Many of us who have followed the Haditha case from the beginning will not be surprised to hear that there were insurgents inside the houses the Marines cleared, as well as inside the vehicle:
Eight of the 24 people whom Marines are accused of killing in Haditha, Iraq, were described yesterday as insurgents by a defense attorney and a Marine liaison officer during a pretrial hearing.
Randy Stone Defense attorney Charles Gittins said the eight were identified by human and electronic intelligence. They were not mentioned by name.
The eight were among five men ordered from a car and shot to death and four men killed in a home cleared by Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, said Gittins, who is representing Capt. Randy Stone at a pretrial hearing at Camp Pendleton. Stone is charged with failing to investigate and properly report the killings.
Last week, Capt. Jeffrey Dinsmore, the intelligence officer for the battalion, testified that “it’s fairly well established through the (unmanned aerial vehicle) coverage that there were insurgents in those homes,” referring to the homes where civilians were killed.
Gittins’ comments outside court were supported by Maj. Dana Hyatt, a Marine liaison officer in Haditha, who testified yesterday under a grant of immunity that four men that Marines killed inside one of three houses that the Marines cleared were insurgents. If proved, the developments could complicate the prosecution of three Marines charged with murder in the November 2005 incident.
“Obviously this will make a difference,” said Tom Umberg, a former military defense counsel, prosecutor and judge. “It’s a fact favorable to the defense. I think it adds a new dynamic to what the Marines did. It may affect whether their actions were reasonable.”
John Hutson, former judge advocate general for the Navy and now president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H., agreed that this could help the defense.
“If it is true and one-third are insurgents, it would certainly be complicated to explain how these guys should have been able to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys,” Hutson said.
Complicated? Yeah, just a bit. They receive small arms fire from the houses during an obvious ambush and they are now expected to just sit there and wait until the enemy runs out of ammo? All because they don’t know if there are human shields inside the houses?
No, you go in and go in hard.
As Ilario Pantano wrote a few days ago, war can be messy. To expect pinpoint accuracy as if your playing a video game is foolhardy:
Illogically high expectations about pinpoint accuracy and target discrimination in a fire-fight are the fantasy of armchair-academics and videogame players. Men on the ground know that war is sloppy and rough. Combat is not a noun or a place that you are “in,” but rather a verb, a thing that you “do” to other people. Principally, combat is imposing your will on the enemy by violence of action and the ugly truth is that the process kills all kinds of people: good ones, bad ones, and yes, even our own. When our expectations of success and precision are unrealistic it threatens not only our service men, it emboldens our enemy, and it breaks our will to stand and fight.
The Marines were ambushed and taking fire from some houses. Even one of the survivors inside one of the houses reported knowing that the IED was going to go off. How would she know this if the terrorists weren’t living amongst them?
A 12-year old survivor of the alleged massacre of innocent civilians by U.S. Marines patrolling Haditha has admitted she had prior knowledge of the plot to detonate an IED as their convoy was passing by her house on the morning of Nov. 19, 2005.
In a CNN interview broadcast Wednesday, Safa Younis – who says eight members of her family were killed by U.S. troops – recalled that she was getting ready for school as the Marine Humvee approached.
"I was planning to go to school. I was about to go out of bed. I knew the bomb would explode so I covered my ears," the youngster said, according to a CNN translator.
Which would suggest that the town was indeed crawling with terrorists.
They get attacked so they do what is necessary to take out the threat. How in the world does anyone come to the conclusion that these Marines "murdered" these people? There was no premeditation, they didn’t drive into Haditha with some evil plan to kill a bunch of civilians.
They were attacked and they fought back….period.
Meanwhile a Marine Intelligence Officer, Captain Dinsmore, testified that he rejected the Haditha city council’s assertions that it was cold blooded murder because the whole town was full of terrorists:
A military intelligence officer testified Friday that he dismissed complaints from the mayor of Haditha and its city council about the slaying of 24 of its townspeople in 2005 because he believed insurgents heavily influenced the local government.
Capt. Jeffrey Dinsmore said he also questioned the veracity of complaints in a pamphlet published by the council a week after the slayings, which took place at the hands of Marines from Camp Pendleton’s 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment Kilo Company.
The flier asserted that the Nov. 19 killings were a massacre by troops enraged by a roadside bombing that killed one of their own. The pamphlet called for an official investigation.
“My assessment was the city council was being used as a tool of insurgent propaganda,” Dinsmore said. “They would take grains of truth and add details that were false and it would end up looking like a wild allegation.”
Which makes complete sense since the only ones accusing the Marines prior to the TIME story were the terrorists:
Insurgent groups have actually made more of the massacre. Within days of TIME’s story (which was picked up by the Arab media), pamphlets appeared in Haditha, congratulating ‘those who participated in exposing the dirty deeds of the Americans’. The pamphlets were released by a group using the name ‘Islamic Resistance’ – a cover for the terrorist group Ansar al-Sunnah. TIME’s story was cited in websites and Internet bulletin boards known to be used by insurgent groups.
And finally, Reuters has got around to issuing a correction to their reporting last week. Recall they wrote on May 10th that the five guys from the vehicle had their hands tied first and then they were shot.
Dela Cruz also said he watched squad leader Sgt. Frank Wuterich shoot five men whose hands were tied up near a car.
Three days later they finally get around to correcting a very large error:
Corrects 5th paragraph to delete word "tied" to make clear hands were held up in the air.
Of course they would never had issued the correction if it were not for bloggers who noticed the error. I’m sure it was just one big mistake. Not like the writer, Marty Graham, had been sitting through the whole trial and heard the entire testimony of Dela Cruz.
Oh wait a minute, he was there throughout Dela Cruz’s testimony.
Sigh….
If you would like to help with the civilian lawyer’s legal fees for the Haditha Marines you can do so by going to these sites.
SSgt. Frank Wuterich
Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani
See author page
There hasn’t been one nanosecond of time from day one that I have believed any of these charges to be even close to the truth. And, forgive my language, but murtha is lower than a POS. Thanks for the space to vent.
Kathleen
Auntie of Marines
Had the honor of working with Marines until I retired. God Bless them. I know they are innocent of Murder.
It is a travesty and a betrayal of America to try them. Bush is no better than Murtha if this continues. If Bush does not Pardon, I will support his impeachment. Bush and his Generals responsible need to re read about Pontious Pilate. ‘Letting the legal process go forward ‘ = “washing my hands of this just man”.
Had friends at NCIS also but somebody has sold out.
Mike the Marine Iridium guy
Jeff kept personal logs and backed up every message and sentence of correspondance from his tour in Iraq. He has everything that proves those Marines totally innocent, and he is determined to not leave one of his unit behind. With the written information that he has submitted I can’t understand how the prosecution can get up in the morning and stand to look at their own images in the mirror. They need to understand that it’s not a game of burn the Devil Dogs, after all the Prosecutors are supposed to be Marines, too. There is no case against the Marines, except by the Insurgents. Chesty Puller would be ashamed.