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Independent News: "US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.

Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: 'They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons.'"

Collective guilt. Assumed guilt. Taking away people's means of making a living. And people are supposed to look at us as liberators?

The naivete is impressive, though. "They didn't find any weapons." Tell it to Saddam, buddy. We took his ass out without finding any weapons, you think it's going to save you?

And our military is quite clear that this was done as punishment, not because we thought rebels were hiding there or anything:

Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added.

And hey, what about that Iraqi free press?

When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."

How far is this from "we had to destroy the village in order to save it?"

P.S.

Article 33, Geneva Convention IV. No protected person (i.e. civilian) may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.