It was ignored precisely because it WAS so common.

The only thing distinguishing Haditha is that the killings were execution style and there was a video that ended up in the MSM.

Otherwise, it was "business as usual" for "our boys in uniform."

Anybody who gives those Marines the "benefit of the doubt" is being extraordinarily naive.

For three and a half years - ever since the actual invasion - there have been reports from MSM, independent media, and returning soldiers that this sort of thing was occurring - along with panic killings, random shooting into crowds after an attack, the wholesale machinegunning of buses full of people, snipers firing at any adult male in Falluja - including ambulances and people trying to aid wounded Iraqi civilians - and a variety of other stupid crap like running over people's cars with tanks.

Excusing this crap as being a "normal part of war" is just an excuse for war crimes.

This IS what the US military does - and has done for decades. Ask most Vietnam infantry troops. Ask some who were in Panama. Ask those who were in Korea. Ask those who are returning from Iraq now. Go look in the history books for what was done in Haiti and the Phillipines.

Go back and read the study that showed a very good estimate that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed - most by US military action and/or as a direct consequence of the invasion.

And that doesn't count the increasing cases of depleted uranium poisoning cropping up in reports.

The stories are piling up - and being studiously ignored by a US public which is in denial that US troops have ever committed war crimes because it would offend the memory of John Wayne or some such crap.

Besides which, it is irrelevant. ANY action done by a US soldier in Iraq in an illegal war is by international law definition a war crime. The war was illegal - every action by any US soldier there is illegal.

The link to his source (an article in the Santa Maria Times) no longer works, but John Aravosis at AMERICAblog discovered that the investigation will not include officers....

"Pentagon investigations into the shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians are focused on about a dozen enlisted Marines and do not target their commanding officers, the lawyer for one of the officers said Tuesday."

Actually, I think everyone is waiting to hear the facts before making a judgement.

We don't know why hte soldeirs attacked those three houses, and until we do, we can't judge if it was justified or not.

Right now, what little information we have about the sequence of events is:

Some soldiers were attacked and one killed.

The soldiers then attacked three nearby houses belonging to one extended family.

One of the survivors of that family (a 12 year old girl) admitted on videotape that she knew that the IED was there.

So, what is the appropriate position if that family was actually active members of the insurgency and were killed in the process of attacking the US military occupation forces?

Randyjg2 (9:34am):

We don't know why hte soldeirs attacked those three houses, and until we do, we can't judge if it was justified or not.

Randyjg2 (9:53am):

There is no doubt ... that incidents like Haditha are abhorrent.

Am I alone in detecting some inconsistency here?

There is certainly some truth to what you write, but it comes off as unduly harsh because you present this (deliberately or not) as a criticism of the United States military.

What you are describing is WAR. It's foolish for Americans to close their eyes and believe that "our boys in uniform" are unsullied heroes, but it's doubly foolish to present them as uniquely monstrous. As horrific and inexcusable as civilian casualties have been in this war, they could easily have been far, far worse. It's high time that Americans learned that we don't need to canonize our troops in order to honor their sacrifice, but blanket condemnations of the military are counterproductive.

The lesson from Haditha, and from every other tragedy in that godforsaken country, is that there is no such thing as a humane war. When you put heavily armed young men into situations where their fellow troops are being picked off one by one and they can't distinguish friend from foe, it is inevitable that they will eventually snap and start shooting indiscriminately. And when they do so, the number of our foes will only increase.

War is not a goddamned Olympic sport or a handy tool for political gain, it is an atrocity, and it should never be undertaken unless it is absolutely necessary. Americans were failed by their political leaders, and the young men and women serving in Iraq are being sacrificed for an woefully inadequate cause. Let's make certain that blame is placed squarely where it belongs... at the White House and Pentagon, not in the mess halls and tents.

Excusing this crap as being a "normal part of war" is just an excuse for war crimes.

This is not a normal war, and therefore what happens in Iraq is not a normal part of war. "Normal" wars are conflicts fought at full intensity. Awash with tax cuts for the wealthy, this one hardly meets that definition.

By many measures, it is not a war at all, it is a botched attempt to protect America from an imagined threat; a goal successively transformed into a half-witted effort at saving the legacy of our ineffectual President. The problem is that the administration came swinging after this hornets nest of Iraq because they thought the queen bee was plotting against us.

You are blaming the behavior of assault troops in an open-ended combat situation rather than the idiotic senior commanders that put them there. I offer no excuse for a situation where there are lots of people with guns and frustration to end in tragedy. But let's not start adding to the tragedy by blaming our fighting forces for this abortion of a liberation invasion.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Haditha's MyLaiII with a cover-up at the highest levels which of course the CoverUpCongress will, with the assistance of the DoNOthing Democrats and the compliant synchopants of the US media, seek confine to "a few bad apples" and bad leadership.

But it will be hard for two reasons:

1. Bush is losing 2 wars for one simple reason - attrocities are exactly the objective of the insurgents. On the short end of the force assymetry, Hadithas and the daily massacres of so-called "insurgents" put them on the business end of the moral asymmetry and in the catbird's seat

2. Or as Gen Batiste of the Big Red One put it - "We have a failure of leadership with troops fighting an enemy they cannot see in a war  they do not understand"

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

I would find it hard to believe that, at the very least, Rumsfeld as well as our Ambassador in Iraq didn't know of the allegations, especially since money was paid out.

 

Bush said yesterday that first he learned when he read about it the newspapers!

And here I believed him when he said he didn't read newspapers.

Was he lying then or now? Both?

Depends on how much thought you put into considering the issues, I guess. Justified is not the antonym of abhorrent.

All actions which involve death are abhorrent to me, justified or not. Nobody deserves death.

But sometimes, it is unavoidable to fight, to hurt or kill people, and in such circumstances, your actions are justified. That makes them no less abhorrent. Nobody should ever become complaisant about harm to another person.

Then why was that one family singled out?

Because an IED blew Cpl. Terrazo away; because his buddies wanted revenge; because there were no insurgents in the area on which to wreak that revenge; because the IED had been planted in front of houses the occupants of which, the marine squad knew, had to have known it was there; because "if you're not with us, you're against us" -- ?

Aw right! Get it on!

And the evidence connecting those assertions to the actions of the soldiers is?

Because, silly boy, no one goes about covering up a firefight.

What is the difference between a cover up and a slow leak investigation. Not much. So then we ask, what happened that needed to be covered up? A lot of atrocities went uninvestigated in Vietman. Others only came up in death bed confessions. Even so, each one played a small role in what in what ultimately happened to us there. I'm with Cong. Murtha on this one.

But if it was a firefight (or simply an angry mob) there was no coverup. Supposedly, the coverup WAS the firefight.

It IS a criticism of the US military.

What part of that didn't you understand?

And it's bullshit that just because the US didn't nuke all of Iraq, that it excuses the 100-250,000 civilian casualties that did occur.

"When you put heavily armed young men into situations where their fellow troops are being picked off one by one and they can't distinguish friend from foe, it is inevitable that they will eventually snap and start shooting indiscriminately."

Bullcrap. That is the main point of my criticism of the US military. You DON'T DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

A guerrilla war cannot be won except in certain exceptional circumstances. And no guerrilla war can be won using the tactics being applied by the US military.

This is a known fact - it has been known since at least the Fifties or before. It was reinforced in Vietnam.

It has been ignored yet again by the Pentagon.

Every single senior Pentagon officer needs to be fired, arrested and charged before the Hague with war crimes.

Every single one of them involved in the war in Iraq is responsible first for a badly trained and badly lead military, secondly for an incompetent war plan, third for incompetent performance of that war, and fourth for responsibility for war crimes leading from the rest.

Explain the members of a taxi that just drove up and got gunned down.

What were they, insurgent reinforcements?

You're reaching for straws.

As usual.

Agreed. I think there's a CSM article on whether the Pentagon CAN investigate itself legitimately today.

An opinion piece at Yahoo by Ted Rall sums it up nicely exactly as I did:

"So far reaction to Haditha has been the reverse of what you might expect. Republicans and other pro-war types are running around like it's the end of the world. Meanwhile the streets of Arab capitals, recently ablaze over the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy, are quiet.

The reason is simple: For Iraqis, American atrocities are old news, dating back to the invasion in March 2003 and a full decade earlier. (U.S. planes dropped so many bombs on Iraqi schools, hospitals and power plants during the 1990s that they ran out of targets.) So are the boulevards of New York, San Francisco and other cities where hundreds of thousands of American lefties once marched against the invasion of
Iraq.

"As the war in Iraq rages on," CBS News' Dotty Lynch asks, "Where are the young people this time around? Where are the campuses? Where are the new Tom Haydens and Sam Browns and where are the Noam Chomskys, William Sloane Coffins and Daniel Berrigans?" Well, Chomsky's still around. Over a million young Americans, many of them college students, protested Iraq. They certainly had allies in the media. (Hi.)

But The System is even less responsive to protest now than it was during Vietnam. State-run media made fun of antiwar activists as tattooed neo-hippies, called them treasonous and refused airtime to Administration critics. When is the last time a hard-hitting opponent of the Iraq war showed his or her face on national TV? Those of us who raised our voices against this war from the start, having fruitlessly complained about stories of battlefield abuse reported by the European media, are suffering from marginalization fatigue.

Meanwhile, in the "new" Iraq, Abdel Salam al-Qubaisy of Iraq's Sunni Muslim Scholars Association says, U.S. massacres of civilians occur routinely. "The American soldier has become an expert in killing," he shrugs. Like many Iraqis, Baghdad shopkeeper Mohammed Jawdaat says that U.S. troops have never shown respect for the lives of Iraqi civilians. "Six months ago," remembers Jawdaat, "a car pulled out of a street towards an American convoy and a soldier just opened fire. The driver was shot in the head. There were no warning shots and the Americans didn't even stop."

Abd Mohammed Falah, a Ramadi attorney, says: "U.S. forces have committed more crimes against the Iraqi people than appears in the media. The U.S. defense secretary and his generals should be sent to court instead of two or three soldiers who will be scapegoats."

Newspapers don't bother to report when the sun rises in the east nor do they assign reporters to cover when dogs bite men. Likewise, says Baghdad newspaper boy Imad Mohammed, Iraqi newspapers haven't mentioned Haditha. Same-old, same-old massacres of Iraqis by American forces are no longer news: "The Americans see a Muslim go into a mosque and just assume he is a terrorist. They either arrest him or blow it up."

Rami Khouri, editor at The Daily Star in Lebanon tells NPR that Haditha is "not a huge story [in the Middle East]. It's getting a lot of coverage in the United States, obviously, but most people in the Arab world are against what the United States did in Iraq...They say look, this was a catastrophe from the beginning and they're not surprised that this is happening. They kind of take it in stride because everything the United States is doing in Iraq is seen as morally and politically unacceptable."

Most of the world's population--including virtually every Muslim and about a third Americans--always believed that the war against Iraq was a genocidal attempt to intimidate the Muslim world and extort its oil at gunpoint. They don't see a difference between Haditha and the thousands of other Iraqis killed by U.S. forces since 2003. Because the entire exercise was morally bankrupt from the outset, sold and perpetuated with countless lies, all of the 200,000-plus civilians and Iraqi soldiers who have died--whether by bomb or by bullet--were effectively murdered by the U.S. military.

Haditha, where two dozen were executed, was merely the 10,000th Haditha.

The morality-come-latelies still don't understand that nothing good will ever come out of the U.S. war against Iraq. Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that massacres of civilians by U.S. soldiers do "not happen very frequently, so there's no way to say historically why something like this might have happened." Actually, similar incidents have taken place in every war, including World War II. Pace's statement is either a dazzling display of ahistorical ignorance or a bald-faced lie--take your pick. Pace adds that if some of his men committed an atrocity at Haditha, they "have not performed their duty the way that 99.9 percent of their fellow Marines have."

That's not what the Iraqis say."

Meanwhile, Bush says he's "troubled" by Haditha.

Gee, I hope it doesn't put him off his brush cutting the next time he's on vacation.

Winners always get away with war crimes (ask Curtis LeMay or Bomber Harris).

The trouble for the US is that it is losing the war. If you're going to lose a war, then you've got to watch your behavior very very carefully.

We all know from Bill O'Reilly that Sy Hersch is a paid agent of al Qaeda but let's assume for a second that he's just a patriotic American. The man has reported the high frequency of Haditha like massacres and indiscriminate aerial raids on civilians.

Can someone give me a single reason why we should glorify the US military? (Or, for that matter, any military.)

For obvious reasons, Europeans long ceased to worship their troops. Alone in the Western world, we still do. Why?

For half a trillion dollars a year, what exactly are we getting? Bin Laden is at large; the Taliban are regrouping; the Iraq war is lost; and now it's on to the "atrocity of the week" show.

How may wars does the US military have to lose and war crimes to commit before we have the courage to look a soldier in the eye and say: "why don't you get a real job?"

You're right, Ellen. I've already heard that one - not as an actual incident, but another person warning the same thing.

It will devolve back into the same old story - if you don't "support our troops" - even when they're shooting four-year-old kids in the head - then you're "unpatriotic."

This is why the Democrats are shying so far away from this in an election year.

The Dems are SCARED TO DEATH to touch this story. Just look at the article we're discussing. "Let's wait for the investigation to be done." By which time, of course, it will be old news and the Dems can bury it along with the Republicans. Only Murtha will have the balls to push this one because he has the military credentials.

Look at how Abu Ghraib turned out. Already we see that the Pentagon "investigation" of Haditha is NOT targeting the officers in charge of those troops, but only the grunts. A half dozen Marines will get charged, convicted, and get a couple years at Leavenworth Military prison. Meanwhile, another thousand Iraqis will get gunned down this month in Iraq by US troops.

US troops just shot two women - one pregnant - today. The usual excuse: their car entered a restricted zone and didn't heed "warning shots" (bullshit - everybody heeds warnings shot - the US doesn't FIRE warning shots, regardless of what the troops say.) They were driving to a hospital zone because the woman was pregnant.

How many times is this crap excuse about "car bombs necessitating shoot first and ask questions later" going to be trotted out before somebody starts questioning the tactic of immobilizing our troops at checkpoints and other areas where a car bomb is effective?

The only reason that story got mentioned in the MSM is because Haditha is on the front page. Once Haditha goes to the back pages again, such stories will vanish.

The facts are: Americans don't give a shit about "foreigners" and never have. The US slaughtered scores of thousands of Filipinos back in the day - who cared?

I just go them one better: I don't give a shit about Americans, American soldiers or humans in general unless they're doing something to give me the tech I need to stop being one.

Yup, just saw that one myself, just mentioned it above.

And we get the usual US military bullshit - "we fired warning shots, they didn't stop, yada, yada, so because we're all so terrified of car bombs, we had to kill everybody..."

Pathetic.

If the US military moron leaders weren't having their moron grunts standing around in full view at "observation posts" (what the FUCK are they "observing"? Life going by?) and "checkpoints" (what the FUCK are they "checking" for - some terrorists to drive up and say, "Hey, check our car for explosives!"?), they wouldn't have to be sitting ducks and then they wouldn't have to kill everybody on the street when a street light bulb explodes (that actually happened a couple years ago, by the way.)

Look at the video of the "Baghdad sniper" - EVERY DAMN ONE of the US victims are standing around, peering out of an immobilized tank turret, and otherwise just hanging out a "Shoot Me - I"m an American Idiot" sign!

This is NOT how you fight a guerrilla war.

Not to mention that the very fact that the US is IN a guerrilla war proves we shouldn't be there at all.

QUOTE: The Geneva Convention says that every single individual member of a military is responsible for his own actions.
I am not here to justify murder (if that is what truly transpired), but you need to grasp, as disgusted as you may be with their actions, that these troopers are caught in a impossible mortal situation.

QUOTE: Incompetent leaders are not an excuse.
This is a dysfunctional command structure directing a dysfunctional (and increasingly unpopular) war, courtesy of the Bush Administration and his chorus of delusional advisors.

QUOTE: The nature of the conflict is not an excuse.
To even conceive of a Marine mutiny, while in a combat zone, where one f*ck-up and your battle buddy is hamburger, is a disgrace to the uniform--whether or not you agree with that is not the issue, because to the trooper in the field, it is a virtue worth dying for. Life doesn't have much meaning when you see humanity at its worst, and a battle buddy may be the only thing keeping your head on straight.

QUOTE: If you don't know what you're doing in a conflict, you'd better either find out or get the hell out of there.
The men and women who were sent to Iraq only want to serve their country honorably and if necessary sacrifice their own lives to for the chance that others might better their own. The Marine Corps gives only one ticket home, and that is either: shoulder-to-shoulder with the men and women of your unit, strapped to a med-evac gurney, or in a coffin.

QUOTE: If the US military had mutinied in Iraq, I would give them the benefit of the doubt. They didn't. It's on them.
That these troopers should just toss down their weapons and do...what? Make a truce with the insurgency? March back to Washington? Start a letter writing campaign to end the violence? The romantic sentiment that these individuals have the freedom to act can only be appreciated from the secure comfort of a sane environment, and that is a luxury they do not have.

Yeah, but the problem is, we still don't know if the soldiers were attacked by the local residents. We are just assuming that they were lying when they said they were.

Not only have we seen no evidence to support this, but most of our experience in the region suggests that is a likely scenario.

The fact that we paid money to a local politician and his family isn't an admission of guilt, bribes are a part of the normal course of doing business in Iraq.

Even if the Marines had been attacked, again, that's no justification to go room to room shooting civilians including handicapped old men, mothers and children.

"I just go them one better: I don't give a shit about Americans, American soldiers or humans in general unless they're doing something to give me the tech I need to stop being one."

Ok, I gotta ask. If you hate humanity so much, why do you need to interact with them on regular and extensive basis, such as in these forums?

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

War is the tool of small-minded scoundrels who worship the death of others on the altar of their greed. – John Cory

 Undermining the war effort
Atrocities and cover-ups should surprise no one, least of all Iraqis

No surprise at all to anyone who bothers to read or even skim the caption of one of TPMC's contrubtor's blog posts. Sometimes 2-3 a day all with the same racist hatea-filled propaganda. 

Bottom line, no war without "towelheads" cause killing human beings for nothing - that is hard work. And god knows none of these creatures want to work at all, especially the Lobbyists among us

Stop playing stupid. It's not cute.

What kind of bullshit excuse are you going to come up with next? That the victims committed mass suicide? I mean, they could have, right? None of us was there so what do we know, and the investigation is still in progress.

Nothing bad happened in Haditha, and the investigation is in progress only to prove that beyond reasonable doubt. And there is a parallel investigation of a coverup simply because someone has too much free time on their hands.

How about this alternate line of reasoning: Bad stuff happens in a war, that is a given. Most of it goes more or less unnoticed. If an investigation is launched, it's probably not because someone is bored to tears. It's probably because something really, really bad happened, and it can't be swept under the rug.

Do you suppose Rep. Murtha is a fool and jumping to conclusions, or is it more likely that he actually knows a lot more about the incident than you do?

Investigations are launched all the time...you ever watch JAG? Allegations have been made, and need to be investigated. There is no presumption of guilt involved.

The purpose of any trial is to uncover the truth, not to confirm a conviction. I have seen far too many false accusations to ever believe any statement which has not been tested in court.

It may very well be that a massacre has occurred. But, remember, those accused are Americans, and have as much right to due process as you or I.

It is especially important since the tasks we ask of them are so inherently difficult. Whatever you feel about the war in Iraq, the fact that the incident occurred while the soldiers were in the process of executing their duty, imposes on the rest of us the reponsibility to protect them from false accusations. If they did commit a massacre, they should be punished appropriately. But under our laws, that is only a true statement when decided in a court of law.

P.S. Got to admit I am a bit confused by your vehemence. My statements are substantially similar to Ms Kayyem's, and you don't seem upset with her.

"Rule of law was an 18th century thing. We're progressives."

Apparently so. I do wish you would stop claiming that you speak for all progressives, though.

Just because a bad thing happened in the middle of a war doesn't even slightly imply that we must abandoned our our way of life in response. I mean, haven't you been paying attention to the past five years? America has nearly collapsed because we reacted to 9/11 without regard to our laws.

There is rarely an excuse for violating the process of law in our society. The guarantee that the government cannot act arbitrarily is a fundamental tenet of American institutions.

Listen to Lurps?  You're joshing me, right?

That's because Mrs. Kayyem is not a troll who tries this crap of bullshit arguments with every freakin' article on the site that is even remotely critical of the government.

The fact that you do this marks you as a troll - that and the pathetic level of your "arguments" rife with misinterpretation, irrelevancies, and pointless babble.

Would you like to be accused of something like that and be convicted solely on the basis of the accusation?

I'll tell you about cautious.

Last week word was going around about a video in which a former soldier who served in Iraq claimed that these sorts of massacres were done constantly. He personally claimed to have killed over 200 Iraqis "with my own hands."

As soon as I saw that quote, I said: hold up. That kill count was WAY past what virtually any soldier is likely to ever be involved in unless all he does during his tour is go out and shoot people daily. I told the guy who sent me the story that I wanted to see more evidence - some confirmation that this guy was legit.

Well, he wasn't. The Pentagon and independent investigators have determined that he wasn't.

So I'm cautious, too, when there is reason to be.

You have to remember that the military covered up this story until Time got hold of the video. It was Time's investigation - not the Pentagon's - that broke the story.

So I don't take this as being a "Dan Rather moment".

As for the left, read the articles by Stan Goff. He was in Vietnam. He writes for the left. He "supports" the troops.

And he wrote this in 2003:

"I changed over there in Vietnam and they were not nice changes either. I started getting pulled into something--something that craved other peole's pain. Just to make sure I wasn't regarded as a "fucking missionary" or a possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group that was untouchable, people too crazy to fuck with, people who desired the rush of omnipotence that comes with setting someone's house on fire just for the pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone, man, woman, or child, with hardly a second thought. People who had the power of life and death--because they could.

The anger helps. It's easy to hate everyone you can't trust because of your circumstances, and to rage about what you've seen, what has happened to you, and what you have done and can't take back.

It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I couldn't name, and the reason I know that is that we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong. So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to be reduced to "niggers" here before they could be lynched. No difference. We convinced ourselves we had to kill them to survive, even when that wasn't true, but something inside us told us that so long as they were human beings, with the same intrinsic value we had as human beings, we were not allowed to burn their homes and barns, kill their animals, and sometimes even kill them. So we used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to strip them of their essential humanity, and then we could do things like adjust artillery fire onto the cries of a baby.

Until that baby was silenced, though, and here's the important thing to understand, that baby never surrendered her humanity. I did. We did. That's the thing you might not get until it's too late. When you take away the humanity of another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own soul because it is standing in the way.

So we finish our tour, and go back to our families, who can see that even though we function, we are empty and incapable of truly connecting to people any more, and maybe we can go for months or even years before we fill that void where we surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics--drugs, alcohol, until we realize that the void can never be filled and we shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we can disappear with the flotsam of society, or we hurt others, esepcially those who try to love us, and end up as another incarceration statistic or a mental patient.

You can never escape that you became a racist because you made the excuse that you needed that to survive, that you took things away from people that you can never give back, or that you killed a piece of yourself that you may never get back.

Some of us do. We get lucky and someone gives a damn enough to emotionally resuscitate us and bring us back to life. Many do not.

I live with the rage every day of my life, even when no one else sees it. You might hear it in my words. I hate being chumped.

So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to survive, however you define survival, while we do what we have to do to stop this thing. But don't surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching fucking military careerist to make his bones on. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium.

The big bosses are trying to gain control of the world's energy supplies to twist the arms of future economic competitors. That's what's going on, and you need to understand it, then do what you need to do to hold on to your humanity. The system does that; tells you you are some kind of hero action figures, but uses you as gunmen. They chump you.

Your so-called civilian leadership sees you as an expendable commodity. They don't care about your nightmares, about the DU that you are breathing, about the lonliness, the doubts, the pain, or about how you humanity is stripped away a piece at a time. They will cut your benefits, deny your illnesses, and hide your wounded and dead from the public. They already are.

They don't care. So you have to. And to preserve your own humanity, you must recognize the humanity of the people whose nation you now occupy and know that both you and they are victims of the filthy rich bastards who are calling the shots.

They are your enemies--The Suits--and they are the enemies of peace, and the enemies of your families, especially if they are Black families, or immigrant families, or poor families. They are thieves and bullies who take and never give, and they say they will "never run" in Iraq, but you and I know that they will never have to run, because they fucking aren't there. You are

They'll skin and grin while they are getting what they want from you, and throw you away like a used condom when they are done. Ask the vets who are having their benefits slashed out from under them now. Bushfeld and their cronies are parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries of the chaos you are learning to live in. They get the money. You get the prosthetic devices, the nightmares, and the mysterious illnesses.

So if your rage needs a target, there they are, responsible for your being there, and responsible for keeping you there. I can't tell you to disobey. That would probably run me afoul of the law. That will be a decision you will have to take when and if the circumstances and your own conscience dictate. But it perfeclty legal for you to refuse illegal orders, and orders to abuse or attack civilians are illegal. Ordering you to keep silent about these crimes is also illegal.

I can tell you, without fear of legal consequence, that you are never under any obligation to hate Iraqis, you are never under any obligation to give yourself over to racism and nihilism and the thirst to kill for the sake of killing, and you are never under any obligation to let them drive out the last vestiges of your capacity to see and tell the truth to yourself and to the world. You do not owe them your souls.

Come home safe, and come home sane. The people who love you and who have loved you all your lives are waiting here, and we want you to come back and be able to look us in the face. Don't leave your souls in the dust there like another corpse.

Hold on to your humanity."

I should point out that my posts are coming from the "correct" angle. This is how it should be - that everybody is responsible for their actions.

In the real world, you're correct - most of the troops in Iraq, like the ones in Vietnam (including me, who enlisted - to avoid the draft) are not directly responsible for the killing of Iraqi civilians.

They ARE responsible for doing their jobs in an illegal war which results in war crimes. They are, perhaps, "accessories after the fact."

They didn't prosecute every German soldier in the Nuremburg trails. That would have been impossible.

But the principle was enunciated that every single German soldier WAS responsible.

In the real world, all US troops should be pulled out of Iraq as soon as physically possible. Every claimed incident of Iraqi civilian deaths which has been documented to date should be investigated, the soldiers involved and the officers in charge held responsible and dealt with appropriately.

The chain of command up to the Commander in Chief needs to be re-evaluated, the entire US military organization and training needs to be re-evaluated, and appropriate action taken to insure that the US military does not do any of this - illegal war, badly planned war, badly executed war, and war crimes - ever happens again.

Anything less than that is complicity in war crimes - in the real world.

"we know in advance that after getting shot at and bombed for a couple of years in an insurgency situation,"

THAT'S RIGHT! WE KNEW IN ADVANCE! THAT is what makes your argument that it's "inevitable" BULLSHIT!

"But a whole bunch of our soldiers are just naive, dead-end kids snatched up by the recruiting vultures."

That's what I said - morons who don't have a clue.

But they're responsible for that, too.

"How many can say, for sure, that they wouldn't end up in the same depraved boat?"

I can say it - because I spent three years in the military, including a year in Vietnam, and eight years in Federal prison and it didn't change my view of what is correct behavior.

You either have intellectual integrity or you don't.

Most people don't.

Which is why Haditha and 100-250,000 Iraqi civilians killed by the US military will never be explained or compensated for or redeemed.

Except by the deaths of US soldiers - and perhaps one of these days, the deaths of US civilians - like 9/11.

What goes around comes around.

9/11 was DIRECTLY the result of US policies and US military actions going back decades.

It is irrelevant that the US citizens who died on 9/11 were innocent. So were the Iraqi civilians killed in Iraq. So were the Iraqi children who died because of the US sanctions before the invasion.

I'm not a Christian. But "you reap what you sow" is true in Transhumanism as well.

Dan, I must say, I applaud your post. (Though not for the Psalms, they are taken totally out of context).

For some time now, I have been increasingly concerned that Republican competitive intelligence (i.e. dirty tricks) operators have been attempting to widen the gap between the voting public and the Democratic party by forcefully advocating extreme positions and attempting to intimidate anyone who responds otherwise.

We can't simply depend on investigative reporters and Justice department officials to deal with the matter, by then, it will be too late. We have to be cautious in cases like this, it may be indeed, a setup as you suppose, but more importantly, even if it isn't a ploy, it can be used to drive the marginalization of progressives.

I, for one, don't want to see the Democrats lose in the next elections.

Ms Kayyem, unlike you, does not come across as wilfully ignorant and brandishing naivete honed to a sharp point.

What do you mean "it may well be that a massacre has occurred"? How do you explain the dead bodies if a massacre did not occur? Or are the corpses an unsubstantiated allegation too?

By the way, how much are you willing to bet that the US soldiers involved have crystal clear consciences and will be cleared of even a shadow of any wrongdoing? Would you bet more than two cents on that?

1. Paranoia is healthy in prescribed doses, no question about that.

2. Clearly the ones giving orders bear the most responsibility.

3. If all this is known prior to a war, what is the justification for starting a new one regardless? Sounds like monstrously stupid conduct to me.

4. "I'm just a dead-end kid, your honor, I'm not responsible for my actions." Somehow I don't think I'd have much success with that line in court. People are responsible for their own actions, period. How do you suppose crap like Nazism or Soviet-style communism happens? Everyone makes excuses for themselves, thinking that, no, it's not my fault, I'm just following orders. Everyone just does their job and the end result is twenty or fifty million people dead.

5. Of course no one can say for sure they wouldn't do the same in such situation. Sounds like an excellent reason to avoid such situations at all costs, especially because all this was known in advance. It's a lot like drink driving. You know it's dangerous and you still do it -- and there's no excuse for that.

What's your pathetic excuse, troll?

"I, for one, don't want to see the Democrats lose in the next elections."

You don't mind if I call you a lying sack of shit, do you?

"dirty tricks) operators have been attempting to widen the gap between the voting public and the Democratic party by forcefully advocating extreme positions and attempting to intimidate anyone who responds otherwise."

And your attempt to try to link me with Republicans is so pathetic that it shouldn't be necessary to even call it to the attention of anyone else on the site.

My posts have credibility and consistency. Yours do not.

Your posts are precisely those of someone who is intent on disorganizing appropriate responses to the Bush crime organization by muddying the issues with nonsense.

And a girl after my own heart -- also, a Hackworth protege.

Yeah, I've read quite a bit of Karen's stuff, too.

She was the one who broke the story about the Israeli generals entering secure areas in the Pentagon without having to sign in, in order to cover up the fact that they were there, prior to the Iraq invasion.

No, but there is a difference between a massacre and a battle. We do not yet know which of those two occured.

Article 32 proceedings are slow, but they tend to be fairer than civilian courts. I don't think that it is anywhere near a forgone conclusion that the soldiers will get off. If so, then that is the time to examine the proceedings and determine if justice has been served properly.

If it were you who were accused, i am certain you would want the same considerations also.

Yeah, when the going gets tough for Team Bush Cheney, their propaganda machine kicks into high gear to find a story that bleeds for diversion.

We have NO right to judge those Marines as we were not there. But here we go again, scapegoating the guys in harm's way.

It requires less intellectual honesty and mental discipline, doesn't it? to let our angst out on those who had the LEAST power, our soldiers.

American citizens have the power to stop this evil if they will only rise up and demand it.

Soldiers have NO POWER, none! The government can breach its contracts with them -- and does daily -- while holding them to their signatures on the bottom line.

These troops have been OVER deployed in Iraq, a war that should never have happened and a war that Americans are idly allowing to continue.

Actually, I wasn't linking you. I am not concerned about any of your actions, one way or the other. I am sorry, but you really aren't that important to me at the moment. Mostly, I am focused on the Democratic party's success in the next election.

I was responding to the proposition that the Haditha exposure being a trap in the post I was responding to and the recent convictions of the phone storm dirty tricks against Democrats in New England.

In addition, there have been rumors floating around of such an operation starting up. I do not know if they are correct, but I have heard that a number of investigative reporters are looking into it right now.

If it helps, they will probably be looking at both of us as potential subjects, since neither of us is a "me too" poster.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Door Gunner: Git some! Git some! Git some, yeah, yeah, yeah! Anyone that runs, is a VC. Anyone that stands still, is a well-disciplined VC! You guys oughta do a story about me sometime!
Private Joker: Why should we do a story about you?
Door Gunner: 'Cuz I'm so fuckin' good! I done got me 157 dead gooks killed. Plus 50 water buffalo too! Them's all confirmed!
Private Joker: Any women or children?
Door Gunner: Sometimes!
Private Joker: How can you shoot women or children?
Door Gunner: Easy! Ya just don't lead 'em so much! Ain't war hell?

Excellent.

If that is true, I would certainly have to retract my statements.

Has this evidence been examined by those accused? what do they have to say about it? I would feel a little bit more confident about admitting I was wrong if I knew both sides of the story.

You just don't get it.

First of all, I never said that EVERYBODY in the US military is equally guilty of behaving this way or even supporting such behavior.

"and with a few specific guilty parties on the ground. The blame does not lie with the Marine Corps."

Yes, it does. It does NOT lie with JUST Bush and a half dozen Marines.

The Marine Corps has an attitude about combat which is braindead. Their training is STUPID. It brainwashes people who are morons to begin with and makes them DANGEROUS morons. Don't tell me a thing about their "professionalism". I've talked to Marines on the Net and elsewhere. There's just as goddamn braindead as most other US soldiers.

I don't care that one or more officers are responsible enough to know that this sort of behavior is unacceptable.

It goes beyond that - WAY beyond that. It goes to the issue of how the ENTIRE US military is trained and organized from day one. It goes to the issue of how the entire US population views war in the first place.

Without resolving these issues rationally, the US will CONTINUE to MURDER literally HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of civilians worldwide.

Look - Bush has said he will NOT take nuclear bunker buster bombs off the table for an attack on Iran - despite the FACT that detonating such weapons near Isfahan is likely to kill SCORES OF THOUSANDS, possibly HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS, and (theoretically) up to THREE MILLION civilians in several countries!

What part of this stupidity can't you comprehend as a total failure to understand the nature of the US military?

The US military has been denying for YEARS that depleted uranium is ANY kind of threat to ANYBODY - despite the fact that it has been PROVEN to be a serious threat - not least of all by the scientist who invented it, and numerous others since.

What part of this utter and total callousness to pointless civilian deaths don't you comprehend?

randy, I'm not trying to change your mind or get you to admit you are wrong. I told you what had been reported. Read this LA Times story about Hidatha which is an account of what happened according to Iraqi witnesses and victims. Their story appears to match details leaked from the military investigation, according to the Times.

I don't care if believe the story in the LA Times. I'm suggesting that you read it because I thought you might be interested in what may have happened.

I suspect that the LA Times account is close to the mark because no one on the right is disputing that there was a massacre of civilians. What they are saying is that liberals will use Hidatha as an indictment of the war and give ammuntion to the terrorist. 

I probably was wrong about the intelligence officers paying bribes. From what I've read, the Marines classified nine victims as combatants. Fifteen were classified as civliians and entitled to compensation.

According to some reports, there were several vehicles carrying a multi-national force and when the bomb exploded, one of the vehicles was hit and a Marine inside was killed. Other marines got out of their vehicles, stormed into the nearest house and started shooting. They shot a old man in a wheelchair first. One victim was four years old. 

According to these same reports, Iraqi soldiers were outside the houses while the Marines were killing people inside them. One Iraqi soldier stopped a man from trying to help people inside one of the houses, telling him it was too late and if he tried to enter, he would be killed. Another Iraqi soldier helped an injured twelve year-old after the killng stopped. The girl was the only one in her family who survived. 

I also read that the military investigators have photos taken by another Marine helping with the cleanup of the bodies. He used his cell phone to take photos of the bodies before the were moved. 

And this is my last post here.  

Excellent article by Justin Raimondo over an Antiwar.com about the meaning of Haditha.

Money quotes:

"Surely this could be said about most armies in the history of human warfare: the overwhelming majority do not commit war crimes. They're too busy just trying to stay alive. But what this has to do with the cold hard fact that these U.S. Marines did commit a number of especially horrible atrocities is not at all clear. Aside from that, they have Murtha all wrong. He is full of excuses for American soldiers who murder children as young as 1 year old:

"They were so stressed out, they went into houses and killed children, women and children. 24 people they killed. Now this is the kind of stress they are under. Listen, I don't excuse it, but I understand what's happening and the responsibility goes right to the top. This is something that should not have happened, that should have been investigated, they've already relieved three commanding officers … but this is the kind of stuff … stress is going to cause these kind of things. That's why I'm so upset about it."

"Stress," my a**. We are not talking about National Guard units, here: these are U.S. Marines, highly-trained killing machines who know the rules of war, know the difference between a woman with a baby in her arms and a group of insurgents, and know, furthermore, that the war they are fighting is supposed to be against terrorism. Would they succumb to "stress" like some housewife who's run out of vacuum-cleaner bags, go ballistic, and slaughter 24 innocents, including women and very young children, if they didn't think they could get away with it? In short, would they have done it if it wasn't policy – directed, encouraged, and condoned by their commanders?

Hell, no.

Yes, Murtha is right: those Marines aren't going to take the fall all by themselves, the responsibility does go right to the top – but they, as individuals, are not absolved. They pulled the trigger, they slaughtered children, fer chrissake, executed them in cold blood. So they're responsible – right? If they were Iraqis, there wouldn't be any question about that: we wouldn't be talking about "stress," now would we? Does the fact that they're Americans somehow ameliorate their crimes? I don't think so...

Last year, I wrote about the "El Salvador option" – the emerging strategy of this administration in fighting a losing war, which amounts to throwing off all constraints and simply terrorizing the Iraqi people into cowed submission. We are now seeing the results of this policy of desperation in practice. Haditha is not just an "isolated incident," but evidence of a new strategic orientation by the U.S. military – a scorched-earth policy designed to stave off the humiliating prospect of impending defeat.

Further evidence of this new orientation is the revelation of yet another massacre, this time in the village of Abu Sifa, about 600 miles north of Baghdad. Of course, it isn't a revelation to readers of Antiwar.com and this column, where we covered it in detail back in March. The Times of London reported it, most of the American media ignored it, and the news dropped like a stone, clear out of sight and out of mind – except that, as in the case of Haditha, a videotape has come out that vividly documents American atrocities...

As we said in the beginning – nay, before the beginning – the occupation of Iraq will soon take on all the familiar earmarks of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Both Iraqis and Americans will be locked in a deadly embrace of indignities that will soon escalate into everyday atrocities. The Iraqis, like the Palestinians, will become captives in their own land, and their jailers will get progressively more abusive and cruel as a matter of sheer necessity. Iraq is the occupied territories writ large, and we are well on our way to becoming as hardened, as self-exculpatory, and as ruthless as our Israeli allies.

"A few sadists" – or a nation of sadists? That's what this whole question boils down to: have we become so corrupted by ambition and blinded by self-righteousness that we have spawned an army of baby-killers? And are we going to make weak excuses for them – by crying over the amount of "stress" the poor dears have to endure – or will we face the truth, about ourselves as well as them?...

Yes, our soldiers commit atrocities – but they are being investigated and prosecuted, aren't they? Well, that remains to be seen, but, in any event, what this argument misses is that our policy of untrammeled aggression requires terroristic tactics. If we don't have the stomach to kill women and children, then we had better turn back now. Because there is no nice way to be a global hegemon. We either give up the role, or else resign ourselves to many more Hadithas.

Back in October 2002, in a speech at Missouri's Washington University, as the likelihood of an American invasion of Iraq grew into a certainty, I warned about the "corruption of empire" that would inevitably infect every aspect of our culture."

Not really necessary. I just have a certain amount of caution against placing anyone in a "Richard Jewell" type accusation. Above all, I would rather let a hundred guilty people go free rather than convict an innocent one.

Above all, I would rather let a hundred guilty people go free rather than convict an innocent one.

 Don't worry, hundreds of guilty people WILL go free, and some of them will continue to lesd our government.

Look, I'm going to try and respond to this calmly, because this issue is too important to be reduced to a shouting match.

I share your revulsion for the elements of military training that essentially break down the natural resistance most humans have to killing other humans. I didn't serve because I have absolutely no desire to participate in the machinery of mass-killing. I was strongly opposed to war with Iraq and I strongly oppose war with Iran because I believe the cause for war is not nearly strong enough to justify this sort of violence.

I think I understand the nature of the US military quite well, thank you, although as a non-veteran I freely admit that some of my perceptions could be wrong.

But a military, ANY military, is by nature an engine of mass-killing. And as was demonstrated fairly effectively in the 20th century, a peace-loving nation without a strong military can quickly find itself on the business end of war crimes. If you believe that the United States should not have a Marine Corps, or that Marines should not be trained to kill people, or that we don't need to have planes that are capable of dropping bombs, then you are sadly, sadly deluded.

I also believe we have an obligation as the world's most powerful nation to prevent atrocities when it's within our power, and the Kosovo campaign, flawed though it was, achieved some real good.

The problem you correctly point out is the way the US population views war in the first place. I think perhaps this stems in part from a historical tendency to glamorize the military rather than representing its unpleasant realities. But if you want to change people's minds, referring to their friends and loved ones in the service as "dangerous morons" is probably not the right way to achieve that goal.

We need a strong military, but we need people in charge who refuse to use the military except when absolutely necessary. And I find it very, very interesting that the Bush Administration and Rumsfeld's Pentagon are composed almost entirely of thinktank wannabe warriors and draft evaders.

The US Marine Corps and the US Army did not make the decision to go to war. In fact, many of the harshest criticisms of the administration have come from retired military and Vietnam vets. These people are key allies in our efforts to develop a sane military policy, and demonizing them is just plain stupid.

. . .  a peace-loving nation without a strong military can quickly find itself on the business end of war crimes . . .but we need people in charge who refuse to use the military except when absolutely necessary. LaFolletteProg

Hey now; you gotta keep the tip of the spear honed, you know.