I can vouch for Grider being present in what was a textbook platoon attack against an armed, manuevering and hostile force. These are pictures of enemy fighters, regardless of their age, who routinely ambushed American patrols in Buhriz. Though I appreciate the level of imagination required to label these photos "proof" of war crimes, I’m left mostly angry. The Infantry in Iraq do a tough and dirty job, executing faithfully their duties to the best of their abilities. Buhriz is a hateful place, full of hateful men who routinely placed weapons in the hands of the young. These youth ambushed the wrong platoon that day and these pictures prove their folly. If these misdirected and ignorant posts are an indicator, the accusations come from those who have lost faith in their fellow American and their Army, live in a world of hindsight, and will jump into any cowardly, literary ditch they can find. The destruction of my countries enemies is my duty, as is Griders’. I ask that regardless of one’s feeling on how the war started, remain humble in the face of the sacrifices that are being made there everyday. By slandering soldiers you are not disagreeing with our foreign policy or questioning our leaders, you are simply infecting the situation with more blindness and uncertainty, for soldiers and civilians.

Of course, commenting on what appears to be a massacre (and it should be noted we do know all the facts of what happened in Buhriz, only have several rather damning digital photos) is not “slander” although a few posts here accused the soldiers of molestation (a comment I do not agree with). However, I find it extremely difficult to “remain humble in the face of the sacrifices that are being made there everyday,” and in fact consider this immoral, considering the fact Bush’s invasion and occupation are illegal in every sense of the word. Moreover, I consider it my duty to disagree “with our foreign policy” and question “our leaders,” who are in fact war criminals. As I have previously stated, I will support U.S. military forces when they are here on our soil, protecting the United States from foreign invasion. I will not support them when they are used as instruments of “our foreign policy,” a foreign policy demonstrated not to be in the interest of the American people but in the interest of an intermixture of neocons, Israeli Likudniks, neoliberal globalists, and transnational oil corporations demanding soldiers like Grider and KP do their destructive (although profitable and politically expedient) bidding.

As the unembedded journalist Dahr Jamail wrote at the weekend, “the American government is pressuring foreign countries to censor their news. Aside from the fact that this act is the height of arrogance by the United States, it makes it exceedingly clear why so many Americans who rely on the corporate media for their news continue to be so misinformed/uninformed about the goings-on in Iraq,” going-ons such as what is happening in Buhriz. Eric Edelman, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, has “asked the prime minister of Turkey to pressure [a large Turkish newspaper, Yeni Safak] to not run so many of my stories.” Jamail complains that people “like Edelman don’t want people to know what one of my sources in Baquba just told me today. His e-mail reads:”

Near the city of Buhrez, five kilometers south of Baquba, two Humvees of American soldiers were destroyed recently. American and Iraqi soldiers came to the city afterwards and cut all the phones, cut the water, cut medicine from arriving in the city, and told them that until the people of the city bring the “terrorists” to them, the embargo will continue…. The Americans still won’t [allow] anyone or any medicines and supplies into Buhrez, nor will they allow any people in or out. Even the al-Sadr followers who organized some help for the people in the city (water, food, medicine) are not being allowed into the city. Even journalists cannot enter to publish the news, and the situation there is so bad. The Americans keep asking for the people in the city to bring them the persons who were in charge of destroying the two Humvees on the other side of the city, but of course the people in the city don’t know who carried out the attack.

This is how the corporate media reported the situation in Buhriz, almost completely devoid any details, certainly not the details mentioned by Jamail (the following is an excerpt from a longer Associated Press report):

The U.S. military said Saturday [June 11] that two soldiers were killed and one was wounded after fighting with insurgents late Friday while transporting a detainee near Buhriz, about 35 miles north of Baghdad. A civilian and the detainee also were killed.

No mentioned of the above collective punishment and violations of the Geneva Convention.

“People like Edelman don’t want the public to know that the same tactics were used in Fallujah by the U.S. military—posting snipers around the city to shoot anyone who moved, targeting ambulances, impeding medical care, and detaining innocent civilians en masse,” Jamail comments. “After all, Fallujah is the model. Fallujah is our Guernica. And now, Haditha and al-Qa’im can be added to the list, with Baquba and Buhrez under deconstruction.” (emphasis added)

Is it possible the teenage males in the digital photos that found their way on the internet are victims of Fallujah model? As we know—although the corporate media did not report it—innocent civilians of all stripe were summarily executed in Fallujah. Is it possible, as well, the killing of the teenagers was a vendetta? “I suspect revenge for the attack on the American Hummers is the real reason behind the massacre in Buhriz,” speculates Xymphora.

Stan Goff, a former soldier, writes on his blog that the “reality of war” is that “bystanders always get beat up in urban combat actions worse than anyone, and are often attacked without provocation because of the trigger-happy paranoia and rage of the troops who are dropped into their cities—troops who are not unlike hornets screwed inside a Mason jar. What I am saying is that it is simply not possible that when 50 people are killed in one of these actions, that all 50 are ‘insurgents.’ That’s an outrageous claim—on par with telling people that a piss-ant just ate a bale of hay—and the outrage is magnified by the fact that the press repeats these figures WITH THE UNQUESTIONED CLAIM that the dead (no wounded, mind you) were all ‘insurgents.’”

Goff continues:

After all the perfidy that has been exposed, not just this time around, but for decades and decades, from governments and from the military brass, the press still grants them the presumption of honesty. Yet they would have us believe that this so-called journalism is a "free press" checking and balancing power. And this is where people get fooled. They haven’t been sufficiently compelled to see the press for what it is, an apparatus of hegemony—an integral part of the ruling class system of population control, the self-policing drug… Soma is better than love, baby.

That’s why building these bypass media networks are so important. And they work… not as fast as we’d like, but they work.

And now we need to use them to break down this critical-lie. Critical-lies are lies that are essential to maintain the main fictions of empire. We have to systematically and relentlessly attack the lie that all the dead are insurgents, and we have to just as relentlessly beat down the capitalist press—putting them on the defensive—about supporting this lie. We need to jam a pry-bar into this contradiction between image and reality and pull hard until we tear it off the hinges.

Our “bypass media networks” will need suffice for now, since the corporate media will never publish these allegations or admit that innocent civilians are routinely killed (or possibly massacred) by what turns out to be spooked, fearful, or yahoo soldiers in a country where they have no business, planted there by a cabal of oilmen, neolibs, and Israel-firsters. In the Arab world, however, stories such as the possible Buhriz massacre are published (for instance, al-Jazeera published a story headlined “US soldiers plant weapons on fake rebels,” a story I was unable to read because al-Jazeera’s server is down as I write this). Since the illegal and immoral U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq will only be defeated by Iraqis, the fact al-Jazeera is reporting this story is significant. Of course, Iraqis do not need evidence the U.S. is committing atrocities in their country—they live with the results every single day.