U.S. military officials said the video offered no proof of the soldiers' fate, and their comrades near Mahmudiyah remained undeterred. "I'll find 'em," their battalion commander, Lt. Col. Michael Infanti, said with quiet defiance while standing on the roof of his makeshift base 400 meters from the site of the attack. "I ain't stopping till they kill me or send me home."
The video that surfaced Monday purports to depict the May 12 ambush near Yusufiyah that led to the killing of four Americans and one Iraqi army interpreter and the abduction of three others. The body of one of the missing soldiers, Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, Calif., was found 11 days later in the Euphrates River several miles south of the ambush site.
The above is from Joshua Partlow's "Insurgent Video Claims Captured U.S. Soldiers Are Dead" (Washington Post) and you can read Damien Cave's crappy write up (owing a huge debt to SITE) but we're not quoting it. In fact, considering that the second 5 British contractors went missing, the New York Times went days and days and days without mentioning the 2 missing US soldiers (Richard A. Oppel Jr. mentioned them Saturday) we probably shouldn't quote from their nonsense on this story. Nothing is known at this point. The ID cards are thought to be authentic and that's all that is known.
DK notes Der Spiegel's "Tensions Rise as Turkey Shells Iraq:"
Turkish patience is running out over the cross-border raids by Kurdish militants based in northern Iraq. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has urged caution, but Ankara is openly debating an incursion to root out the rebels. And it plans to take its case for action to the UN this week.
Currently the US government has spent considerable time attempting to deny that a civil war or wars was ongoing on Iraq. Can you imagine how much worse things could get? This comes when Dan Balz and Jon Cohen (Washington Post) report on a new ABC-Washington Post poll that finds increasing discontent with the Bully Boy and the Democratically controlled Congress
"has left satisfaction with the overall direction of the country at its lowest point in more than a decade" with many voicing dissatisfaction with the direction of the country (six out of ten) and most saying that the illegal war has not increased the safety of the US (53%). Discontent can also be found in Iraq, of course, and Damien Cave's "Cheated of Future, Iraqi Graduates Want to Flee" (New York Times) addresses one faction of that:
Four years later, Iraq's college graduates are ending their studies shattered and eager to leave the country. In interviews with more than 30 students from seven universities, all but four said they hoped to flee immediately after receiving their degrees. Many said they did not expect Iraq to stabilize for at least a decade.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
the new york times
joshua partlow
the washington post
dan balz
jon cohen
