Latest related thread:
Blue Star Dad Organizes West Coast Motorcycle Run to Show Support for the Haditha Marines, update at post 70.
Posted on 06/23/2007 8:28:34 PM PDT by RedRover
IN November 2005, a group of marines killed 24 Iraqi men, women and children after Sunni Arab insurgents detonated a roadside bomb in Haditha that killed one infantryman and wounded two others. Marine officers assumed the Iraqi deaths occurred during combat and were justified, if regrettable.
More than a year later, in December 2006, the Marine Corps charged three enlisted men with murder in those deaths, as well as four officers with dereliction of duty in failing to determine exactly how and why the Iraqis were killed. All have said they did nothing wrong.
Military hearings began last month. But the episode might have gone unexamined if not for Tim McGirk, a reporter for Time magazine. In January 2006, he sent an e-mail message to the Second Marine Division in Haditha, asking questions that clearly conveyed his suspicion that an atrocity had been committed.
The Second Division wanted a response to each question from its Third Battalion, which was responsible for fighting insurgents in Haditha. So on Jan. 29, 2006, the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, gathered his executive officer, Maj. Kevin M. Gonzalez, Capt. Lucas M. McConnell, the commander of the company involved in the shootings, and First Lt. Adam P. Mathes, to hash out answers.
The four officers produced a five-page memo of “talking points” and answers that displayed a searing view of American journalists conspiring to undermine the war effort.
The memo, excerpted below with a few typos, came to light in a military hearing earlier this month for one of the accused officers.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
McGirk: How many marines were killed and wounded in the I.E.D. attack that morning?
Memo: If it bleeds, it leads. This question is McGirk’s attempt to get good bloody gouge on the situation. He will most likely use the information he gains from this answer as an attention gainer.
•
McGirk: Were there any officers?
Memo: By asking if there was an officer on scene the reporter may be trying to identify a point of blame for lack of judgment. If there was an officer involved, then he may be able to have his My Lai massacre pinned on that officer’s shoulders. ...
In the reporter’s eyes, military officers may represent the U.S. government and enlisted marines may represent the American People. Given the current political climate in the U.S. at this time concerning the Iraq war and the current administration’s conduct of the war, the reporter would most likely seek to discredit the U.S. government (one of our officers) and expose victimization of the American people by the hand of the government (the enlisted marines under the haphazard command of our “rogue officer.”) Unfortunately for McGirk, this is not the case.
One common tactic used by reporters is to spin a story in such a way that it is easily recognized and remembered by the general population through its association with an event that the general population is familiar with or can relate to. For example, McGirk’s story will sell if it can be spun as “Iraq’s My Lai massacre.” Since there was not an officer involved, this attempt will not go very far.
We must be on guard, though, of the reporter’s attempt to spin the story to sound like incidents from well-known war movies, like “Platoon.”
In “Platoon,” Sergeant Barnes, the movie’s antihero, is depicted as a no-nonsense, war-haggard platoon sergeant who knows how to get things done in the bloody jungles of Vietnam — and it ain’t always pretty. During one scene, Sergeant Barnes is shown on the verge of committing war crimes in front of his platoon by threatening to kill women and children as a means of interrogation. This is a classic “runaway sergeant” storyline wherein the audience is supposed to be sickened by the sergeant’s brutality and equally sickened by the traumatic effects war has on soldiers. This schema is especially fruitful for Mr. McGirk because if he tries to adapt our situation to this model it simultaneously exposes a “war crime cover-up” and shows the deteriorative (albeit exaggerated) effects of war on U.S. marines (the best of the best), which could be expanded by the general press as a testament for why the U.S. should pull out of Iraq.
[Colonel Chessani later shortened this answer to “No.”]
•
McGirk: How many marines were involved in the killings?
Memo: First off, we don’t know what you’re talking about when you say “killings.” One of our squads reinforced by a squad of Iraqi Army soldiers were engaged by an enemy initiated ambush on the 19th that killed one American marine and seriously injured two others. We will not justify that question with a response. Theme: Legitimate engagement: we will not acknowledge this reporter’s attempt to stain the engagement with the misnomer “killings.”
•
McGirk: Were there any weapons found during these house raids — or terrorists — where the killings occurred?
Memo: Again, you are showing yourself to be uneducated in the world of contemporary insurgent combat. The subject about which we are speaking was a legitimate engagement initiated by the enemy. ...
•
McGirk: Is there any investigation ongoing into these civilian deaths, and if so have any marines been formally charged?
Memo: No, the engagement was bona fide combat action. ... By asking this question, McGirk is assuming the engagement was a LOAC [Law of Armed Conflict] violation and that by asking about investigations, he may spurn a reaction from the command that will initiate an investigation.
•
McGirk: Are the marines in this unit still serving in Haditha?
Memo: Yes, we are still fighting terrorists of Al Qaida in Iraq in Haditha. (“Fighting terrorists associated with Al Qaida” is stronger language than “serving.” The American people will side more with someone actively fighting a terrorist organization that is tied to 9/11 than with someone who is idly “serving,” like in a way one “serves” a casserole. It’s semantics, but in reporting and journalism, words spin the story.)
Tim McGirk in Time (March 19, 2006):
The Marines raided a third house, which belongs to a man named Ahmed Ayed. One of Ahmed's five sons, Yousif, who lived in a house next door, told Time that after hearing a prolonged burst of gunfire from his father's house, he rushed over. Iraqi soldiers keeping watch in the garden prevented him from going in. "They told me, 'There's nothing you can do. Don't come closer, or the Americans will kill you too.' The Americans didn't let anybody into the house until 6:30 the next morning." Ayed says that by then the bodies were gone; all the dead had been zipped into U.S. body bags and taken by Marines to a local hospital morgue. "But we could tell from the blood tracks across the floor what happened," Ayed claims. "The Americans gathered my four brothers and took them inside my father's bedroom, to a closet. They killed them inside the closet."
The military has a different account of what transpired. According to officials familiar with the investigation, the Marines broke into the third house and found a group of 10 to 15 women and children. The troops say they left one Marine to guard that house and pushed on to the house next door, where they found four men, one of whom was wielding an AK-47. A second seemed to be reaching into a wardrobe for another weapon, the officials say. The Marines shot both men dead; the military's initial report does not specify how the other two men died. The Marines deny that any of the men were killed in the closet, which they say is too small to fit one adult male, much less four....In all, two AK-47s were discovered.
_________________________________________
But McGirk's account was entirely based on insurgent fabrications.
LCpl Justin Sharratt was put on trial for murder on the basis of McGirk's story.
You won't read it in the New York Times, but the hearing officer said, after all of McGirk's evidence was actually examined: Evidence does not support murder case
Latest related thread:
Blue Star Dad Organizes West Coast Motorcycle Run to Show Support for the Haditha Marines, update at post 70.
In other words, your ignorant.
McGirk refused to testify in any of the hearings...hearings that came about because of his story
McGirk is gutless.
Exactly! The Slimes has had that info for a week but didn't include it in this article. They don't report news, they promote propaganda.
The Marines were right. This wasn’t spin.
The accused will be exonerated, but Tim McGirk will still be ignorant.
That is true BWAHAHAHAHAHA HAA!
The NYT is heavily invested in winning this one despite the article 32’s that have been favorable to our marines.
My sense is that even if the marines are exhonerated, the NYT will perpetuate a myth and always refer to it as the Haditha Massacre.
Yep, they have their massacre and they’re sticking to it.
Some things are just too important for facts to get in the way.
Does this offer evidence that time magazine and the nyt are colluding to subvert the war effort? The short answer is YES.
And how did the Times get their hands on the memo?
This leak had to come from within Pendleton.
Haditha: Is McGirk the New Mary Mapes? (Is Haditha a Hoax?)
... 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.” ...
“a budding journalism student”
The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict
By Marvin Kalb
...
The upshot is a new kind of populist journalism, which strongly influences the story that is being covered. Indeed, the journalist or, in this new age, the commentator, often becomes part of the story.
During the Lebanon War, for example, the bloggers had more influence over the flow of the story than they had had during any other war. Ravi Nessman, the senior Jerusalem correspondent of the Associated Press, thought the influence of the bloggers, especially in the United States, was "unprecedented." When the bloggers [in the U.S.] discovered that photographs had been doctored, "the credibility of the bloggers ... skyrocketed and our credibility plummeted." Nessman added, "After that everything that we did was suspect. And that makes it very difficult to cover a war, to have honest people who are trying, who are not doctoring photographs, who are not taking one side or the other, but who are trying to present the truth of what is going on there, and have everything we say be examined, which is fair, but basically be questioned as a lie, and starting with that premise that the media is lying."
Some of the leaks attributed to”DOD members on the condition of anonymity are lies manufactured by the reporter. Others, such as this are criminal and need to be investigated and prosecuted. I don’t know what the administration is doing about it. If the are aggressively working to shut this treason down, we haven’t heard about it. I think that if they were the msm would be whining and crying about the 1st Amendment by now. Why has the administration abandoned this crucial front, that of the information war?
Wow, good stuff. Whoever wrote the memo is sharp as a tack and has got the media’s methods pegged. Just another reason to love the Marines, and for the media to hate them.
Good context and references in this thread.
Good eyes on the “talking points” derogation.
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