Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

War Crimes in Falluja

We should call the Marine machine gunning of an Iraqi "insurgent" what it is: a War Crime. Briefly a US Marine was shown on film firing at an apparently injured (shot) Iraqi in a Mosque (more on that later). The Marine was shown as saying "He's faking" before he shot the man. One could suppose that order were to "take no prisoners" except that other video footage showed that the Marines were in deed taking prisoners. So when what was it that made the Marine kill an injured combatant? My immediate guess is that the Marine was operating in Video Game mode. I say that because in most video games you don't simply injure an enemy you kill them. For example in the Jedi Knight series One tactic for dealing with Storm Troopers is to 'use the force" and push them down or pull them down and then chop them up as they lay there. Never mind that in the game, once you pull the gun out of an enemy's hand he can't do anything else to you. Thus we have a generation of soldiers in the prime age group that games are targetted to who are used to "blowing the enemy away." But that's my psychological take on it. In reality what we saw was a war crime. An execution of a "combatant." But hey with 1600 estimated dead, what's another one?