Surrender is not a Ranger word

Last month, Seymour Hersh mentioned a series of digital photos that had been forwarded to him:

After I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of digital pictures emailed me, and -- was a lot of work on it, and I decided, well, we can talk about it later. You never know why you do things. You have some general rules, but in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehicles. One of them got blown up. The other two units -- soldiers ran out, saw some people running, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys playing soccer. And in the digital videos you see everybody standing around, they pull the bodies together. This is last summer. They pull the bodies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Americans pulling bodies together. Young kids, I don't know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see soldiers dropping R.P.G.'s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they're called in as an insurgent kill.

Hersh determined not to follow up on the story because it was inconclusive and it could threaten his sources.

Cryptome has the pictures of the dead boys with and without the weapon, courtesy of Mark Kraft.

Baghdad Dweller and Feral Scholar also weigh in.

As an aside: today is something of a watershed moment for me. For the first time, I am not aghast or even surprised by this kind of news. For so long now, I have been astonished by my own ability to continue to be shocked and outraged. Today, it just feels wearying.

(Thanks to S for the link.)