Rising Hegemon
[S]urvivors of Sunday's shooting at a busy Baghdad traffic roundabout said Tuesday that security guards for a State Department convoy opened fire without provocation, contradicting assertions by the guards' U.S.-based employer, Blackwater USA, that they were responding to enemy fire...
...Sami Hawas Karim, 42, a taxi driver who was shot in the hip and side, said he, too, had stopped for the convoy when he saw the guards suddenly open fire on a car bearing a man, a woman and a small child. The guards then opened fire on maintenance workers in the square, the car in front of him, the car behind him and a minibus full of girls.
When he felt the pain of his two wounds, he opened the door of his car and fell to the ground; his 13-year-old son in the car with him wasn't harmed.
"I thought about my family and my five kids," he said. "I remembered my two brothers who were killed, and I said to myself, 'I'm going to be the third.'" ...
His statement makes sense especially when viewed in light of this recent report (which will probably receive NO PLAY in the United States media so we so don't feel all "icky" about ourselves):
A startling new household survey of Iraqis released last week claims as many as 1.2-million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq -- apparently lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels...
The estimates, extrapolated from a sample of 1 461 adults around the country, were collected by a British polling agency, ORB, which asked Iraqis how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.
Previous estimates, most prominently collected by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, reported in Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number, 654 965, as a likely figure in a possible range of 390 000 to 940 000.
Although the household survey was carried out by a polling organisation, rather than by epidemiological researchers operating under the discipline of scientific peer review, it has again raised the spectre that the 2003 invasion of Iraq has caused a far more substantial death toll than officially acknowledged by the US or UK governments or the Iraqi Ministry of Health.
Someday people may be able to go around Iraq without private security contractors either preventing their being added, while simultaneously adding others to, the death rolls and actually come up with a precise count of the dead since March 2003. When that happens...
Well, the Japanese will be justified in asking when the hell we are going to apologize for what we've done? Of course, we just ignore that person from Vietnam or Cambodia who is already asking, so there's that. Plus every decade or so "the Juice" goes on a crime spree and that, along with pantyless celebretarts is truly what is incredibly important.
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