The New York Times And Haditha: An MSM Outlet Without A Clue
The Times today puts together an utterly inept view of the supposed massacre in Haditha, Iraq. Normally, Marcie would handle the defense of the troops today but she is currently beginning the prep work for dinner (it was her choice to cook tonight), so this one falls to me, and their insane revisionism demands to be answered.
The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by United States marines at Haditha will be hard to dispose of with another Washington damage control operation. The Iraqi government has made clear that it will not sit still for one, and neither should the American people. This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad men.
This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place. Critics of the war predicted that American troops would become an occupying force, unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and murderous insurgents, propelled down the same path that led the British to disaster in Northern Ireland and American troops to grief in Vietnam. The Bush administration understood the dangers too, but dismissed them out of its deep, unwarranted confidence that friendly Iraqis would quickly be able to take control of their own government and impose order on their own people.
Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field. The inquiry also needs to critically examine the behavior of top commanders responsible for ensuring lawful and professional conduct and of midlevel officers who apparently covered up the Haditha incident for months until journalists' inquiries forced a more honest review.
So far, nothing in President Bush's repeated statements on the issue offers any real assurance that the White House and the Pentagon will not once again try to protect the most senior military and political ranks from proper accountability. This is the pattern that this administration has repeatedly followed in the past — in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, in the beating deaths of prisoners at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in the serial abuses of justice and constitutional principle at Guantánamo Bay.
These damage control operations have done a great job of shielding the reputations of top military commanders and high-ranking Pentagon officials. But it has been at the expense of things that are far more precious: America's international reputation and the honor of the United States military. The overwhelming majority of American troops in Iraq are dedicated military professionals, doing their best to behave correctly under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Their good name requires a serious inquiry, not another deflection of blame to the lowest-ranking troops on the scene.
What we now know about the events last Nov. 19 in Haditha, a town in Anbar Province in western Iraq, the violent epicenter of the Sunni Arab insurgency, essentially boils down to this: A roadside bomb struck a Humvee traveling in the vicinity, killing one of the marines on board, and sometime later 24 Iraqi civilians were gunned down, many in their homes. The victims included women, children and grandparents. We know this not through the original Marine Corps report on the incident, which claimed that all the Iraqi deaths resulted from the bomb and an exchange of gunfire with insurgents. We know it because reporters from Time magazine began challenging inconsistencies between eyewitness Iraqi accounts and the Marine Corps version.
We still do not know how high up the Marine Corps chain of command the original cover-up went, nor do we know how the president, the defense secretary and other top officials responded when they first learned of the false reporting. Americans need to be told what steps are now being taken, besides remedial ethics training, to make sure that such crimes against civilians and such deliberate falsifications of the record do not recur.
It should not surprise anyone that this war — launched on the basis of false intelligence analysis, managed by a Pentagon exempted from normal standards of command responsibility and still far from achieving minimally acceptable results — is increasingly unpopular with the American people. At the very least, the public is now entitled to straight answers on what went wrong at Haditha and who, besides those at the bottom of the chain of command, will be required to take responsibility for it.
OK, let's start at the beginning. I dislike the use of the word "apparent." It denotes that these men are guilty already. (As in "How could it not be true.") This truly sickens me that the Times has the audacity to pull a John Murtha, and act as judge, jury, and executioner over these Marines before the investigation is even complete. And I fail to see how an investigation is equivalent to "damage control." The military has done an outstanding job of holding those that commit wrongs in this war accountable. And aside from Abu Ghraib, every other soldier who has faced charges has been found innocent. From 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano, to the unnamed Marine who shot a terrorist in a mosque in Fallujah who was faking his death, to the troops cleared in the Ishaqi incident; this proves that the MSM hype about such subjects is literally much ado about nothing.
We never believed that the Iraqis would "take over" anything quickly. The ravages of living under the regime of Saddam Hussein made our job over there even more pressing. But we are accomplishing those goals. And as for being unable to distinguish friend from foe seems a bit of a stretch for the Times. The incident in Haditha is contentious due to the contradictory information coming out, and the fact that the MSM is running off of talking points from the original TIME magazine article that first "broke" this story. (They didn't break it to the military who, like Abu Ghraib, has been investigating this for some time now.) No one connected to the investigation has made any official statements except to confirm that they are investigating this incident. The Marines are forbidden from talking about this, and to date (and to my knowledge) the only person who has spoken about this is one Lance Cpl. James Crossan who has stated that during the ambush, terrorists were using women and children as shields. But I notice the Times doesn't bring that piece of the puzzle up in this editorial.
With their third paragraph, the MSM paints too high a picture of itself for the world. It wasn't their inquiries forcing the Marines to investigate the Haditha incident deeper. It was the Marines questioning what they have termed as "contradictory" accounts. To them that means someone's not being forthright. The Times, I'm sure, takes this as some sort of admission by the Marines that these men are guilty. Again, the investigation is ongoing. As for the commanders in the field, and back at SOUTHCOM headquarters, I'm wondering where they "blurred" any lines for the troops. The Times obviously believes that these men are know-nothings coming out of boot camp, or advanced training schools, and that they simply follow orders given on any given day. That's not how the military works. These men are trained professionals, and know how to do their jobs. They have ROEs (rules of engagement) that they abide by on a daily basis, and those rules hardly change.
Now, we move onto their charges, and we just knew the Times would bring up Abu Ghraib (a vain attempt by the MSM to keep propping this incident up, and a pathetic attempt at that) in this story. And in an act of intellectual dishonesty, the Times fails to note that those involved in the Abu Ghraib abuse were prosecuted and either sentenced to Ft. Leavenworth, or dishonorably discharged. The incident at Bagram that they bring up was dealt with. Private Corsetti was cleared of all charges (and that link comes directly from the Times showing they know this fact). And, of course, they have to bring up Gitmo. But in doing so, they fail to grasp the utter stupidity of their statement. There are no constitutional protections for illegal combatants, which is backed up by the conditions listed under the Geneva Convention. (In addition, the following comes directly from Wikipedia's reference to POWs:)
In principle to be entitled to prisoner of war status the captured service member must have conducted operations according to the laws and customs of war, e.g. be part of a chain of command, wear a uniform and bear arms openly. Thus, franc-tireurs, terrorists and spies may be excluded. In practice these criteria are not always interpreted strictly. Guerrillas, for example, may not wear a uniform or carry arms openly, yet are typically granted POW status if captured. However, guerrillas or any other combatant may not be granted the status if they try to use both the civilian and the military status. Thus, the importance of uniforms — or as in the guerrilla case, a badge — to keep this important rule of warfare.
It takes the Times six paragraphs to admit that they are taking the information from the TIME article to make their allegations that the Marines committed this crime; that they did it knowingly and willingly, and without remorse. I know of no soldier who will admit that they don't have at least a slight twinge of remorse when it comes to killing anyone. Yes, an enemy is an enemy, but it is still a life. I knew a Marine who used to utter a silent prayer when he had killed an enemy. It was the Catholic side of him, but that firm belief changed nothing for him in the way he carried out his orders or performed his job.
And in the very next paragraph they further admit that they do not know how high up the chain of command this incident goes, yet just two paragraphs before that they wanted everyone from the president on down held accountable. Accountable for what? The president didn't order those Marines to shoot innocent civilians, and I'm betting no one in the chain of command did either. These Marines, according to the accounts of Lance Cpl. Crossan, were set up and ambushed. The Marines performed their duties under fire. Were there civilians killed? Yes. But the question that no one seems to be asking is who killed them? Yesterday, Michelle put up a post regarding a Times Online smear of the troops by using photos of Haditha residents killed by terrorists, rather than US forces. The caption below one of the photos from their site (Times Online removed them, but Michelle has them posted and cached) states the following:
"Insurgents in Haditha executed 19 shi'ite fisherman and National Guardsmen in a sports stadium."
So, it begs the question of who killed them? Another question that has to be asked is whether or not Lance Cpl. Crossan's account of the terrorists using human shields is correct. The standard issue weapon for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan is the the M4 carbine,/li> (and it's related family) which is chambered in 5.56 NATO; was an autopsy performed to confirm that those were the rounds that killed these people? I have yet to see any forensic reports regarding that, but if they had 7.62 rounds in them, that's an AK-47 round. There is more to this investigation than the mere conjecture the Times chooses to engage in.
And it goes beyond conjecture, really. This is pure speculation without a wit's worth of evidence to back them up. The Times, with this editorial, has chosen to jump off the deep end over Haditha rather than allowing the military to finish their investigation. What's worse, to them it won't matter what the outcome will be. To the Times anything but charges being filed, and a guilty verdict being rendered, amounts to a cover-up. What the Times can't seem to cover-up is their blatant dislike of the troops or of the administration, and their unwavering stupidity regarding what this war is about and why we're fighting it.
Publius II
The Times today puts together an utterly inept view of the supposed massacre in Haditha, Iraq. Normally, Marcie would handle the defense of the troops today but she is currently beginning the prep work for dinner (it was her choice to cook tonight), so this one falls to me, and their insane revisionism demands to be answered.
The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by United States marines at Haditha will be hard to dispose of with another Washington damage control operation. The Iraqi government has made clear that it will not sit still for one, and neither should the American people. This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad men.
This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place. Critics of the war predicted that American troops would become an occupying force, unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and murderous insurgents, propelled down the same path that led the British to disaster in Northern Ireland and American troops to grief in Vietnam. The Bush administration understood the dangers too, but dismissed them out of its deep, unwarranted confidence that friendly Iraqis would quickly be able to take control of their own government and impose order on their own people.
Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field. The inquiry also needs to critically examine the behavior of top commanders responsible for ensuring lawful and professional conduct and of midlevel officers who apparently covered up the Haditha incident for months until journalists' inquiries forced a more honest review.
So far, nothing in President Bush's repeated statements on the issue offers any real assurance that the White House and the Pentagon will not once again try to protect the most senior military and political ranks from proper accountability. This is the pattern that this administration has repeatedly followed in the past — in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, in the beating deaths of prisoners at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in the serial abuses of justice and constitutional principle at Guantánamo Bay.
These damage control operations have done a great job of shielding the reputations of top military commanders and high-ranking Pentagon officials. But it has been at the expense of things that are far more precious: America's international reputation and the honor of the United States military. The overwhelming majority of American troops in Iraq are dedicated military professionals, doing their best to behave correctly under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Their good name requires a serious inquiry, not another deflection of blame to the lowest-ranking troops on the scene.
What we now know about the events last Nov. 19 in Haditha, a town in Anbar Province in western Iraq, the violent epicenter of the Sunni Arab insurgency, essentially boils down to this: A roadside bomb struck a Humvee traveling in the vicinity, killing one of the marines on board, and sometime later 24 Iraqi civilians were gunned down, many in their homes. The victims included women, children and grandparents. We know this not through the original Marine Corps report on the incident, which claimed that all the Iraqi deaths resulted from the bomb and an exchange of gunfire with insurgents. We know it because reporters from Time magazine began challenging inconsistencies between eyewitness Iraqi accounts and the Marine Corps version.
We still do not know how high up the Marine Corps chain of command the original cover-up went, nor do we know how the president, the defense secretary and other top officials responded when they first learned of the false reporting. Americans need to be told what steps are now being taken, besides remedial ethics training, to make sure that such crimes against civilians and such deliberate falsifications of the record do not recur.
It should not surprise anyone that this war — launched on the basis of false intelligence analysis, managed by a Pentagon exempted from normal standards of command responsibility and still far from achieving minimally acceptable results — is increasingly unpopular with the American people. At the very least, the public is now entitled to straight answers on what went wrong at Haditha and who, besides those at the bottom of the chain of command, will be required to take responsibility for it.
OK, let's start at the beginning. I dislike the use of the word "apparent." It denotes that these men are guilty already. (As in "How could it not be true.") This truly sickens me that the Times has the audacity to pull a John Murtha, and act as judge, jury, and executioner over these Marines before the investigation is even complete. And I fail to see how an investigation is equivalent to "damage control." The military has done an outstanding job of holding those that commit wrongs in this war accountable. And aside from Abu Ghraib, every other soldier who has faced charges has been found innocent. From 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano, to the unnamed Marine who shot a terrorist in a mosque in Fallujah who was faking his death, to the troops cleared in the Ishaqi incident; this proves that the MSM hype about such subjects is literally much ado about nothing.
We never believed that the Iraqis would "take over" anything quickly. The ravages of living under the regime of Saddam Hussein made our job over there even more pressing. But we are accomplishing those goals. And as for being unable to distinguish friend from foe seems a bit of a stretch for the Times. The incident in Haditha is contentious due to the contradictory information coming out, and the fact that the MSM is running off of talking points from the original TIME magazine article that first "broke" this story. (They didn't break it to the military who, like Abu Ghraib, has been investigating this for some time now.) No one connected to the investigation has made any official statements except to confirm that they are investigating this incident. The Marines are forbidden from talking about this, and to date (and to my knowledge) the only person who has spoken about this is one Lance Cpl. James Crossan who has stated that during the ambush, terrorists were using women and children as shields. But I notice the Times doesn't bring that piece of the puzzle up in this editorial.
With their third paragraph, the MSM paints too high a picture of itself for the world. It wasn't their inquiries forcing the Marines to investigate the Haditha incident deeper. It was the Marines questioning what they have termed as "contradictory" accounts. To them that means someone's not being forthright. The Times, I'm sure, takes this as some sort of admission by the Marines that these men are guilty. Again, the investigation is ongoing. As for the commanders in the field, and back at SOUTHCOM headquarters, I'm wondering where they "blurred" any lines for the troops. The Times obviously believes that these men are know-nothings coming out of boot camp, or advanced training schools, and that they simply follow orders given on any given day. That's not how the military works. These men are trained professionals, and know how to do their jobs. They have ROEs (rules of engagement) that they abide by on a daily basis, and those rules hardly change.
Now, we move onto their charges, and we just knew the Times would bring up Abu Ghraib (a vain attempt by the MSM to keep propping this incident up, and a pathetic attempt at that) in this story. And in an act of intellectual dishonesty, the Times fails to note that those involved in the Abu Ghraib abuse were prosecuted and either sentenced to Ft. Leavenworth, or dishonorably discharged. The incident at Bagram that they bring up was dealt with. Private Corsetti was cleared of all charges (and that link comes directly from the Times showing they know this fact). And, of course, they have to bring up Gitmo. But in doing so, they fail to grasp the utter stupidity of their statement. There are no constitutional protections for illegal combatants, which is backed up by the conditions listed under the Geneva Convention. (In addition, the following comes directly from Wikipedia's reference to POWs:)
In principle to be entitled to prisoner of war status the captured service member must have conducted operations according to the laws and customs of war, e.g. be part of a chain of command, wear a uniform and bear arms openly. Thus, franc-tireurs, terrorists and spies may be excluded. In practice these criteria are not always interpreted strictly. Guerrillas, for example, may not wear a uniform or carry arms openly, yet are typically granted POW status if captured. However, guerrillas or any other combatant may not be granted the status if they try to use both the civilian and the military status. Thus, the importance of uniforms — or as in the guerrilla case, a badge — to keep this important rule of warfare.
It takes the Times six paragraphs to admit that they are taking the information from the TIME article to make their allegations that the Marines committed this crime; that they did it knowingly and willingly, and without remorse. I know of no soldier who will admit that they don't have at least a slight twinge of remorse when it comes to killing anyone. Yes, an enemy is an enemy, but it is still a life. I knew a Marine who used to utter a silent prayer when he had killed an enemy. It was the Catholic side of him, but that firm belief changed nothing for him in the way he carried out his orders or performed his job.
And in the very next paragraph they further admit that they do not know how high up the chain of command this incident goes, yet just two paragraphs before that they wanted everyone from the president on down held accountable. Accountable for what? The president didn't order those Marines to shoot innocent civilians, and I'm betting no one in the chain of command did either. These Marines, according to the accounts of Lance Cpl. Crossan, were set up and ambushed. The Marines performed their duties under fire. Were there civilians killed? Yes. But the question that no one seems to be asking is who killed them? Yesterday, Michelle put up a post regarding a Times Online smear of the troops by using photos of Haditha residents killed by terrorists, rather than US forces. The caption below one of the photos from their site (Times Online removed them, but Michelle has them posted and cached) states the following:
"Insurgents in Haditha executed 19 shi'ite fisherman and National Guardsmen in a sports stadium."
So, it begs the question of who killed them? Another question that has to be asked is whether or not Lance Cpl. Crossan's account of the terrorists using human shields is correct. The standard issue weapon for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan is the the M4 carbine,/li> (and it's related family) which is chambered in 5.56 NATO; was an autopsy performed to confirm that those were the rounds that killed these people? I have yet to see any forensic reports regarding that, but if they had 7.62 rounds in them, that's an AK-47 round. There is more to this investigation than the mere conjecture the Times chooses to engage in.
And it goes beyond conjecture, really. This is pure speculation without a wit's worth of evidence to back them up. The Times, with this editorial, has chosen to jump off the deep end over Haditha rather than allowing the military to finish their investigation. What's worse, to them it won't matter what the outcome will be. To the Times anything but charges being filed, and a guilty verdict being rendered, amounts to a cover-up. What the Times can't seem to cover-up is their blatant dislike of the troops or of the administration, and their unwavering stupidity regarding what this war is about and why we're fighting it.
Publius II
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 2:52 PM
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