Apparently in a knee-jerk reaction to the suicide bombing attacks ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mid...st/2904911.stm

Interesting piece here:

n Monday's shooting incident, soldiers opened fire at a vehicle that had reportedly ignored warnings to stop, killing seven women and children and wounding two. The four other occupants of the vehicle were unhurt, according to the Pentagon.

A Western journalist "embedded" with the US Army division involved in the incident gives a different version of events.

William Branigin of the Washington Post says the vehicle contained 15 people, of whom 10 were killed and two seriously injured.

He also reports that soldiers at the checkpoint failed to fire warning shots in time.

"You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!" the paper quotes Captain Ronny Johnson as telling his platoon leader.

The platoon leader says he did fire warning shots, according to the paper.
In another unrelated incident, I just read this in the story on sacking Peter Arnett: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2903503.stm

His reporting of an allied bombing of a baby milk factory there in 1991 drew criticism from the US military, which said it was a biological weapons plant.
Of course, Iraq must be having huge caches of biological weapons

.