Below a grotesque picture of shroud-wrapped corpses – one of which someone has gratuitously unwrapped to better display a gory rictus – the New York Times reveals a “talking points” memo formulated by four Marine officers in answer to questions posed by the Time magazine reporter who “blew open” the Haditha case.
After a quick review of the facts not in dispute – 24 Iraqis died, including several women and children subsequent to an ambush in which an IED killed one Marine and seriously wounded two others in a murderously hostile town, military hearings are on-going to determine whether three enlisted Marines are guilty of murder, four of their officers are charged with dereliction of duty – the Times writer breathlessly leads into the memo itself thus:
The four officers produced a five-page memo of
Heh. And reporters wanting to profile a Valour-IT recipient wonder why I can’t find any who will talk to them these days…
“But I don’t want to talk about ‘the war.’ I just want to talk about Valour-IT. I’m trying to do a positive story.”
“I’m sorry, but they don’t trust you and they just don’t believe that.”
McGirk: Are the marines in this unit still serving in Haditha?
Memo: Yes, we are still fighting terrorists of Al Qaida in Iraq in Haditha. (?
McGirk: Are the marines in this unit still serving in Haditha?
Memo: Yes, we are still fighting terrorists of Al Qaida in Iraq in Haditha. (“Fighting terrorists associated with Al Qaida” is stronger language than “serving.” The American people will side more with someone actively fighting a terrorist organization that is tied to 9/11 than with someone who is idly “serving,” like in a way one “serves” a casserole. It’s semantics, but in reporting and journalism, words spin the story.)
^An important differentiation to be made. Unfortunate that the government hasn’t been able to reinforce this point more effectively amongst the general populace to any significant degree.
The NY Slimes strikes again. Implicit in the story is the theme that these hick soldiers [to them Marines are soldiers] must be engaged in some sort of consipiracy if they prepare talking points. Bet they have never printed a sentence from any talking points prepared for a single liberal Democrat. Ever!
The stunning fact that the talking points proved to be 100% accurate and/or prophetic is completely ignored. If the Haditha Marines committed criminal acts, they should be punished, but only after a fair trial with all the evidence. Not a public lynching by scumbag ex-Marine politicians like Murtha, or protracted media jihads from the NY Slimes, CNN, or Al-Jazeera.
I must add a prophetic quote from a USMC LT.COL in Iraq during the opening campaign- “It is the curs in the media who cannot stand victory that can defeat us. It is the political hacks who cannot stand victory that can defeat us. American warriors have taken out another threat to our country. I am proud to stand amongst those here.”
Where will the Haditha Marines go to get THEIR reputations back, if/when acquitted?
Who can believe the NY Slimes any more, and why do people still buy it?
Today’s media is a far second cousin to the “free press” of old. Now, lying and politically active (Dan Rather and National Guard Memos as an example) the media has a axe to grind despite (and many times in conflict with) the truth. Trust today’s media? Not on a bet. As a whole there are still some good to be had from the various news outlets but individually they have betrayed millions in search of their grist for the mill. Doctored photos, invented interviews, false documents?
Today’s media is a far second cousin to the “free press” of old. Now, lying and politically active (Dan Rather and National Guard Memos as an example) the media has a axe to grind despite (and many times in conflict with) the truth. Trust today’s media? Not on a bet. As a whole there are still some good to be had from the various news outlets but individually they have betrayed millions in search of their grist for the mill. Doctored photos, invented interviews, false documents… the list of offenses are telling, damming and virtually endless. We have changed for the worst beginning with Walter Cronkite’s proclamations that the War in Vietnam was lost… while we still had troops on the ground dying.
Oh, and who watches the media and insures reporting fairness and morality? They do it themselves, of course… awarding themselves trophies and kudos for their efforts. That whole fox and the hen-house thing. Nice, real nice…
Thank God for the bloggers!
If we lose this war and radical Islamism gains more of a foothold in the West, the first people to have their heads sawed off will be the liberal reporters and feminists who are so busy undermining the war effort. They are too mentally vacant to understand that if we are forced to retreat from the Middle East, a terrible price will be paid and they will not be immune from the consequences.
A friend of mine was a Bradley Fighting Vehicle driver in Iraq in 2004. Due to the danger of IUD’s they drove in the middle of the street. Vehicles that did not yield faced negative consequences, to say the least. Long and short is he ended up squashing a vehicle. Turned out it was not exactly a military target. Examination fell well within the ROE. A publicized story of the incident brought out an investigation and subsequent release from active duty. But not from the results of the investigation, that came out clean after 3 months of processing. The release was for medical reasons. Having to face demons of war is much easier if you were in the perceived right of the laws of the land. Having your judgment come into question when you knew full well the right and wrong of the day, having to question the fact of whether or not you made the right call to follow orders is a whole new set of demons. Those demons make you a cold blooded killer. Premeditated death to the innocents, it makes you. These are what led my dear friend to the door, with much more baggage than a graffiti skull candle ashtray. Because even when he was proved to be in the right, even with the proof that the tank commander made the right call, that everyone on board followed orders that should have been followed, he still felt like a killer.
War is Hell.
Time Inc has been caught in their baldfaced web of lies. As the Article 32 process grinds forward to a judgment of whether to proceed to Court Martial, the operational events of the day have been declassified, and innocence revealed. The question we await is whether Gen. Mattis will allow this injustice to go to trial. An argument may be made that proceeding to trial with attendant media hoopla will allow the accused to recover their reputations as the truth is bared to the public, instead of allowing Time Inc’s dastardly deed to go unrefuted.
Whichever way the good general decides, I predict one hell of a slander action by the accused against Time Inc. They picked the wrong group to try to punk. As we travel this road, one may rely on the feckless faggots of the MSM to throw the kitchen sink at them. That is the light in which I see this article. Like the accused standing before the CO at Office Hours, you may rely on Time Inc to grab at every straw. This only sinks them deeper in the mire.
BTW DJVC, you should tell your friend what I told my son before I kissed him and sent him off to war. If you find yourself in a situation where someone who shouldn’t have been a casualty became one, there is only one judgment to hold in your heart. They were unlucky. You on the other hand get to roll the dice again, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
DJVC’s friend’s tale sounds like a classic case of the law of double-effect. On a mission, no apparent bad intentions and no subjective “foul” – though small consolation to the friend. …I had an interesting discussion with a former 20yr old WW2 tanker in my grandfather’s unit who “clipped” an inmate from a concentration camp they’d liberated because he “thought the SOB was trying to climb up on the cupola and eat me..” [inmates were devouring the grass outside the wire after the guards fled]- boy was (according to him) in sheer terror and of course he wished things had been different, but he moved on with whatever baggage he’d picked up. Kinda things a country asks of its youth.
Um, shouldn’t they capitalize Marines?
Shit Sh1fty, I’m still trying to figure out what the “Second Division’s… Third Battalion” is.
I have a dream…
Someday, reporters will report the news without obvious, blatant bias. They’ll research a story and then imagine the details swapped (white/black, male/female, Arab/Israeli, Democrat/Republican, etc.) and examine to see if the story still carries water or not. The way things are now, 90 percent (if not more) would be spiked.
It’s a modest dream, but still, a dream.