The Ongoing Media Bias Against Our Marines In Haditha

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The first thing that jumps out to me while reading this news report on the Marine Corps officer in charge during the Haditha incident is the headline:

Officer Called Haditha Routine

But nowhere in the article itself do you get a quote that states he said it was routine. Sure he said:

“I thought it was very sad, very unfortunate, but at the time, I did not suspect any wrongdoing from my Marines,” Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines, said in the statement.

“I did not have any reason to believe that this was anything other than combat action,” he added.

And why would he? The Marines were engaged with bombs and small arms fire in a town. They defended themselves and ended the threat to their lives. As he said, it was sad that civilians died but what should the Marines have done? Not defended themselves?

Then you have this excellent example of leftist propaganda:

It suggests that top U.S. commanders have been unsuccessful in urging subordinate leaders to focus less on killing insurgents and more on winning the support of the Iraqi people, especially by providing them security.

Focus less on killing those who want to kill them? Are you freakin kidding me? You provide security to the Iraqi’s by ending the threat. I know this maybe a foreign concept to those who think flower power is the answer to war but come on….

Chessani told investigators he concluded that insurgents had staged a “complex attack” that began with a roadside bomb, followed by a small-arms ambush that was intended to provoke the Marines to fire into houses where civilians were hiding.

Which was correct.

“I did not see any cause for alarm,” especially because several firefights had occurred in the area the same day — Nov. 19, 2005 — Chessani said. Because of that conclusion, the commander added, he did not see any reason to investigate the matter, or even to ask how many women and children had been killed. “I just saw this as a large combat action that had been staged by the enemy,” he told investigators.

I find it curious how these major MSM outfits can gloss over the fact that this city was a hotbed of terrorist activity. Hell, one reporter called it a “insurgent bastion”.

insurgents blend in with the residents, setting up cells in their homes next to those belonging to everyday citizens, some of them supportive.

This same reporter said:

several storefronts were lined with posters and pictures supporting al-Qaida. … “There is no functioning police station and the government offices are largely vacant. The last man to call himself mayor relinquished the title earlier this year after scores of death threats from insurgents.

The Guardian reported in 2005 that Haditha:

is a miniature Taliban-like state. Insurgents decide who lives and dies, which salaries get paid, what people wear, what they watch and listen to.

These Marines rolled into that area, over a road where dozens of IED’s had been placed under freshly paved asphalt roads. They were attacked by these same IED’s and small arms fire from houses near the bomb site. To suggest that the Marines should have just taken cover while receiving small arms fire is ludicrous. They attacked the houses that were attacking them and in so doing civilians died. Hell, the bomb disposal crew enroute to help the Marines clear the rest of the IED’s were attacked as they reached the area…this is how dangerous this town was.

A UAV started videotaping the incident shortly after the house clearing and caught four terrorists loading a car with weapons and then attempting to leave.

What the UAV captured was a view of Marines in their perimeter, as they went about doing house-clearing. It was then vectored to the surrounding area to catch any fleeing insurgents. It showed four insurgents fleeing the neighborhood, loading weapons into their car, and linking up with their partners (the ones that had conducted the ambush on the EOD team).

Knowing what we now know about Wuterich’s account, these fleeing insurgents were most likely the same ones that left through the back door of the house he was clearing.

The rest of this latest propaganda piece from the WaPo is spent with nary a word about any of this. Not one word about the blood money that was given to those deemed innocent victims. Nine of them were not so deemed and not given blood money, which upset them greatly. Funny how the town didn’t complain about the deaths until they realized money was not coming their way. Then months after the incident this tape of the dead suddenly appeared.

The article ends with this:

Ewers asked: “Did it occur to you that you needed to do an investigation simply so you could go to the locals and say, ‘This was righteous’? . . . And be confident that you were speaking with certainty?”

Chessani responded: “Sir, I did not think about it like that. . . . Enemy has picked the place, he had picked the time, and the location for a reason. . . . [H]e wanted to make us look bad.”

Tell the locals that “this was righteous”? The locals were sympathetic to the terrorists, how in the world would that have worked? Combat soldiers should not have to think like this. They identify a threat and then take out that threat.

I guess this lawyer feels the failed Vietnam “win the hearts and minds” policy should be used once again in a terrorist hotbed.

Could the Marines tactics have been better? I do not know. I wasn’t there. I am certain tho that a whole platoon of Marines did not kill these people as sport.

We call this “innocent before proven guilty”, a foreign concept to our MSM and the liberal left….unless they are talking about William Jefferson or Ted Kennedy of course.

UPDATE

Allah at Hot Air posts about this NYTimes article which claims evidence was tampered with:

The report … says that the logbook, which was meant to be a daily record of major incidents the marines’ company encountered, had all the pages missing for Nov. 19, the day of the killings, and that those portions had not been found, the officials said.

No conclusions are drawn about who may have tampered with the log. But the report says that Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the leader of the squad involved in the killings, was on duty at the unit’s operations center, where the logbook was kept, shortly after the killings occurred, the officials said.

Funny since being in the communications field myself logbooks such as these don’t record what is said directly, it lists times and dates of important radio traffic. As Wuterich lays out:

The New York Times on Friday reported that pages detailing what happened on that day in Haditha had been excised from the official logbook of the company involved in the incident. But the sergeant on duty the next day at the unit’s operation center, where the logbook was kept, denies that he tampered with the logbook.

Through his lawyers, Wuterich, the Marine who was the unit leader in Haditha on Nov. 19, says that, while he was on duty in the makeshift operations center the following day, he never handled the radio operator’s green logbook. The logbook, he said, is usually kept by a low-ranking enlisted Marine and simply tracks the time of radio calls in and out of the center. Wuterich says he never took any pages out of the logbook and never “tampered” with it.

Wuterich says he also never saw any other more substantial logbook that would have contained so-called after-action reports — detailed descriptions of incidents. Other Marines with experience in Iraq say that such battlefield operation centers are often confused and informal settings where the rush of events prevents methodical record keeping. They say it would be highly unusual to have so-called “after-action reports” kept there.

The NYT’s then tries to see more conspiracies with the AK-47 story:

Marines have told investigators that at least one Iraqi who was shot was brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle. But no records were found that such a weapon was recovered at the scene and turned in to the unit’s headquarters, as regulations require, the officials said.

To which Wuterich replied:

The New York Times story also said that there is no official record of an AK-47 rifle that the Marines claim was taken from one of the town residents killed that day. But Wuterich’s lawyers say their client has a clear memory of what was done with that AK-47; he says it was put into the first Humvee in his convoy, along with a suitcase taken from one of the Iraqi houses, by another Marine (whom the lawyers will not name). The AK-47 and the suitcase were to be taken back to base, tagged and put in a secure location. Wuterich says he does not know what happened to it after that.

Finally, the Times lays into the Drone evidence:

The video taken by the overhead drone was very limited, according to one of the officials. The aircraft was not flying over the site until after the bomb attack, so it only captured the aftermath. Even so, the video appears to contradict statements by marines about what occurred, the officials said.

In particular, it has raised doubts about a claim by enlisted marines that five Iraqis were shot as they were running away after the roadside bombing.

The officials said the video showed the bodies of the five Iraqis on the ground close to the car that they had been riding in, the officials said. In one case, the video appears to show one body stacked on top of another, which the officials said was inconsistent with the account that the men had been shot while fleeing.

We already knew the drone was called in after the house clearing, which is not unusual. The house clearing came quite quickly after the unit was first attacked so for the Times and this leaker to see a conspiracy in this is ludicrous. Then they say that the Iraqi car story is not consistent because a few of the bodies were stacked, another idiotic assertion. Bodies do not fall on each other while fleeing? Huh? Were the bodies moved after the firefight?

And then there is this nugget:

The report has been closely held within the Defense Department, and the officials who agreed to discuss it did so because they said they thought it should receive wider public attention. They agreed to speak only if their names were not published because they had not been authorized by superiors to discuss its contents.

Hmmmmm, another leaker with an agenda….

Other’s Blogging:


Focus less on killing those who want to kill them? Are you freakin kidding me? You provide security to the Iraqi’s by ending the threat. I know this maybe a foreign concept to those who think flower power is the answer to war but come on….

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This story has more holes than Nancy Pelosi’s brain.

These guys will be vindicated in the end…

Semper Fi!

Yet another example of a “straight” news story playing into the notion that Iraq is Vietnam (and that Vietnam was My Lai). Incidentally, the WOPO article states that Lt. Col. Chessani’s statement was “provided to The Washington Post by a person sympathetic to the enlisted Marines involved in the case.” Well, I guess that underscores that more care ought to be taken in the future about talking to those members of the press who care less about facts and context than in agenda-driven reporting such as this.