June 11, 2006

Memorium

A soldier remembered at Blue Crab Boulevard.

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My Lai, or My Lie?

Perhaps this should not be surprising, but Marine Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich gives a version of events exactly opposite of those described by "cold-blooded" Congressman John Murtha and the Sunni residents of Haditha in a story by Josh White in the Washington Post:


Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, 26, told his attorney that several civilians were killed Nov. 19 when his squad went after insurgents who were firing at them from inside a house. The Marine said there was no vengeful massacre, but he described a house-to-house hunt that went tragically awry in the middle of a chaotic battlefield.

[snip]

Wuterich's version contradicts that of the Iraqis, who described a massacre of men, women and children after a bomb killed a Marine. Haditha residents have said that innocent civilians were executed, that some begged for their lives before being shot and that children were killed indiscriminately.

Wuterich told his attorney in initial interviews over nearly 12 hours last week that the shootings were the unfortunate result of a methodical sweep for enemies in a firefight. Two attorneys for other Marines involved in the incident said Wuterich's account is consistent with those they had heard from their clients.

Other comments in the Post article also seem to contradict claims of a cover-up levied by some.

I will not comment at this time to say which version of events is correct, but I'll note that Dan Riehl captured last week the various inconsistencies in the media-reported statements of Haditha residents, which makes this appear to be anything other than a cut-and-dried case as the media so eagerly reported it at first. I'll also note that radio traffic and reputed surveillance video from drone aircraft in the area can provide nearly irrefutable evidence supportingor disproving the facts as presented by some in this case. As Rick Moran notes at Right Wing Nut House:


One side or the other is lying in spectacular fashion.

And not just little inconsistencies in eyewitness testimony that one would expect in a war zone either. There are extremely disturbing indications that press reports detailing eyewitness accounts have failed to reconcile what Iraqis in Haditha were telling them with other known facts that were either conveniently left out or ignored altogether. There are also clear and unambiguous cases where Iraqi eyewitnesses have changed their stories 2, 3, and even more times.

It will be very interesting to see which side is lying, and what the repercussions of that lying will be.

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June 09, 2006

Zarqawi Strike Aftermath

AllahPundit digs this up from the Times of London:


Al-Zarqawi's second wife Israa, in her late teens, and their 18-month-old baby, Abdul Rahman, died in the strike, Jordanian officials told The Times. Israa was the daughter of Yassin Jarrad, a Palestinian Islamic militant, who is blamed for the killing in 2004 of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, the Iraqi Shia leader.

Officials also said that Jordan would not allow the body of al-Zarqawi to be buried in his native country.

I guess I should feel sorrow that Zarqawi's wife and child died, but I can't seem to find my sympathy right now. Israa is the daughter and wife of terrorists, and the world is diminished by her loss no more than it was when Eva Braun died, and perhaps less.

Abdul Rahman, some are sure to note, was only an 18-month old infant, and it is true that he has done nothing wrong. He was however, the son and grandson of terrorists, and odds were that he would have grown into the "family business." If Uday and Qusay Hussein are any indication, he could have grown up to be even more of a sociopath than his father.

But the violent termination of the al-Zarqawi bloodline isn't the only news of note in this Times article. The move to center stage of Zarqawi's suspected successor shoots holes in one of the most firmly held liberal lies about the war, that Iraq had no ties with al Qaeda before the 2003 invasion:


...al-Zarqawi's likely successor was an Egyptian national, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, whom the radical leader first met in 2001 at a terrorism training camp in Afghanistan. Al-Masri, who has a $50,000 (£27,000) price on his head, is believed have come to Baghdad in 2002 on a mission to set up al-Qaeda's first cell in Iraq.

al-Masri was setting up al Qaeda cells in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion?

So much for the liberal lie that there were no terrorists in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion (well except for Abu Nidal. And Abu Abbas. And Abdul Rahman Yasin. And—oh, you get the point)

Look for this "fact" to be hammered again and again as long as al-Masri remains alive.

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Loose Lips

After reading this post at the Corner (h/t Instapundit)and just a few minutes of internal deliberation, I decided that we need to find the man in this article and make an example of him to others:


The Americans had gotten close before, but Mr. Zarqawi had always managed to get away. He was an elusive and wary figure who knew well how much the Americans relied on high technology to track down suspects: he and his men refrained from using cellphones, knowing how easily they could be tracked. Instead, American officials said, they relied on handheld satellite phones, manufactured by a company called Thuraya, to communicate with one another. The Thurayas were more difficult to track.

Indeed, what the Americans had always lacked was someone from inside Mr. Zarqawi's network, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who would betray him — someone close enough and trusted enough to show the Americans where he was.

According to a Pentagon official, the Americans finally got one. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the raid are classified, said that an Iraqi informant inside Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia provided the critical piece of intelligence about Mr. Rahman's meeting with Mr. Zarqawi. The source's identity was not clear — nor was it clear how that source was able to pinpoint Mr. Zarqawi's location without getting killed himself.

"We have a guy on the inside who led us directly to Zarqawi," the official said.

This man should be hunted down ruthlessly, exposed, and imprisoned, or if allowed by law, executed as a warning to others. I'm talking, of course, about the “Pentagon official” who “spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the raid are classified.”



Once again, the Pentagon leaked classified National Security information to the New York Times. Once again, the Times published this information with reckless disregard for the lives it puts in danger.



We had an asset inside al Qaeda, one that helped us find and kill al-Zarqawi and seven of his top lieutenants. This same asset could have presumably stayed hidden and provided further intelligence, helping roll up other senior terrorist leaders in al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, dismantling their network from the inside. Perhaps he or she could have shortened the war to some extent, and in doing so, could have saved the lives of American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, or more likely, save the lives of the Iraqi soldiers, police, and civilians who have been the focus of the brunt of al Qaeda's attacks.



Instead, the Pentagon leaks continue, and this asset was compromised within one day of al-Zarqawi's end.



Evil men who could have been compromised will continue to haunt this earth. The blood of good men—and women, and children—will continue to soak Iraqi soil. All because of a simple betrayal that this anonymous Pentagon official no doubt sees as nothing, or almost nothing; a simple favor for a journalist.



But this “favor” can cost lives in a war far from over, and this “favor” is a form of treason, a form of espionage, and a form of sabotage, one that should be exposed and prosecuted with ruthless aggression.



When people talk in war, people die. It's time to root out those that talk, and put them where they belong.


6/11/06 Update: It's like Chris Muir can read my mind...

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June 08, 2006

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Is...




Update:Perhaps not too surprisingly, some Democrats are taking this as an opportunity to retreat, and Texas Rainmaker notes that the hive--well, mind isn't quite the right word--at the Democratic Underground is already in overdrive.


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Veracity of Haditha Witnesses is Questionable

I'm starting to understand why the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has been working so long to develop physical evidence and forensics to base their Haditha investigation on.

Dan Riehl notes in comparisons of "witness" interviews in various media outlets that few if any of the Haditha witnesses are credible. One of the witnesses even admits to knowing that an IED blast was imminent.

This information would in no way make it acceptable for U.S. Marines to shoot civilians (in Haditha or anywhere else) without just cause, but it does make this incident far more complex than many initially thought.

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June 07, 2006

Young Americans

Raw.

That one word sums up what I've seen in the trailer of Pat Dollard's Young Americans (link on this page definitely NSFW), a documentary shot over seven months in places like Fallujah and Ramadi in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq with U.S. Marines.

Dollard was injured in an IED attack on his Humvee on February 18.



The HMMWV Dollard was in when it was destroyed by an IED in Ramadi, Iraq.

Unlike others reporting events in Iraq who were injured by IEDs, a Google News search reveals just one only article about Patrick Dollard in Iraq. I guess if you aren't reporting the right stories you don't deserve much of a mention.

The trailer I viewed for Young Americans is, if anything, excruciatingly raw, often vulgar, but almost certainly real footage of how frontline Marines act after the networks retire back to the Green Zone.



Private Zachary Kother (left), Pat Dollard (center), Lance Corporal Eric Cybulski (right). survived the IED attack that killed Lt. Almar Fitzgerald and Corporal Matthew Conley.

Dollard himself is something of a controversial figure, a former Hollywood agent and producer (read more here) that looks like a cross between Anthony Perkins and R. Lee Ermey who generates strong opinions from those who know him.

All the footage taken in Dollard's seven months in Iraq in Ramadi, Fallujah and other part of the "Triangle of Death" were shot by Dollard himself or the Marines he was with, and the 600 hours of high-def footage is being edited into a 15-20 hour ultra-reality series for cable.

Dollard's "Young Americans" trailer isn't pretty, isn't politically correct, and isn't going to be liked by many people.

In short, it's war.

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Other Than Honorable

Today, quite a few news outlets and blogs are discussing the case of Army 1st. Lt. Ehren Watada, an officer in the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division based in Fort Lewis, Washington, who has stated the intention to refuse deployment to Iraq with the rest of his unit this month. His stated reason?


"I feel that we have been lied to and betrayed by this administration," Watada said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Fort Lewis. "It is the duty, the obligation of every soldier, and specifically the officers, to evaluate the legality, the truth behind every order — including the order to go to war."

If Watada follows through with his stated intentions, he will likely be the first military officer to refuse deployment to Iraq. Further in the article, Watada's father explains his son's reasoning:


His father — Robert Watada, a retired Hawaii state official — was opposed to the war in Vietnam, and was able to do alternative service in the Peace Corps in Peru.

And Robert Watada said he laid out the "pros and cons" of military service as his son considered joining the service in the spring of 2003 as the invasion of Iraq was launched.

"He knew very well of my decision not to go to Vietnam, and he had to make his own decision to join the Army," Robert Watada said. "It was very noble. He felt like he wanted to do his part for his country."

After the younger Watada enlisted, he was sent to officer-training school in Georgia. Watada said he supported the war at that time because he believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

"I had my doubts," he said. "But I felt like the president is our leader, and he won't betray our trust, and he would know what he was talking about, and let's give him the benefit of the doubt." Over the past year, his feeling changed as he read up on the war and became convinced that there was "intentional manipulation of intelligence" by the Bush administration.

In January, Watada told his commanders that he believed that the war was unlawful, and therefore, so were his deployment orders. He did not, however, consider himself a conscientious objector, since he was willing to fight in wars that were justified, legal and in defense of the nation.

So Watada's basic argument is this: he joined the U.S. Army several months after the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, because he believed that Iraq under Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). For reasons not clearly stated, Watada then determined that in his mind, "that we have been lied to and betrayed by this administration," and that he didn't have to deploy in what he regarded as an "illegal" and "immoral" war.

Watada's stance has garnered the support of many on the far left, presumably from the very same web sites and blogs where he "read up on the war" and became convinced that "there was 'intentional manipulation of intelligence' by the Bush administration."

I might have some sympathy for Lt. Watada's position if he had formally stated his opposition to the war to his superiors in his nearly three years of continuous military service until this point. Instead, he withheld these sentiments until his deployment orders were issued. Watada's newly-pronounced idealism reeks of an attempt to cover for other mortal flaws in his own character, shows a profound lack of loyalty to his men, and betrays an absence of any true and binding morality.

Soldiers do not get to pick and choose their wars, yet hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Guardsmen, and Reserves have cycled into an out of Iraqi in the past three years of war, and while many perhaps felt that this war was not one they would chose, they followed their lawful orders to deploy.

They do not do this because they love combat, nor death, nor deprivation. They give up families, stability and even their lives, because of honor, duty and loyalty. They do this because of bonds between soldiers that civilians such as you or I will never truly understand.

Ehren Watada has betrayed the men in his command. He has shown that his fear of dying, and flailing political sensibilities are stronger than is sense of duty and loyalty to his men, and be betrayed his oath and his commitment to this nation.

Based upon the previous convinctions of other soldiers and sailors, Watada will likely be court-martialed and demoted, perhaps sentenced to prison, and when he is finally excreted from the military criminal justice system, it will be with with a Other-Than-Honorable (OTH) discharge, with which he will be able to continue to live out an other-than-honorable life.

Update: Kim Priestap at Wizbang and Michelle Malkin have more.

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June 06, 2006

Breaking: LAW in Durham

WRAL TV (no story link yet) in Raleigh is reporting that two light antitank weapons have been found by a contractor working at a home in Durham, NC. A weapons disposal team is on the way from Fort Bragg.

More as the story develops.

Blind Speculation: I'm going on a hunch that if a contractor found these in a home being renovated, they may be older rockets, perhaps 70s-era M72s... and they very well could be inert.

Update: Via WRAL:


Authorities said a contractor found two suspected rocket launchers under a Durham home early Tuesday evening.

According to police, the contractor was doing work on a rental property on Midland Terrace around 6:30 p.m. when he discovered found two items that appeared to be lightweight anti-tank weapons in a crawl space under the house.

Police evacuated residences in the immediate vicinity and blocked Midland Terrace between Faucette Avenue and Cheek Road. Durham, state and federal authorities responded to the scene after the discovery. Authorities said that a bomb squad from Fort Bragg is expected to arrive at the scene overnight to inspect and dispose of the device.

According to authorities, no one was injured by the weapons. Police are trying to determine where the devices came from and how they ended up in that location.

Google Maps shows us that the suspected anti-tank weapons are in one of these homes not too far from the I-85/U.S. 70 interchange between Floyd Drive and Aiken Avenue.



Hopefully, members of the Duke University Lacrosse team were not among the renters.

6:49 AM Update: WRAL states that Fort Bragg EOD has removed the devices and confirms that "two items originally believed to be two anti-tank weapons -- each measuring around two feet in length" are in fact inert.

Their length and description all but confirms them as the disposable launcher tube-and-firing mechanism of the obsolete M72 LAW, which is 24.8 inches long (closed), or the reloadable M190 training variant of the same weapons system.

I suspect that the tube assemblies were obtained as souvenirs, and I cannot immediately find any applicable firearms legislation that would indicate that the possession of such devices would be illegal, since they cannot readily be made into functional weapons.

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A Higher Standard

Think of this CNN report the next time you here a member of the media or a hyperventilating liberal blogger intone that the military is whitewashing potential war crimes in Iraq:


Seven Marines and a Navy medical corpsman are being held in the brig at California's Camp Pendleton, as commanders weigh possible charges against them in connection with the April 26 killing.

[snip]

An attorney representing the Navy medical corpsman, expressed concern that the media frenzy surrounding the case "has contributed to the current conditions my client is enduring at the Camp Pendleton Brig."

"There are known terrorists incarcerated in military facilities around the world who enjoy more freedom and less restriction than he is experiencing," Jeremiah J. Sullivan said in a statement issued to the media.

"During the one brief period per day he is allowed to utilize the recreational yard, my client remains shackled at the hands, waist, and ankles. Anytime he walks within the recreational yard he is escorted by at least one military prison guard who grasps onto his waist shackles at all times. The balance of his time is spent in solitary confinement," Sullivan said.

If this account is accurate, then captured al Qaeda terrorists confined at Guantanamo Bay have more freedom that do U.S. military servicemen and women that have not yet been charged with a crime.


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June 05, 2006

An Atrocity of Atrocities?

It is but one of several atrocity cases that you will find the press laying at the feet of American Marines in Iraq, but the death of Hashim the Lame strikes me as among the most curious, and potentially the most troubling.

Other incidents in Iraq have led to the deaths of Iraqi civilians at the hands of American Marines. Haditha was the incident that triggered the current media frenzy, and is under investigation as a possible war crime after 24 Iraqi civilians were killed by a Marine unit after an IED attack killed on of their own.

In Ishaqi, a disputed number of women and children were killed after an air strike was called in on a house that was engaging Marines with intense small arms fire. The Marines were cleared after an investigation determined that men with ties to al Qaeda, including an al Qaeda financier, initiated the firefight. The financier was pulled alive from the rubble and is now in U.S. custody.

In both of these incidents, the Marines were responding to immediate provocations. If Iraqi accounts of the death of Hashim Ibrahim Awad al-Zobaie are correct, this killing had no such immediate trigger.

The official Marine account and the version of events told by Iraqi villagers could not be more different:


Members of the Marine foot patrol under investigation in the case said they came upon Hashim digging a hole for a bomb near his home in the Sunni Arab village of about 30 homes near Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. The Marines said they killed Hashim in a brief gun battle and that they found an AK-47 assault rifle and a shovel by his side.

According to accounts given by Hashim's neighbors and members of his family, and apparently supported by photographs, the Marines went to Hashim's home, took the 52-year-old disabled Iraqi outside and shot him four times in the face. The assault rifle and shovel next to his body had been planted by the Marines, who had borrowed them from a villager, family members and other residents said.

The family members of al-Zobaie have agreed to allow an exhumation and autopsy, which should she light onto which version of events is more accurate. I'm hoping that the Marine account is accurate for the simple reason that the alternative—that Marines singled out and premeditated the murder of a cripple for unknown reasons—is so difficult to contemplate.


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June 04, 2006

The Silence of the Lambs

If you visit the always useful memeorandum.com to see how the blogosphere is responding to the arrests of 17 terrorists in Canada, you'll notice something: not a single left-of-center blog of note will discuss it.

Not yesterday afternoon.

Not last night.

Not this morning.

Ace of Spades noticed this phenomenon last night, and writes:


Not a word about it at has-been harridan Jane Hamsher's combination blog-slash-application for voluntary state psychiatric confinement.

The Daily Kos mentions it as a single item in an open thread about three other news stories, the other three fairly trivial.

Mostly Open Threads are opened. Later in the day, "Georgia" posts this:

Open Thread

by georgia10

Sat Jun 03, 2006 at 05:03:58 PM PDT

It's a slow news day...so what's going on in your corner of the world?

Yes, very slow news day, Georgia. So what's going on? Well, in the state you either live in or share the name of, two Muslim extremists -- or, should I say, Terrorist-Americans -- are named as co-conspirators with the Toronto megabombers.

So, no big whoop. Go back to sleep.

Nada at former Democratic strategist (or something) Peter Daou's "The Grit" blog. He does have time to mention Haditha, of course.

Nothing at Atrios, despite a higher post-to-open-thread ratio today.

Nothing at Jesus' General... though he does think he's pretty funny for showing American kids at a gun range, with a caption saying "GOOD," and Palestinian kids parading with guns, with a caption saying "BAD." Apparently it is lost on him that the American kids shoot at targets, whereas the Palestinian kids (who are younger) shoot at human beings.

Oh, and blow themselves up in pizzarias.

Nothing on Andrew Sullivan. He talks about -- yes, wait for it! -- Haditha and the other alleged "massacres," and also about how much spiritual support disco-pop-synth band Pet Shop Boys have provided him.

Otherwise-- radio silence.



IS ANY LEFT WING BLOGGER COMMENTING ON THIS STORY AT ALL?

Or is it too dangerous to alienate readers by presenting discomfiting facts?

Why, one would almost imagine that a victory in the War on Terror is unwelcome news to them. It's almos as if it's... bad news for them or something.

One could almost venture to postulate, even, that their political and personal interests are precisely aligned with the terrorists'.

Almost.


The Man That Liberals Hate Most lays on the snark:


Somehow, I have a feeling someone's civil rights were violated during all this “investigating” and “probing.” And if that's the case, well, then the terrorists will have already won.

Although to be sure, lots of buildings and public transit venues in a number of countries remain intact as a result—and thousands of innocent civilians were probably spared. Still, small consolation indeed if it turns out some “spy agency” somewhere plucked a conversation out of (cyber)space and used it to zero in on these guys.

Keep an eye on Glenn Greenwald's site for updates and analysis on how, during these overlapping probes, the Constitution was shredded.

Yes, the "true patriots" are silent as the grave on this subject. This "unpleasantness" reminds them we are at war, which tends to destroy the wall of illusion they've been laboring to build since 9/11/01 that we are isolated and safe.

I'm sure they'll snap back later today. They can't let reality intrude over fantasy for too long, you know.

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June 03, 2006

Close to Home: Terror Sweep in Canada

Via CNN:


Canadian police on Saturday said they have prevented a major al Qaeda-inspired terror plot to attack targets in southern Ontario.

Twelve adults and five young people were arrested, authorities said.

"This group took steps to acquire three tons of ammonium nitrate and other components necessary to create explosive devices," said Royal Canadian Mounted Police Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell in a statement.

"To put this in context, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people took one ton of ammonium nitrate."

The detained suspects are all men, Canadian residents "from a variety of backgrounds" and followers of a "dangerous ideology inspired by al Qaeda," said Luc Portelance, assistant director of operations for Canadian Security Intelligence Service, in a news conference.

The targets were all in Toronto, CNN's Jeanne Meserve reported at least one source as telling her.

The charges include: participating in terrorist group activity, including training and recruitment; the provision of property for terrorist purposes; and the "commission of indictable offenses, including firearms and explosives in association with a terrorist group."

What authorities are not saying—and will almost certainly not confirm—is the distinct possibility that this plot was uncovered via the NSA foreign intelligence surveillance program that the NY Times tried to label a “domestic spying” program. As most international communications into North America filter through U.S. switching equipment, it seems logical that if international communications were involved, the NSA would be the lead agency handing off information their counterparts in Canadian border police and intelligence agencies.

CNN also suggests—but doesn't support—is that this raid could be tied to the London terror raid conducted Friday that foiled a suspected chemical weapons plot.

Update: Via Stop the ACLU, it appears that internet monitoring was indeed responsible for helping break the al Qaeda cell:


The investigation began back in 2004, when CSIS was monitoring Internet sites and tracing the paths of Canadians believed to have ties to international terrorist organizations. Local youths espousing fundamentalist views drew special attention, sources say.

[snip]

Four months after authorities began to fear that Canada might have its own homegrown terrorist cell, two Americans entered the picture.

Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi descent who had attended high school in Ontario, and Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, a student at Georgia Tech, boarded a Greyhound bus in Atlanta on March 6, 2005, and travelled to Toronto to meet "like-minded Islamic extremists," a U.S. court document alleges.

The NSA program, as repeated described, tracked targeted communications between terror suspects in the United States, and other countries... like Canada.

I think we have a winner.

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June 02, 2006

Live From Kabul

Blogger Bill Roggio is in Kabul, Afghanistan, and has a podcast up at Pajamas Media about the recent anti-American riots.

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Eating the BBC Alive

I was going to post on the BBC's recent attempt to place another "atrocity" at the feet of the American military, but Bruce Kesler at The Democracy Project gutted them so thoroughly that any attempt to add to his takedown it is wasted effort.

Read the whole thing.

It's nice we can truth the free world's media to be skeptical of our troops while blindly believing insurgent cameramen to be truthful, isn't it?

Update: And just to further gut the BBC, ABC News is reporting that U.S. investigators who started an inquiry into this incident in March have called these allegations "unfounded," and that U.S. forces followed the rules of engagement, capturing the al Qaeda suspect that was the focus of the raid.

I hope they have a recipe for crow.

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June 01, 2006

When Specific Words Matter

I do not think that Will Dunham at al-Reuters—or perhaps his military sources—quite understands the definition of the word "unprovolked."

Mr. Dunham runs with this lede:


A preliminary military inquiry found evidence that U.S. Marines killed two dozen Iraqi civilians in an unprovoked attack in November, contradicting the troops' account, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

While the killings of up to 24 Iraqi civilians that day may be wrong and even criminally so, it was not by any means "unprovoked."

“Unprovolked” conjures up a certain image and a specific definition, namely :


Not provoked or prompted: an unprovolked attack

Clearly, the Marines in Haditha on November 19, 2005 were provoked into action by a very concrete, undisputed event: the detonation of an improvised explosive device by an unknown individual or individuals that killed one Marine and wounded two others. The Marine response to this attack seems to be both misdirected and clearly unacceptable in its result (we'll trust the military criminal justice system to determine the extent of criminal culpability), but if the brutal killing of you fellow Marine in a tremendous explosion isn't provoking, I don't know what is.


I suspect that some will say that the difference between "unprovoked" and "misdirected" is no difference at all, but obviously, if they are willing to argue the point, then those very different words and what they represent to the future of the accused, does indeed matter.

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