And still the blood flows...

On the day the Haditha massacre is revealed for what it really was -- an Iraqi My Lai -- this story emerges:

(CNN) -- A human rights group said Friday that about 34 civilians were killed in a U.S. air attack Monday on the village of Azizi in southern Afghanistan, more than double the number previously cited by President Hamid Karzai.

"According to a witness who was wounded and is now in the Mirwais hospital in Kandahar, there were two separate groups of civilians killed in the village," said Engineer Abdul Qader Noorzai, director of the Kandahar office of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said.

He said one group of about 25 people was the extended family of a man named Atta Mohammad.

"They were living in a walled mud compound that was destroyed. The family included many women and children."

He said the second group, which included the witness, was composed of day laborers who had been constructing a second floor to the village madrassah when the attack occurred.

"There were nine people killed in this second group," he said.

The witness said "many more Taliban fighters were also killed, but that the 34 village people killed were civilians and were not involved in the fighting."

And so it goes, as it always does in war. I paraphrased Nietzsche in a previous post, but I think his quote deserves to be appended in full:

"Whoever battles monsters should take care not to become a monster too, for if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares also into you."

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil