Immoral act

It's late in the evening, UK time, and so I do not know what response there will be, if any, in the British press to the breaking news that U.S. forces and Iraqi National Guardsmen have attacked a mosque in Baghdad during Friday noontime prayers and killed several worshipers.

Not only is this immoral in every conceivable sense, it is an act of the most outrageous stupidity, being, as it is, a recruitment standard for every suicide bomber who exists.

There have been so many acts of cultural insensitivity in this whole black farce of the illegal invasion and occupation it is difficult to know, in recounting them, where to begin. But let's start with turning dogs -- pariah animals to Muslims -- onto Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and continue to this latest outrage, attacking worshipers at the most important prayer meeting of the week.

This, sad to say, is on a continuum of logic that begins with the notion that international law does not apply. If it doesn't apply to the Americans and their proxy forces, then why should it apply to the brutes who executed Margaret Hassan? But all the way to the top in the current dispensation in the U.S. nobody gets it, which makes it all the more shameful that an Oxford university-educated lawyer like Tony Blair is complicit in the crimes now being committed. What was the value of his privileged education?

DAVIDE JARDINE Carlisle, UK