Author: Mike Ewens

Hidden under an obscure photo on Yahoo! News, one finds this interesting fact:

An anonymous note slipped under a superior’s door by a part-time soldier from Pennsylvania triggered the Iraq prison abuse scandal now engulfing the US military and administration.

Any reader with more information, please email us.

UPDATE: 5/7/04, 9:00pm EST

Ask and you shall receive

The AFP reports:

The act eventually catapulted the name of Joseph Darby, a 24-year-old reservist in the 372nd Military Police Company, from comfortable obscurity to the floor of Congress where he was praised Friday by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his “honorable” conduct.

Darby’s act ironically led to the deluge of Democratic calls for Rumsfeld to resign.

An article in New Yorker magazine this week identified Darby as the soldier who sounded the alarm over the treatment of Iraqi detainees in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Thanks to readers M. Evans, J. Avery and George.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael C. Anderson, along with four other soldiers, died in a mortar attack outside of Fallujah. His mother desperately asks:

“What is a builder doing there, staying in a hot spot? He shouldn’t have been there. How do they explain that? . . . I think they’re running out of soldiers.”

Anderson was a part of the Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 14, which is based in Jacksonville, Fla., on mission “fixing sewage problems and electrical and water systems in Iraq.” Strange that non-combat Marines would be fixing things in a besieged city that was for a few weeks under American bombardment. Perhaps Anderson’s mother is right. It would explain the recent announcement that 47,000 more troops are headed for Iraq.

$100 billion for new pipelines, private security firms, Haliburton contracts, but not nearly enough for ammunition:

Cpl. Richard Stayskal, a 22-year-old Marine from San Jose, Calif., arrived in Landstuhl Tuesday after being wounded by automatic weapon fire in Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

Countering the insurgency, Stayskal said, has been difficult for Marines on the ground. In his case, his unit was chronically short of ammunition, and his support unit got pinned down at the same time across town. The two units couldn’t help each other.

“They weren’t giving us nearly enough ammunition for the situations out there. Everyone was running out. Everyone was grabbing each other’s ammunition.”

Though the numbers are still somewhat inconclusive, a total of nineteen soldiers have been killed in Iraq in less than 24 hours.

First, CentCom reported that three soldiers died from combat on April 5th:

Three Task Force 1st Armored Division soldiers were killed during separate attacks April 5-6 in the Kadhimyah district here.

The first soldier died of wounds received during an attack that took place at about 11 a.m. April 5. The soldier was traveling with a southbound convoy when it was attacked with small-arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire.

A second soldier died later that day, at about 9:30 p.m., when his vehicle was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade during a firefight in the same area.

A third soldier died from wounds he received during a rocket-propelled grenade attack on his Bradley Fighting Vehicle at about 12:30 a.m., April 6.

The military also reported the death of four Marines later in the day:

Four Marines serving with the I Marine Expeditionary Force were killed as a result of enemy action in the Al Anbar province April 5 while conducting security and stabilization operations.

Finally, a highly coordinated attack on Marines in Ramadi resulted in the deaths of at least 12. These deaths bring the total American fatalities to 636.

Stay tuned with Antiwar.com for updates on these figures.

With the recent death of an American soldier by improvised explosive device, the total number of Americans killed in Iraq reached 555. This combat death follows three other incidents in Iraq:

March 8th: soldier dies of a “non-combat cause.”
March 7th: soldier dies of a “non-combat cause.”
March 5th: soldier dies in auto accident.

Nestled inside another Economist article is this little tidbit about the Iraqi governing council’s take on freedom of the press:

Though appointed and not elected, the council is reasonably representative of Iraq’s various groups. But it also has its flaws, one of which is a growing allergy to criticism. Its members say they believe in a free press but have shut down, albeit temporarily, the Iraqi operations of two of the Arab world’s most popular satellite channels.