US claiming Iraq executed prisoners of war possible in front of townspeople.

[stocktrader23]

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1762/3782194.html

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Some of the Army mechanics captured after their supply convoy took a wrong turn Sunday in the Iraqi town of Nassiriyah apparently were executed by their captors, probably in front of townspeople in the area, U.S. officials charged Tuesday night.

The officials cautioned that the information was based on a single source, apparently a communications intercept, and that they were seeking corroborating evidence.

It is unclear how many of the seven soldiers killed were executed, rather than slain in a skirmish, as the Iraqis contend. Five other U.S. soldiers were taken prisoner.

The accusations came days after a videotape of the Army prisoners and the dead soldiers was broadcast on Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite TV network. The tape showed images of at least four bodies; some appeared to have bullet wounds in the head.

"When the full story comes out, people will be outraged," said one senior military official.

The accusations came at the end of a day in which senior White House and Pentagon officials accused the Iraqis of a number of war crimes, including feigning surrender and then shooting at U.S. forces, and using a hospital as a staging area for military operations.

The White House also said that Iraqi paramilitary forces were responsible for blocking the flow of food and aid into Basra, a city that U.S. forces largely bypassed in their drive toward Baghdad.

At the Pentagon Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, repeatedly defended their war plan against criticism that it had stretched ground forces too thin, leaving their rear areas too vulnerable to guerrilla-style attacks by paramilitary forces.

"It's a good plan, and it is a plan that in four and a half or five days has moved ground forces to within a short distance of Baghdad," said Rumsfeld, displaying testiness on the subject after repeated exchanges with reporters. "And forces increase in the country every minute and every hour of every day," he said.

Myers called the war plan "brilliant," saying any setbacks were due to Iraqi violations of the Geneva Conventions. "It's a plan that's on track," he said. "It's a plan everybody had input to. It's a plan everybody agrees to."

A senior administration official who was deeply involved in the war planning with President Bush said that loyalists to the Iraqi regime "fight like terrorists," not soldiers, and blamed the absence of a warm welcome for U.S. troops on the fact that "there is a reign of terror in some of these cities, with these paramilitary and special security organizations enforcing the same brutal terror they have been enforcing for years."

"We haven't encountered large segments of the Iraqi population yet," the official cautioned.

The official said that Bush had decided to assume that Saddam Hussein's regime "is still functioning." But the official compared the first six days of this war to the first six in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and said "the surprise is the speed of our advance."