Is the US military covering up the events of 26 Dec 2007 at al-Siha?

You my remember this story in which an Iraqi soldier opened fired on his US allies, killing a captain and a sergeant, and wounding three others.

Cernig, noticing something out of whack, stayed on the story. Certainly, there was more to it than originally reported and while we all waited for some reporter to jump all over and fill in the empty spaces in the story, nothing really happened.

Cernig hasn't dropped the story and it is slowly starting to fill out. The Iraqi soldier, Kaissar Saadi Al-Jibouri, is being elevated as a hero, not because he killed US troops, but because he may have been trying to defend an Iraqi woman. From IPS:

Conflicting versions of the killing have arisen. Col. Hazim al-Juboory, uncle of the attacker Kaissar Saady al-Juboory, told IPS that his nephew at first watched the U.S. soldiers beat up an Iraqi woman. When he asked them to stop, they refused, so he opened fire.

"Kaissar is a professional soldier who revolted against the Americans when they dragged a woman by her hair in a brutal way," Col. Juboory said. "He is a tribal man, and an Arab with honour who would not accept such behaviour. He killed his captain and sergeant knowing that he would be executed."

Others gave IPS a similar account. "I was there when the American captain and his soldiers raided a neighbourhood and started shouting at women to tell them where some men they wanted were," a resident of Mosul, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS on phone. "The women told them they did not know, and their men did not do anything wrong, and started crying in fear."

The witness said the U.S. captain began to shout at his soldiers and the women, and his men then started to grab the women and pull them by their hair.

"The soldier we knew later to be Kaissar shouted at the Americans, 'No, No,' but the captain shouted back at the Iraqi soldier," the witness told IPS. "Then the Iraqi soldier shouted, 'Let go of the women you sons of bitches,' and started shooting at them." The soldier, he said, then ran off.

As Cernig says, there should be a full investigation into the allegations that US troops were abusing Iraqi civilians and exceeding their authority. If the story is true, then there needs to be further explanation. If it is not true, then the details now need to be aired.

That, of course, is assuming that the truth is ever likely to come out. From Cernig:

Whether or not the story of US servicemen beating a pregnant women is true - and there should be a full investigation of those accusations - it is now, thanks to the US military's obsessive secrecy leaving the clear impression that something was being hidden, firmly fixed in the minds of exactly those who the military least wants to antagonize.

It is not like worse hasn't happened before. Back then Seymour Hersh dug the story out after speaking to someone who had second hand information, almost 20 months after the event.

So, yes, there is a history of this kind of thing happening when armies of occupation are fighting an elusive resistance and the US military has a track-record of trying to hide such incidents.