Posted on 11/15/2004 4:49:43 PM PST by Cornpone
The US military is looking into whether an American marine in Falluja shot dead a severely wounded Iraqi insurgent at point-blank range. Television footage shows US soldiers entering a building as injured prisoners lie on the floor.
The soldier, from the 3rd battalion of the US marines, has been removed from the field and faces possible charges.
The images were taken by an NBC reporter embedded with the US troops in the Sunni city under assault.
The BBC's James Robbins says the incident could prove highly damaging and that the US military will need to answer key questions about whether the rules of engagement were broken during the incident.
It must explain, he says, whether wounded combatants were abandoned, or killed, illegally.
Mosque stormed
US marines have been battling with sporadic but fierce pockets of resistance inside the city. They say they have already killed 1,200 insurgents.
The images show a group of marines, armed with rifles, entering a building near a mosque.
The mosque had been used by insurgents to attack US forces, who had stormed it, killing 10 militants and wounding five.
At least three severely wounded men are seen in a room inside the building - two are slumped against one of the walls, partially covered with a blanket.
The NBC's Kevin Sites says the wounded men had been left in the mosque after marines had fought their way in on Friday and Saturday.
According to Mr Sites, one of the soldiers points his rifle at the head of one of the injured, an old man. The sound of a shot is then heard.
There was no immediate comment from the Pentagon on the report.
My new ROE: Embedded reporters get to search the "dead" bodies first.
That will put a quick end to this B.S.
Did you watch that segment with O'Reilly? What did he say?
I agree.
I’ll just re-post below what I already posted this morning on another thread. Thanks for the opportunity, Mike.
(First, an aside ...)
Tonight I watched FoxNews (‘fair and balanced’ my eye) for a half hour or so. They spent a good six or seven minutes covering the Marine who was naturally responding to wartime pressures. He did nothing wrong, in my book. Abiding by ‘normal’ wartime rules when dealing with sub-human, bloodthirsty madmen – now that would be insane.
And they never mentioned the tortured mutilated woman. I am willing to bet we will never hear about her again, and, even if they verify her identity (through dental records, perhaps … if they left enough of her teeth within her battered head), we will never be afforded the privilege of being told whether she is Hassan, or Khalifa, or some other anonymous woman whose life and agonizing death weren’t deemed worthy of expending more than a passing moment of air time, if that.
A few weeks ago, I substitute taught in a city school, and a few of us teachers had a silly impromptu floor hockey game in the gym during one of our breaks. One of the men tripped on an extended hockey stick, and ran full force into a wall. To keep himself from hitting hard head first, he extended his right arm and broke it in many places on impact. The agony that man endured is something I will never forget. (He required four hours of surgery, twelve pins, two rods, and a plate, and it will be many weeks before he recovers any use of that arm).
When I read about this discovered body last night, and what had been done to this dear woman, I thought about the agony that man endured before my eyes when ‘merely’ a few bones in an arm were broken. My heart broke for him, and I know that all of us are still feeling the effects of witnessing the pain he experienced before we were able to get him to a hospital. Yet his suffering was insignificant compared to what this woman must have endured, surrounded by an enemy that inflicted, relished, and may have even mocked, her agonizing pain, rather than friends who sought to comfort her.
I still well up with tears thinking about it. And I thank God that she is now in the arms of the Great Comforter, and her tormenters will someday know His judgment.
This morning's post:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Odds are good that this victim was either Margaret Hassan, a C.A.R.E. worker who spent twenty-five years in Iraq for no other purpose than apolitical humanitarianism, or Teresa Borcz Khalifa, a woman who holds dual Polish/Iraqi citizenship, and whose only ‘crime’ was being the Caucasian wife of an Iraqi citizen. But even if it were someone else ...
Summon up the courage to imagine the unthinkable, and force yourself (because it is by no means easy for you or I) to reflect on what was done to either Hassan or Khalifa before she died -- in the demented minds of her executioners, there would be no purpose in perpetrating their sadism afterwards. She had her legs hacked off, her face completely chopped up, suffered disembowelment (can anyone forget the powerfully sickening final scene of Braveheart that caused many of us to look away in horror, amid sobs of human compassion?), and then was decapitated, no doubt in the slowest, most agonizing way possible.
When I first read about this yesterday, sitting here at my computer, a chill so bone-deep ran through me that I literally had to get up, put a sweater on, and compose myself before I could continue reading.
Please. Think for a few moments about how this innocent woman met her death.
Now ask yourself a few questions:
(1) Why will the average American -- one who does not expend the effort to take part in a forum like this, or listen to more than a half hour of daily ‘news’ as served up on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, or MSNBC -- never hear about her exquisitely painful, torturous death?
(2) Why does the average American know every minute detail about the handful of Iraqi terrorists who were embarrassed by a handful of American troops at Abu Ghraib?
(3) Why have we been subjected to facts, and unending speculation, about the murder of Laci Peterson for two years, amid incessant, droning, Chinese-water-torture-like repetition (and why are we likely to hear about it, and its repercussions for two more)?
Set aside, for a moment, the holocaust that took place on 9/11/01. Or the countless other human-on-human atrocities that have occurred on land, in the air and on the sea over the past few decades at the hands of Islamic butchers. On Iraqi soil alone, barbaric, bloodthirsty Muslim terrorists have either caused, or allowed, the filling of countless mass graves with hundreds of thousands of bodies of their own countrymen … and they continue to torture, mutilate, and murder -- simply for the sake of witnessing another human being suffer excruciating agony -- countless American and coalition-force citizens.
One of their latest victims was apparently an innocent woman whose physical and emotional agony none of us can even remotely hope to comprehend, and to whom death no doubt finally came as a welcome blessing.
And the reason this woman met such a fate at their hands is the same reason that these people would see you and I meet the same fate, were they able to mete it out to us: as was she, we are infidels
. Yet there is a deep, incredibly disturbing reason that the people of the western world are not being sufficiently exposed to such mounting atrocities, but are instead having their attention diverted to stories of far less long-term significance – and it has absolutely nothing (repeat: nothing) to do with the media’s claim that they would prefer not to disturb the ‘sensibilities’ of their viewers/listeners. These are the same media that share an ideological mindset with the Hollywood elite, who insist on filling our televisions, music outlets, and movie screens with sickening, shock-value, lowest-common-human-denominator artistic creations.
The mainstream media are among the most deadly enemies of life and liberty this planet has ever known, complicit and on equal footing with the madmen who perpetrate the barbaric crimes that they refuse to expose in their entirety.
I, for one, have chosen not to listen to one more word of media coverage of the Laci Peterson case, or one more report of American ‘atrocities’ committed against the Afghani or Iraqi people, or one more politician who calls for a more ‘sensitive’ war on terror. There are hundreds of other stories, far more worthy of our attention, far more threatening to our own existence, and far more deserving of our compassion, empathy and anger, that will remain forever buried by ‘journalists’ whose calling it is to enlighten those of us who will always choose life, liberty and compassion over tyranny, bloodshed and hatred.
~ joanie
20 posted on 11/15/2004 7:42:50 AM EST by joanie-f
No story here. Move along, and let the Marines do their job.
I'm new here, but I'll say that I'm with you on this matter.
This warrior of ours is a Hero!
Maybe the reporter should accidentally, of course, get killed by fire from the terrorist. Then, of course, the BBC will bitch that the Marines he is embedded with didn't protect enough. We are never right in our actions when the liberal media and other countries are concerned.
What the media seems not to give a sh*t about is that their going off half cocked with this stuff only serves to demoralize our troops -- everyone will be so fearful of doing their job that they'll get killed for being too cautious. I really hate what is called "journalism" these days. Everything is for ratings, consequences be damned.
Who care what Tubby Sullivan says anymore? The blogosphere's reigning authority on beagles and sodomy! Big deal.
5.56mm
I don't see a problem here. Aren't we supposed to be killing these b@$t@rd$?
The only consolation is that their (MSM) power (e.g. viewers and revenues) is heading south. Quickly.
5.56mm
I despise war more than most. However, when these
"journalists" start persecuting our soldiers while they
are in the process of having to make some very tough
calls, our soldiers are going to finally decide to let
the bleeding heart liberals fight the wars themselves.
I am about ready to just move to an even more remote area
than we already live in, where a six month's supply of
provisions are trucked in and Hollywood and the "media" is
totally abandoned. Did Ann Coulter really say something
about joining a militia? Well, we are too much loners for
that, but there's an element in this society who can either
fish or cut bait as far as I'm concerned. We'll just take
our stand in the holler, and if "insurgents" want our
holler they'll have to take it.
You need to post this as its own thread.
Please do that, Joanie.
bookmark bump
Another e-mail address for the NBC traitor:
kevinsites@hotmail.com
Faking surrender removes you from protections. Not just you, but your whole unit (how far that extends is subject to judgment).
Ditto for no uniforms or insignia.
5.56mm
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