An Iraqi Police Officer's Death, a Soldier's Varying Accounts (Must Read)

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

The American soldier and the Iraqi police officer were on patrol together outside a flea market south of Baghdad, chatting from time to time, when one of them suddenly started shooting.

What prompted the gunfire is a matter of dispute, but one thing is not: The soldier, Cpl. Dustin M. Berg, fired three times at his Iraqi partner, Hussein Kamel Hadi Dawood al-Zubeidi, and killed him. As Corporal Berg ran away, he picked up Mr. Zubeidi's AK-47 and shot himself in the side.

In the days that followed, Corporal Berg lied about what happened, saying Mr. Zubeidi was the one who had shot him. And for months he went right on lying, after he recovered from his wound, after he left Iraq, even after he received a Purple Heart he did not deserve with his parents watching at a solemn ceremony back home in Indiana.

Corporal Berg has long acknowledged that he killed Mr. Zubeidi in a rush of moments that day in November 2003, but says he did so only after the officer abruptly raised his gun in a threatening way. Everything Corporal Berg now admits doing wrong after that - shooting himself and lying about the events - grew out of fear for what would happen to him, he says, and the knowledge that other soldiers in his unit had already been investigated for incidents in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/23/national/23soldier.html?hp&ex=1116820800&en=1c6933f6adf4c150&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[TheGunslinger]

1. Is this going to be the next "Newsweek"?

[thebigidea]

2. kinda hard when he confessed to doing it.

[TheGunslinger]

3. I meant that the NY Times had the "gall" to print it.

Don't they know this could inflame Muslim sentiment?


:sarcasm: