by Larry C. Johnson
This happened one month ago and word of it is just now leaking out. Yep, things sure are going well over there in Iraq. The heats and mind thing is certainly progressing. The image of children piling straw on a living man who is on fire and dying certainly captures the “progress” we’ve made. – LJ
Biography:
Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps corporations and governments manage threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism (as a Deputy Director), is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management. Mr. Johnson has analyzed terrorist incidents for a variety of media including the Jim Lehrer News Hour, National Public Radio, ABC’s Nightline, NBC’s Today Show, the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and the BBC. Mr. Johnson has authored several articles for publications, including Security Management Magazine, the New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. He has lectured on terrorism and aviation security around the world. Further bio details.
By Adrian Blomfield
The Telegraph (UK)
(Filed: 22/10/2005)
The mob grew more frenzied as the gunmen dragged the two surviving Americans from the cab of their bullet-ridden lorry and forced them to kneel on the street.
Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight. Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man’s body to stoke the flames.
It had taken just one wrong turn for disaster to unfold. Less than a mile from the base it was heading to, the convoy turned left instead of right and lumbered down one of the most anti-American streets in Iraq, a narrow bottleneck in Duluiya town, on a peninsular jutting into the Tigris river named after the Jibouri tribe that lives there.
As the lorries desperately tried to reverse out, dozens of Sunni Arab insurgents wielding rocket launchers and automatic rifles emerged from their homes.
The gunmen were almost certainly emboldened by the fact that the American soldiers escorting the convoy would not have been able to respond quickly enough.
“The hatches of the humvees were closed,” said Capt Andrew Staples, a member of the Task Force Liberty 1-15 battalion that patrols Duluiya and other small towns on the eastern bank of the Tigris, who spoke to soldiers involved.
Within minutes, four American contractors, all employees of the Halliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown & Root, were dead. The jubilant crowd dragged their corpses through the street, chanting anti-US slogans. An investigation has been launched into why the contractors were not better protected.
Perhaps fearful of public reaction in America, where support for the war is falling, US officials suppressed details of the Sept 20 attack, which bore a striking resemblance to the murder of four other contractors in Fallujah last year. … (Read the full article.)
Larry C. Johnson
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a lovely picture for Congess about how nicely everything’s going over there.
Perhaps she’d like to take a drive through Duluiya just to show she really believes it.
Does she purposely lie or is she stupid..anyone who believes her after her mantra of ‘no one could have guess they’d fly planes into a building’ that was so patently untrue that she certainly had no business being Security Adviser. (and another thing I hated the MSM for when they kept repeating that also)
And I suppose actually my answer to that question is probably both.
Poll shows Iraqis back attacks on UK, US forces .
This story makes me ill, Larry. It’s tragic.
All of the things that have happened since the 2000 election make me violently ill, and have changed my life forever. I was completely unpolitical until Bush got (s)elected.
It’s been a true nightmare since then. Especially since I have devoted my life to the environment.
But it doesn’t stop there. I abhor EVERY SINGLE decision that has come from this administration.
I abhor -PERIOD!! I hear the name Bush – and my body cringes. I’ts become highly personal, physical, and psychological. I don’t know how much longer I can put up with every day news before I snap!
Gabriele, you and me both…I simply cant stand his puss onthe tv or hear his voice but what the hives appear and the veins in my neck pop out and my b/p goes out of sight! I have never been like this about anyone in my life like this one man…well cheney takes a close second..well they all take a close third! all of them just simply make me sick to the stomach, literally.
Nor can I bear to hear that dreadful, whiney voice. Amy Goodman has of late developed an unfortunate tendency of using Dubya soundbites, causing me to turn off the radio.
An old friend of mine was in that class at Yale, and I asked him once if he’d known Dubya in those days.
“Oh, no!” he said, backing away in horror, hands raised to ward off the evil. “Not then, not now.”
yup, we certainly have begun to win this war for sure!!!!!! NOT This has got to stop someplace and sometime soon or we will never have our kids home. They will all be dead. KBR ought to say enough is enough and leaeve for certain…Let cheney andhis pals in washington go over there and talk to the locals and try to convience them of the good we are all doing for them..like I can really see that ever happening…
shades of Somolia…no wonder they’re not talking about it…
you got that right, catnip..for sure…..and they cant blame clinton for this one either..
.
U.S. Forces Destroy Eight Bridges over Euphrates
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Hey Oui, and that bombing of all those bridges was another thing that MSM barely mentioned or if it did did not wonder why this was so wrong and how it would affect all the regular Iraqi people who used those bridges..screw them I guess.
Somebody should post that Q for Pat .. I think I e-mailed him about it a while back. I distinctly remember Pat saying that the Tigris is the key for the insurgency … they need the water, the transportation, etc. Probably the U.S. military is thinking that way too. But it’s devastating, surely, for local peoples to lose EIGHT bridges. God, if we lost that many bridges in the state of Washington, we’d be paralyzed.
That story in particular has haunted me ever since it was reported..wondering about people who depended on those bridges for transportation, communication, everything and how that has effected them…and I would guess that that didn’t win us any more grateful flower throwing either. I also thought that the Geneva Conventions(quaint I know) states you’re not supposed to destroy infrastructure that regular people use but I’m kinda hazy on GC rules(as is our government apparently).
And it also makes me want to run out and smack people here around and ask them why they really don’t seem to give a shit about this stupid bloody war-what it’s doing to the Iraqi’s and to us and our troops…as long as it’s not here in our country and it’s not us without electricity for several years or water and such who cares.
You have to wonder just how many more war stories are being suppressed? There were so many in Vietnam and yet we had reporters there actually reporting every day and here we have almost no news except what we get filtered from the Pentagon or various reports from Iraqi people(like Riverbend)and William Pitt that manage to get through to us.
I’m sure this story is just one of many similar stories that we don’t know about-yet. The tragedy is that this is what war is/does and not some John Wayne notion that so many Americans seem to have of war.
I’m am still wondering how we can find out how many soldiers have really died …not just on the battle field but after they were sent to hospital, etc and wonder also just how many contractors have been killed?
…this has just made me physically ill.
I wasn’t commenting on blogs back when those contractors, the Americans, were torn to pieces – their charred bodies aloft, but I knew one of them in a distant way. He commented on another board I visited, with a group of women who were taking a fitness course that he was involved in. The absolute anguish this caused – seeing what happened to him, to his body, after being tangentially associated was, and still is, indescribable. All I can say is that the bile rises in the back of my throat.
It’s when I read this stuff that I truly think that it doesn’t matter anymore, that we’re all fucked. That we’re teaching kids to throw straw on people who are buring alive? That we’re inciting that much hatred. It just doesn’t. ever. end.
There is no justification for burning human beings alive, ever.
Given the lack of wherewithal necessary to disarm, detain, and repatriate the invading gunmen, shooting them, while about as far from ideal as one can get, is driven by necessity of protecting one’s home.
However, to sink to the level of the brutes themselves is counter-productive to self-defense as well as Resistance.
So I guess Americans could “frame” the incident as a kind of victory.