Posted on 06/07/2006 5:16:01 AM PDT by Dark Skies
We face an Islamist enemy for which no deception, no cruelty, no inhumanity is too low in battling the infidel. I have previously argued that the Jihadis (among others) were fabricating incidents pointing to American involvement in massacres of Iraqi civilians. With the Haditha story, the subject has exploded across the media in a far more disturbing fashion than anyone could have wished. But there is one element that has been all but ignored: clear evidence that the insurgency has gone one step further, to actually contriving massacres involving U.S. troops.
Haditha is one of a flurry of mass-murder accusations leveled against American forces in recent months. Another serious instance occurred in Ishaqi, sixty miles north of Baghdad. On March 16, U.S. troops allegedly attacked the home of a local schoolteacher, killing eleven people, including women and children, before blowing up the house to conceal the crime. A video was released showing the victims being dug out, and the story was verified by local police.
The soldier’s version was more prosaic: coming under fire from the house in question, they called in an AC-130 gunship to level the place. While plucking an injured Al-Qaeda gunman from the wreckage, the troops found four other bodies, including two women and a child. (A similar case in which U.S. soldiers were accused of murdering a family of three in Duluiya, a nearby village, had scarcely begun circulating before it was proven to have actually involved seven grenade-wielding terrorists.)
Ten days later, yet another such “massacre” was revealed in Baghdad itself. Iraqi and U.S. troops raided an office complex held by militiamen, killing sixteen, capturing another eighteen, and rescuing a kidnapping victim. But by the next morning, the offices had been transformed into a mosque, the number of dead had multiplied, and the operation had become an all-American effort.
Initial media interest faded after the kidnap victim denied the mosque claim and revealed the torture scars he’d suffered at the militia’s hands (he refused, probably wisely, to identify which militia it was). By this time, the Ishaqi story had also fallen apart, over conflicting accounts of the incident and the victim’s identities, ages, and relationships to each other—which didn’t prevent a new video from popping up in the wake of the Haditha revelations. (Even as the video made the rounds, the Pentagon announced that the Marines involved had been cleared of all charges.)
What’s striking about the Ishaqi report is its surface similarity to the Haditha incident. Both feature ambushes of U.S. troops, carried out from occupied homes, by a single gunman acting alone.
It’s that last element that raises questions. A single shooter amid a group of unarmed civilians – that’s a strange setup for an ambush. A one-man ambush is a contradiction in terms. A guerilla unit conducting such an operation would use all the men available, to concentrate fire and cause as much damage as possible. A single man may take a pot-shot or two and then break contact. But from a houseful of people, who will inevitably come under fire in return? There’s no reason for that. Not unless it wasn’t an ambush at all. Not unless a completely different effect was intended.
The war in Iraq is a low-level insurrection slowly – all too slowly – grinding to a halt. The insurgents have attempted to take and hold ground in cities like Tal Afar and Fallujah, and have failed. They have attempted to stop the electoral process through intimidation, and have failed. They have attempted to split the country through civil war, and have failed. Few tactics remain to them, one of which is to take a page from the Vietnam playbook and work the media, hoping that upheaval in the U.S. itself will win their war for them. And that requires a My Lai.
So they’ve been trying to arrange one. To create the conditions for a massacre. Ambushing Coalition troops from houses full of helpless, unarmed civilians, hoping that the soldiers would respond with all the firepower at their command, and exposing the resulting carnage to the full glare of the international media. That was the plan at Ishaqi, and it might have worked if the shooter hadn’t survived. That was also the plan at Haditha—and somebody walked right into it. Some young men angered beyond rationality at seeing a friend blown in half by an IED, driven by impulses we will never know, stormed the nearest homes to kill not only the lone terrorist (according to the account in Time, there were two AK-47s but only one gunman), but everyone else as well—man, woman, and child.
If more proof is needed, consider the May 30 USA Today story in which Marine Captain Andrew Del Gaudio described coming under machine-gun fire this past April after an IED killed four of his men. As he was about to engage, he saw that the enemy had placed a line of children in front of the gun, with two video cameras ready to film them as they were shot down. Del Gaudio held his fire, and was injured by the next rounds. His troops flanked the machine-gun nest before attacking, and the children survived. (Further testimony along the same lines in offered in the Wall Street Journal’s June 6 “Best of the Web Today” by a unnamed officer under the heading “Letter from Iraq”.)
Clearly, there is no conceivable way to exaggerate the sheer viciousness of the fanatic Islamist.
None of this excuses the alleged actions of the troops at Haditha. Nothing could excuse that. If guilty, they will be tried and punished as they deserve. But if they were goaded into attacking, if it was a setup, if the terrorists are deliberately working to create such atrocities, then it’s a development we ignore at our peril. The My Lai paradigm must not be allowed to blind us to the possibility. This tactic (if that’s the term I’m groping for) must be investigated, verified, and exposed. Otherwise Haditha, and the media firestorm surrounding it, will simply open the door to a never-ending series of such tragedies. To more lines of children, and more houses full of innocents.
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One would think that after some of the recent MSM missteps that we would all wait for all of the facts, but it's clear some haven't yet learned that lesson.
Bump!
Denials of fabricated incidents would be more easily debunked and denied if the US hadn't lost an awful lot of face via Guantanamo and Abu Gharib. Although each is completely justifiable on their own terms, the net affect on the image of America has been serious and significant.
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Regardless of how the rest of the world sees it, Americans should support our troops. Guantanomo and Abu Ghraib have nothing to do with that issue.
Bah-and the MSM and Dhimmicrats (redundant, I know) give the terrorist scumbags the benefit of the doubt. We don't know what happened in Haditha, but I am willing to give American Servicemen the benefit of the doubt every time-not so our treasonous, liberal "elites".
You're absolutely correct. Anyone got a ping list?
Bump
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If someone does, please add me.
With regard to this Haditha thing I smell set up from the get go. Our Marines are a dedicated and highly trained fighting force. I very much doubt that they would knowingly masacre innocents. The islamopignazis on the other hand, as previously documented, will use children as pawns in their game in order to fabricate a masacre.
Quite frankly I don't believe one word of this supposed masacre B.S. but even if it were true I'd say hey some bad apples, move on and gee we're only about 2,975 innocents behind in the ledger.
Let's not only "be adults," but let us at the very least read up on what we do know. Freeper Sam Hill has uncovered a lot of information that should make reasonable people question the official story the media is handing around.
The only witnesses were terrorists and/or terrorist sympathizers. The doctor who performed the "autopsies" hates the west in general, the US in particular, and has previously accused us of genocide. The "reporter" turns out to have been held on terrorist charges in the past, due to "suspicious" photos in his camera (unspecified--so, beheadings, I wonder?). Add to this that the MSM reporters pushing this story were the very ones who strongly pushed the "wedding party massacre" story that also turned out to be false.
Worse, some of the news organizations published, as proof of the "atrocity," photos of the "massacre" that were taken of an incident where the victims had been gunned down in a stadium by the terrorists.
Now consider, please, the simple fact that to date, no independent autopsies have been performed. The last I heard, the families were refusing to allow the bodies to be exhumed for such tests.
Before you suggest WE are jumping to conclusions, I suggest YOU read up on this. Most of us are basing our conclusions on facts of which you are apparently unaware.
The only time the media seems to call the terrorists what they are is when one of "their own" is kidnapped, wounded, or killed by them.
Thank you. We don't know yet of the reports were falsified. We only know that the terrorist witnesses claim something else happened.
bump
religion of peace eating its young ping
If the net effect of the American "image" is significant and serious, then this is the fault of the American people for not understanding the full implications of what we're up against. We're not fighting a bunch of civilized, cultured gentlemen here. We're fighting base creatures who don't care who they kill or how, and for the most part, I believe, kill because they like to see pain and death.
We are going to have to approach this war differently if we plan on winning. The only thing these terrorists understand is brute force--to them, anything less is a sign of weakness, and they utterly despise weakness. (Just read what Osama said in his "declaration of war" when Clinton was president.)
We simply cannot expect our troops to be able to win this war if they must carry a gun in one hand and an etiquette book in another. Let the troops do what they must to win this war, and worry about "image" later.
Funny how this came up in this case--what the supposed wrong was at Gitmo was another press-contrived story that was proven completely false: the so-called flushing of the Quran. Never happened, but I do see that some here have completely missed that point.
The media should be shot but in real life I haven't heard this as being in the average person's daily concerns so I don't think they are getting the outrage they want.
Don't flame me for this. I don't condone My Lai but I know a man who was there, more than once. They were dropping humanitarian supplies because the people in the village were starving. They would land in the helicoptor, offload the supplies and then when they started to fly off the people would come out and try to shoot them out of the sky as they took off. I'm not making any excuses but it isn't like the people of My Lai were innocent. The Vietnamese were famous for hiding behind children and also rigging children with "suicide bombs".
Pure propaganda.
LOL, the "image" of the United States of America will always "suffer" in the world, its human nature to resent those who have to constantly take care of your security and financial health, when you are unable to fend for yourself.
Much like a teen's resentment of their parents.
In case you folks haven't seen this...
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