She was a GIRL

The horror of the latest revelations from the dark swarm in Iraq: our own US soldiers plotted and carried out a gang rape of a beautiful 14-year old girl and the murder of her and her family.

According to the many reports, four soldiers break into an Iraqi family's home and take aside the beautiful 14-year old GIRL. While she listens, one soldier takes the girl's mother and father and 7-year old sister into the other room and shoots them each in the head, killing them. The soldier returns to where they're holding the girl, he lifts up her dress, gathers it around her young neck, and he and at least one other soldier rape her. When they're finished, they shoot her in the head.

They then attempt to set her body on fire to cover up the evidence.

The AP and other media say the soldiers raped and killed an "Iraqi woman." But she was NOT a woman, she was a GIRL. The military has tried to say her age was 20, but her identity card shows she was only 14 years old. Her name was Abeer Qasim Hamza, born Aug 19,1991.

We must bear responsibility for this. The hatred of our leaders breads hatred down the line. The blatant disdain and dismissal of the law exhibited by the White House gets passed along to soldiers with the MREs. The macho desperation for power and control spouted at the top reaches the rank and file. Some use these poisonous teachings to hold the thought that gang raping a beautiful Iraqi girl, worthless for anything else in their eyes, is within their right.

If it is our right, according to the White House, to defraud America and the world into launching this war that has killed so many -- and We the People allow it to persist even as we know it was a fraud -- how far off are these soldiers in their conclusion? If torture and firing nuclear bombs at will are acceptable to our leaders -- and We the People allow them to stay in power -- how far off are these soldiers?

For a moment just countenance our outrage if a foreign country overthrew our evil government, occupied Los Angeles, destroyed every decent building and infrastructure, ignited huge sectarian unrest, gave power to ultra conservative religious fanatics, and then their soldiers plotted and carried out a gang rape and murder of a beautiful 15-year old girl and her family in Sherman Oaks?

We are not Darfur! We must either identify with this family or we are dead as a country. ALL are created equal.

I must believe that we are not so unconscious. I must believe that the country of integrity that we yearn to be, that we long for, is still within us. I must believe that we will find that country within us and stand together to bring to account -- through hard-won laws that we will now uphold -- those who have perpetrated all these frauds: the elections, the war, and everything in between.


Details Emerge in Alleged Army Rape, Killings
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/02/AR2006070200673.html?referrer=emailarticle

BAGHDAD, July 2 -- Fifteen-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza was afraid, her mother confided in a neighbor.

As pretty as she was young, the girl had attracted the unwelcome attention of U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint that the girl had to pass through almost daily in their village in the south-central city of Mahmudiyah, her mother told the neighbor.

Abeer told her mother again and again in her last days that the soldiers had made advances toward her, a neighbor, Omar Janabi, said this weekend, recounting a conversation he said he had with the girl's mother, Fakhriyah, on March 10.

Fakhriyah feared that the Americans might come for her daughter at night, at their home. She asked her neighbor if Abeer might sleep at his house, with the women there.

Janabi said he agreed.

Then, "I tried to reassure her, remove some of her fear," Janabi said. "I told her, the Americans would not do such a thing."

Abeer did not live to take up the offer of shelter.

Instead, attackers came to the girl's house the next day, apparently separating Abeer from her mother, father and young sister.

(more -- follow link above)