I protest.

The Easter that George made.

Via Jeanne at Body and Soul: Brooke Biggs has a description by British activist Jo Wilding of Easter in Fallujah. She went in to help those trapped in the town.

After reading it, I retract my previous statement, that I am not criticizing the Marines. The more I read the more it becomes apparent that they are, indeed, committing atrocities. Even a youth of 19 should know better than to shoot unarmed women and children. Emphasis in all cases mine:

… Maki, a consultant and acting director of the clinic, brings me to the bed where a child of about 10 is lying with a bullet wound to the head. A smaller child is being treated for a similar injury in the next bed. A US sniper hit them and their grandmother as they left their home to flee Fallujah. … "Come," says Maki and ushers me alone into a room where an old woman has just had an abdominal bullet wound stitched up. Another in her leg is being dressed, the bed under her foot soaked with blood, a white flag still clutched in her hand and the same story: I was leaving my home to go to Baghdad when I was hit by a US sniper. Some of the town is held by US Marines, other parts by the local fighters. Their homes are in the US-controlled area and they are adamant that the snipers were US Marines.

The next day

We go again, Dave, Rana and me, this time in a pick up. There are some sick people close to the Marines' line who need evacuating. No one dares come out of their house because the Marines are on top of the buildings shooting at anything that moves. Saad fetches us a white flag and tells us not to worry, he's checked and secured the road, no Mujahedin will fire at us, that peace is upon us. He is an 11 year old child, his face covered with a keffiyeh but for his bright brown eyes, his AK-47 almost as tall as he is. … First we go down the street we were sent to. There's a man, face down, in a white dishdasha, a small round red stain on his back. We run to him. Again the flies have got there first. Dave is at his shoulders, I'm by his knees and as we reach to roll him onto the stretcher Dave's hand goes through his chest, through the cavity left by the bullet that entered so neatly through his back and blew his heart out.

There's no weapon in his hand. Only when we arrive, his sons come out, crying, shouting. He was unarmed, they scream. He was unarmed. He just went out the gate and they shot him. None of them have dared come out since. No one had dared come to get his body, horrified, terrified, forced to violate the traditions of treating the body immediately. The family couldn't have known we were coming, so it's inconceivable that anyone came out and retrieved a weapon but left the body.

He was unarmed, 55 years old, shot in the back.

What a brave Marine, to, from a rooftop, shoot an unarmed 55-year-old man in the back.

Back in Baghdad,

… the satellite news says the cease-fire is holding and George Bush says to the troops on Easter Sunday that, "I know what we're doing in Iraq is right." Shooting unarmed men in the back outside their family home is right? Shooting grandmothers with white flags is right? Shooting at women and children who are fleeing their homes is right? Firing at ambulances is right?

Well George, I know too now. I know what it looks like when you brutalize people so much that they've nothing left to lose. I know what it looks like when an operation is being done without anesthetic because the hospitals are destroyed or under sniper fire and the city's under siege and aid isn't getting in properly. I know what it sounds like too. I know what it looks like when tracer bullets are passing your head, even though you're in an ambulance. I know what it looks like when a man's chest is no longer inside him and what it smells like and I know what it looks like when his wife and children pour out of his house.

It's a crime and it's a disgrace to us all.

There is little I can add to that. Go and read the whole thing. And if you're one of those who agrees with George that what we are doing there is "right," you're a fool, or worse. If you say that it is the mujahedin committing all of these atrocities, you are twice a fool!

Today, again, I am ashamed to be an American. I am ashamed that I share a nationality, a language, a skin color with the people committing these atrocities, but most especially that I share those things with the one who is responsible for those people being there in the first place. The one who claimed, from a comfortable room in Washington, D.C. and far, far away from the smell of gunpowder and blood, that "what we are doing in Iraq is right."

If that is "right," I'll take wrong.