A Must Read: "In a year, life in Iraq has darkened appallingly"

[leftchick]

This is a must read for every american. This is the "good news" from Iraq. :sarcasm:

Look at what the US has done.....

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003319875_iraq1stperson24.html

<snip>

I found that this ancient byway of Islamic learning and foreign invaders has gone over to the dark side. A year ago, car bombs, ambushes, daily gun battles and a chronic lack of electricity and gasoline were sapping the city. But not this: the wanton execution of individuals because of sect — a phenomenon so commonplace it has earned a military shorthand: EJK, for extrajudicial killing.

Every day the corpses pile up in the capital like discarded furniture — at curbside, in lots, in waterways and sewer lines; every day the executioners return. A city in which it was long taboo to ask: "Are you Sunni or Shiite?" has abruptly become defined by these very characteristics.

<snip>

Many residents remain in their homes — paralyzed, going slowly crazy. "My children are imprisoned at home," says a cook, Daniel, a Christian whom I knew from better times, now planning to join the exodus from Iraq. "They are nervous and sad all the time. Baghdad is a big prison, and their home is a small one. I forced my son to leave school. It's more important that he be alive than educated."

<snip>

The U.S. mission here is now defined largely as training Iraqi police and soldiers. But Sunnis don't trust the mostly Shiite security forces, often with good reason. The question lingers: Are U.S. troops equipping Iraq's sectarian avengers?

[SammyWinstonJack]

1. ..

[Cooley Hurd]

2. My God...

K&R...

[leftchick]

3. drill holes

it really is a must read. It is an absolute horror what the US has done. Night of the living dead stuff... :(

BAGHDAD, Iraq — I keep seeing his face. He appears to be in his mid-20s, bespectacled, slightly bearded, and somehow his smile conveys a sense of prosperity to come. Perhaps he is set to marry, enroll in graduate school or launch a business — all of these flights of ambition seem possible.

In the next few images he is encased in plastic: His face is frozen in a ghoulish grimace. Blackened lesions blemish his neck.

"Drill holes," says Col. Khaled Rasheed, an Iraqi commander who is showing me the set of photographs.

He preserves the snapshots in a drawer, the image of the young man brimming with expectations always on top. There is no name, no identification, just a series of photos documenting the transformation of some mother's son into a dead body on a bloody table.

"Please, please, I must show these photographs to President Bush," Rasheed pleads in desperation, as we sit in a bombed-out palace along the Tigris, once the elegant domain of Saddam Hussein's wife, now the command center for an Iraqi army battalion. "President Bush must know what is happening in Baghdad!"

[Phrogman]

4. Imagine being held down while somebody runs a spinning drill bit into your knee

and your chest and your neck....

[leftchick]

5. I can't , this is beyond horrible

:cry:

[leftchick]

6. kick

and I never kick my stuff but this is important.