Haditha Reporter Was Jailed By US, Shares Name With Source

Sweetness & Light ^ | June 1, 2006 | N/A

[Sam Hill]

Given the breathless coverage (actually repetition of the same paltry facts) from our one party media about the civilian deaths in Haditha, I am surprised that we have heard nothing about the curious background of one of the first journalists to report the story.

It turns out he might not have felt the kindliest intentions towards the US, having been imprisoned for five months only weeks before his Haditha scoop.

And, in fact, he has since been detained by the US again, for two weeks -- in fact, being only released today.

From Reuters [excerpted]:

Reuters journalist Ali al-Mashhadani (R), a television cameraman, embraces a colleague in Baghdad January 15, 2006. Mashhadani was released from U.S. military custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad on Thursday after 12 days in detention.

Reuters journalist freed in Iraq

By Alastair Macdonald

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An Iraqi journalist working for Reuters was released from U.S. military custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad on Thursday after 12 days in detention.

Ali al-Mashhadani, 37, was arrested by U.S. Marines in his home town of Ramadi on May 20 when he went to a U.S. base to retrieve Reuters telephones taken from him earlier that week.

He spent five months in U.S. custody last year before being released without charge in January.

Though again no specific allegation or charge was leveled against him, U.S. officials said last week he was held as a security threat. Marines interrogated him intensively about his work as a journalist in the restive Sunni province of Anbar...

As many as seven journalists for international media groups were held by the U.S. military in Iraq at one stage last year. One such journalist, from Ramadi, is currently being held.

Mashhadani, who reports and provides video and pictures, is one of a small number of journalists providing news from Anbar province, where U.S. Marines and Sunni Arab insurgents, including al Qaeda militants, are locked in a fierce conflict...

Among Mashhadani's recent stories was reporting from the town of Haditha in March. Following Time magazine's revelation of accusations that U.S. Marines shot dead 24 civilians there in November, he filmed fresh interviews with local officials and residents that were widely used by international media...

So after five months in prison at the hands of the US, and being released in Janauary, Mr. al-Mashhadani stumbles upon the story of Haditha in March.

Here is al-Mashhadani's original report on Haditha from Reuters [excerpted]:

Iraqi residents say bodies in video from U.S. raid

By Ali al-Mashhadani

Tue 21 Mar 2006

HADITHA, Iraq (Reuters) - A video of civilians who may have been killed by U.S. Marines in an Iraqi town in November showed residents describing a rampage by U.S. soldiers that left a trail of bullet-riddled bodies and destruction.

A copy of the video, given to Reuters by Iraq's Hammurabi Organisation for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy, showed corpses lined up at the Haditha morgue. The chief doctor at Haditha's hospital, Waleed al-Obaidi, said the victims had bullet wounds in the head and chest.

Most residents interviewed by Reuters in Haditha on Tuesday echoed accusations by residents in the video that U.S. Marines attacked houses after their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb.

They said the Marines opened fire on houses. "I saw a soldier standing outside a house and he opened fire on the house," said one resident, who did not want to be identified...

Haditha, 200 km (125 miles) northwest of Baghdad, is in Anbar province, an area that has seen much activity by Sunni Arab insurgents whose campaign to topple the Iraqi government has killed thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians.

On November 20, U.S. Marines spokesman Captain Jeffrey Pool issued a statement saying that, on the previous day, a roadside bomb had killed 15 civilians and a Marine. In a later gunbattle, U.S. and Iraqi troops had killed eight insurgents, he added.

U.S. military officials have since confirmed to Reuters that that version of the events of November 19 was wrong and that the 15 civilians were not killed by the blast but were shot dead.

TRUCK PILED WITH CORPSES

Time magazine said this week the video of the corpses it provided to the military in January had prompted the revision.

Accusations that American soldiers often kill innocent people have fuelled anger at the occupation among Iraqis over the past three years.

The video given to Reuters shows bodies piled in the back of a white pickup truck outside the morgue. Among them was a girl who appeared to be about three years old...

Some residents blamed U.S. President George W. Bush, former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and President Jalal Talabani. "Is this the democracy Allawi, Talabani and Bush are talking about?" one resident asked.

Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani, head of Hammurabi, said U.S. Marines had killed 15 people in Haditha after the roadside bomb attack. The group's Haditha branch said it got the video from a local man.

Mashhadani said he had brought the case to the attention of the United Nations office in Baghdad. "These violations of human rights happen every day in Iraq," he told Reuters...

This account is pretty much the same account that is still being parroted throughout our one party media worldwide now two months later. There are several particulars which are just stated as fact, such as:

U.S. military officials have since confirmed to Reuters that that version of the events of November 19 was wrong and that the 15 civilians were not killed by the blast but were shot dead.

This assertion has been repeated in almost every subsequent account. But I have never seen any confirmation of this from the US military or any named officials.

And what is the relationship if any between this news-making journalist Ali al-Mashhadani, and Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani of Iraq's Hammurabi Organisation for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy?

The latter al-Mashhanis is the person who first brought these "human rights violations" to public attention.

Perhaps al-Mashhadani is a very common name around those parts. (Probably being a kind of tribal or regional descriptor.) But what are the odds?

And how odd it is that Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani just happened to be given a video by an unnamed local. And that he then turned it over to Ali al-Mashhadani who just happens to make videos for Reuters.

And had anyone ever heard of Iraq's Hammurabi Organisation for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy before this?

But even leaving their similar names aside, did Ali al-Mashhadani have an axe to grind against the US after having just been released after being held for five months by the Americans?

Did it color his reporting, which is still the centerpiece of every report we have on the Haditha deaths to date?

[narby]

There have been innumerable cases in the last few months of dozens of people slaughtered mysteriously by bands of gunmen.

I'd put the chances of this being a huge hoax pretty high.

For a fact, the media desperatly *wants* this story to be true.

[Sam Hill]

"For a fact, the media desperatly *wants* this story to be true."

So true. I don't know if you saw the NY Times piece where they talked about how they hired an unnamed "Iraqi writer and historian" to go to Haditha to collect stories about the incident that The Times will then report as gospel:

Times Begs For Tales Of “Marine Massacre” | Sweetness & Light
http://www.sweetness-light.com/archive/the-times-is-desperate-for-tales-of-iraq-massacre/

They are using unnamed reporters now. As long as they will tell them what they want to hear.

[Marine_Uncle]

So. What would SS Major Houchstder of Hogan's Heros have to say about this?

[Marine_Uncle]

Ping a ling.

[PeskyOne]

Well, well, I wonder why Time and Murtha didn't tell us this?!! If this story about the Marines killing innocent people is proved to be false, and I hope and pray it is, I hope they expel Murtha from Congress without any retirement or quirks.

[Jim_Curtis]

Marines are being prosecuted on evidence produced by Reuters and distributed by Time?

[Marine_Uncle]

Ping

[eyespysomething]

I've asked this and not had an answer yet, so I'm asking on all the Haditha threads:

Was any type of autopsy done? Don't Muslims bury their dead within 24 hrs? Any ballistic tests done? Is all that in the investigation? Anyone heard anything about this?

[RVN Airplane Driver]

Your post about the muslim lying....you bet....I spend a good bit of time out at the DFW airport meeting and sending off the good folks who are defending our country. If any Freepers can come through DFW on their way to anywhere....it will do your heart good to greet the young heroes that climb off of a R & R flight every morning here... As a "Vietnam Guy" as I call myself...when talking to them.....what a great bunch of guys/now gals.... The kids out on patrol depending on the area tell me different stories....those out in Western Iraq....are big time scared shitless when they go in.....because the bad guys are without scruples...nothing new...whereas the guys around Baghdad have different challanges...kind of like mama-sons dropping grenades with the pin pulled wrapped in tape into fuel tanks...in a couple of days...BOOOOOOM...hopefully the airplane is on the ground... Again the real enemy as in Vietnam again appears to be our spineless, (you fill in the blanks) congress critters.

[MNJohnnie]

Thank you! So a shady "Journalist" who seems to be the "source" for this is suspected of being tied to the Terrorists. Here is one scumbag that needs some rigorous interrogation. Pity in our PC world that isn't going to happen.

[Fred Nerks]

Thanks for posting this, Sam Hill.

Very important background info - please read this and let your ping list know. Video evidence shows Marines were set up.

[imintrouble]

Re Murtha and some of his synchophants - is there a chance when someone campaigns for political office they could be given a professional check up for dementia - before they file???

[pissant]

And what are the chances that the terrorists would allow a non-friendly reporter to film and narrate and make claims about the incident in Haditha?

Answer: NONE.

But try telling that to the *%$#! MSM.

[MNJohnnie]

It a fraudulent claim. They are not "Reuters" or "Times" reporters. They merely call them that to give them a false aura of credibility. They are local Iraqis hired as "Stringers" to go out and dig up new stories. Basically paid informants sent out to "report" what the Junk Media wants to hear.

[MNJohnnie]

I think Murtha is being run by Moveon.org the same way Cindy Sheehan was a media creation of Moveon.org. I think they took the Terrorists propaganda and ran with it because they WANTED to belive. I hope this comes right back and bites them hard.

[MNJohnnie]

Or how does a "Iraqi Civil Rights Group" just breeze in and out of there as they want? Seems they must be working with the terrorists permission. If so, why not at the Terrorists direction?

[jazusamo]

..I spend a good bit of time out at the DFW airport meeting and sending off the good folks who are defending our country

Thank you for doing this for our military and thank for your service.

[Sam Hill]

Here's a little more information on the reason for Al-Mashhadani's arrest last year, from the Center To Protect Journalists:

U.S. forces release two long-detained journalists

New York, January 16, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the release of two Iraqi journalists detained by the U.S. military without charge for several months, but calls again for U.S. officials to specify charges against at least three other journalists still in custody or to release the detainees at once...

Ali al-Mashhadani, a television cameraman working for Reuters, and Majed Hameed, a correspondent working for Reuters and the Dubai-based broadcaster Al-Arabiya, were released from Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison on Sunday, Reuters reported. They were freed without charge as part of a larger prisoner release that included around 500 Iraqi detainees.

Al-Mashhadani, a freelance photographer and cameraman, had been held incommunicado and without explanation by U.S. forces since August 8. Al-Mashhadani was taken from his home in Ramadi during a general sweep of the neighborhood by U.S. Marines who became suspicious after seeing pictures on his cameras. After his detention, a U.S.-Iraqi Combined Review and Release Board (CRRB) determined that al-Mashhadani posed a "threat" and ordered his continued detention. Officials did not publicly substantiate the basis for his detention.

Hameed was arrested along with several other men at a gathering after the funeral of a relative on September 15 in Anbar province. Both Reuters and Al-Arabiya said his arrest appeared connected to footage found on his camera by U.S. troops. U.S. officials never specified the basis for his detention.

Of course Haditha is in the Anbar province.

[pissant]

There is NO WAY ON THIS EARTH that the islamo-scum would allow ANY legitiamte human rights organization near them (if there is such an animal).

My bigger question is why aren't the world's headlines condemning terrorist attacks killing civies day in and day out? Sure they report on them, usually to make it appear they are winning, but if they are so concerned about civilian deaths, why the f**k don't they try shaming the terrorists with 24/7 headline like they are trying to do to the Marines?

Answer: They are on the terrorists side. We are due for a revolution.

[SJackson]

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I've little to say about this other than the Corps will handle it properly. But this is interesting background information.