I didn’t care if it was some kind of dark expression of relief. I was horrified. I couldn’t stop thinking about the near-universal belief among soldiers that those human lives, in comparison to ours, were utterly expendable. I watched civilian deaths on a screen all day, every day. Sometimes it was the result of mistaken identity. But reporting by The Washington Post has also confirmed that certain units used a technique called “baiting,” in which something as innocuous as wire or as blatant as a Kalashnikov-style rifle was left on the ground. Any Iraqi who picked it up was now holding a
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