Posted on 06/01/2004 6:08:53 AM PDT by pabianice
Just reviewed a classified brief on the supposed wedding - no way it was.
Here are some unclass details I can provide (brief had lots of pictures to back up the details): > > >
- Weddings traditionally held on Thursdays in Iraq to take advantage of Friday as a day of rest - raid took place on Tuesday night.
- Only permanent dwelling at the site held large stocks of food, bedding, medical supplies (lots of these - was the wedding going to be a cage match of some sort or were the caterers just bad cooks?), ammunition and weapons, as well as an apparent document forging set up.
Meat was still frozen solid - not prepared for a wedding feast and there were no Stocks of dishes, plates, etc.
- Contrary to "media reports," no "Nuptial Tent" was found and a 1KM area around the site was searched - any further away than that would be just too far for the catering staff to walk carrying all those huge platters of food - against union rules.
- No evidence of any means of support for the house (like sheep farming which is most common in that area).
All evidence pointed to a smuggler way station - fit perfectly the description of several Other found in the past.
- "Wedding guests" (deceased of course) were almost all men of military age, only a couple of women, no elders at all and only one child (wounded) noted. All dressed as city dwellers, not bedouins who would hold a wedding at such a location. All of the deceased were sterilized, as in none had any form of ID on them at all. Only ID's found were in a nice neat stack inside the house - and then quite a few less of those than there were people at the site.
- Weapons were varied and included RPG's (they really suck when you fire them up in the air for celebration), there were also military binoculars (when they separate the men and women they have to look at each other with bino's I guess), and IED making material (party favors?).
- Lots of clothing prepackaged in pants and shirt sets (guerranimals for guerrilla's).
- There were also no gifts, no decorations, no food set out or left over, and the good bit of money recovered was all in the pockets of the "guests" (maybe they were just cheap guests). > > >
I strongly suspect that after their Foreign Fighter way station got whacked, they tried to set it up to look like what happened in Afghanistan when a wedding was actually hit due to celebratory firing being taken for ground fire by orbiting aircraft. I also would not put it past the scum bags to sweep a local village for approriately aged "guests" to kill and display for the TV cameras. Our BDA assessment was made by people on the site just after the schwacking and they took their time to count and exploit the site. This is just speculation on my part.
> > >
Bottom line assessment: Good hit - no wedding. These were foreign fighters that had just crossed into Iraq and got an early trip to paradise and the martyrdom hall of fame.
> > > Thought it was important to get this word out as much as possible as you won't see any of this on CNN. > > >
Take care, > > >
LtCol Bill Mullen, USMC
Executive Assistant
J-3, Deputy Director for Regional Operations
Why can't bad guys have weddings? Maybe it was both.
The truth is even worse! The military is covering up - it was a GAY WEDDING! Our homophobic military bombed a bunch of innocent gay men!!!!! [/sarcasm]
Interesting indeed.
After the wedding the couple shared a huge climax. It was a boomer.
According to the after-action report, the assessment team was on the target for about an hour. That's plenty of time for them to have gotten the facts. I think LTCOL Mullen is right on target.
The FACTS found on the ground do
not support that a wedding took
place.
In a hypothetical case, bad guys
could have weddings.
This is a fact-driven report of
an ACTUAL - not hypothetical-
event.
Confiscated items are on display while Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, unseen, speaks during a press conference in Baghdad, Iraq (news - web sites), Monday, May 24, 2004. The U.S. military introduced the photographs Monday to bolster its contention that American aircraft attacked a safehouse for foreign fighters near the Syrian border on Wednesday, May 19, 2004, not a wedding party, as claimed by Iraqi survivors and police and suggested by footage from the scene. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)
I'm getting tired of the terrorists' claims that firing powerful weapons into the air is some ancient honorable mideast "tradition."
I mean...
Not only was this a fraud, but they used the same technique in Afghanistan.
What time of the day did the strike occur? I thought that I heard somewhere that it was in the middle of the night, another strange time to have a wedding.
3AM
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