Shooting Civilians?

The Christian Science Monitor reported that US troops may have targeted and killed Iraqi civilians. American is become increasingly intolerant to war atrocities since World War II. It has been alleged that US marines shot and killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, Iraq last November. These allegations have already spawed two military investigations. John Allen Williams a political scientists commented " marines are as horrified as anyone at the possibility that the stories coming out of Haditha are true." The initial account given by the marines said they were fired upon but forensics tells a different story. This week military officials in Iraq were quick in reporting yet another incident involving Iraqi civilians. Being kept from knowing about earlier atrocities, the meadie is now more eager to investigate and expose any new ones. The role of the United States soldier in Iraq is as a liberator and not an avenger. Many see these agressive acts as violating the high standard of behavoir expected from those claiming to be liberators.


During the Vietnam war, American soldiers suspected the Quang Nai province as a base for guerilla forces of the People's Liberation Armed Forces and the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam better known as the Viet Cong. A company of soldiers was sent to the Vietnamese city of Mai Lai and were advised by the US Military that any genuin civilians would have left their homes to go to market by 7 a.m. They were told that they could assume that all of those who remained behind were Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers. When they arrived the soldiers found no insurgents in the villiage but enraged that another band of soldiers had been killed there previously they opened fire on the people of Mai Lai. The soldiers killed hundreds of civilians who were primarily old men, women, children and babies. Some of the villages were even tortured and raped. Villagers were herded into a ditch and executed by automatic firearms.