24

5/31/06



Twenty-four Iraqi civilians were killed on November 19th, 2005 in the western town of Haditha. Initially this story was reported as 15 citizens and one US Marine killed in an insurgent bomb, but recently it's come to light that maybe, just maybe, a group of Marines went full-tilt, Apocalypse Now-insane and slaughtered a bunch of innocent people.

The conflict began when Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, was killed by a roadside bomb while driving the last Humvee in a line of four inside Haditha. After that, the story gets a little fuzzy. Numerous Iraqi survivors report that immediately following the explosion, Marines went door-to-door executing any men, women or children found inside the houses even as they pleaded for their lives. Inside the house of Younis Salim Khafif girls aged 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1 were shot and killed, confirmed by death certificates.

But stick with me, the story gets better! It seems that after the bloodbath, the Marines huddled up and decided that hey, maybe it's not such a good idea people know about what happened out here, and out came the story about the deaths by insurgent attack. That might have been the end of it, had local journalist Taher Thabet not gone through the homes and city the next day with a video camera, interviewing survivors of the attack and filming damage that was clearly not done by an insurgent bomb.

But it gets better! Not only are the Marines involved being investigated for murder, dereliction of duty, and a whole grab-bag full of other sundry horrors, it seems as though their superiors tried to cover-up the cover-up!

The military routinely pays out money to family of civilians killed or injured erroneously due to US soldiers, and in this instance that amounted to about $38,000 altogether in a sort of "sorry we murdered a bunch of people; our bad" prize, I guess. But that was back in December, when the military was still claiming that the deaths were due to insurgent action, which would not have been subject to payment. It remains to be seen how far up the chain of command this knowledge went.

The Senate is already gearing up to hold hearings on the massacre, and those members already briefed on the situation say it looks pretty abysmal. Rep. John Murtha, (D-PA) a former Marine colonel and Vietnam vet said,

"there was no firefight, there was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

I would say that this gives our presence in Iraq an even darker black eye, but the really fucked up part (well, not as fucked up as US soldiers killing helpless human beings, but...) is that the debacle has caused barely a ripple of scandal in Iraq. Our profile in that country is so far in the gutter that most Iraqis are just shaking their heads in a kind of sad, "well, what did you expect?" kind of way! They're not even pissed! They just all expected this sort of thing to happen. God, that's horrifying.

I understand being on the verge of being forcibly separated from your organs by high-velocity explosives everyday is a terrible, stressful situation, and far-and-away most soldiers are there to do their job honorably, but fuck you, you child-murdering assholes.





Sources:

Washington Post
BBC News
NPR
MSNBC