CBC News: Deadline Iraq - Uncensored Stories of the War

CBC News (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) has put together a website called Deadline Iraq: Uncensored Stories of the War which interviews journalists who have been stationed in Iraq. You really, really need to check it out. It's fantastic.

ROSS SIMPSON, REPORTER, ASSOCIATED PRESS RADIO One day
Simpson saw the soldiers gun down an Iraqi officer who was bathing in
the bushes with an AK-47 within reach. The body lay there burning for
an hour hour a half before a corpsman put out the fire with an
extinguisher.
"The corpsman went up and said 'better you than me.' And that was it.
It was just cold steel. No emotion whatsoever, total disconnect. And I
simply thought, these guys were trying to kill me a few minutes ago,
how can I feel sorry for them?"
Simpson also witnessed some horrific mistakes. Tense and under the
constant threat of suicide bombers, soldiers fired on innocent
civilians attempting to flee the city at military checkpoints. "One
soldier had to bury 3 of the people, a mother, a father and a 14 year
old boy. They dug a grave along the Tigris rive, it was so hard they
could only dig it shallow. They put the mother and the father in first
and laid the son across their bodies. And the sergeant who had been in
the marine corps for 15 years almost had tears in his eyes."
"He said 'what I regret most of all is that we don't have anybody in
this battalion with a Polaroid camera who could take their pictures and
make the location. We could put out some flyers in the neighbourhood
saying, these people were killed on this evening, do you know them.'"

Posted by flow Frazao on November 26, 2003 at 01:20 AM | Permalink