Haditha planned by Al Qaeda

[Undertoad]

NYT gives up, Saturday:

...on Thursday, a senior military investigator recommended dropping murder charges against the ranking enlisted marine accused in the 2005 killings, just as he had done earlier in the cases of two other marines charged in the case. The recommendation may well have ended prosecutors’ chances of winning any murder convictions in the killings of the apparently unarmed men, women and children.

Then, separately, a blogger over the weekend:

Buried in the mountain of exhibits attached to the once secret Haditha, Iraq murder inquiry prepared by US Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell is an obscure Marine Corps intelligence summary (see pdf) that says the deadly encounter was an intentional propaganda ploy planned and paid for by Al Qaeda foreign fighters.

Wow. Just wow.

TW had told us:

Today, we know this was a massacre of Iraqis including a 76 year old blind and decrepit man in a wheelchair, his elderly wife, and children ranged in age from 15 to 3. This was all unquestioned for a month until Time Magazine's Tim McGirk reviewed pictures and saw obvious discrepancies. Four months later, Time Magazine would publish facts that eventually revealed the 2005 massacre.

But the blogger points out that McGirk was getting his information from the enemy.

McGirk received his video "evidence" and contacts from two known Iraqi insurgent operatives already under observation by Marine Corps counter intelligence teams. One of the Iraqi witnesses McGirk relied on had just been released from almost six months captivity for insurgent activities and the other witness was considered a useful intelligence tool by Marines listening to him talk on his cell phone. McGirk never interviewed the Marines, who ironically had prepared a similar intelligence summary in anticipation of his canceled visit.

http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=10896

Undertoad: "However, I'll go ahead and guess that the psychology of a team of Marines hit by a roadside bomb is far different from the psychology of a unit that massacres an entire village."

Happy Monkey: You misspelled "that massacres an entire family".

Do you maybe want to walk back from that one? Don't say I didn't warn you.

tw:

When direction at the highest level is flawed (no smoking gun, no strategic objective, no exit strategy), then this is how troops end up in this no win situation. They don't control the terrain. They are not proactive. It results in MyLai, Haditha, and Fallujah.

blogger:

After Tim McGirk wrote his specious report claiming a squad of Marines massacred 24 civilians at Haditha the world press immediately compared the incident to the massacre at My Lai. The unwarranted comparisons still anger Meyers.

"From our perspective - from a legal perspective - we knew it was a kinetic event," said Meyers. "We knew enough to present to the IO (Investigating Officer) that this was not an isolated event; that the entire city was in a kinetic state that day. Anyone who tries to compare this event to My Lai is an absolute fool."

Or a tool. But don't worry tw... you were just following the My Lai narrative set up for you by the New York Fucking Times. Too bad they were tools too.