Iraq war veterans talk about they saw and experienced during the war in an extensive feature published in the July 30 issue of The Nation.
Link, edited by Laila Al-Arian and Chris Hedges.
Article is related to a forthcoming title from Nation Books: Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians .
Image: 31-year-old staff sergeant Camilo Mejía recalls arriving at the scene after an Iraqi man was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun, while his young son watched.
Snip:
We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.
"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.
The scene, Sergeant Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.
(thanks, Susannah Breslin, via Radosh)
Reader comment: Dan says,
I think we would be remiss not to note that some of the soldiers that were interviewed were not happy with the way their words were presented and actually accuses the nation of being "guilty of poor analysis or of using my quotes to their own ends." Here's the
link to the letters. BTW Bravo to the nation for leaving them up.
