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Monday, July 10, 2006

So does Bill Napoli think that Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi qualified to have an abortion had she not been shot to death?
Posted by Jill | 10:46 AM
Private Steven Green and his four cohorts didn't "rape a woman" in Iraq, they raped a 14-year-old girl before killing her and her entire family.

Think about it.

A 14-year-old girl.

How fucked up do you have to be; how far removed from your own humanity, let alone the humanity of your victims, to commit this kind of violation, even in wartime?

Yet this is what the Iraq war is doing to the people that George W. Bush is sending there.

Here's the ugly story:

Days after former private Steven Green was charged as a civilian in a U.S. court with rape and four murders, four serving soldiers were charged with the same offences, the U.S. military said in statement. It did not name the troops.

Another soldier, apparently a sixth member of Green's former unit in the 502nd Infantry Regiment, was charged on Saturday with dereliction of duty for not reporting the crime in March.

All five were charged with conspiring with Green, accused by U.S. prosecutors of going with three others to a house near the checkpoint they were manning outside Mahmudiya, near Baghdad, and of killing a couple and their two daughters. The five could face the death penalty.

Court documents described the raped daughter as an "adult female" and estimated her age as 25. U.S. military officials in Iraq say their documents have her as 20. Local officials and relatives had said she was 15 or 16.

Her identity card and a copy of her death certificate obtained by Reuters, however, show she was 14.

Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was born on August 19, 1991 in Baghdad, according to the identity card, provided to Reuters by a relative. Issued in 1993, it features a photograph of her at 18 months, wide-eyed and with a lick of dark hair over her brow.

A copy of her death certificate, dated March 13, gives the same birth date. She was found at home by a relative on March 12 and had died from "gunshot wounds to the head, with burns", said the document, signed by doctor Wael Habib and a registrar.

No independent verification of the documents was immediately available.

The age of consent with parental approval in Iraq is 15, though it is not uncommon for girls to marry younger in rural areas.

Abeer's sister Hadeel was aged six when she died of "several gunshot wounds".

SCORCH MARKS AND BLOODSTAINS

The killers tried to burn the bodies and house to cover their tracks, relatives and local officials have said. Scorch marks and bloodstains can still be seen in the one-storey home.

Some relatives have said they would not object to exhuming the dead for forensic tests, a religiously sensitive process.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, balancing a dependence on U.S. firepower with a need to show Iraqis he is in charge, has voiced frustration with a mounting number of cases against Americans and wants a review of their immunity from Iraqi law.

Since revelations in March of a U.S. probe into whether Marines killed 24 people at Haditha, Mahmudiya is the fifth case of serious crime being investigated by the U.S. military. In all, 16 soldiers have been charged with murder in the past month or so -- as many as in the previous three years of fighting.

[snip]



"She was a beautiful girl," one relative said, asking not to be named. "She complained to her mother about trouble from American soldiers. She gave them no encouragement as we are a conservative and respectable family."


These guys stalked a 14-year-old girl for a week before raping and killing her -- and killing anyone else who happened to be home.

We in the United States like to think of ourselves as superior to the rest of the world. The janjaweed in Darfur rape and kill women, and we turn the other way because after all, it's in Africa, and "we're more civilized." Rape was a common outgrowth of warfare in the former Yugoslavia. Whenever you give men guns and tell them to kill, rape is sure to follow. Even on U.S. soil, where you have war you have rape.

Why is this? Does war make men feel invincible? Or does watching your buddies get blown to pieces turn ALL humans into just so much meat?

And why on earth target a 14-year-old?

And this is the course that Republicans (and Joe Lieberman) want to continue to pursue?

UPDATE:

Eric Blumrich's comments on this horrific crime perpetrated by Americans under the command of George W. Bush are worth reading. He also has a picture of Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi's identity card -- the one proving that she was fourteen years old. You'd better look at it there, because you can bet your life that the mainstream media, who are still insisting that this girl was 20 years old (and by implication, insisting that she was "asking for it" or at the very least, that raping and then shooting a 20-year-old in the head is somehow less heinous), won't touch it.
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