Kevin Sites gives metrosexuals a bad name.
Mr. Sites wants to portray himself as a "down-the-middle" objective journalist. It's quite possible that he is, but what I've seen of his work is blatantly anti-American.
If Mr. Sites wants to prove his bona fides, he ought now to attach himself to the terrorist side for a fair and balanced report on their tactics and execution. An honest portrayal of their atrocities would be very interesting and newsworthy.
It is doubtful that Mr. Sites would survive such an engagement, but that is what it will take for me to believe he's not more concerned with bashing America than he is in objective journalism.
What he should have done was to describe the incident without releasing the video. Now the video is being used as propaganda by Arab news stations.
Sooooooo sorry. But thanks for playing.
Check out the link in #21 also.
Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my ‘miscellaneous’ ping list.
Check out the link in #21 also.
Too (censored) Late!!! You can't unring that bell.
What an evil turd.
Translation: bla bla bls. bla bla bla. bla bla bla. Please don't frag me.
"I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. " The prize he is referring to is, of course, the Pulitzer Prize. Rather, Jennings and the rest of the Hate Bush MSM crowd will be sure to richly reward Mr. Sites for this coup. They do not care that it does irreparable damage to the Marines. It will be used as a cudgel against the Bush Administration for their efforts to liberate Iraq. Mr. Site's shouldn't worry. He will be a hero in Manhattan and Hollywood. It's the rest of the country that sees him as a traitor. But we don't count...
Nearly 150 of my fellow FReepers posting so far and nary a one seems to be able to handle these truths:
1) just as at the outset of OIF, some of the fallujah 'insurgents' were pathetic conscripts who were coerced (at gunpoint and with threats to their families) to resist our 'invasion'
2) under certain circumstances, some uniformed americans have difficulty suppressing the sadistic tendencies that some of them harbor
Can't we admit our position that, after 9/11, any muslim who fails to recognize the rightness of our cause and thank us for their liberation bears some responsibility for every injury Americans have suffered at the hands of their terrorists? This includes muslims in the West and the civilian casualties in countries that harbored Bin Laden and allowed Saddam to fester.
Am I evil to relish the communication to the muslim world that their failure to cooperate in putting down the 'resistance' may result in their dying like dogs? Or foolish to think that this is a better message to send than that they can count on us to play by Queensbury rules?
Hey Kevin ... then why didn't you hold it till it was properly invesitgated??
Sorry .. but IMO this is a sorry excuse from this reporter and I am not buying it
When we repeatedly post his comments on his anti-war activities, and then he says he is not an anti-war activist...
He is a liar.
Ah yes, the preemptive denial. It is a classic 'tell' of a liar. Everything denied preemptively is true.
This guy sounds strangely like John Kerry.
Another POS.
It's time you to have the facts ... All the other armchair analysts don't mean a damn to me.
Here it goes.
...we're taking sniper fire from both the front and the rear.
...There are also reports that the mosque, where ten insurgents were killed and five wounded on Friday may have been re-occupied overnight...
We hear gunshots from what seems to be coming from inside the mosque...
The lieutenant asks them, "Are there people inside?"
One of the Marines raises his hand signaling five.
"Did you shoot them," the lieutenant asks?
"Roger that, sir, " the same Marine responds.
"Were they armed?" The Marine just shrugs and we all move inside...
"These were the same wounded from yesterday," I say to the lieutenant...
I see an old man... Another is face down next to him...I notice that the blood coming from the old man's nose is bubbling. A sign he is still breathing. So is the man next to him...
Ah, I think this is what you call faking death! If I've got this straight so far, they were taking fire from the mosque that was supposedly cleared the night before, and they believed the enemy may have reoccupied the mosque, they re-enter and notice some are ominously still, un-cleared and unsecured. Bingo, do I have to read any more?
Then I hear him say this about one of the men:
"He's ....... faking he's dead -- he's faking he's ....... dead."
Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging...
Memo to the naive, enemy-soldier-loving cameramen: wounded enemies faking death are not, I repeat not, expected to be moving, reaching, or lunging.
However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.
Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.
"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.
...I feel the deep pit of my stomach...
...I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here...
Notice how he adds more to what he allegedly said to the Lieutenant when first entering the building ("These were the same wounded from yesterday," I say to the lieutenant).
In the aftermath, the first question that came to mind was why had these wounded men been left in the mosque?
It's obvious: THEY WERE FAKING DEATH -Just as the marine had surmised.
... the squad that entered the mosque on Saturday was different than the one that had led the attack on Friday.
...those Marines inside knew from their training to check the insurgents for weapons and explosives after disabling them, instead of leaving them where they were and waiting outside the mosque for the squad I was following to arrive...
In the particular circumstance I was reporting, it bothered me that the Marine didn't seem to consider the other insurgents a threat...
This may come a surprise or shock to you, Mr. Cameraman, but if that marine was thinking as I am, he did not give a d*mn about what bothers you when clearing out and securing that room from which the enemy was fighting.
...it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. According to Lt. Col Bob Miller, the rules of engagement in Falluja required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all.
SFW, was it part of the rules of engagement to check with you before shooting enemy soldiers -huh, Mr. Cameraman?
...I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. In fact...Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command...
If he didn't think he had some kind of "prize" video, why did he feel compelled to immediately show the commanding officer part of it?
We all knew it was a complicated story, and... could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks.
I guess it never occurred to you jacka$$ they were in the middle of a fierce battle to retake a city filled with enemy soldiers who were still fighting with them, and they did not have time to pu$$yfoot around with some tender-heart, enemy-sympathetic reporter.
For those who don't practice journalism as a profession, it may be difficult to understand why we must report stories like this at all...
The answer is not an easy one.
...there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil that people are capable of. As journalists, it is our job is to report both...
How nice to finish this up with a condescending lecture to us common folk about how being a journalist elevates one to a higher understanding of these novel concepts -yes, novel indeed.
... I had no idea how our other "pool" partners might use the footage. I considered not feeding the tape to the pool -- or even, for a moment, destroying it. But that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn't make it go away...What happened in that mosque would eventually come out...
Yep, straight down the middle, you can see he's made no judgments at all about what he's filmed.
The Marines have built their proud reputation on fighting for freedoms like the one that allows me to do my job, a job that in some cases may appear to discredit them. But both the leaders and the grunts in the field like you understand that if you lower your standards, if you accept less, than less is what you'll become.
After all this, this SOB thinks he can now speak for marines.
...when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera -- the story of his death became my responsibility.
The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.
This is the most disingenuous, kiss my a$$, diatribe I've read in quite some while. I'm just praying that this glory hound gets a new ticket back to unit he's taken upon lecturing.
So many posts! If this is redundant, sorry!
IMH0,no matter HOW he tries to rationalize it, he's SCUM who is trying to build a career on the bodies of US Troops; troops he helped to get killed. If anybody ever deserved to be "fragged" this guy is it. Where's a "friendly fire" "accident" when you need one?
NONE of these "insurgents" meet the criteria of legal combatants under the rules of land warfare, especially in light of their collective behavior(s).
They don't meet the criteria of "militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements..." as they are not( a)being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;(b)having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;(c)carrying arms OPENLY;(d)conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war and (3) are NOT Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power. these rules also state "as soon as a soldier (and these are NOT "soldiers" nor any other type of lawful combatant) is no longer able to fight, that person ceases to be a target."
Would that be before of after the bomb on which they are lying is detonated??
ANSWER: "in the blanket protection of wounded or sick troops(and they are not "troops")...there is the assumption that these people are unarmed...but if they do arm themselves, they give up certain aspects of their protected status". Like if you and your buddies strap a 155 round to your butt and you hold the trigger, yer gonna get tapped. If your group has a rep of strapping 155 rounds to your butts, you will probably (reasonably) be considered "armed and dangerous" and treated as such. They are targets, they are war criminals & IMHO, fair game. How could it be a "war crime" to kill a presumed-armed "war criminal"?
..Now about that freakin' reporter... }:-(