All: A link to this article was posted on one of yesterday's threads. I wanted to be sure as many people as possible saw it, hence the ping.
Posted on 05/13/2007 10:50:11 PM PDT by ScaniaBoy
It's not getting big coverage but new information information could lead the military court to believe, as we suggested earlier, that the Haditha incident was manufactured by an anti-American writer for Time magazine, some "human rights" groups and the enemy. Rick Rogers of the San Diego Union Tribune reports:
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. 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.
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.
So four of the five men in the car were "insurgents" aka terrorists - sounds like a pretty pertinent fact!
Thank you for posting this!
I’m not surprised that it all leads back to the Lefties. They will do anything to harm our troops, country, and president. They are the enemy within.
Prayers for the acquittal of all the Marines in this case!
ping!
(Do you have a ping list on the Haditha case?)
(( ping ))
_____________________________________________
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.
"The bomb [then] exploded," she explained. "The bomb struck an armored vehicle. I don't know if it was a Humvee or an armored vehicle. When the bomb exploded, they came straight to my house."
WOW!!! So it turns out that the five men who raced up in the car were apparently enemy combatants after all!
This information needs to be verified and the whole bogus case thrown out ASAP.
Then I’d like to urinate on the scumbags who mounted this prosecution.
Thank you for posting this! There was a good discussion on this topic at this thread, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1832789/posts
Glad to see it’s getting some coverage.
And the journalist who gave life to this travesty should be sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor on bread and water in one of those bloodstained houses. With a 24-hour webcam broadcasting it to CNN around the world. Forever.
I’m not familiar with the workings of a military court-whether the defense can call witness’, but that being said-I would love to see the defendant’s attorney call none other than the big wind bag himself-John Murtha to testify as to what and who were his sources of information-”what did he know, and when did he know it”.
All: A link to this article was posted on one of yesterday's threads. I wanted to be sure as many people as possible saw it, hence the ping.
Looks like the only court martials in this travesty are going to be in the prosecution’s office. Stooges for Turda.
Pray for W and Our Marines
Thank you for posting that everywhere. :-) It needs to be seen! (And understood)
Not that that legally should make a huge difference. The question is not whether the Haditha Marines were right in considering the Iraqis in the car or in the home to be insurgents. Instead, the question is whether the Marines reasonably perceived them to be a threat. It's a lower standard, and one which the defense would do well to exploit. It's just not a good idea to get caught up in arguments about whether or not the victims actually were insurgents, since it's unnecessary and will inevitably result only in arguments of "are so!" and "are not!"
What an odd statement to make considering the FACT our Marines were called cold blooded murderers looooong before any investigation could produce any sort of evidence.
That should not have been taken at face value nor was it a "fact."
the question is whether the Marines reasonably perceived them to be a threat.
Of course the Marines reasonably perceived them to be a threat! They were in a battle for their lives, in which one of their brothers had already lost his, and in the middle of a war zone.
Hey, jude. Good to see you.
Yes, it is important to separate the “trial by media” from the actual proceedings.
Personally, I would have favored a closed tribunal with the names of the accused only being released if guilty verdicts were reached.
The circumatances of this case, however, are such that the Corps itself is under suspicion so that isn’t practical. So the civ attorneys are fighting on two fronts.
It is important that, when the Marines are exonerated, the general public accept the verdict as reasonable. The media coverage does, unfortunately, matter.
Legally speaking, that's irrelevant except for a possible Command Influence argument (which would be a long shot).
Of course the Marines reasonably perceived them to be a threat! They were in a battle for their lives, in which one of their brothers had already lost his, and in the middle of a war zone.
It's not immediately apparent that the way they cleared the houses - killing women and children - was reasonable nor proportionate. Even granting that the Marines had reason to believe the guys in the car and some of the houses contained insurgents, the issue still remains whether they reasonably perceived the other houses - namely the ones with non-combatant women and children - contained a threat to them.
This is what the Marines will have the hardest time proving - that their actions were reasonable with respect to clearing **all** the houses. It can be done (and it would be easier to prove this than to get dragged into the politically polarizing insurgent argument this thread proposes).
You're probably right. This is why, if I were in private practice defending the Marines, I'd almost certainly retain a media consultant. (A Marine JAG assigned to defend the soldiers wouldn't have the resources to do so, though if I were a JAG defending the Marines, I'd place a phone call to a friend who knew something about public and media relations.) Popular perception simply is not an area I focus on, nor particularly care about.
What sort of PC nonsense is being espoused by the media that women living with insurgents can not be terrorists, much less their children?
We know they can be suicide bombers, and will openly raise and praise their children for growing up to be terrorists and suicide bombers.
It seems the media wants to glorify the terrorists as protectors of the homeland who are just trying to keep their families safe.
For that image to stick, all women and children must be victims, not aggressors
This flies directly in the face of everything we've learned about how people are raised in Islamist controlled areas.
1st and foremost among the lessons is Jihad - they're even using Mickey Mouse to put the point across. How old does a kid have to be before he will kill as he has been taught?
I don't know if any of the women or kids that got killed in those houses were terrorists, or if and how many were killed by other terrorists beforehand, and by whom.
I just think it's ridiculous to automatically categorize anyone in a family headed by a terrorist as an innocent.
Another dose of Murtha/Durbin anyone?
Here ya go...but this is NOT command influence, make NO mistake about it!
Rep. John Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, told reporters Wednesday [that would have been May 17th] that he got his information from U.S. commanders, who said the investigation will show that the Marines deliberately killed the civilians.
"There was no firefight.
There was no IED that killed these innocent people.
Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and
they killed innocent civilians in cold blood," Murtha said on May 17, 2006.
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