Sunday, April 15, 2007

G Mitchell: "Sorry We Shot Your Kid, ... but here's $500"

One of hundreds of US military Iraqi casualty claim documents posted on the ACLU Web site.
Excerpts from the Mitchell report. Read the full report here, and browse the complete list of Documents from the DOD made available by the ACLU. (Via IraqSlogger)
(April 14, 2007) -- The most revealing new information on Iraq -- guaranteed to make readers sad or angry, or both -- is found not in any press dispatch but in a collection of several hundred PDFs posted on the Web this week.

Here you will find, for example, that when the U.S. drops a bomb that goes awry, lands in an orchard, and does not detonate -- until after a couple of kids go out to take a look -- our military does not feel any moral or legal reason to compensate the family of the dead child because this is, after all, broadly speaking, a "combat situation."

Also: What price (when we do pay) do we place on the life of a 9-year-old boy, shot by one of our soldiers who mistook his book bag for a bomb satchel? Would you believe $500? And when we shoot an Iraqi journalist on a bridge we shell out $2500 to his widow -- but why not the measly $5000 she had requested?

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