Jun 10 2006
Haditha Uncovered
I must say I have always admired reader SBD’s talent and diligence in finding news articles that have direct bearing on stories, and finding them first! So it seems with the Haditha charade. SBD posted this comment on June 8th (from this post):
A cameraman working for Reuters in Haditha says bodies had been left lying in the street for hours after the attack.
Reuters camerman, Reuters Story, and no mention of Massacre. Maybe reuters has blind cameramen?? Do they really expect us to believe that Reuters withheld a story like this for 8 months when they had a cameraman right there during the supposed massacre?
The media really has no shame.
A roadside bomb that killed a US Marine in the restive town of Haditha on Saturday also killed 15 Iraqi civilians and led to intense clashes with insurgents.
The powerful bomb detonated as a US military convoy was passing through the town, which is 220 kilometres north-west of Baghdad.
The US military says immediately after the blast, gunmen opened fire on the convoy.
US and Iraqi soldiers returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another in a firefight.
A cameraman working for Reuters in Haditha says bodies had been left lying in the street for hours after the attack.
He says the town has been virtually shut down for the past two days as US and Iraqi forces try to impose order.
US troops have been trying for months to quell the insurgency in Haditha and other Sunni Arab towns on the Euphrates.
It was suspected several months ago that Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was hiding out in the area.
The casualties from Saturday’s blast raised the death toll from attacks across Iraq over the past three days to at least 166.
Sunni-led insurgents are stepping up their battle against US and Iraqi forces ahead of parliamentary elections in December.
– Reuters
Apparently he also posted the at Free Republic. The critical point is that on the scene reporters for the anti-war, anti-Bush Reuters did not make mention of a massacre or incursion into homes, just a street fight. My hat is off to SBD for helping to expose a possible slanderous lie against our military and troops as they simply acted to protect themselves during an attack.
SBD has been doing more research, and found this possibly related article (comment from this post) on an Iraqi cameraman killed just weeks before the Haditha story came out in Time:
I have found something that may be nothing, but seems rather suspicious. The person who was in charge of Iraqi TV was murdered just 2 weeks before the Hadithi story was published by Time. The official had the same last name as the alleged massacre victims in Hadithi. Was he related? Did he provide any of the film or photos used in the massacre alligation? Maybe he had footage to prove the contrary, but more than likely he had access to enough footage from Iraq to manufacture any evidence needed to fabricate this story.
Xinhua General News Service
March 11, 2006 Saturday 4:00 AM EST
SECTION: WORLD NEWS; Political
LENGTH: 101 words
HEADLINE: Gunmen kill senior TV official in Baghdad
DATELINE: BAGHDADBODY: Unknown gunmen ambushed the car of the director in the government-backed Iraqia TV in western Baghdad on Saturday, a police source told Xinhua.
“Unidentified armed men shot dead Amjad hamid Hassan, director of Iraqiya TV, near the al-Shurta tunnel,†Captain Ahmed Abdullah from Baghdad police said.
He added that the attack took place at about 10:30 a.m. (0730 GMT).
Iraqi security forces cordoned off the scene and an ambulance reached to evacuate the victims.
The Iraqiya TV cut its regular programs and announced the news and started broadcasting holly Quran following the incident.
LOAD-DATE: March 12, 2006
We shall see if this lead pans out as well as the last one. Good job SBD.
Addendum: seems even Time now sees problems in their reporting:
If the Marines are indeed guilty of an atrocity, they had the ill fortune to have committed their crime in the worst possible place: outside the front door of a budding Iraqi journalist and human-rights activist.
And if the Marines are innocent, they had the misfortune of being bombed outside the front door of a human rights activist. What are the odds of a bomb being planted at that specific location on that route? With armed men covering the site from nearby homes?
More on this Time POS later today. But one ponders how far an Al Qaeda sympathizer would go to ensnare the US military in a My Lai styled debacle and have a duplicitous media push for withdrawal from Iraq? Would they go this far:
[Time’s] McGirk contacted Marine headquarters in Ramadi to inquire about the incident. The Marines sent back an e-mail saying there were 15 civilian deaths in Haditha on Nov. 19 but that the victims were killed by the roadside bomb and by a firefight that erupted when insurgents fired on the Marines. But the videotape showed that many of the dead were pajama-clad women and children. The bodies had wounds from bullets, not shrapnel, and the scene suggested that they had been murdered inside their homes.
The insurgents and Al Qaeda are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. So what makes anyone think they would not kill these people before the bombing of the convoy, shoot from the homes of the people they massacred, and then stage video in the next few months? Doesn’t sound out of bounds for Zarqawi’s thugs.
As to that crap AP story, Ed Morrissey shows why it was impossible. He concludes:
Capt. Ed Morrissey notes why the story was impossible. He concludes:The logistics of the site appear determinative that the residents of the village could not have seen any of what transpired at the safe house. The sequence of events show that the US had timed their raid for maximum security and efficiency, and that the ground forces of Iraqi and American troops would have acted immediately to secure this very remote site to ensure no one escaped. The AP apparently didn’t read the Reuters description of the attack site before publishing this uncorroborated account of a supposed atrocity.
Is the AP now in the business of reporting anything anyone says about any event without doing some rudimentary investigation first? We call that gossip, not news, and we expect better than a National Enquirer standard at the AP.
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/007178.php
Only when the information is negative toward the current administration, a Republican, the Republican Party, or the war effort. Other than those cases, no. They check out dirt on Democrats six ways to Sunday … if they report it at all.
Good Captain makes an excellent point: Troops going berserk do just that…they do not stop fighting and begin systematic executions which are preceded by calmly tying the hands of those to be killed. This seems much more like a thorough, “professional” process. I must confess that while I don’t know what happened at Racak (1/15/99) this story has many parallels, not the least of which is a compromised “crime” scene.
Whatever Happened to…
The MSM likes to prate on about how people we know to have committed heinous crimes, like Tookie Williams, are innocent until proven guilty. And, even when that person is found guilty (as sin) by a jury of his peers, the MSM still treats him as thoug…..
Hugh Hewitt notes that Haditha is not the only case under investigation where Murtha has pre judged the conduct of servicemen and blabbed to the press about it. He concludes:
“Even if charges are brought against Marines in both Haditha and Hamandiya and convictions secured, Congressman Murtha’s conduct that has prejudged these men will always remain an outrageous political intervention into the military’s criminal justice system. If any of those implicated by Murtha are not charged, or are charged and acquited, Murtha’s conduct will be revealed as disgraceful. ”
http://hughhewitt.com/archives/2006/06/11-week/index.php#a002409