecting an airport and it’s contents is just the icing on the cake of U.S. aggression.
“I don’t want to detract from all the great work that’s going into getting the airport running again,” says Lieut. John Welsh, the Army civil-affairs officer charged with bringing the airport back into operation. “But you’ve got to ask, If this could have been avoided, did we shoot ourselves in the foot here?”
What was then called Saddam International Airport fell to soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division on April 3. For the next two weeks, airport workers say, soldiers sleeping in the airport’s main terminal helped themselves to items in the duty-free shop, including alcohol, cassettes, perfume, cigarettes and expensive watches. Welsh, who arrived in Iraq in late April, was so alarmed by the thievery that he rounded up a group of Iraqi airport employees to help him clean out the shop and its storage area.