Haditha

BASTA! Leave our boys alone. Innocent until proven otherwise. That's the American way, right leftards?

Sounds like Pantano right? Love him.....he's been running on my sidebar under True Heroes column for as long as I have been  blogging .
Haditha?   In September  '05, 14 Marines were killed instantly by a massive IED in Haditha (worst one ever) and during the same month 6 more were blown to smithereens.   This history is not known by the public. Reader Rich listened to WPHT 1210AM and Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) was telling host Dom Giordano all about it.   It puts things in context.  Which is what Weldon was stressing - CONTEXT...

  The Marines were trying their best to get this area under control, but the townspeople were pretty much in cohoots with the terrorists. 

Nothing in the human experience is more physically exhausting, mentally challenging, and emotionally rattling than ground combat, particularly that which is fought in tooth-to-eyeball proximity to the enemy. It does things to soldiers that people who have never experienced it will never truly comprehend. Though the facts are not yet known, the killings are alleged to be the result of an emotionally charged retaliation for the ambush killing of Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, who was driving a Humvee on patrol when the vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device (IED).

According to preliminary reports, after Terrazas was killed, his fellow Marines raided two or three houses suspected of harboring insurgents. There was shooting, and people died.

Today, it seems most anyone on either side of the political fence—whether supportive of our efforts in Iraq or not—would agree that someone is probably going to be charged. Whether or not they will be convicted, and of what, is another matter entirely.

Now, I’m not excusing what may—with “may” being the optimum word here—prove to be a shameful day in the history of our Marine Corps. But it benefits no one if we do not attempt to understand the men involved and the dynamics of the system, and how it all could have temporarily broken down, if it did. Nor is there any justifiable reason to publicly convict the Marines—as we have seen in the rhetoric of Congressman John Murtha (D., Penn)—before those Marines have had their day in court. More here (hat tip Bruce )

No matter what this investigation reveals - "civilians" can be and are collaborators. Haditha will become the buzzword to club America (Abu Ghraib), but in this case will they use it to tie our b0ys hands, make it an even more dangerous war? Now they are getting mandatory "sensitivity" and "rules of war - civilian rights" training..... oy.   The media made the assinine actions of a couple of losers at Abu Ghraib the face of the Iraq war. This will be a hundred times worse.

The outcome of the insurgents’ war will hinge on whether we assess our own strengths and weaknesses in this sort of fighting far better than does our canny enemy. And that answer in turn will determine whether Iraq and Afghanistan shatter the aspirations of our enemies—or turn out to be colossal Mogadishus. Victor Davis Hanson here (hat tip Bruce h)

More of my thoughts on Haditha here on my VLOG

UPDATE The Haditha our Media woen't tell you about here (hat tip Bruce H)

The executions are carried out at dawn on Haqlania bridge, the entrance to Haditha. A small crowd usually turns up to watch even though the killings are filmed and made available on DVD in the market the same afternoon.

One of last week’s victims was a young man in a black tracksuit. Like the others he was left on his belly by the blue iron railings at the bridge’s southern end. His severed head rested on his back, facing Baghdad. Children cheered when they heard that the next day’s spectacle would be a double bill: two decapitations. A man named Watban and his brother had been found guilty of spying.

With so many alleged American agents dying here Haqlania bridge was renamed Agents’ bridge. Then a local wag dubbed it Agents’ fridge, evoking a mortuary, and that name has stuck.

A three-day visit by a reporter working for the Guardian last week established what neither the Iraqi government nor the US military has admitted: Haditha, a farming town of 90,000 people by the Euphrates river, is an insurgent citadel. Read it all

UPDATE: More troubling Haditha developments form Little Green Footballs

Haditha Reporter Jailed by US

 

Sweetness & Light has an interesting look at the history of Reuters journalist Ali al-Mashhadani, responsible for some of the first reports on the Haditha incident, upon which he stumbled shortly after being released from five months in a US military prison. (And he was released today after another two week stay in military custody.)

Many of the descriptions and phrases from al-Mashhadani’s initial report are still being parroted in current wire stories. And in a curious coincidence, al-Mashhadani shares a surname with his main source.

UPDATE at 6/1/06 6:11:52 pm:

Allahpundit has more: Pushback: Marine Capt. James Kimber says he’s being scapegoated.

Comments

[dventimi]

You wrote "innocent until proven otherwise" then followed it later with, "no matter what the investigations reveal, - 'civilians' can be and are collaborators". You appear to be cautioning against prejudgment on the one hand, then embracing it on the other, which would be a contradiction.

Also, the construction, "'civilians' can be and are collaborators" itself is redundant, and at any rate hard to parse. Perhaps you meant something like, "Civilians can be collaborators, and the victims at Haditha were collaborators". If that's what you meant, then I don't believe you know it.

Regards,
Dave