Below an image of a US soldier's mirrored sunglasses, reflecting people and cars waiting behind an army checkpoint, are the words "A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi ...You know, so what?"
Another day, another dramatic Iraq-led Independent front page. This one is based around a series of in-depth interviews with 50 combat veterans of the Iraq war from across the US. Published today in The Nation magazine, the report presents, for the first time, named military witnesses to a series of human rights abuses.
"Through a combination of gung-ho recklessness and criminal behaviour born of panic, a narrative emerges of an army that frequently commits acts of cold-blooded violence," says the paper.
The worst abuses seem to have been carried out during raids on private homes when soldiers were hunting insurgents. The paper quotes Sergeant Jesus Bocanegra, 25, of Weslaco, Texas 4th Infantry Division, who was in Tikrit on a year-long tour that began in March 2003.
"People would make jokes about it, even before we'd go into a raid, like, 'Oh fuck, we're gonna get the wrong house'. Cause it would always happen. We always got the wrong house."
Another soldier, Specialist Josh Middleton, said: "A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want."
You can read the whole 14,000-word Nation article by clicking herehere.
This is an extract from the Wrap, our digest of the daily papers.
