planting evidence?

three u.s. snipers claim that the u.s. is planting guns, ammo & explosives with the goal of baiting in insurgents. when people pick them up, they're gunned down.

now, this is a claim. and, it's a claim coming from 3 snipers accused of planting evidence on people they gunned down. so, are they just claiming this to cover their butts? of course, the gov't won't confirm or deny whether or not they've authorized any sort of baiting plans.

other reactions? well, "James Ross, the legal and policy director of Human Rights Watch, said the dispersal of ammunition and explosives by US forces as a method of targeting insurgents would present obvious human rights problems.

"It seems to me that there are all sorts of reasons that civilians would want to pick up ammunition that is sitting on the ground," he said."

yeah, that does seem quite problematic. would you pick up a gun you saw in the street? don't tell me that you'd call the police, because that's not really an option in a war zone. you may pick it up for your own personal safety, to get it off the street, or for whatever reason. you may pick it up to stop someone nefarious from picking it up. or, yeah, you may pick it up to use against the foreign occupiers.

if i'm in iraq, i'm not picking up anything. in fact, i'm probably staying inside. and when i go outside, i'm leaving the country.

march 17

four years it's been going on. well, that and the prior decade where we were economically and literally starving women and children.

make it stop please

another perspective on 600,000 dead

"Admitting a number like that would be the equivalent of admitting they had endorsed, say, a tsunami, or an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale, or the occupation of a developing country by a ruthless superpower… oh wait- that one actually happened."

that's a quote taken from probably my favorite blog. she doesn't update every day, but when she does, it means something. and really, it had been long enough since the last update that i worried about her health, considering the situation in iraq.

this quote really spins things another way:
"Let's pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years."


on a completely unrelated note, rush limbaugh said that michael j. fox was acting, playing up his parkinsons in a commercial. when he was informed later by callers that he was wrong, at least he had the sense to apologize.