WikiLeaks: U.S. troops Handcuffed Children and Shot Them in the Head

crankycritic:

anticapitalist:

According to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, U.S. troops willfully massacred an Iraqi family in the town of Ishaqi in 2006, handcuffing and then shooting 11 people in the head including a woman in her 70′s and five children ages five and under.

McClatchy is reporting that the soldiers then called in an air strike on the house to cover up evidence of the killings.

This account differs sharply from an official version of the 2006 incident, which indicated that coalition forces captured an al Qaeda in Iraq operative in the house, which was destroyed in a firefight. The WikiLeaks cable, however, corroborates accounts by Ishaqi townspeople and includes questions about the incident by Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

The cable is dated twelve days after the incident, which took place March 15, 2006. In it, Alston says that autopsies performed in Tikrit on bodies pulled from the wreckage of the farmhouse indicated that all of the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head.

If true, this action, although not as egregious as the My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, wherein 347-504 unarmed civilians were shot to death by U.S. forces during the Vietnam conflict, still speaks volumes about war and the atrocities committed for war’s sake.

Read the original article (warning: graphic images)

Oh my God.