WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army has charged four soldiers, three of them with manslaughter, after the drowning of an Iraqi prisoner who was pushed off a bridge, while a senior general criticized U.S. military detention policies, officials said on Friday.

The soldiers, on patrol near the city of Samarra 60 miles north of Baghdad on Jan. 3, pushed two Iraqis off a bridge at nighttime into the Tigris River after picking up the men on a curfew violation, officials said. One Iraqi drowned, while the other got out of the river.

The case followed revelations about ill-treatment of military prisoners in Iraq (news - web sites), Afghanistan (news - web sites) and at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Source (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1896&e=20&u=/nm/iraq_usa_prisoners_dc)

What do you people think? This is truely a thread for everyone's opinon. President Bush says the American people and the American do not stand for this. Yet has President Bush emphasized enough about not mistreating Iraqis, seeing as how this is a serious matter for America's credibility and the war on Iraq? Does this also hint that maybe there are more mistreatment going ons with the other Iraqi prisoners? Are Americans not tainted by hatred, anger, prejudice, selfishness,...guilty murder? Or is it that the Iraqis who expressed fear in the war were actually telling the truth?

What now?

I really don't see how one can go farther than charging them with the crimes they committed and publicly saying at every opportunity that what has happened was deplorable and will be punished.

But hey, when it comes to question-begging, the logically unsound have never found it a hard tactic to resort to.

This is a fairly old story, which was plain from the start (links, anyone more motivated than me?). Why do we feign surprise that the US Govt is attempting to shift blame for racism and exploitation down the chain of command?

The US embarked on economic and political policy that encouraged such behavior, and inevitably resulted in it. We are not watching justice unfold- We are watching inept damage control. I will hold our leaders accountable for this and many other crimes in Iraq. American patriots, who believe in a government of, by, and for the people, please join in upholding the ideals that make the USA worth keeping.