TIME Issues Retractions About Their Haditha Story

Sweetness and Light has an important post up today about Haditha and the reporting done by Time magazine. Specifically the retractions being made in a few articles such as this one :

Last November, U.S. Marines killed 15 Iraqi civilians in their homes. Was it self-defense, an accident or cold-blooded revenge? A Time exclusive

By TIM MCGIRK / BAGHDAD

Sunday, Mar. 19, 2006

In the original version of this story, TIME reported that "a day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared with TIME." In fact, Human Rights Watch has no ties or association with the Hammurabi Human Rights Group. TIME regrets the error.

Sweetness and Light notes how Time made a big deal about the videotape coming from a "student" and the Human Rights Watch:

In fact, Time had originally reported that it was Human Rights Watch who had provided the tape. They then retracted that and claimed that it came from Hammurabi which works with Human Rights Watch. And now they have backed off even that.

Note that even now Time still does not correct the intentionally false portrayal of the source of the videotape that they gave in all of their original stories and interviews.

Time’s source, Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi, is not a "young man." He is not a "budding journalism student."

[…]Al-Haditha is 43 years old. He "created" Hammurabi 16 months ago. (Before that he worked directly under the head of Haditha’s hospital, Dr. Walid al-Obeidi, who pronounced that all the victims had been shot at close range.)

In fact, al-Haditha is one of Hammurabi’s only two members. He serves as its "Secretary General" while the only other member, Abdul-Rahman al-Mashhadani, performs as its "Chairman.")

Al-Haditha is the one and only person behind this tape. He made it. And he sat on it for four months before turning it over to Time magazine.

As many of us have been stating, this whole incident is starting to smell. Smell because the evidence isn't adding up and the motives of the Iraqi's involved are suspicious. This kind of thing just makes it stink even more.

Sweetness and Light then lay's another doozy with this one:

With the Pentagon completing its probe into whether U.S. forces massacred civilians one November morning in Western Iraq, the damage to America’s image abroad could take a further hit

By MATTHEW COOPER/WASHINGTON

Posted Friday, May. 26, 2006

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.

What! The most damaging piece of evidence is this photo which no one can produce. Human Rights Watch just HEARD there is a picture.

But Time runs this story making it seem like the photo is already booked into evidence.

Amazing!

You think maybe Time may issue a retractions saying "In fact the accusations against the Marines in Haditha have been proven false and we're actually the work of Al-Qaeda, TIME regrets the error."

We will see.

UPDATE

American Thinker has an excellent article up that details more the dubious evidence:

A key source for McGirk’s report that US Marines in Haditha had deliberately attacked civilians was Thaer al-Hadithi. whom McGirk inexplicably described as “a budding journalism student”. He is a middle-aged man, and was subsequently described by the AP as an “Iraqi investigator.”

McGirk also failed to note that Hadithi is “a member and spokesman for the Hammurabi.” The chairman of Hammurabi Organization and Hadithi’s partner in publicizing the “massacre” is Abdul–Rahman al-Mashhadani. It is unknown if he is related to Ali al-Mashhadani but their names suggest a possible relationship, and it beggars belief that as Sweetness& Light notes,

“Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani just happened to be given a video by and unnamed local. And that he then turned it over to Ali al-Mashhadani who just happens to make videos for Reuters.”

Hadithi’s story is that was staying near to one of the two houses where the massacre occurred and saw it with his own eyes. According to his version of events he waited one day to videotape what had occurred, though apparently nothing prevented his doing so from the very window he “watched” it from as it took place. More troubling is why he waited months to turn the tape over to anyone.

The actions of his partner al-Mashhadani are equally puzzling. On December 15, 2005 Mashhadani was interviewed by the Institute for War and Peace which described him as “an election monitor.” In that interview he expressed great satisfaction with the election turnout (which in fact was terribly low in Haditha). Why did he not mention to this apparently sympathetic group one word about the supposed “atrocity” which he claimed had occurred three months earlier?

Hammurabi apparently did share the video in March with the largely Soros-funded Human Rights Watch which in turn provided it to Time.

(d)   The videotape. On March 21, 2006 Reuters reported that Hadithi and Mashhadani’s organization, the Hammurabi Organization, had provided the organization was a copy of a videotape showing corpses lined up in the Haditha morgue, claiming these were the bodies of civilians deliberately killed by the Marines. Aside from the suspiciously-timed release of the video and the fact that chairman al-Mashhadani had never mentioned the incident or the tape in December when he was interviewed, the video shows people removing bodies from a home, a report at odds with the Reuters report the day after the incident which spoke of bodies lying in the street.

(e)   The witnesses to the “massacre”

(1)   The Doctor.

In the March 27 report, McGirk quotes the local doctor:

Dr. Wahid, director of the local hospital in Haditha, who asked that his family name be withheld because, he says, he fears reprisals by U.S. troops, says the Marines brought 24 bodies to his hospital around midnight on Nov. 19. Wahid says the Marines claimed the victims had been killed by shrapnel from the roadside bomb. “But it was obvious to us that there were no organs slashed by shrapnel,” Wahid says. “The bullet wounds were very apparent. Most of the victims were shot in the chest and the head–from close range.”

Another report however, indicates the doctor bore considerable animus to the US troops.

(2)The Iraqi eye-witnesses.

In “Haditha: Reasonable Doubt,” Andrew Walden describes how a similar case against British soldiers fell apart , describing the Arabic “blood money” tradition which hardly is as exotic as it sounds. Ask the American Trial Lawyers Association.

Reports of the eyewitnesses are conflicting and incredible. Al-Haditha was the source of a report by the AP on the death of a man whom the Washington Post quoted 10 times as an eyewitness on May 27,six months after his reported death, and the young girl “survivor” has given between two and four utterly inconsistent versions of the events.

(3) The American eye witnesses.

There are two American witnesses who have spoken out. Despite the press spin, neither has a first hand account of the events.

Lance Cpl. James Crossnan is the source of some very selective quotes on the incident. He, however, was wounded in the IED explosion which killed the US Marine Martin Terrazas. He was evacuated from the scene and saw none of the after-action.

And then there is Lance Cpl. Ryan Briones. He helped evacuate Crossnan and took bodies to the morgue. He was not an eyewitness. He claims he took pictures of the bodies at the morgue and has made various statements about what happened to the pictures and his camera. Aside from the fact that he is not an eyewitness, and his claims about his photographs seem unlikely, his story remained unuttered until he was arrested for stealing a truck, driving under the influence and crashing the stolen vehicle into a house. It was then for the first time that he claimed post traumatic distress and pointed to Haditha as the source of that stress. (His report of taking the bodies to the morgue, moreover, seems inconsistent with the first Reuters report that there were 15 bodies left lying in the street the day after the incident.)

The sum and substance of this thumbnail sketch on the Haditha claims is that it follows so closely the template for the TANG and Plame stories. Take a reporter with an anti-Administration agenda, an interested group (think of the Mashhadanis as the VIPS in the Plame case or Burkett and Lucy Ramirez in the TANG case) and a story too good to be checked and circumstances where the people attacked are limited in what they can quickly respond to and you get a story which smells to me like it will soon be unraveled.

The more we read into this situation the more it appears the TIME and the MSM are forcing the pieces to fit a scenario that they HOPE is true rather then reporting the news as it actually occurred.

UPDATE II

Wizbang found this article where a minister embedded with the Haditha Marines at the time did not find anything unusual had happened:

The father spent 12 days with the unit in January in Haditha as a reporter with the Sacramento, California-based K-Love Christian Radio Network. He also ministered to the troops.

"It was freezing cold and everybody gathered around this kind of metal fireplace where we chopped up wooden pallets and burned them and we'd sit there and talk about home and family and the deepest things with these kids," he said in an interview on Thursday. "Not once did anything come up that something horrible had happened."

"They talked about the first battle of Falluja and things that haunt them. They'd talk about they had mortars land right beside them that were duds and three landed right beside them and a third one went off and it injured the buddy next to them and they didn't get hit."

He said he also did not feel animosity from Iraqis he encountered while on patrol with Kilo company in Haditha.

"You would think that if something horrible had happened they would just disappear or just have nothing to do with these folks," Mathes said. "They came out on the streets and brought us bread and tea and invited us into their homes. The businessmen would have them come into their shops."

Christopher Price, a Georgia-based Presbyterian minister who traveled with Mathes to Iraq, also reported he saw no signs of bad feelings between Iraqis and Kilo company.

UPDATE III

Jonathan Gurwitz writes about the liberal shrill cries for war crimes prosecutions even before the investigation is completed, and hey, what about Darfur?

On May 29, two days before it ran Kuperman's op-ed, the New York Times placed the following headline above the fold: "Witness Accounts Tie Marines to Killings of 24 Civilians." In the days that followed, no less than three stories about Haditha appeared on the front page.

The Times, of course, was not unique in this regard. Nor was the Haditha revelry or the generous reception given to allegations of American misdeeds limited to the print medium. Evening newscasts were replete with breathless remonstrations of, as Rep. Murtha put it, "cold-blooded murder" by the Marines. Blogress Arianna Huffington, referring to a Newsweek story, alluded to "drugged up, hallucinating, and stressed out U.S. troops, 'killing the wrong people all the time.'"

Something very bad happened in Haditha. And it is very possible that some or all of the allegations against the Marines regarding those 24 deaths will be borne out by impartial investigation.

But ask yourself if you have ever seen a leading news story, let alone a series of news stories, about the genocide in Sudan.

Ask yourself how the Islamic world can be so enraged about 24 deaths in Haditha and the indignities of Abu Ghraib, while there is no outcry about the death of 400,000 Muslims and the atrocities in Darfur.

Ask yourself why Lynndie England is the most recognizable name from the war in Iraq, while you may never have even heard the name of Paul Ray Smith.

Ask yourself why every misdeed and every accident of the U.S. military is made a media spectacle, while the thousands of success stories and humanitarian efforts chronicled by Bill Crawford for National Review Online — and previously by Arthur Chrenkoff on his blog — go unnoticed.

And ask yourself why liberal commentators seem less inclined to get to the truth of what happened in Haditha and to prosecute for war crimes those who may be responsible for what happened there than they are to quickly assign blame to President Bush for stressing out the troops, putting them in an unwinnable war, not giving them the resources they need, creating the circumstances for another My Lai, and on and on.

Yes, truth is generally more complicated than idealized fiction. But here's a simple truth: if Americans are responsible for war crimes in Haditha, the U.S. military will prosecute and punish them long before any semblance of justice is meted out from the tribunals for Rwanda, the Balkans, Sudan and Iraq, which have already plodded along for years.

What must America's enemies think when members of the American political and intellectual classes find ways to mitigate the responsibility of the butchers of Darfur while condemning the men of Kilo Company for murder in Haditha?

And this great cartoon (via Sister Toldjah)

Sums it up quite nicely.

I think a quote from William Tecumseh Sherman would also fit nicely:

"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast."

UPDATE IV

Allah at Hot Air is a bit skeptical, as we all should be of both sides of this story, but does end with this excellent fact:

All I’ll say is this: if it turns out Time was hoaxed, if this ends up being little more than a smear job on the Marines, the backlash will be ferocious like nothing blogs have ever seen. Rathergate will pale by comparison.

You bet your ass the backlash will be ferocious.

Also, one of the wives of the accused has set up a website for donations for their defense.

UPDATE V

Oliver North writes today about a the killing of Zarqawi and how quickly victories are forgotten by the left so they can hype the "massacres":

Here's a "self-test" to prove how well this "branding" works. Clip or print this article. Put it in a pocket and a week from now, whip it out and ask a "representative sample" of your family, friends and associates two questions: "What happened at Bakuba?" And then, "What happened at Haditha?" Tabulate the results. Prediction: Eight of ten will be able to tell you something about "Marines accused of killing civilians" in Haditha. Fewer than three in ten will know anything about Bakuba — and only a few will even know that it's in Iraq.

Bakuba, in case you have already forgotten — or never heard — is where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the most brutal terrorists in history, was tracked down and killed by Joint Task Force 145 — a special air-sea-ground unit of the U.S. Special Operations Command. That was good news — and, therefore, transitory. Haditha, on the other hand, is here to stay.

What did or didn't happen in Haditha, Iraq last November will remain a full-throttle topic for every "talk-jock" with a microphone for months to come. TV, radio, and newspaper pundits, armchair admirals, bar-room brigadiers and pontificating politicians are all openly opining on the fates of those involved. Most want you to remember the "horror" of "American crimes" in Haditha. Others purport to be "outraged" at the "mistreatment" of the U.S. personnel allegedly involved. Some politicians, like Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., claim to "know" that Americans committed murder "in cold blood." None of them know what they are talking about because not one of them has seen the final reports of ongoing investigations.

The dissonant reporting and commentary about the two places — Bakuba and Haditha — reflects far more than a difference in what's "known" before you hear, see or read the "news" from each. From bloggers to broadcasters, few of today's "reporters," editors or news directors require two or more sources to corroborate a story. Journalists blame intense competition for ratings and circulation in a "24-hour news cycle" for "minor factual errors" and an "if it bleeds it leads" mentality. Politicians claim that they need to be "out front" on issues important to their constituents.

These are lame excuses for what's really going on — and the Bakuba-Haditha stories are perfect examples of what's been happening in this war since the liberation of Baghdad. The critics of the Bush administration and those who seek political advantage in denigrating America's military have decided: Haditha — like Abu Gharib — is going to be beaten like a rented mule. Bakuba — like the capture of Saddam outside of Tikrit — will be "buried" like every other "good news" story coming from this war. And the Washington politicians are helping to make sure that happens.

Hell, minutes after the news came out that Zarqawi had been killed the left was already in full throttle mode trying to down play it. They will now down play any news that the Haditha incident may not have occurred as TIME first reported.

Same ole' same ole' from the MSM and the left.

UPDATE VI

The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin has a editorial today which pulls together a few different events to describe the Haditha situation:

On Saturday, Nov. 28, 1987 Tawana Brawley, an African-American teenager who had been missing for four days, claimed she had been brutally assaulted by three white men, at least one of them a police officer.

The Brawley case became national news immediately. "Civil rights" leaders, like Al Sharpton, Alton Maddox and Vernon Mason held rallies denouncing the incident. The three claimed that the entire case was a cover-up. Louis Farrakhan led marchers in support of Tawana. TV talk show hosts, like Phil Donahue, promoted Brawley's cause.

The Brawley incident was eventually revealed to be a hoax.

[…]The reason for mentioning these incidents is to illustrate that occasionally false accusations are made against police officers and information about the criminal justice system. It is necessary to keep this in mind when thinking about the alleged atrocity at Haditha.

Some journalists, politicians, and others opposed to the war have acted as judge, jury, and executioner. Take, for example, the callow and sciolistic columnist, who wrote an article titled "The Few, the Proud, the Murderers," which states, "There were no insurgents hiding among civilians. There was no crossfire. The Marines weren't defending themselves. They were out on a rampage, murdering at point-blank leisure, lodging bullets in the heads of women and children … When you train men not only to kill but to become sub-human drones who dehumanize their enemy in turn, and when you place them in situations where they want to see nothing but sub-human creatures, you can't expect them not to act the part they've been trained to act!"

What, or how, the columnist knows about the Marines' training and its correlation to the alleged incident is never stated. He simply makes the assertion they are murderers and claims to know why.

[…]If the Marines are guilty, they should be punished.

However if they are not, the braying accusers should be exposed and discredited for the sanctimonious hypocrites they are. They are the very same people who are the first to condemn others about abusing civil rights. They are the very same people who have appointed themselves guardians of justice and equality – yet somehow never apply those ideals to law enforcement or military personnel accused of crimes.

Of course, we know that is not going to happen. Liberals never suffer the consequences of their actions – unlike United States Marines.

Sadly the accusers fade away into the woodwork instead of being exposed and discredited. They fade away waiting for the next opportunity to become a victim.

UPDATE VII

Look at this article from Nov 25th, 2005 that appears to be the Haditha incident: (h/t Free Republic )

A roadside bomb that killed a US Marine in the restive town of Haditha on Saturday also killed 15 Iraqi civilians and led to intense clashes with insurgents.

The powerful bomb detonated as a US military convoy was passing through the town, which is 220 kilometres north-west of Baghdad.

The US military says immediately after the blast, gunmen opened fire on the convoy.

US and Iraqi soldiers returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another in a firefight.

A cameraman working for Reuters in Haditha says bodies had been left lying in the street for hours after the attack.

He says the town has been virtually shut down for the past two days as US and Iraqi forces try to impose order.

US troops have been trying for months to quell the insurgency in Haditha and other Sunni Arab towns on the Euphrates.

It was suspected several months ago that Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was hiding out in the area.

The casualties from Saturday's blast raised the death toll from attacks across Iraq over the past three days to at least 166.

Sunni-led insurgents are stepping up their battle against US and Iraqi forces ahead of parliamentary elections in December.

So a cameraman witnessed the whole incident but failed to tell the media that the Marines had "massacred" a few families?

Do you really believe a Al-Reuters cameraman would not report to Al-Reuters this fact if it indeed happened?

Other's Blogging:

As many of us have been stating, this whole incident is starting to smell. Smell because the evidence isn’t adding up and the motives of the Iraqi’s involved are suspicious. This kind of thing just makes it stink even more.

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