US soldiers massacring Iraqis?

According to a post over at A Tiny Revolution, investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh (he exposed the My Lai massacre and its cover-up), spoke at Berkeley on October 8th and “told a story about recently receiving a call from an American lieutenant in Iraq who’d just witnessed other American soldiers massacring Iraqis.”

An excerpt:

So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he’s hysterical. He’s totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, “No, you don’t understand. That’s a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents.”

How long after this war, how long after this election, will these kinds of stories come out? And the question is, are these kinds of events rare things that get attention, or the standard operating procedure over there?

Alls I know is that next time I hear about “insurgents” being killed in Iraq, I’ll think twice.

* * *

More: Mark Adams links to video of a US pilot killing — no, destroying a group of 30 or so people walking across the street in Fallujah.

He writes, “It is unclear whether they were armed insurgents or civilians,” although they certainly don’t appear to be walking like any soldiers I’ve ever seen, especially with an American attack aircraft overhead.