Human Shields in Baghdad

Today’s fun with Google Earth. The picture is hyperlinked to the placemark. (Hat tip)

Late Update: Self-described “reporter, poet and activist” John Ross claims he began painting “human shields” on this particular roof:

This past Friday, March 7, the day the fatal Blix report was broadcast to an expectant universe, my Turkish comrade – an ex-Greenpeace Mediterranean campaigner and Elvis Presley lookalike named Tolga Temuge – and I were perched upon the rickety roof of the engine house at the Daura oil refinery in west Baghdad.

We were marking the roof with industrial black paint. We had already filled in the six-meter-long letters “H-U” and were outlining the “M” in the words that, when spelled out completely, would signal to George Bush’s death-dealing missiles that the refinery was a United Nations-certified civilian site providing fuel and home heating oil to the residents of Baghdad and beyond. And that, by blasting the plant off the face of the earth, the US president would also be endangering the lives of his own citizens and those of many other nations.

It was at that moment – on mid-letter – that a delegation from the Organization of Peace and Friendship (our hosts in Iraq) summoned us down to the ground floor to read us the riot act.