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.
==He says the town has been virtually shut down for the past two days as US and Iraqi forces try to impose order.==
Order from what?
I agree there are too many discrepancies in the news reports. But the military is not investigating based on news reports, at least I hope they aren’t.
Hmmm
15 +8 = 23
Plus one wounded = 24
The magic Haditha number , or at least very close..
Just watching the flow here…
Let me see here , do I take the analysis of SBD or TIME magazine.
Based on past performance I tend to lean with SBD.
Excellent call AJ..like my wife was always fond of saying
Give credit where credit is due.
Blogs R good , they fisk the dish…
And so it goes.
Standing back and looking at all of this, I am amazed and the expression of love and devotion to our service members who risk their lives to protect us. How we rush to defend them in their time of need is beautiful indeed. Makes me proud to be a member of the same community with you all.
Yes, we do love our military.
All this is putting focus on the military-hating Left like Soros, Murtha and and the media…they are so quick to criticize our WELL INTENTIONED military. They see our ability to defend ourselves as bad. All masculine traits are bad to them, while, all the while they are acting in the exact manner they claim to disdain.
For all those who say they are staying home in November, I ask you to consider in who’s hands you will place the future of America. Voting for the global socialist dems will be a vote for those who hate with a passion.
And I can’t wait for this hoax to “explode” in the media’s front and center cameras.
Of course I ment amazed AT the expression of love and devotion. And now news that makes my blood boil even more: Sweetness and Light has discovered the article many of us knew was coming when it came out that Zarqawi was alive after the bombing. It has taken less than 24 hours for AP/CBS to publish the obligatory atrocity article. According to the article, we beat Zarqawi.
Our media is sick. It isn’t just the journalists, it is the editors too. Rushing half-baked stories to print with no fact checking just because they are negative toward our war effort. The media really is our enemy in all of this. I am sickened by the CBS/AP article.
Here is the article on S&L
I am so angry I could spit.
What amazes me is that members of the blogosphere, who mostly write for free, generally have real “day” jobs; and have limited resources are tearing apart the Haditha meme with very little trouble.
The Looney, Left-wing,Liberal, LameStream Media did no due diligence; no checking of background or sources; and no followup.
Are there any adults in charge?
“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. ”
AJ’s call here is supported by the (ahem) lawyer for the families, who insists they will not allow the bodies to be exhumed. No way to know if they were actually shot, shot post-mortem, or shot by Kalashnikovs instead of military-issue weapons.
But it still doesn’t explain the initial (well, four months later) report that said the ‘bodies were still lying in the street two days later.’ What, then, the Marines are supposed to have gone back after a 2-day R&R to drag the bodies into the houses? Even Michael Moore couldn’t say that with a straight face.
The Haditha doctor, ali-Obaidi, who claimed they were “shot in the head and chest” said a few other things in an interview with the same Reuters cameraman, Ali al-Mashhadani, who was released from Abu Ghraib in January (security threat, ties to terrorists).
In the interview, al-Obaidi described how he was repeatedly threatened, beaten and brutalized in essentially routine interactions by American servicemen — according to his preposterous claims, he had been (almost routinely) kicked in the head, face, nose, etc., but which apparently didn’t interfere with his work days. Perhaps the Marines of his stories wear velvet sandals? In any event, an objective witness, he isn’t.
I’ve reached the tipping point on this story, where the only way I would accept that any Marine “misconduct” occured, is to hear the accused Marine confess.
I think this “Haditha incident” is a complete fabrication, and that charges should be considered against al-Mashhadani of Reuters, and perhaps Tim McGirk of Time.
That same question has crossed my mind. I have often wondered if Goober was running those operations.
This is exactly what I mean when I say that journalists are lazy these days. What you do is get a PR agency like Fenton Communications to neatly package up your message, create an event that the media can’t pass up and then drop the package in the reporter’s lap.
These people are paid to do this kind of digging. They have Lexis Nexis accounts, they can research media stories going back to nearly the begining of the printing press on the company’s dime. They don’t. Why are the amateurs digging out the real story here? Why aren’t the professionals investigating this with an eye toward TRUTH rather than being spring-loaded to reach a certain conclusion?
The entire professional journalism trade has become corrupt. Want evidence? Check out the 8th all time largest political donor sometime. Communications Workers of America. CWA has an affiliate called The Newspaper Guild. 99% of their political donations go to the Democrats. Think they don’t have a clear agenda? Think again.
You will never see a professional corporate journalist digging this information out. It would cast a shadow on their occupation and peers. Who would be the first pot to call the kettle names? Isn’t going to happen. They will be dragged back from this story fighting tooth and nail because they have no professional integrity left, they are more interested in serving their agenda. We are witnessing the agonizing death of a once proud American institution, and maybe the bbirth of a new one.
And one more thing. Google:
“Institute for War and Peaceâ€+â€Fenton Communicationsâ€
and
“Human Rights Watchâ€+â€Fenton Communicationsâ€
and it becomes no wonder jounralists got this story so neatly packaged up for them and dropped into their lap. It’s the same old usual suspects playing the same old usual game. And the reporters buy it hook, line, and sinker every darned time.
Another source for people digging into old stories would be news.ask.com which sometimes has articles that don’t appear for whatever reason in a google news search. For example, going to news.ask.com and giving the following search:
haditha beforedate:20060101
Would pull up articles before Jan 1 of this year.
The item from the original set of MSM stories that suggested that this was not done by our troops was the indications that they were killed close range execution style. The image this concept gives me is a close shot to the head type of picture which (if correct) is unlike that of a small unit gone beserk. Instead it would indicative of a “professional” or experienced executioner.
I guess we’ll get better indications soon.
As again this BS unravels I ask.
Why were our troops forced to undergo training under this BS Flimsy excuse?
Who the hell is in charge and instituted that so called Seminar Training without giving our future the benefit of the doubt.
It is the simple things that matter to our military yet when we should love them to death we give them doubts. ..What hurts them more.
Iraq’s hardships or our lack of faith.
Earlier, Iraqi Security Forces discovered an insurgent propaganda center in Haditha.
Emphasis Mine
Marine Corps Times October 24, 2005 Monday
SECTION: FAST TRACK; Pg. 9
LENGTH: 632 words
HEADLINE: Around the Corps
BODY: Iraq RCT–2 links car bomb to video evidence Members of Regimental Combat Team 2 found a video camera in the possession of three men stopped at a vehicle checkpoint northeast of Haditha, Iraq, on Oct. 12, according to a 2nd Marine Division news release. Minutes later, a similar white, four–door sedan approached the checkpoint. U.S. forces guarding the checkpoint used hand and arm gestures to signal the vehicle to stop, but the car continued to accelerate toward the checkpoint, even after warning shots were fired, according to the release. The vehicle detonated shortly after the first shots were fired, killing the driver.
When the video camera was inspected, it yielded several minutes of footage showing one of the men from the first sedan speaking to the driver of the car that detonated. The Marines said videotaping suicide car bombings is an insurgent propaganda tactic used to spread fear and intimidate Iraqi citizens.
Earlier, Iraqi Security Forces discovered an insurgent propaganda center in Haditha. The site raided by Iraqi forces included “numerous prepared al–Qaida in Iraq compact discs and audio tapes, three computers, several printers, banner makers, multi–disk copiers and thousands of [blank] disks and tapes,” according to an Oct. 10 Stars and Stripes newspaper report.
SBD
With a hat tip to Sweetness & Light, Clarice Feldman puts the whole story together regarding the possibility of Haditha as a another CBS/Mary Mapes type hoax in this post/essay at The American Thinker – http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5566.
Six or seven years ago I used to think our Government was hopelessly corrupt. I believe it still has its problems, but over-all is still functioning in the best interest of ‘the people’. I believe GWB is a major factor in this ‘clean-up’. I now believe we (USA) have a far more serious problem; that being a hopelessly corrupt ‘free press’, namely the MSM and print services like AP, Reuters, etc. I now believe that they are a far more dangerous and cancerous long-term problem than corrupt members of our government. There are Constitutional provisions to ‘fix’ corrupt government. There are not these provisions to ‘fix’ a corrupt free press, other than the free market. I suggest that instead of writing to your Congress people, the solution lies in writing to heads of all major corporations to eliminate the advertising dollars to “news” companies such as NYT, ABC, CBS NBC, MSNBC, CNN, AP and Reuters. Drying up the funding for terrorist organizations is having a noticable effect. The same tactics need to be used against the MSM. There are alternatives for advertising, and probably less expensive in the long run! The current MSM is evil, and must be destroyed!
That is a big problem, MFS. It seems the media has become an active enemy of the United States. They expose intelligence programs and methods. They expose sources of information to the government to include giving out names and showing pictures of the faces of snitches while being careful to protect their own sources. They are quick to publish unconformed bad news, slow to report good news if they report it at all.
The media has decided to become an active combatant in a support role for the terrorists. They are the intelligence and psyops arm of al Qaeda at this point. It is time to start jailing editors who decide to publish such detailed information. Then we can go after the leakers to the reporters and finally the reporters themselves. I hold the editors more responsible than the reporters, though. A reporter is trying to advance their career, it is the editor that decides what goes on page one or gets buried in the middle of the section. The reporter is responding the desires of their employer that sets the standard for what is the most desired content.
It’s time for editors to be held responsible.
So American troops, as seen by an “unidentified source” beat him on the head. First I’m sure the local Iraqi’s were running away from the bomb blast, not to it.
But in that story I found this:
“One insurgent group, Ansar al-Sunnah, posted a gruesome video showing militants interrogating and then beheading three Iraqis said to be members of a Shiite “death squad” that killed Sunnis.”
So now I’m gonna go out on a limb and say, was the “unidentified source” saying we should’ve been sawing his head off, not beating him. because that’s the Iraqi way?
Well it certainly would have been fitting But and it’s a big BUT, IT’S NOT THE AMERICAN WAY.
More on Haditha…
AJ Strata has another development in the Haditha story. While the story does cite a Reuters camerman. I do not see who actually filed this story in the link provided nor can I determine if the Reuters camerman was an eyewitness or just reporting what h…