SOWING SEEDS OF DOUBT:

US soldier admits role in deadly Kuwait grenade attack (AFP, 3/23/03)

A soldier with the US Army's elite 101st Airborne Division has admitted carrying out a grenade attack that killed a member of his unit and wounded a dozen others.

"I'm told he admitted doing it," Time Magazine reporter Jim Lacey, who is embedded with troops from the unit in the northern Kuwait desert, told CNN television early Sunday.

Military officials said the unidentified soldier hurled an undetermined number of grenades Saturday into a heavily guarded US military camp in the northern Kuwait desert.

Lacey said family members of the injured soldiers were being notified early Sunday.

The suspect is a sergeant attached to an engineering unit and has "an Arabic-sounding last name," Lacey said.

This is terrorism of an exceptionally effective kind because it sows doubts--hopefully illegitimate--about the loyalty of Muslim soldiers generally. But it would be helpful if the next announcement from an Arab-American civil rights organization deplored this kind of thing rather than leaping directly to fretting about potential backlash. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 23, 2003 6:52 AM