Picture of the supposed Haditha victims.
Check these two pictures carefully and read the captions on both.
RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There's plenty of evidence civilians were killed in Haditha -- 24 bodies were counted.
At the morgue, women and children among the dead. Many images too graphic to show. But the dead can't speak.
So at CNN's request, a human rights organization went back to Haditha with a camera to interview survivors. The interviewer found three, all children.
For each, the story begins here. Where a roadside bomb struck a humvee carrying American Marines, killing one of them.
It was 7:30 in the morning. 12-year-old Safa Younis was getting ready for school. She says she was the only survivor in her house. Eight relatives killed.
SAFA YOUNIS, FAMILY KILLED (through translator): A bomb exploded on the street outside. We heard the sound of the explosion, and we heard shouting. We were inside the house when U.S. forces broke through the door. They killed my father in the kitchen. The American forces entered the house and started shooting with their guns. They killed my mother and my sister Noor (ph). They killed her when they shot her in the head. She was only 15 years old. My other sister was shot with seven bullets in the head. She was only 10 years old. And my brother, Mohammed (ph), was hiding under the bed when the U.S. military hit him with the butt of a gun, and they started shooting him under the bed. The U.S. military then shot me, and I was showered in blood. We couldn't leave the house because the U.S. military surrounded the area with a large number of soldiers.
...........................
CHILCOTE: Iman (ph) is initially poised. She has clearly told the story many times. She needs no questions to prompt her.
IMAN (through translator): My grandmother, she decided to open the kitchen door. Before she opened it, she said, maybe they will break it otherwise. I wish she hadn't.
CHILCOTE: Iman's (ph) brother, Abdul Rahman, doesn't say much. The interviewer asked him to show his wounds.
Off camera, a voice in the room is heard asking, he didn't have a weapon. What danger did he pose? But there is an intriguing variation in Iman's (ph) account. The third time she tells it, she says she was expecting the bomb.
WHAT WAS NOT REPORTED ..................... The third time she tells it, she says she was expecting the bomb. .........The third time she tells it, she says she was expecting the bomb.
Yeah. They're real professionals, alright.
Which version? It reminds me of a sequence in JFK. Joe Pesci's character, David Ferry, is being questioned. After relating many versions of a story, he is told it is unbelievable. His response: "Really? Which part?"
Check these two pictures carefully and read the captions on both.
Pretty much irrelevant.
Civilians are under no obligation to report insurgent or enemy activity to our troops, especially at obvious risk to their own and their family's lives.
If we were justified in making reprisals against uninvolved civilians, based simply on their knowledge of upcoming attacks, then German reprisals against uninvolved civilians in WWII were equally justified. But we call those war crimes.
I do not know if Haditha was a war crime, and neither does anyone else at this point. But intentional killing of civilian bystanders is a violation of US military law and should be prosecuted when it happens.
I will wait until all the facts are in before making a judgement for myself.
Just because someone is a woman or child doesn't mean that person is an innocent... remember Vietnam.
Think of this scenario... IED explodes. Gunfire erupts from surrounding houses at the Marines. One of the Marines notices some fire coming from a window; he aims a little low, shooting below the window, through the wall. The shooting from that location stops. The Marine looks for the next target.
Inside the house, the body lies motionless under the window, the Kalashnikov only fired half a dozen times. Another insurgent empties the magazine of his rifle, throws it aside, and picks up the rifle next to the body. He then moves out of the room, carrying the rifle with him.
Finally the Marines eliminate all of the threats; they start entering the houses. Under the window is the body of a 10 year old boy, with no weapon near him. Now all of a sudden, they've killed an 'innocent,' when in actuality, the boy was firing upon the troops and another insurgent took his rifle before the troops came in for his own use.
Another possibility is that the insurgents could have been hiding amongst them, and shot the civilians themselves, knowing how we tend to strangle ourselves with our own righteousness.
Nothing is black and white in wartime.
I saw this two-days ago"Newsmax"and tried to get someone here to pick up on this!FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!
"So at CNN's request, a human rights organization went back to Haditha with a camera to interview survivors."
This sentence sent a red flag up for me.
Any decent journalist knows these organization members have an agenda, and therefore would not report the facts. They'd use this ASSIGNMENT to further their agenda.
Doesn't CNN have reporters in Iraq? Why let a biased organization with an AGENDA of its own report this story?
This is a setup.
The Haditha incident is going to become a nightmare for liberals and their media because as usual they have badly over played their hands, and they will be seen by “majority of voters” as attacking the troops in times of war rather than anything else.
That's the evidence -- claims by three children in a Sunni insurgent stronghold where IED's are the norm claiming massacre - against the word of US Marines?
No way in hell I'd believe Arabs over Marines. They lie all the time. They stage events all the time. They kill their own all the time. They hate us.
Our enemies in Iraq learned to do this from the Palistinians. Somehow the Pali's kids are always hanging around with the suicide bombers when the Israeli soldiers are fighting back. Aftewards we get a sob story that "accidentally" neglects to mention the weapons, bombs, etc being used by the Pali's. Evil uses children as shields and propganda. You'd think the left (and the American public) would have grasped that fact by now.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1647142/posts
Lawyer: Marine Denies Haditha Massacre
TBO.com | June 11, 2006
Posted on 06/11/2006 2:09:50 AM PDT by Kaslin