A Combat Leader Gives The Inside Skinny on Samarra events

The reports of 54 enemy killed will sound great on the home front, but the greater story is much more disturbing and needs to be told to the American Public....

most of the casualties were civilians, not insurgents or criminals as being reported. During the ambushes the tanks, brads and armored HUMVEES hosed down houses, buildings, and cars..This was actually a rolling firefight through the entire town...soldiers are to consider buildings, homes, cars to be hostile if enemy fire is received from them (regardless of who else is inside. It seems too many of us this is more an act of desperation...We really don't know if we kill anyone, because we don't stick around to find out....

The belief in superior firepower as a counter-insurgency tactic is then extended down to the average Iraqi, with the hope that the Iraqis will not support the guerillas and turn them in to coalition forces, knowing we will blow the hell out of their homes or towns if they don't...

It does not take a George Patton to see we are using the wrong tactics...I still can't understand why somebody would throw a stone at a tank, in the middle of a firefight...and I am afraid instead of climbing out of the hole, we are digging ourselves in deeper....

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=Special%20Reports%20Hack.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=92&rnd=16.346899020788562

... hardly a left wing source. Hackworth hated Clinton and hammered him constantly. He has also been hard on Bush since he launched Gulf War II.

It's like the Pentagon is following a blueprint from the late '60s.