Iraq Correspondent Richard Engel: “The People Who Are Being Killed Are Too Old, Too Stupid, Too Poor...To Leave”...

Regime Change, Liberation and Democracy for Iraq

Eat The Press Rachel Sklar October 28, 2006 05:31 PM

Yesterday, Howard Kurtz ran a profile of NBC Middle East bureau chief Richard Engel, who has the (dubious) distinction of being the TV news correspondent with the longest-running tenure in Iraq at 3 1/2 years. Here's a sampling of what he's seen:

Earlier this month he interviewed a woman whose 13-year-old son was kidnapped. After she paid the $12,000 ransom, the boy was tortured and killed anyway.

"It's horrible," Engel says. "I've seen hundreds of dead bodies -- rotting bodies, bodies buried in shallow graves. One time I watched a dog carry a severed human head in its mouth. You're smelling bodies, you're seeing people who are so angry and insanely distraught. The people who are being killed are too old, too stupid, too poor, too young or too weak, socially or otherwise, to leave."

This is the same war Bush described the U.S. as "winning" earlier this week.

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