"There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla," Huguenin said in a interview by satellite telephone.

"We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening."

"Surgical" indeed.

The rhetoric of US soldiers is often provocative. An American colonel, asked what the role of the Fifth Corps would be, replied: "We are going in there. We are going to root out the bad guys and kill them." His men whooped and punched the air as if they were watching a football match.

A British officer who witnessed this exchange shook his head, saying: "We are working from a different script but you won't get anyone in Whitehall to admit it."

"F___ Saddam. We're taking him out." Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's Middle East allies. Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase. The Senators laughed uncomfortably; Rice flashed a knowing smile. The President left the room.

Time Magazine, March 23, 2003

Two sides of the equation

"It is false to argue that only those who support war support our troops. It is entirely legitimate to support our troops while seeking an alternative to the conflict that will put those troops at risk." -- Robin Cook, in his resignation speech to the House of Commons

Michael Tomasky: "The day this war start[ed], the world enter[ed] a new era of global Darwinism in which a structure of covenants and norms -- admittedly far from perfect, but at least the result of an ongoing dialogue of nations -- that has developed over the last half-century will be pushed aside. It's no contradiction at all to hope for the best for our troops but remain dead set against the rules of world order being rewritten overnight by the jungle's biggest lion."

The national mood...

Robert Scheer: When bombs fall, U.S. will join the ranks of war criminals

CIA director sells out

"Tenet caved in to political pressure to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Equally important, he retracted key intelligence judgments of barely four months ago on Iraq."

Regime change?

All it takes is one member of Congress to introduce articles of impeachment.

Who will it be? Who will have the strength?

"This non-violent, constitutional process may be our best way of stopping World War III and saving our civil rights."

The U.S. is bound by the The Nuremburg Principles, in spite of what this administration thinks.

Who armed Saddam?
The Sydney Morning Herald explains, but you won't hear this stateside:

Reaping the grim harvest we have sown: How the West armed Saddam

"The US corporate contribution includes Hewlett-Packard (nuclear weapon, rocket and conventional weapons programs), Tektronix (nuclear, rockets), Eastman Kodak (rockets), Honeywell (rockets, conventional) and American Type Culture Collection (biological)."

Then-special envoy Donald Rumsfeld and good pal Saddam Hussein in the 1980's. US companies were selling Saddam materiel for WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) to help him defeat Iran, which was the US agenda at that time.