War As We Saw It Authors Killed

Last month the NY Times published a well-written and incisive op-ed piece called "War as We Saw it" by seven NCOs from the 82nd Airborne. It was written by "boots on the ground" infantry soldiers who, presumably, were in a position to know what they were talking about:

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the "battle space" remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers' expense.

. . .

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are - an army of occupation - and force our withdrawal.

Predictably the right wing noise machine leaped on this like flies on shit, and criticised the soldiers for being "too close to the action" and not knowing what they were talking about.

And now, buried somewhere in the MSM, comes the news that two of the soldiers who wrote this piece have been killed in Iraq.

SGT Omar Mora and SSG Yance Gray died this week in a vehicle accident.

Vehicle accident? As much as I don't what to believe it, could this be another "friendly fire" incident, designed to stifle dissent and serve as a warning to others to keep their fucking mouths shut if they can't "support" the president?

I'm just asking.

And I'm also asking why the MSM is refusing to cover this story. Do a Google News search and you'll find precious little in the way of coverage, and once again it's the foreign media who seem to be covering it, and by and large not the SCLM in this country.

Could it be that they don't want to cover what they didn't want to cover last month, and that is the sad fact that after they steadily beat the drums of war leading up to the illegal invasion and occupation of a country that had not attacked us on 9-11, the uncomfortable truth that American soldiers are dying in that quagmire in the sand is too much to bear? So they hide their heads in the sand and ignore the tragic reality on the ground -- the soldiers themselves are questioning the whole sorry misadventure, dreamed up by Dickless Cheney and Baby Doc Bush.