More info from the Iraq Papers, this time detailing more than 600 civilian deaths at US military checkpoints. Usually in these situations, an Iraqi civilian vehicle will approach a checkpoint, and the soldiers there will instruct it to stop so they can inspect it for bombs and the like. If the vehicle does not stop as instructed, standard procedure is to fire warning shots, then shoot out the tires if the car continues towards the checkpoint. The military refers to this procedure coldly as "escalation of force" and many of these encounters have turned deadly. Al Jazeera has an excellent piece on this on-going problem -
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