"THESE WERE NOT COMBATANTS."

Voices against the Iraq War:

"It's the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time."
--John Kerry

"We've gotten rid of [Saddam Hussein], and I suppose that's a good thing."
-- Howard Dean

"There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud."
--Ted Kennedy

"I believe that the president's leadership in the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment and experience in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers."
--Nancy Pelosi

"Despite marshaling powerful armed forces in the Persian Gulf region and a virtual declaration of war in the State of the Union message, our government has not made a case for a pre-emptive military strike against Iraq."
--Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Laureate

"What makes me cringe even more is the continued claim that we are "liberators." The facts don't seem to support the label we have so euphemistically attached to ourselves. True, we have unseated a brutal, despicable despot, but "liberation" implies the follow up of freedom, self-determination and a better life for the common people. In fact, if the situation in Iraq is the result of "liberation," we may have set the cause of freedom back 200 years."
--Robert Byrd

"BUSH LIED. PEOPLE DIED."
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From the Washington Post:

113 Kurds found in Iraqi mass grave

Women, children pulled from trenches that may hold 1,500

By Ellen Knickmeyer

BAGHDAD - U.S. investigators have exhumed the remains of 113 people — all but five of them women, children or teenagers — from a mass grave in southern Iraq that may hold at least 1,500 victims of Saddam Hussein's campaign against the Kurdish minority in the 1980s, U.S. and Iraqi officials said this week.

...The non-acidic soil at the grave site preserved layers and layers of distinctive Kurdish clothing worn by many of the victims, suggesting that they may have piled on their best clothes expecting to be relocated, investigators said.

‘These were not combatants’

Authorities showed reporters some of the remains, including the skull of an older woman with pink dentures and the skeleton of a teenage girl clutching a bag of possessions.

"These were not combatants," said Gregg Nivala, a member of a U.S. team investigating crimes committed by Hussein's government and assisting the tribunal. "These were women and children."

...The grave actually is a series of 18 trenches, which investigators say they believe Iraqi forces dug with front loaders and maintained for systematic executions.

Investigators said that women and children were forced to stand at the edge of the pits, then shot with AK-47 assault rifles. Casings were found near the site, they said.

"They sprayed people with bullets so they fell back" into the graves, Iraq's human rights minister, Bakhtyar Amin, told reporters...

Campaign of violence

From 1987 to 1988, Hussein initiated a wave of violence, called the Anfal campaign, to punish the Kurds for siding with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Hussein's forces forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of Kurds from their lands in northern Iraq. Amin said that as many as half a million people died or were killed outright and thousands of villages were destroyed.

Hussein's forces carried out similar campaigns against the Shiite majority. More than 300 mass graves have been found across Iraq since U.S.-led forces overthrew Hussein in March 2003, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. The grave near Samawah would be one of the largest...

"It will ease the suffering and pain of many families to establish a truth for part of the history of Iraq. It will tell us more about what has happened and to whom," Amin told reporters. "Wouldn't you, God forbid, if your father or brother was killed, wouldn't you want to know it was your loved one? You would want to know how they were killed and to see who killed them brought before justice."

...Ten of the 18 trenches are believed to hold remains. Magnetic imaging was used to help reach the estimate of 1,500 victims.

Of the 113 bodies removed from one trench, two-thirds were children or teenagers. Most of the children were very young, and 10 were infants, authorities said.
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Remember the half million people killed by Saddam Hussein's regime, the next time someone echoes John Kerry, "It's the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time."

An argument could be made that the war was at the wrong time.

It was a half million lives too late.