Grave topic

From the Washington Post:

Baghdad, April 29 - U.S. investigators have exhumed the remains of 113 people - all but five of them women, children or teenagers - from a mass grave in southern Iraq that may hold at least 1,500 victims of Saddam Hussein's campaign against the Kurdish minority in the 1980s, U.S. and Iraqi officials said this week.

The recovered bodies are expected to be among the evidence used against the deposed Iraqi president by prosecutors at a special tribunal, investigators said.
.....
Investigators said that women and children were forced to stand at the edge of the pits, then shot with AK-47 assault rifles. Casings were found near the site, they said.

"They sprayed people with bullets so they fell back" into the graves, Iraq's human rights minister, Bakhtyar Amin, told reporters.

Women and children forced to stand at the edge of pits. Remind you of anything? There's been rather a lot of talk lately about people having to hold their noses to vote in a certain way. Well, when you read or hear such talk you may want to hold your nose.