I'm sorry, but the ROEs wouldn't use the words "shoot first and ask questions later."
But that is ALWAYS understood. One protects oneself first and if there is any fear at all, then one fires. The ROEs MUST have had a line about self-protection.
Beyond that, the ROEs at that time also permitted firing through walls and grenades in rooms.
Now, although the above is true, that is not my issue.
My issue is that these Marines cannot receive a fair trial in this Marine Corps with Murtha's comments public record.
Their entire trial should be taken out of the hands of any active duty military.
US military prosecutors charged four US Marines on Thursday with murder and four others on related charges in the November 2005 deaths of 24 unarmed civilians in the western Iraq town of Haditha, according to charging documents.
The Pentagon has spent months investigating allegations that the marines, who are now based at Camp Pendleton, California, ran amok after a fellow marine was killed in a roadside bombing, and killed the Iraqis in cold blood.
The military originally claimed that the Iraqi civilians were killed by a roadside bomb. But it was forced to open a full-blown investigation after Time magazine produced evidence suggesting that the marines had killed the civilians to avenge the death of their colleague.
John Murtha, a former marine and influential Democrat in the House of Representatives, earlier this year accused the military of a cover-up by not opening an investigation until approached by Time magazine.
"One woman…was bending over her child, pleading for mercy, and they shot her in cold blood. That's the thing that is so disturbing," Mr Murtha told ABC television at the time.
The alleged massacre at Haditha, a village about 100km north of Baghdad, has raised comparisons with the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, where US soldiers slaughtered more than 300 innocent civilians. The allegations also came to light just as the image of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad were starting to fade in the US. President George W. Bush earlier this year said he was "troubled" by the Haditha allegations, and added that any US troops that had broken the law would be punished. With Congress reverting to Democratic control in January, lawmakers are expected to more closely scrutinise US policy in Iraq, including investigating allegations of abuse by US troops.
The charges against the marines come at a sensitive time for Mr Bush, who is struggling to find a new Iraq policy to quell the sectarian violence that is claiming the lives of several thousand Iraqis each month.