Two football fields were turned into cemeteries, with hundreds of freshly dug graves, marked with wooden planks scrawled with names some with names of women, some marked specifically as children. At one of the fields, an AP reporter was told by volunteer gravediggers on April 11 that more than 300 people had been buried there.

On Friday, with the U.S. military trying to implement a tentative deal to lift the siege, volunteers drove around looking for the dead that never made it to hospitals or graveyards. At least eight highly decomposed bodies were loaded into station wagons, including those of a woman and her daughter found in a home in the Golan neighborhood, scene of heavy fighting this week.

"This will increase the sense of dissatisfaction among Iraqis toward the Americans," said a member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Mahmoud Othman. "The resistance people will try to make use of such painful incidents."

"The Saddam era was full of executions and torture, and we want the new Iraq to be clean of such images," Othman added.

Part of the problem, said Hurst Hannum, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University outside Boston, is that Bush has "put this war on such a high moral plane that any moral deviance will be taken more seriously by critics, and will be interpreted as either being arrogance or hypocrisy."

Seeing those naked, helpless, hooded men was like being slapped in the face with an ice cold hand. I felt ashamed looking at them- like I was seeing something I shouldn’t be seeing and all I could think was, “I might know one of those faceless men...”

- posted by Cynthia @ 1:23 AM | | | Link |