But attention must be paid to what happened at Haditha, if we are to start reclaiming what's left of our national soul.
A Pentagon probe into the death of Iraqi civilians last November in the Iraqi city of Haditha will show that U.S. Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," a U.S. lawmaker said Wednesday.
From the beginning, Iraqis in the town of Haditha said U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children.
One young Iraqi girl said the Marines killed six members of her family, including her parents. “The Americans came into the room where my father was praying,” she said, “and shot him.”
On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said the accounts are true.
Military officials told NBC News that the Marine Corps' own evidence appears to show Murtha is right.
A videotape taken by an Iraqi showed the aftermath of the alleged attack: a blood-smeared bedroom floor and bits of what appear to be human flesh and bullet holes on the walls.
The video, obtained by Time magazine, was broadcast a day after town residents told The Associated Press that American troops entered homes on Nov. 19 and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old girl, after a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine.
It takes a certain kind of person to blow away a three-year-old girl, for revenge no less. Guess they showed her.
Look, no one has any illusions about what the nature of the beast is here. These are men who are trained to kill, and they are in an impossibly tough spot, where they must kill or be killed. Still: a three-year-old girl. Those Marines volunteered for this; she didn't. This is what we've sunk to.
No doubt this will be portrayed, like Abu Ghraib, as an aberration, a one-of-a-kind freak occurrence with no connection to the actual decision-making process or hierarchy. And hopefully a real and thorough investigation will dig into that very thing, whether or not there are more Hadithas we just haven't heard about, or if this was merely a lone platoon of psychopaths that needs to be held accountable for what they've done. This is beyond shameful, beneath despicable.
Military officials say Marine Corp photos taken immediately after the incident show many of the victims were shot at close range, in the head and chest, execution-style. One photo shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead, said the officials, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because the investigation hasn't been completed.
One military official says it appears the civilians were deliberately killed by the Marines, who were outraged at the death of their fellow Marine.
“This one is ugly," one official told NBC News.
Ugly doesn't even begin to describe it, nor the rampant death squad murders carried out by the people we are training to "stand up" so's we can "stand down", without ever ever having to say we were wrong, or that we're sorry for causing all this. All the weasel words from a draft-dodging preznit and the 82nd Chairborne who chronicle his adventures and support his war vociferously and obnoxiously -- yet somehow never seem to show up for it themselves -- don't mean a damned thing to families who were murdered while they prayed for their lives.
Another interesting coincidence is the release of a book chronicling the heretofore unknown exploits of a similar band of men in Vietnam, the Tiger Force.
During the summer of 1967, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Gerald Morse radioed soldiers operating under his command in the central highlands of Vietnam and barked, "You're the 327th infantry. We want 327 kills." It was an unforgivable statement that would eventually lead to one of the most appalling killing sprees of the Vietnam War and the unwarranted deaths of hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children.
The unit Morse was addressing, his "Tiger Force," was a group of 45 gung-ho soldiers that made up the reconnaissance platoon attached to the 327th Infantry, a battalion of 900 infantrymen that was just one of three in the 101st Airborne. The Tigers were the most bloodthirsty lot of them all.
Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss' unsettling "Tiger Force" explains how this motley group of young men from the far corners of the United States became unhinged murderers and why their war crimes went unreported for nearly four decades.
Sallah and Weiss, reporters for the Blade newspaper of Toledo, Ohio, were tipped to the story by a fellow reporter at their newspaper who was bequeathed boxes of secret documents from Henry Tufts, a former head of the Army's Criminal Investigations Command (known as CID), after his death in July 2002.
Their four-part series for the newspaper, outlining the heretofore unknown story, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. This book offers an even more exhaustive account of Tiger Force's killing rampage and the subsequent efforts by a series of Army investigators to hold the soldiers accountable for their actions.
On the one hand, you have to wonder how these posthumous whistleblowers can live with themselves all these years, just waiting to bequeath all that awful knowledge for someone else to foist on the public and deal with the fallout. On the other, the fact that there's fallout, the fact that there are people who will seriously defend the out-and-out murder of women and children pretty much explains why they just don't want to deal with that level of irrationality.
Sallah and Weiss re-create the events, relying on interviews with 43 Tiger Force veterans. The reporters also went to Vietnam and tracked down now-elderly Vietnamese witnesses and descendants of the victims. Central to their account is the story of Pvt. Sam Ybarra, an American Indian who together with his childhood friend, Kenneth "Boots" Green, joined the Tigers. Initially, the two fought together in the fertile highlands that were one of the principal sources of rice for the North Vietnamese Army. The Army deemed it a strategic necessity for the United States to clear the area of farmers, many of them Buddhists with spiritual ties to the land. Some farmers agreed to be flown to relocation camps, which Ybarra compares to his fellow Indians being relocated. When some of the farmers refuse to leave, the area is deemed a "free-fire zone" -- a confusing designation that still stipulated that soldiers must request permission before shooting. That eventually leads to much unnecessary bloodshed. Typical of these stories is that of an unarmed North Vietnamese soldier taken prisoner whom Ybarra nonchalantly executes by cutting his throat.
The Tigers, forced to remain in the field far longer than others, grow frustrated. Ybarra is among the first Tigers taking trophies, slicing the ears off slain Vietnamese and fashioning them into necklaces. Others collect scalps or teeth. Then, after Green is shot in the head by a sniper, Ybarra snaps. In the most disturbing episode of the book (or frankly almost any book describing American soldiers at war), on the day the Tigers achieved their "magic number" of 327 kills, on Nov. 19, 1967, Ybarra beheads a crying baby.
The review also exceprts passages that purport to describe the physiological changes that occur in combat situations, where basically our vestigial lizard brains take over, and the survival instinct kicks in to such a degree that even basic humanitarian behaviors and restraints (such as, say, murdering little girls) are forgotten. And that too comes at a steep price; Ybarra's Wikipedia entry doesn't say exactly how old he was when he died in 1982, and frankly, I don't want to waste any more of my time reading about that turd of a human being, but from the dates given, it sounds like he was probably about 35 years old, had a long history of substance abuse, probably died hard. Which is fine by me; war is hell, but collecting trophy ears and beheading infants is simply unacceptable. The man was a psychopath and should have died in prison.
But whatever. Let's play devil's advocate here. Let's say that the fog and fury and confusion of war does indeed mitigate even the most horrible of actions to at least some degree. The bottom line is that these men still have to come back home, still have to internalize what they've done, try to get back to the way their lives were before Dubya and Cheney and Rummy and Wolfie and the rest of these morons decided they were smarter than the rest of the world and stepped on their dicks, and sent these folks over there. How does a man come back to normal after slaughtering a family? He may get a pass from the legal system or the military justice system, but not from his conscience. He knows what he did and has to live with that, and there needs to be some sort of support for them to re-enter civilian life, and not inflict their newfound demons on their unsuspecting families.
And maybe some of the folks who are fortunate enough to remain stateside could maybe think twice before blindly supporting a proven idiot who just wantonly throws these lives into a meat grinder, with no plan in place, just arrogance and hubris and meat-headed phony swagger.
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