The U.S. military is investigating the videotaped fatal shooting of a wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner by a U.S. Marine in a mosque in Fallujah, a Marine spokesman said.
The dramatic footage was taken Saturday by pool correspondent Kevin Sites of NBC television, who said three other prisoners wounded a day earlier in the mosque had also apparently been shot the next day by the Marines.
On the video, as the camera moved into the mosque during the Saturday incident, a Marine can be heard shouting obscenities in the background, yelling that one of the men was only pretending to be dead.
"He's (expletive) faking he's dead!"
"Yeah, he's breathing," another Marine is heard saying.
"He's faking he's (expletive) dead!" the first Marine says.
The video then showed a Marine raising his rifle toward a prisoner lying on the floor of the mosque. The video shown by NBC and provided to the network pool was blacked out at that point and did not show the bullet hitting the man. But a rifle shot could be heard.
"He's dead now," a Marine is heard saying.
The shooting is shown so quickly that it is impossible to tell whether the body was moving before the shot. The only movement which can be seen is the body flinching at the moment the bullet hits.
Sites reported a Marine in the same unit had been killed just a day earlier when he tended to the booby-trapped dead body of an insurgent.
NBC reported that the Marine seen shooting the wounded Iraqi had himself been shot in the face the day before, but quickly returned to duty.
We're not fighting the country of Iraq any longer. Using Mosques as forts isn't allowed either. So here you have terrorists using places of worship to kill our guys and we're somehow supposed to treat them as legitimate soldiers of a legitimate army fighting in a legitimate battlefield.
The U.S. Military may expect more from our fighting men, but I don't. Neal Boortz said today that we're supposed to be better than them. My feeling is that they're not scared enough of us to quit fighting us. The other side has demonstrated that there are no rules in this fight. Why are we holding ourselves to a set of rules that the barbarians won't follow? The only result will be more U.S. Servicemen getting killed.
UPDATE: Sowell says it better than me (as Always). At least I beat him to it.
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