Forget about ‘freedom fighters’. Discard the notion of Iraqis fighting the invaders. This has nothing to do with that. Margaret Hassan was not ‘executed’ she was murdered, in exactly the same way as the defenceless injured Iraqi murdered in Fallujah. Ms. Hassan was not one of those latter day arrivals in Iraq, bravely broadcasting from Baghdad’s best hotel and greedily devouring every US press releases before regurgitating them for our consumption. Hassan was, like her friend Felicity Arbuthnot and Robert Fisk and others, someone who genuinely cared about the people of Iraq. Cared about them for the last ten years whilst they were being slaughtered by Saddam, bombed by the US and UK, and dying in their hundreds of thousands from a sanctions regime designed to push them back into the stone age.
The world, and Iraq in particular, is a worse place this morning as Margaret Hassan's name is added to the death roll of victims of this war for oil.