Apr 25 2007
Haditha Case A Fabrication?
The media’s desire to create a new My Lai massacre (you know, the kind of act which is remeniscent of Ghengis Khan) they latched onto an incident in Haditha to tarnish the military. It seems that the ones who will be tarnished are the media and others who ignored clear evidence the event WAS an ambush and our Marines acted correctly.
Much of that evidence remains classified, but it includes videos of the entire day’s action, including airstrikes against insurgent safe houses. Also included was all of the radio traffic describing the ongoing action between the men on the ground and battalion headquarters, and proof that the Marines were aware that the insurgents conducting the ambush of the Kilo Company troops were videotaping the action — the same video that after editing ended up in the hands of a gullible anti-war correspondent for Time magazine.
For those rampaging about Pat Tillman, this act is aking to friendly fire. Any news source that takes propaganda films at face value is either stupid or colluding with the enemy. What is clear here is the media was used to attack our soldiers and now needs to own up for their role in this mistake. H/T Clarice Feldman
New evidence exonerating Haditha Marines?…
This story from Newsmax is making the rounds so I figured I would link to it, even though I usually take what Newsmax says with a grain of salt (sometimes they’re accurate, sometimes they’re not – then again, so is the NYT …).
Some of…
I was told a few months ago that Calley’s military records specifically to the Mai Lai massacre have been quietly expunged. Calley has been exonerated of this incident.
As for the Haditha incident, shame on Murtha.
At the time all this came out about Haditha, the AP was printing false information and pictures about other incidents. And I firmly believed this was another such incident. I never believed this about the marines because we have photographers and the media watching their every move. Which I think is dumb. War is horrible and we don’t need a blow by blow picture of same. Split second decisions are made all the time and some of these decisions are the wrong ones. We cannot micromanage a war , not by the population or by congress. The military are the only ones with the experience to do so. But Murtha jumped on the bandwagon with this and trashed the military in doing so. What is it with the dims? Do they actually want us to fail. This terrorist propaganda has been in force since the invasion of Iraq. It is mind numbing to think some of our citizens fall for it especially someone in congress. But then my theory has always been that the people in congress are in love with the sound of their voices and they don’t really listen to what they are saying. It is up to their staffs to clean up their gaffes.
The reason I credit this story is that it is consistent with the stories about the genesis of this incident which Steve Gilbert and Dan Riehl were reporting and which I put into narrative form for those not able to track back thru their blogs on the subject.
Time said they got the stuff BTW from the Soros’ funded Human Rights Watch and Human Rights Watch got it from a highly suspicious source which had rather apparent ties to the Baathists.
Haditha Fabricated?…
Newsmax has a bombshell report from Philip V. Brennan….
Clarice:
This information has been public knowledge for almost a year.
Back on July 2, 2006, Los Angeles radio talk show host Captain Dale Dye (ret. Marines) informed listeners that every second of the Haditha firefight was monitored on tactical radio nets by company batallion regimental headquarters. Further, division headquarters was able to monitor the action on a live feed from an overhead UAV. (The time delay between the actual firefight and the video download at division headquarters was within several minutes.) Dye also reported that several insurgents were captured in the fighting and were taken into in Coalition military custody.
The real bombshell is why court martial prosecutors are only finding out this information now when millions of KFI-AM640 radio listeners knew about this a year ago.
Incidentally,
My information has it that Human Rights Watch was not involved in this case. I may be mistaken, but I believe that to be a Time magazine gaffe. The “group” that first came forward with Haditha so-called evidence was the Hammurabi Human Rights Watch, a separate Iraqi organization consisting of, I believe, two people.
What are you guys smoking now? Are you saying that Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell, the author of a 104-page report on Haditha is fabricating?
The General’s report is scathing in its criticism of the Marines’ actions, from the enlisted men who were involved in the shootings on Nov. 19, 2005, to the two-star general who commanded the 2nd Marine Division in Iraq at the time. Bargewell’s previously undisclosed report found officers may have willfully ignored reports of the civilian deaths to protect themselves and their units from blame.
A Naval Criminal Investigative Service report found
If this is true, will the military haters like soothie give these people a fair hearing? No, they will not. People like soothie only like soldiers if they are useful to them, if they are victims or victimizers. What was it you said about Oklahoma and Fort Sill soothie? Oh yes, those people are all stupid.
The only people associated with the military that soothie likes are people like Kevin Tillman or Cindy Sheehan. The thousands of people who have lost people and who still support the military or their government don’t count. No, if they don’t hate Bush they do not count.
It took 30 days for the military to get the truth after Tillman’s death due to friendly fire. The truth is not enough.. No sir, if Kevin Tillman wants to use the incident to besmirch the war, the entire military, the Bush administration, anyone and everyone remotely associated with the US government…that is a good thing. After all why else would Pat Tillman have joined up in the first place unless his service and his death could be used to disgrace the military?
But, on the other hand, any indication at all that the men at Haditha deserve a fair hearing or a fair trial or might be anything but murderers is completely out of the question. The truth only counts here if sooth can perpetuate the idea of the soldier as baby killer.
Like I said to soothie, there are two kinds of soldiers, victims and victimizers.
I mean after all it is not as if overzealous prosecutors have ever been known to withold evidence.
And if this is true, that is what happened here.
Dubious, IIRC the reports of the aerial videos were poopoohed with suggestions they were of another area in Haditha.
Also, the Time story was followed by 2 or 3 “corrections”. In the original story McGirk reported that Human Rights Watch had seen pics of assassinations. I think one of those corrections denied that. I contacted the Human Rights Watcher involved and as I recall he said he’d told McGirk he had never had those pics in his possesion but had (as I recall )only heard about them.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/06/haditha_when_a_picture_cannot.html
e—mailed John Sifton and asked him to tell me in his own words what he had reported to Time. He promptly answered.
Here is the substance of his reply on the ‘photo, taken by a Marine with his cell phone that shows Iraqis kneeling—and thus posing no threat—before they were shot’:
I told Time magazine in May the same thing I told a whole set of journalists: that multiple sources in the military told Human Rights Watch in [M]ay that Navy NCIS investigators have photographic evidence supporting their conclusion that some of the Iraqi civilians killed on November 19 in Haditha were intentionally murdered, and not accidentally shot. [Emphasis added]
I also mentioned to Time magazine (as well as several other journalists) a fact which they didn’t know: that NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski and NPR’s Tom Bowman had been told by NCIS investigators about one photograph in particular, and had described it in reports about the Haditha allegations. As Miklaszewski reported on May 17:
‘But military officials say Marine Corps photos taken immediately after the incident show many of the victims were shot at close range in the head and chest, execution style. One photo shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead. One military official familiar with the investigation says it appears the civilians were deliberately killed by the Marines who were outraged at the death of their fellow Marine.’
It now appears that Time Magazine mixed up their reporting, possibly conflating and then confusing what I said with what others had reported. I wouldn’t know: you would need to ask Time for a further explanation of how they misquoted me.
Absent photographs of our troops actually shooting the Haditha residents, I don’t see how what he says ‘multiple sources in the military told Human Rights Watch.’—that they had photographic evidence that the civilians had been ‘intentionally murdered’—can be true. Clearing operations would certainly kill civilians who might be in various postures when they died by shrapnel or arms fire.Equally problematic, not only are the sources kept anonymous, but so are the recipients of those ‘reports’ so I cannot comment further on the truth of the assertion that military sources told anything to Human Rights Watch.
But the MSNBC and NPR articles Sifton refers to in the second paragraph are online and can be checked. (I have also asked Jim Miklaszewski for more details but have not yet heard from him.)
Here is the NPR report’s the sole reference to photos or videos:
The government official says the investigative file includes photos and videotape of the dead taken inside the four houses. Some of the photos and video were taken by Marines, others by Iraqis. The pictures, says the official, “are about as bad as I’ve ever seen.”
There is no clue in this report who ‘the government official’ cited is. The term is, of course, a broad one, which could cover many people in and outside the military.
The MSNBC reporting on the photos in the original story was interwoven with the charges leveled against the troops by Congressman Murtha:
Miltary hater? Bull-bleep. I don\\\’t hate the military – I loathe the non-military idiots (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Rice) who placed the military in the middle of a perfectly predictable civil war – a civil war that was actually predicted by the CIA. Here\\\’s an excerpt from the Washington Post, September 2003:
Warned in advance of the specific dangers, Bush, Rice and Runsfeld mimicked the See, Hear and Speak No Evil monkees, covered their eyes, and wadee deeper in Bush\\\’s vanity quagmire in Iraq.
Quite simply, Bush is the military hater – he\\\’s the one with the blood of 3000+ soldiers on his hands, and 20,000 wounded. Some legacy, George, you simple-minded loser.
SS:
The blood on hands is mine in reference to the Democrats betrayal of our South Vietnamese and Cambodian allies, please think up your own. And can you tell me why it is you feel the need to personally attack the President? “simple-minded loser” What would that make the Honorable (trying to keep a straight face) John F’ing Kerry, or Teddy and Patches “Do you know who I am, I’m a Kennedy”? When Democrats stop voting for murderers they will be taken seriously, until that day please continue with the show.