Posted on 05/31/2006 6:20:21 AM PDT by Coop
... Snow said that he has been assured by the Pentagon that "all the details" will be made available...
Rep. John Murtha... has said Marines shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot others.
On Tuesday, [Snow] said President Bush learned of the killings only after a reporter from Time magazine asked questions...
Asked when Bush was first briefed about the events in Haditha, an insurgent stronghold in western Iraq, Snow replied Tuesday: "When a Time reporter first made the call."
According to the attorney for one of three Marine Corps officers relieved of command from a Marine battalion are not targets of investigations into whether their troops killed the civilians or tried to cover it up.
Meanwhile, Lance Cpl. James Crossan of North Bend, Wash., who was injured in the roadside bomb attack in Haditha, told a Seattle television station that some of the Marines might have snapped after seeing one of their own killed in action.
"So, I think they were just blinded by hate ... and they just lost control," Crossan told KING-TV, which aired the interview Tuesday.
The targets... are about a dozen enlisted Marines, according to Hackett, a Marine reservist and Iraqi war veteran who represents Kimber... [Hackett] said the highest ranking among those under investigation is a staff sergeant who led the four-vehicle convoy that was hit by the bomb.
Kimber... was relieved of command last month because his subordinates... used profanity and criticized the performance of Iraqi security services during an interview with Britain's Sky News TV...
...Hackett told The Associated Press by telephone. "He's not under investigation for anything related to what has played out in the press." [snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
There's no rule, per se, but the vast majority of the IEDs in Iraq are command detonated. Command detonated simply means that an individual has a trigger for the device, so it doesn't go off until initiated. Some IEDers use spotters, some have only one guy doing the observing and trigger pulling, but either way, it's a human who's making the call. They could, of course, use tripwires or other 'booby trap' mechanisms to go off when someone activates it, but 'someone' could be anyone, and very likely not your target.
These Marines will always be my heroes.
War is hell. Marines have been there and back. The United States Marine Corps will still defend the United States of America to protect the freedoms of all of us, including the POS like Murtha, Kerry, and the MSM.
Aw, that one was much too calm for you. There wasn't even any name-calling. Sobering up?
I just watched that video, and I could swear it says she was 9. Why does everyone keep referring to her as a 10-year-old?
It's true of any major war or conflict. Once the payback starts, things really start to get ugly. Revenge, especially collective revenge, gives the conscience of civilized men permission to wreak havoc.
"I could swear I heard the Iraqi Prime Minister saying we shot them."
Do you have a source?
"So how did the terrorists get the Marine commander to submit a false report up his chain of command?"
Isn't that only 1 possible conclusion? Is it possible that the subsequent investigation was false?
I don't know about you, but I will wait until the investigation is completed and the report is released before I decide what I believe.
It was confusing to me until they got to the part about her covering her ears, because they had the first girl on, 12 I think, then the 9 year old with boy, and I was waiting for the 10 year old when they started talking about the discrepancy.
She may have been 9 when it happened and had a birthday since.
What??? I have said no such thing!!
Dev, why don't you cork the scotch; you're clearly getting confused and making accusations you can't back up.
One thing you are not going to do is shut people up who disagree with you.
Go read Steel Wolf's posts. I associate with everything he has posted thus far. And he goes further than I do in saying that, even if the civilians were not innocent, there is no justifiable reason to shoot them.
It was here - I'll search if you want someone to do it for you. It was the article /interview where he was saying he was tired of being told by the coalition military that they had made a 'mistake.'
I found the video for you that shows a bullet riddled exterior door.
http://emea-search.blinkx.com/tv/search.do?q=&channel_News_ITN=true&query=haditha&engine=blinkx
Second video at the link.
http://www.wtj.com/articles/gabaldon/
I guess you never heard of Guy Gabaldon.
Marines don't go out of their way to kill civilians, even enemy civilians.
Anyone know if we have a policy/procedure in place to give $2500 to the families of Iraqis killed by terrorists?
"But higher-ups found inconsistencies, dug a little deeper, and found that the deaths were the product of gunfire."
Is it possible those people were dead of gunshot wounds before the US military arrived? Is it possible that they also had shrapnel wounds?
It is my understanding that we don't. The military only coughs up monetary "damages" when it is culpable in a death.
I don't want to say, 'that's not a big deal', but it's not. It happens all day, every day in Iraq. She could have known that the IED was an 155mm artillery shell hidden in a dead goat and rigged to a Motorola cell phone as a trigger, and it still doesn't matter. The only story here is that no one in our government, military, or even in the rumor mill has suggested that the killings were done as part of an engagement or otherwise in self defense.
The reason that raises the red flag with a lot of people is because the normal reaction from our side would be to say 'it was self defense', and move on. If we can't say that here, we have a problem. We don't have all the facts, but what we do know tells us that it might be pretty bad.
If any of them point blank executed defenseless and nonthreatening individuals they will be punished. What more do you want?
That's all I'd want or ask for, and in a sane world that's all that would be needed.
The real problem is way bigger than that. Our good friends on the left will turn it into a few congressional seats, and more ammo for the impeachment. The media will be spitting up Fox News Alerts every 10 minutes about 'Mai Lai II', which will sap our nations support for the military. Iran will say, 'Who are you to say that we are morally unfit to have weapons', everyone will laugh, and diplomacy will fail. Et cetera, et cetera.
The sad thing is, they don't even need to fully prove it. If we can't come back with solid evidence exonerating our guys, the propaganda effect will be almost as good as if they were found guilty. It's a much bigger problem than what some little girl in a hovel in Iraq knew prior to an ambush.
I don't think I inferred that Marines go out of their way to kill enemy civilians. At the same time, ca-ca happens in war. I presented four rational scenarios for how this particular situation might have gone down. We shall see what happens once all the evidence is in.
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