First of all, I find it interesting that no one felt it relevant to make a comment about the fake hostage crisis. But getting onto the more bathos-inducing part of the story:
Leigh M. writes:
>>The insinuation that Marla Ruzicka was "targetted", as opposed to
just being a blonde white female in a land of dark haired people is
particularly... FUBAR, and I'd like to see verification of that
*before* the denigrations begin. >>
Is the analysis of a possible 'targetting' and 'denigration' of her at all in anyway inherently connected besides in your mind (a sure sign of FUBARNESS) ? I wouldn't think much of her activities even if she were still alive. An Iraqi, a man who enabled her the whole time she was in Iraq since she herself knew nothing about the place, died alongside her in the vehicle that got bombed. I feel more sorry for him, since now his family will have to do without his income, like so many other Iraqi familes who have lost their main breadwinner. But no, we are supposed to cry buckets for her because she was so blonde, vivacious and pretty and liked to party with CentCom and its parasitic 'journalists'?
By the way, I went to an Arab restaurant in Kuala Lumpur--staffed by Iraqis--and my waiter had light brown hair and green eyes. Are you making racialist assumptions that you ought not?
Certainly M. Ruzicka's profile was high enough to draw attention to herself. Ask the Italian communist journalist whom the Americans tried to gun down after her release from being held hostage about what being known gets for you in Bush-Allawi's Iraq.
Certainly, her activities and fraternization with the US military are documented at her own web site. I question her judgement for going to a war zone as a freebooter for western charity and enabler of official US policy--make that illegal occupation zone--because, whatever her ill-informed intentions, her actions could be used to make legitimate this war and occupation. Also, I wonder if she considered that, by getting some payments from the US government to some of the people she identified as 'innocent war victims' (for example, the families of government police and national guard, clear combatants in a war against the occupation, though also clearly victims too), that she was doing just that. Her activities, no matter how successful (they weren't that successful in terms of relieving suffering or ending the war, if you actually look at them closely) should not make us somehow feel better about this abomination that the US has done and continues to do.
Also, by getting payments, I wonder if a lot of Iraqi families have waived their rights to seek real damages in Iraqi and European courts against the invader or quislings? How many have signed away their right to sue by accepting a payment of a few thousand dollars?
As for who killed her, we don't even know that. All sides in the conflict are using violence against whomever they can to get what they want, and the US and Allawi side has been measurably the most indiscriminate (Overt examples of Fallujah, Najaf and Sadr City bombings notwithstanding, much of their use of violence is covert and the results, if reported in the media for the homefront, are covered up with mendacious reports about 'insurgent activity' and Al Qaeda, even as the occupiers and their quislings themselves also play down the success of the rebellion when it serves their purposes).
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