Hot Air »Haditha

Allahpundit has the latest on Haditha: Marine eyewitnesses come forward (Update: Audio and video of the attack?)

There are two, according to the AP. They weren’t there during the incident but they took photos and helped carry out the bodies afterwards.One of them, Lance Cpl. Ryan Briones, was interviewed by the LA Times:

Briones said he took pictures of at least 15 bodies before his camera batteries died. He said he then helped other Marines remove the bodies and place them in body bags. He said his worst moment, and one that haunts him to this day, was picking up the body of a young girl who was shot in the head.

“I held her out like this,” he said, demonstrating with his arms extended, “but her head was bobbing up and down and the insides fell on my legs.”

I take Briones at his word because he’s a Marine, but I admit that if he weren’t, I’d find some elements of his story suspicious. Regardless, he sounds shattered by what he saw — not only inside the houses but inside the bombed-out humvee where he found Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas’s body. Terrazas’s death is what allegedly inspired the rampage, you’ll recall.

Allah has links to all the coverage of this. It looks as bad as ever, and we can’t wish it away, despite the jaded reaction of some Baghdadis reported by the WaPo.

There is a lot of commentary on this, some very confused. In particular, many commenters are confusing “explanation” with “excuse.”  Is there an explanation for this? Absolutely. Young Marines seeing their buddy get killed, in a hot, dangerous town, when their nerves have been on edge for months? I’ve seen parents get crazy at youth soccer games. Try to imagine how crazy people get when they are being shot at. That’s a whole order of magnitude of higher emotion. Now try to imagine seeing a buddy get killed. The emotional reaction is not even comprehensible to people whose daily lives are comfortable and safe.

It’s probably fair to say that only the rigorous training and discipline of the US military prevents a Haditha from happening every day.

But all of the foregoing is an “explanation.” It’s no “excuse.” The soldiers and Marines have the responsibility to  conduct themselves properly, or certainly not to blow away dozens of civilians in misguided retaliatory massacres.

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  1. In Search Of Utopia on 30 May 2006 at 2:05 pm

    Haditha Update…

    Haditha: Marine eyewitnesses come forward There are two, according to the AP. They weren’t there during the incident but they took photos and helped carry out the bodies afterwards. One of them, Lance Cpl. Ryan Briones, was interviewed by the……

Comments

  1. Randy wrote:

    War sucks. That’s why we should avoid FUBAR situations like the one in Iraq at all costs. I remember when the bombing began, Bush was caught on camera pumping his fist in the air, saying “Feels good”. I wanted to strangle him for that.

    Posted 30 May 2006 at 1:19 pm

  2. Bruce wrote:

    You sound just like Murtha.

    Posted 30 May 2006 at 3:53 pm

  3. John Gillnitz wrote:

    “It’s probably fair to say that only the rigorous training and discipline of the US military prevents a Haditha from happening every day.”

    I agree completely, but then again how would we know how often something like this occurs? When this story first started coming out the military lied about it. It was an Iraqi who took the first pictures and brought them to the press. Military spokes people tried to say the house was shot at from the outside and that the soldiers thought hostels were inside. Then someone noticed there were no bullet holes in the walls.

    I understand why they lie about what happens. If it is going to make the mission harder and more dangerous why tell the truth? The problem with that is lack of accountability. Not so much for the troops, but for the civilian leaders and their policies that put the troops in that situation.

    Posted 30 May 2006 at 6:00 pm

  4. Bluedog49 wrote:

    As horrible as all of this is, at least the military and the right wing are admitting it happened. For 35 years, people have been calling John Kerry a traitor for reporting to a Senate committee on the “Winter Soldier” investigations. We now know that virtually everything that was reported to Kerry and that he passed on to the senate was the truth. Sure, the first reaction from the right was to smear Murtha, but that smearing is fading away quickly.

    We’ve done the same thing to our soldiers that we did in Viet Nam. They have no clear goal or mission, they can’t tell friendlies from hostiles, and many of them have come to understand that what they’re doing over there isn’t really protecting America. They have little faith in their leaders and many of them get screwed when they get home. When will we ever learn?

    Posted 30 May 2006 at 7:37 pm

  5. Lindata wrote:

    Thank you for noy denying the possibility of this horror. If it happened those young men will never, ever be the same as they were when their loved ones sent them off to war. They are a major casualty of this attempt to take control of the Middle East and its oil. If they are guilty their prosecution, AND THE PROSECUTION OF THOSE WHO HAVE THROWN OUT THE INTERNATIONAL RULES, will save their souls.

    Posted 30 May 2006 at 9:24 pm

  6. Allah wrote:

    You’ve got some live ones here, don’t you, C?

    Posted 30 May 2006 at 11:36 pm

  7. Devil's Advocate wrote:

    So, how are you going to spin this one? “A few bad apples” like at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo? Only the 29%ers believe that one.

    Apples do not fall far from the tree. When are you, rightnutters, going to start asking explanations from the brass and the civilians who oversee the military?

    Never of course. Search for the truth would be so inconvenient, time-consuming, and so potentially disruptive to your little world, that it cannot possibly be done. It is a lot safer to watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh. Just blame someone else!

    That is what the GOP and the rest of the rightnutters have become: a bunch of whiners who piss their pants everytime they hear about 9/11.

    Curiously, none of the pant - pissers are to be found in NYC. That may be because New Yorkers are resilient, tough, and determined to go on with their lives, no matter what happens to them…

    The out-of-town crowd, however, that flocked to downtown Manhattan like a bunch of ghouls in search of a vicarious experience, is the one up in arms. They are still visiting the site!

    So spin away! Your sorry excuse for a President may still be trying to peddle his little war of choice by exploiting 9/11, but he lost credibility a long time ago. No Iraqis were involved in 9/11. The 9/11 commission found no connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

    Meawhile, Bin Laden is now Bin Forgotten and has Bin Misplaced.

    The nest time you soil your pants when Your Decider invokes 9/11, remember this: New Yorkers are giving you the finger. We are not cowards like the rest of you. We keep on moving! And WE know what it means to be attacked!

    Posted 31 May 2006 at 12:13 am

  8. JML wrote:

    “But all of the foregoing is an “explanation.” It’s no “excuse.” The soldiers and Marines have the responsibility to conduct themselves properly, or certainly not to blow away dozens of civilians in misguided retaliatory massacres.”

    - Exactly!

    On the one hand, given that 1) our soldiers in Iraq are under a lot of stress, and 2) not every person who wears a U.S. military uniform represents America responsibly, we can expect occasional missteps.

    On the other hand, it is stories like these that undermine whatever good America’s efforts are actually doing in the region.

    Many on the Right have chosen to attack Mr. Murtha or the MSM for airing grievances about this incident. The problem is that the facts are what they are. Word of this incident will travel throughout the local population no matter what American Congressmen / media report, and that is a far graver threat to the success of our efforts in the region than reports of inconvenient facts to the folks back home ever could be.

    If America is truly dedicated to fostering freedom and democracy in such hostile places like Iraq, then the inidviduals who perpetrated these cimes should be held to account publicly. We need to demonstrate that such acts will not be tolerated by anybody, even our own. (Isn’t it such instances that we invaded Iraq to prevent in the first place?)

    The Right needs to learn that attacking the messengers when they report unpleasant facts ultimately achieves nothing. The Right would far better serve its own interests, and America’s interests in general, if it considered the bad news that it recieves in the larger context of the efforts underway and used such bad news in plotting an educated path forward. (- I’m sure somebody will brand me a commie/liberal/traitor for that…)

    Posted 31 May 2006 at 1:56 am

  9. Pixy Misa wrote:

    The Right needs to learn that attacking the messengers when they report unpleasant facts ultimately achieves nothing. The Right would far better serve its own interests, and America’s interests in general, if it considered the bad news that it recieves in the larger context of the efforts underway and used such bad news in plotting an educated path forward.

    That would be easier if the bad news was accurate more often. In this case it was - the investigation hasn’t reported yet, but Murtha’s comments were well founded even if they turn out not to be 100% accurate. So that’s, well, once.

    Posted 31 May 2006 at 4:22 am

  10. Thomas wrote:

    You sound just like Murtha.

    Do people who want to discredit Murtha know how insane they appear in the eyes of normal people? Murtha’s a decorated veteran who’s served his country all his life, not some guy whose vision of service is hammering at keyboard anonymously on blog comment-boxes. I hope every extreme-right blogger continues this fruitless attempt to discredit Murtha, since every occasion of this attempt directly harms your cause; maybe real republicans will return to the fray after you guys have successfully painted yourselves into a howling, wild-eyed corner.

    Posted 31 May 2006 at 8:26 am

  11. rachel wrote:

    I was surprised at the people who said that Murtha’s telling everybody about the Haditha massacre put our troops in danger. Do they think people in the Middle East don’t have newsmedia of their own? I read about it on Al Jazeera shortly after it happened; everybody but the head-in-the-sand crowd in the USA had heard about it. But somehow Americans finally hearing the truth is hazardous for out soldiers?

    Well, Okey-dokey then.

    Posted 31 May 2006 at 10:15 am

  12. Peter wrote:

    The only saving grace (and it’s really quite sad, in its own right) in all of this is that Iraqis are not totally batsh1t about this because 24 slaughtered innocents is really just a slow day there, and they understand who is doing most of the murdering and why. The sad fact is that a massacre of 24 barely moves the needle in Iraq, where violence of this scale happens every single day, day in day out, 24/7, 365 days a year, and getting worse. When those deluding themselves about “all the good we are doing there” wipe the crud out of their eyes and take a long look at the conflict underway there - a civil war every bit as brutal as the one that tore El Salvador or Angola or Mozambique apart - and realize not only is it not getting better (according to our own military, its gotten FAR worse over the last two years) - but that despite all the best intentions in the world on our part and the poor Iraqi heroes who actually believe this democracy stuff - it will likely end terribly.

    And it is all our fault. All of it. Every single bit. We bear the FULL responsibility of selling, executing and following up on this war. All of it.

    Posted 31 May 2006 at 1:08 pm

  13. Allan wrote:

    Many on the Right have chosen to attack Mr. Murtha or the MSM for airing grievances about this incident.
    The Honorable Congressman Murtha, USMC(Ret.) the dishonorable Jesse Macbeth have a method to their grievance-airing madness.

    What has happened to the soldiers and Marines accused of committing atrocities in Iraq?

    From Abu Ghraib to the drowning of Zeyad (of Healing Iraq)’s cousin to Haditha, the military authorities have investigated and prosecuted those responsible.

    What the Haditha Marines are alleged to have done is horrendous, but it is not institutionally organized or authorized.

    Compare the volume of the Murthas to their silence during the Hussein regime, where families were routinely subjected to Haditha-like treatment or worse.

    There is no perfect war. The Iraq war is no exception, but it is less bad than many possible alternatives.

    Posted 31 May 2006 at 3:22 pm

  14. gil wrote:

    Allan.

    “There is no perfect war. The Iraq war is no exception, but it is less bad than many possible alternatives”

    The key word here is “Possible”.

    The world of outcomes and possibilities tends to be inhabited by people that create their own reality regardless of the evidence. Iraq beeing “less bad than other possibilities”, I am afraid is such a world.

    The Bush Administration considered the alternatives to invasion apparently to be less problematic. It turns out that they were wrong, and the rest of the world was right. So much for “possibilities”.

    What this war needs urgently is people sticking to REALITY. Enough of possibilities. A possibility is a dream, a mirage, a word to spin.

    The “silence” during Saddam’s regime is ironically the shame of our VP Cheney, and Rumsfeld, back when they were friends of Saddam, and he was commiting genocide in the Kurd, and Shiite populations. They were the ones in position to stop the atrocities, not congressman Murtha.

    TEN YEARS later the same Rumsfeld, and Cheney suddenly “rediscovered” the atrocities. How convinient don’t you think? I have heard about delayed reactions, and the slow grinding of burocracies, but this is ridiculous.

    Posted 31 May 2006 at 10:30 pm

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