The Haditha Charges - Flopping Aces

So the Marine Corps has charged four members of the Haditha Marines with murder. As I said on May 17th:

Now if these Marines did in fact murder these innocent people then they should all be hung and quartered. They have dishonored my Marine Corps and there should be no greater punishment. BUT…..I will not proclaim them guilty before proven innocent.

And I stand by that statement. They have been charged, not convicted. They are still innocent until that time. And please, before convicting them yourself take a look at all of my posts which have detailed all of the evidence that suggests this was NOT cold bloodied murder.

But one post in particular that you should not overlook is this one I wrote on June 11th.

Here is an excerpt:

Now lets look at how the story was supposedly "uncovered".

After the incident a video of the bodies is supposedly videotaped by Thaer al-Hadithi.

al-Hadithi is a middle aged man who created the Hammurabi organization. This group believes the US is committing war crimes. al-Hadithi also use to work directly under the same doctor who pronounced the victims had all died of gunshot wounds (This doctor may harbor some ill feelings for the US also).

al-Hadithi makes the tape and then sits on it for months before handing it over to Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani.

Who is Abdel?

He is al-Hadithi’s partner in crime. They both created the Hammurabi Organization.

So Abdel gets the tape and then hands it over to Ali al-Mashhadani (note the similar last name with Abdel).

Now who is Ali al-Mashhadani? He is a journalist with connections to Reuters. He was arrested and imprisoned for 7 months for having pictures that tied him with terrorists. He was released and then given the tape.

The tape and the story was then given to the Human Rights Watch which is also hugely anti-American and funded by none other then George Soros.

Human Rights Watch then gives it to Time.

So EVERY single player in this report holds a grudge or bias against the US. Whether it comes from the doctor who proclaims that the US taking Saddam out of power was not a good thing :

An officer asked dr.Walid what he thinks of the Americans, and he replied “you are occupation troops, I wish that you were friends, but this way, things do not work.”

“Is it not better that we are here?” he asked again.

“No” dr. Walid replied “look at you, heavily armed in your military clothes, you frighten children. You create tension”.

Or from the members of the Hammurabi organization who states that the murder of innocent people happen every day at the hands of the US.

Or from the man who was imprisoned by the US for terrorist ties.

They all have a bone to pick.

Hell, the BBC itself states that the tape comes from a hardline Sunni group opposed to the US forces.

Then you have the residents of the town and the tradition of blood money.

An article from 2004 describes this bizarre tradition:

On the side of a road in a ramshackle tent tribal elders have gathered for a court case, but it is not an ordinary law court, it’s a tribal court. The case defies logic – one brother has killed another, but the tribe they belonged to is blaming a rival tribe for the killing.

Their argument is that if there had not been a feud with the other tribe, the killing would not have taken place; they are now demanding $20,000 in blood money….

At the tribal court, the discussion is heated, but not about guilt or innocence. Through a complex network of tribal support, both sides know where they stand, now it is just a matter of agreeing the money.

Eventually the price is knocked down to $4,000 and a woman, her value to be determined in later negotiations.

For many Iraqis it’s a system that works, and in a violent region recompense appears much more practical than locking someone away.

So following this logic if the US didn’t have a fight with the terrorists then the deaths of those tribe members would not have occurred so regardless of who killed the people and why, the coalition must pay the blood money. The thing is that there already was payment made to the families of 15 of the 24 dead. The other 9 were deemed by the US to have engaged in hostilities with the coalition and were not paid for.

Could the release of the video and the story of atrocities be because the tribe believes the other 9 should be paid for?

One final intriguing note. Recall Thaer al-Hadithi? The man who videotaped the hospital scene and sat on the tape for 4 months before giving it to his cohort in Hammurabi. He is a resident of Haditha.

Secretary-General of the Hammurabi Organization for Human Rights and Democracy Monitoring, and also a Haditha resident who witnessed parts of the incident, Thaer al-Hadithi, gives a detailed account of the alleged massacre of 24 Iraqis by U.S. Marines last year, to an Associated Press reporter at the offices of the group in Baghdad, Iraq Tuesday, June 6, 2006.

So could it be that the reason he sat on the tape is because the blood money was being paid to his tribe members. Once news came that 9 of them would not be paid for he releases it?

Furthermore in a May 27th article the WaPo interviewed residents of the town who say they witnessed or heard the carnage. Here is what I reported about this article that day:

This Washington Post article is one such example. They spoke to “eye witnesses” who describe a house to house massacre and then the shooting of a taxi full of men. But then they acknowledge some people say the taxi incident happened first and some people say a 500lb bomb was dropped on a house. The “eyewitnesses” are only identified as residents of the town but remember Haditha is right smack in the middle of a Sunni hotbed of terrorists. Could the “witnesses” have an agenda all their own?

So in the end we have the changing stories by the child witnesses and the residents of the town. We have the curious motivations behind those who taped the bodies and those who pushed the story to Time. We also have the fact that the biased Human Rights Watch told Time that they have a photo depicting civilians kneeling, posing no threat to the troops. Turns out they just heard that this photo existed. No one has the photo.

In the original version of this story, TIME reported that "one of the most damning pieces of evidence investigators have in their possession, John Sifton of Human Rights Watch told Time’s Tim McGirk, is a photo, taken by a Marine with his cell phone that shows Iraqis kneeling — and thus posing no threat — before they were shot." While Sifton did tell TIME that there was photographic evidence, taken by Marines, he had only heard about the specific content of the photos from reports done by NBC, and had no firsthand knowledge. TIME regrets the error.

I don’t know about you but the motivations behind all these people and groups make me suspicious.

Believe me when I tell you that these recent charges do not constitute a slam dunk for the Marine Corps case. It’s not over until the fat lady sings and until then I will NOT convict these brave men who fought for our country.

Read over all my posts, especially the ones about the source of the evidence and the very real fact that blood money may be more deeply involved then originally thought before you yourself convict them.

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Curt

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