Just before Zarqawi died again and CNN and all other media outlets relegated all Iraq war coverage to the sensational details, the following report ran. When people ask "What does the death of Zarqawi mean?" I've answered, "The selective forgetting of the Haditha atrocity."
Photos seem to contradict Marine version of Haditha killings
By Jamie McIntyre
CNN
Wednesday, June 7, 2006; Posted: 11:29 p.m. EDT (03:29 GMT)
Iraqis are shown after the alleged killings in a video taken by a Haditha student and obtained by Time. WATCH WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Pentagon sources say some of the most incriminating evidence against Marines under investigation in the deaths of civilians at Haditha is a set of photographs taken by another group of Marines who came along afterward and helped clean up the scene.
CNN is the first news organization to examine those images. They were snapped before an aspiring Iraq journalist videotaped the aftermath of the November 19 deaths. That video convinced Time magazine to pursue the story earlier this year.
Pentagon sources say the 30 images of men, women and children are some of the strongest evidence that, in some cases, the victims were shot inside their homes and at close range -- not killed by shrapnel from a roadside bomb or by stray bullets from a distant firefight, as Marines had claimed. (Watch what the new images show about the civilian deaths -- 2:51)
Senior Pentagon officials have said a probe into the November deaths tends to support allegations that Marines carried out an unprovoked massacre after one of their comrades was killed by a roadside bomb. The military is investigating both the deaths and a possible cover-up.
The Marines originally reported that Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha, a town on the Euphrates River in northwestern Iraq that was the scene of heavy fighting in 2005. They later added that eight insurgents were killed in an ensuing gun battle.
The Marine photographs are evidence in a criminal probe, and only investigators and a few very senior officials have access to them.
"I have seen the photographs, but they are part of the investigation and I'm not going to talk about those photographs," Marine commandant Gen. Michael Hagee told reporters Wednesday.
But a source allowed CNN to examine copies of the photographs, which a military official said match in both number and description the pictures in the possession of investigators.
The source would not allow CNN to have copies of the images out of concern over personal repercussions.
There are images of 24 bodies, each marked with red numbers. Some of numbers are written on foreheads, others on the victim's backs. A senior military official told CNN that in some cases the numbers may denote the location of bullet wounds.
Among the images:
A woman and child leaning against the wall, heads slumped forward.
Another woman and child shot in bed.
A man sprawled face down with his legs behind him.
An elderly woman slumped over, her neck possibly snapped by the force of gunfire.
All of the victims were wearing casual attire. Some had been shot in the head. Some were face down, others face up.
The pictures appear to show the locations of the bodies in the houses before a Marine unit loaded them into a truck and brought them to a morgue.
Pentagon officials said there are no plans to release the gruesome images, even after the criminal investigation is complete.
The Haditha photos, like the images of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, would incite anti-American fervor and therefore constitute a threat to national security, they said.
In a separate incident, seven Marines and a Navy medical corpsman are being held in a brig at Camp Pendleton, California, to face possible murder charges in connection with the April killing of an Iraqi man in Hamandiya, a military officer with direct knowledge of the investigation said.
Briefing reporters Wednesday, Hagee was tight-lipped about the investigations but said Marines "absolutely know right from wrong."
Hagee flew to Iraq two weeks ago on a trip the Marine Corps said was already scheduled. But he used the time to lecture his Marines on what he called "the American way of war" amid the two probes.
Hagee said he is "gravely concerned" by the allegations and promised that the investigations now under way will be thorough and complete.
The U.S. command in Baghdad ordered an investigation into the Haditha killings in February, after Time magazine reporters presented video of the scene to American commanders.
http://www.cnn.com/...
On 9/11/01 I developed a terrible habit. I sleep with the news on all night, every night. On Wednesday night I woke for a few short minutes to hear a horrified CNN newscaster talking about having viewed these photos. By 5 a.m. when I woke again, the news was wall-to-wall Zarqawi's death. I've not heard a single thing on the news about the Haditha photos since then.
It's my opinion that Zarqawi has always been a propaganda tool, invented in part or completely. It seems to me the details of his death are already much like the details of his life, conflicting and largely non-provable to people a world away that rely on the same people who've lied to us about this war from the beginning to supply explanations and information. How crazy is that? In our everyday lives, if we were lied to repeatedly by the same person, would we accept what that person had to report about anything, much less matters as important as lives and deaths? Would we say, "Yes, you've lied to me about everything, but I'll accept your explanation anyway." And yet, we do.
I have the same misgivings I've had throughout this Iraq war nightmare about this situation, the same ache in my chest as I witness the nation turning away from demanding to know, both about Zarqawi and about Haditha. Will there be anyone with the courage to ask for real explanations about inconsistencies in either case? Or will Democrats and Republicans alike decide it is too politically risky to question a sensationalized death that is being touted as a military victory, or to look again at Haditha. Maybe it's all too much and we all just want to take a leap into the forgetting pool. If the MSM coverage is any indication, it seems the propaganda aimed at both Iraqis and Americans alike is indeed working, even here on Dkos.
For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I keep hoping that of a sudden there will emerge a sane voice or voices that will finally just say it like it is: "This is all batshit insane, this war is based on lies and continuing it is madness. If we continue to allow the people who brought us there through deceit to inform us we obviously all need our heads examined."
In the night sometimes, when a news story is so horrific it literally pulls me from my dreams, as the reporter's description of the Haditha photos did,
Another woman and child shot in bed.
I often say out loud, "Where the hell is everybody?" I don't know who in particular I'm asking about anymore, only that there should be some people somewhere who see these things besides myself. Does anyone else ask that in the middle of the night, or the day, or ever? I've signed on with a multitude of groups, protested, joined action committees, and yet when things like this happen I still feel very much alone.
Sometimes I feel like we're all so mired in winning elections, even here on the internet, that we forget how crazy this all really is. We forget to question as we should. We forget that people are dying and we should dismiss nothing until it makes sense, until it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. We forget that there was a time when we lived by laws and logic rather than drama and manipulation.
I fear we've lived so much in the lying times that we are collectively willing to just let truth slip through our fingers time and again. If we stop asking questions until we get to the bottom then the status-quo continues. We shouldn't let go of Zarqawi or Haditha or Bin Laden or 9/11 or No WMD or Katrina or Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay or Torture or Spying or any of the issues we have only the word of this lying administration about. We can't while people continue to die, and we can't because people have died. If we just let it go, or make a joke about it, or call it unimportant, or politically inadvisable, well, then we may as well just line up and get the lobotomies now, we have no purpose.
If any of us are to live with ourselves, what choice do we have but to resist joining the fast asleep in this nation? And yet I've noted a turning away, even in my favorite haunts on the internet. Here on Dkos it seems people are caught in our internal site dramas and definitions of late, a kind of sleep in and of itself I guess. I've given up on the MSM, and it was as if people were afraid to even breathe a word about Zarqawi or Haditha in conversation. In fact, it's become less and less appropriate to discuss any of this at all in public. It's damned scary really.
I don't know how anyone sleeps at night anymore, I suspect most of us don't, really. So if you're asking out loud "Where is everyone?" I just wanted to check in, I'm here and awake.