Well, I suppose that just after allegedly slaughtering an Iraqi family, beating a journalist isn’t too big of a deal.
A Japanese journalist who was manhandled by U.S. troops in Iraq on July 27 is recovering from injuries sustained during the confrontation but remains outraged at the use of excessive force against him, said co-worker Mika Yamamoto.
Yamamoto and her colleague, Sato Kazutaka, were filming the aftermath of a U.S. raid on a private residence in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Mansour for a Japanese television company when U.S. soldiers suddenly told her to stop filming.
“An American soldier twisted my arm behind my back and told me to show her some ID, but by the time I had managed to find it, the soldier said that I was too late,” Yamamoto wrote in an e-mail interview from Baghdad where she has resumed work.
\”As the soldier began to lead me away, Sato began to protest and claimed that we had done nothing wrong by filming the scene and that this was an unreasonable reaction.
“When he said that,” Yamamoto wrote, “a nearby soldier began kicking him and then another four or five soldiers took him to the ground, removed the safeties from their weapons, aimed their guns at his head and continued to kick at him repeatedly.”
U.S. troops then confiscated his camera as they tied his arms behind his back with wire and proceeded to detain him in a nearby military vehicle for about one hour, she said.
“They kept him until other foreign journalists began to appear on the scene,” Yamamoto wrote. “As soon as others started arriving, the soldiers’ attitude became far less aggressive and they immediately began removing the wire from around Sato’s wrists.”
(via Jonas)
This very much reminds me of the “hand” picture on the Hanscom Site.
Sad!
/me starts a rousing chorus of “god bless the usa”