Latest related thread:
Blue Star Dad Organizes West Coast Motorcycle Run to Show Support for the Haditha Marines, update at post 70.
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.
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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.
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 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.