On 8 April, newspapers around the world carried a despatch from a Reuters correspondent, “embedded” with the US army, about the murder of a ten-year-old Iraqi boy. An American private had “unloaded machine-gun fire and the boy . . . fell dead on a garbage-strewn stretch of wasteland”. The tone of the report was highly sympathetic to the soldier, “a softly spoken 21-year-old” who, “although he has no regrets about opening fire, it is clear he would rather it was not a child he killed”.
According to Reuters, children were “apparently” being used as “fighters or more often as scouts and weapons collectors. US officers and soldiers say that turns them into legitimate targets.” The child-killing soldier was allowed uncritically to describe those like his victim as “cowards”. There was no suggestion that the Americans were invading the victim’s homeland. Reuters then allowed the soldier’s platoon leader to defend the killer: “Does it haunt him? Absolutely. It haunts me and I didn’t even pull the trigger. It blows my mind that they can put their children in that kind of situation.” Perhaps guessing that readers might
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 28 Apr 2003