New Hampshire: The Real Facts

Haditha: A media-made ‘atrocity’?
Posted: Saturday, Jun 21, 2008 - 11:04:40 pm MDT

The New York Times referred to the deaths of as many as 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha as the “defining atrocity” of the Iraq War.

If so, then the Iraq War must be particularly unatrocious. After all, of the eight people charged in the Haditha case, seven have seen the charges dropped for insufficient evidence or actually been found innocent, and the one remaining case is no more likely to produce a conviction than the first seven.

Yet there WAS a Haditha atrocity. And perhaps it even was defining of this war and its larger meaning. But the atrocity was not committed by soldiers in Iraq; it was committed in Washington, D.C., by Rep. John Murtha, and by his friends at the New York Times, Time magazine and MSNBC.

Murtha, the Pennsylvania congressman who became a media darling for opposing the war in Iraq despite his own record of military service in Vietnam, is now even more famous for calling American soldiers cold-blooded killers.

In a press conference on May 17, 2006, Murtha said that U.S. Marines had deliberately killed unarmed Iraqi civilians during an encounter in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005. “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” Murtha said before anyone had been convicted of anything, before any charges had been filed, and indeed before the investigation was even completed.

Time magazine ran a story on “The Shame of Kilo Company”; the New York Times ran front-page exposes of alleged abuse and coverup; and MSNBC and other cable outlets hyped the story for weeks in an effort to pump their ratings on the adrenalin-spiked news of Marines gone bad.

When it was pointed out to Murtha that he was violating the basic principle of “innocent before proven guilty,” he didn’t back down. “This is what the Marine Corps told me at the highest level,” he insisted to ABC’s Charlie Gibson. “There’s no question the chain of command tried to stifle the story.”

Except that Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, the highest ranking officer charged with covering up the incident, was cleared by a military judge on June 17 of this year, as three other people charged with “covering up” the “massacre” were cleared previously.

But yet there has been no apology from Murtha, and there probably never will be. Turns out that it is a lot harder to admit you were wrong than it is to label American Marines “cold-blooded killers” on national TV.Haditha: A media-made ‘atrocity’?
http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2008/06/22/columns/columns01.txt