Jackson Free Press

Get ready. This one's coming, and it's coming hard:

The fallout from the killing of as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians by Marines could undermine U.S. efforts in Iraq more than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal did, a lawmaker who is a prominent war critic said Sunday. The shootings last November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, were covered up, said Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.
"Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?" Murtha said on "This Week" on ABC. "We don't know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command."

A bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Marines then shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot other people, according to Murtha, who has been briefed by officials.

Murtha said high-level reports he received indicated that no one fired upon the Marines or that there was any military action against the U.S. forces after the initial explosion. Yet the deaths were not seriously investigated until March because an early probe was stifled within days of the incident, he said.

Previous Comments

ID

106108

Comment

I was hoping not to hear anything like this happening over in Iraq, but it appears that it has. While the actions of a few misfits should not tarnish the image of the other soldiers who are serving honorably, it will also put more pressure on the administration to come up with a plan to bring the troops home as quickly as possible.

Author

golden eagle

Date

2006-05-30T01:33:32-06:00

ID

106109

Comment

How awful all this is, and then a cover-up. This makes me sick: - Family members of two Marines say their sons were ordered to photograph and clean up corpses of unarmed Iraqi civilians that members of their unit are suspected of killing, and they have been traumatized ever since. In separate interviews with The Associated Press on Monday, the parents of Lance Cpl. Andrew Wright, 20, and Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones, 21, said their sons told them the events of last November remain seared in their memories. Wright and Briones were members of a Marine unit based at Camp Pendleton that was sent into the western Iraqi city of Haditha to help remove the bodies of as many as two dozen Iraqis, including women and children, who were shot. While there, the two were ordered to photograph the scene with personal cameras they happened to be carrying the day of the attack, the families said. Briones' mother, Susie, said her son told her he saw the bodies of 23 dead Iraqis that day. "It was horrific. It was a terrible scene," Susie Briones said in a tearful interview at her home in California's San Joaquin Valley. Navy investigators confiscated Briones' camera, his mother said. Wright's parents, Patty and Frederick Wright of Novato, declined to comment on what might have happened to the photos their son took but said he turned over all of his information to the Navy. "He is the Forrest Gump of the military," Frederick Wright said. "He ended up in the spotlight through no fault of his own." Ryan Briones told the Los Angeles Times that Navy investigators had interrogated him twice in Iraq and they wanted to know whether bodies had been tampered with. He turned over his digital camera but did not know what happened to it after that. Susie Briones called the Nov. 19 incident a "massacre" and said the military had done little to help her son, who goes by his middle name, deal with his post-traumatic stress disorder.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2006-05-30T13:53:26-06:00

ID

106110

Comment

We'll have to wait and see what the investigation reveals. But, regardless, we have an obligation to stay in Iraq until the government has at least a fighting chance to maintain stability. If there turns out to be insuffiient will in Iraq to make a democracy succeed, then it will fail no matter what. But we incurred this responsibilty when we invaded. If we bail out prematurely, we will do to them what we did to the Afghans, and abandon them to carnage and retribution far worse than what they are experiencing now. The Afghans are still suffering for our abandonment of them, and they still mistrust us for it. We cannot devise a strategy of slinking away. We have to commit to win. That means a commitment to leaving Iraq when the condiitons dictate. I know I sound like Bush. But if anyone has a better idea that doesn't lead to 10 times for carnage for the Iraqis than they are experiencing now, it sure would be nice if they would unveil their grand plan. We mostly get monday morning quarterbacking and political opportunism. Of course, there are those who oppose the war on moral grounds, both those who opposed it originally, and those who changed their minds. I respect that completely. There are lots of very good reasons to have opposed this war, and many people argued persuasively for them before we went in (especailyl Mike Farrell). But I think the false dischotomy lies in the notion that our presence causes all the violence, and everthing will be o.k. for everyone once we leave. Just ask the South Vietnamese if they agree with that.

Author

GLB

Date

2006-05-31T18:22:47-06:00

ID

106111

Comment

Good NY Times editorial today on the Haditha massacre: The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by United States marines at Haditha will be hard to dispose of with another Washington damage control operation. The Iraqi government has made clear that it will not sit still for one, and neither should the American people. This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad men. This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place. Critics of the war predicted that American troops would become an occupying force, unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and murderous insurgents, propelled down the same path that led the British to disaster in Northern Ireland and American troops to grief in Vietnam. The Bush administration understood the dangers too, but dismissed them out of its deep, unwarranted confidence that friendly Iraqis would quickly be able to take control of their own government and impose order on their own people. Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field. The inquiry also needs to critically examine the behavior of top commanders responsible for ensuring lawful and professional conduct and of midlevel officers who apparently covered up the Haditha incident for months until journalists' inquiries forced a more honest review. So far, nothing in President Bush's repeated statements on the issue offers any real assurance that the White House and the Pentagon will not once again try to protect the most senior military and political ranks from proper accountability. This is the pattern that this administration has repeatedly followed in the past — in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, in the beating deaths of prisoners at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in the serial abuses of justice and constitutional principle at Guantánamo Bay. [...] It should not surprise anyone that this war — launched on the basis of false intelligence analysis, managed by a Pentagon exempted from normal standards of command responsibility and still far from achieving minimally acceptable results — is increasingly unpopular with the American people. At the very least, the public is now entitled to straight answers on what went wrong at Haditha and who, besides those at the bottom of the chain of command, will be required to take responsibility for it.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2006-06-04T15:06:54-06:00

ID

106112

Comment

Interesting Editor & Publisher column about the media's role in the Haditha cover-up: By now, it’s clear that the U.S. military engaged in some kind of cover-up of an apparent massacre in Haditha. Following the November killings it took months for an official investigation to begin. But even as reporters explore the story now, with impressive and detailed probes that often end up on the front page, the question must be asked: Did the press also drop the ball in probing the killings? Or was the usual roadblock – the danger of spending a lot of time in hellish Anbar province – just too difficult to overcome? In any case, have editors and reporters back home, for three years now, shown too little interest in possible—some would say, likely—American atrocities in the heat of horrible pressures in Iraq? An Associated Press story from Baghdad on Sunday quoted Hassan Bazaz, a Baghdad University political scientist, complaining that strong interest now being shown by Western news media in the alleged U.S. misconduct is only now catching up with common views in Iraq. ``There is nothing new or surprising for Iraqis,'' said Bazaz. ``The problem is that the outside world has been isolated from what happens on the ground in Iraq. What the media says now is only a fraction of what happens every day.'' This is pretty much what Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki said on Friday.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2006-06-05T14:02:50-06:00

ID

106113

Comment

It amazes me how quickly these marines have been judged. No trial, no court martial, just death by public opinion. I do not know if these marines committed the acts they are accused of. Now I'm afraid because of public opinion they will not get a fair trial. I don't see how this is a cover up. Do you really think the military investigates every firefight or IED? When I was in Iraq we had 3 or 4 IED's a day. I've had detainees claim that we beat them and tortured them. It's a tactic they are taught to use in captivity. It is very hard to say who is telling the truth, but after serving with soldiers that have families and children of their own, I find it hard to believe they "executed" women and children. I can see how they could be caught in a reaction to contact. It would not suprise me if insurgents warped the crime scene to gain sympothy. I once saw a bomb explode in a mosque commonly used by insurgents across the street from my patrol base. I do not know if they screwed up when building the bomb, or if they did it on purpose. They told us they were attacked for supporting US Forces (clearly a lie). It was a weak attempt at trying to obfuscate the activities going on in the mosque. Every day soldiers and marines have less than a second to make life changing decisions. Without walking in their shoes it is very difficult to understand how they could actually be innocent of any wrong doing. If the marines did in fact execute the people they should be severly punished, however, it should be left to the courts martial to decide what happened that day.

Author

nothing

Date

2006-06-07T10:49:17-06:00

ID

106114

Comment

nothing, the individual marines have not been judged, yet. They should get their day in court to present evidence, defenses, etc. Hell, it could be that they were ordered to do this, as in the Abu Graib (sp) scandal. Or, they did it themselves. I'm sure there were heroes there somewhere, and all that needs to come out. The big problem here is the cover-up by the government that the event ever happened, much less the conditions that led to such horror. That's what the first focus must be, and then the Marines themselves need to get their day in court. I lost a cousin in Iraq. He is a hero to me because he died believing he was fighting a good cause for his country. However, that does not mean that I can support a cover-up of horrors against civilians, including elderly and children, by my government. Good people can hold more than one thought at once, and want to ferret out the evil in our own midst as well as others.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2006-06-07T10:54:28-06:00

ID

106115

Comment

**I don't see how this is a cover up. Do you really think the military investigates every firefight or IED? When I was in Iraq we had 3 or 4 IED's a day. I've had detainees claim that we beat them and tortured them. It's a tactic they are taught to use in captivity. It is very hard to say who is telling the truth, but after serving with soldiers that have families and children of their own, I find it hard to believe they "executed" women and children.** <--- nothing Every cold-bloodied murderer, dispicable child molester, or life-destroying drug kingpin this world has ever known was either somebody's child, parent or sibling. Thus, man's inhumanity to his fellow man is as old as humankind itself.

Author

Kacy

Date

2006-06-07T11:49:35-06:00

ID

106116

Comment

"Every cold-bloodied murderer, dispicable child molester, or life-destroying drug kingpin this world has ever known was either somebody's child, parent or sibling. Thus, man's inhumanity to his fellow man is as old as humankind itself." I didn't say it wasn't possible or didn't happen. Just based on my experiences as a combat veteran in the Iraq Theater, I find the whole situation is full of holes and difficult for me to believe in the manner it has been presented by the media.

Author

nothing

Date

2006-06-07T13:06:19-06:00