"The Chick Was in the Way"

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.progressive.org/webex03/wx033103.html

would like to know if he really said this !!!!!!!!!!!!!! Editor Matthew Rothschild comments on the news of the day.



March 31, 2003



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"The Chick Was in the Way"


Sergeant Eric Schrumpf is a Marine sharpshooter in Iraq. According to the March 29 issue of The New York Times, Schrumpf and his fellow sharpshooters sometimes hold their fire when a lot of civilians are in the vicinity. But when fewer civilians are around, they fire away.


Schrumpf recalled one incident where an Iraqi soldier was standing near a woman.


"I'm sorry, but the chick was in the way," he said.


Schrumpf was philosophical to the point of being blas? about civilians "in the way." He said, "We dropped a few civilians, but what do you do?"


That attitude may become the prevailing one as Bush's war drags on.


Already, after this weekend's suicide bombing, U.S. soldiers are being less circumspect with civilians.


And even before the suicide bombing, the U.S. assault was taking a grim civilian toll. In one raid, U.S. bombers destroyed a children's hospital in Rutbah, according to the Associated Press. And the United States apparently bombed two markets in Baghdad last week, killing scores of people.


And yet the images of the casualties from these market bombings have been hard to come by in the American media.


It's not that there's no footage; people around the world have been watching it on Al Jazeera and other outlets. It's just that those who control CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, and PBS are not putting the reality of what Bush is doing to Iraqi civilians in front of us.


Robert Fisk, the great war correspondent for the London Independent, knows that reality. He visited a Baghdad hospital and interviewed some of the 101 patients who arrived after Bush's first night of Baghdad bombing. One family had eight members injured, including a one-year-old baby, who was being breastfed when the bomb struck.


As Fisk says, "If we make war--however much we blather on about our care for civilians--we are going to kill and maim the innocent."


Or, as Sergeant Schrumpf might put it, other "chicks" are going to get in the way.

-- Matthew Rothschild

[MORTARDUDE]

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