It's a small enough step in such circumstances from the knowledge that the enemy might be anywhere to the thought that the enemy is everywhere, and then to the feeling that every Vietnamese/Iraqi is an enemy -- or, as the slaughtered were termed in the initial military indictment of My Lai's Lieutenant William Calley, every "Oriental human being" a "VC." Counterpunch American reporters, once they cross certain lines, are no less unreliable. Unemployment remained sky-high. Think of this as an endless feedback loop, the ultimate self-fulfilling prophesy. Why Do “Left” And “Right” Mean Liberal And Conservative? Even a baby sucking at its mother's breast might, as one My Lai defendant claimed, be helping to conceal a hidden grenade. ThinkProgress Guernica We truly appreciate your support. Locals suggest that the ancient looking structures on or near the Euphrates River were part of a water wheel structure that dates back to a period of Roman occupation. However, resistance continued. Her journey proved to be nothing short of an odyssey. Lieutenant Andrew Grayson, 27, was declared "not guilty on all charges" by a jury, said a spokesman for the Camp Pendleton military base in southern California where the hearing started on May 28. I’ll try to give my own answer to this question by way of analogy. Daily Climate According to an August 2005 report by The Guardian, the town was controlled by insurgents, with US forces making only fleeting visits every few months. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that "Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today." The process by which all human beings in a region transmogrify into the hated and feared enemy works in reverse as well. In fact, to the Pentagon, there is only one objective, reliable investigator of potential U.S. military crimes to be called upon -- and that's the military itself. Of course, everything would go a lot more smoothly if the Iraqis would just accept heavily armed U.S. troops tramping through their streets, wrecking their infrastructure and shooting their family members. Christian Science Monitor Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Sudden Descent of the United States, Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, Prioritizing the Pentagon in a Pandemic, Tomgram: John Feffer, The De-Trumpification of America, Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The All-American Way, Afghanistan The Bush administration ran its numbers quickly after the Haditha story broke big-time in the media -- and word of those numbers went around fast. ), Before the invasion was over, civilian journalists started dying from coalition "accidents." America's global military footprint has virtually disappeared and the United States remains united in name only. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman. That means that only 135 of them are not doing "the right thing," etc. They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story. Grist )[8][9] Some allege the massacre was in retribution for an incident earlier in the day in which US Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas was killed in a roadside bomb attack on Marines from Kilo Company. If someone conducts an armed invasion into your house and shoots you in your sleep, it is clear, is it not, that it is an unprovoked attack. On June 17, 2008 Military Judge Colonel Steven Folsom dismissed all charges against Lt Colonel Jeffrey Chessani on the grounds that General James Mattis, who approved the filing of charges against Chessani, was improperly influenced by an investigator probing the incident. The Haditha Dam and surrounding areas were initially secured by U.S. troops in April 2003 as part of the invasion of Iraq. This is American fairness in action -- though nobody mentions that the whole investigatory process is the equivalent of a corrupt police department being empowered to investigate, charge, and try itself. The entire U.S. military machine is a machine for violently enforcing U.S. will abroad. "Marines and the 'massacre': a neighbor tells of aftermath", U.S. probe implicates Marines - Conflict in Iraq - nbcnews.com, Frank Wuterich Murtha Defamation Suit Dies In Court, "Military: '60 Minutes' loses appeal in Wuterich case: Court rejects claim of reporter privilege for unaired portions of interview", http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/isil-launches-major-assault-iraq-haditha-160105135657979.html, Iraq Image - Haditha Satellite Observation, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Haditha&oldid=938574160, Wikipedia articles in need of updating from February 2014, All Wikipedia articles in need of updating, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia articles with style issues from January 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 1 February 2020, at 01:13. Civilian deaths are now the central fact, the very essence of war. On August 1, 2005, an ambush killed 6 United States Marine snipers, (who were operating in two two-man teams with an additional marine per team for security) in the city; on August 3, a roadside bomb killed another 14 Marines and their interpreter. To commit such acts, these Marines must have concluded in the most visceral way that there simply were no Iraqis to protect in Haditha, perhaps in the Sunni provinces of Iraq altogether, perhaps in the whole country. Iraqi police, however, contend that U.S. troops gathered 11 people in the house into a single room and executed them, before destroying the house as they left the area.". These were the "collateral deaths" and what they held in common was simply their civilian-ness, and how civilian -- and so criminal -- war itself has become. Not seeing that means not seeing war. 'I cannot believe you're buying any of this,' the magazine said the officer wrote in an e-mail. This finally brings us to the 24 dead noncombatants in Haditha (and any of the other Hadithas that haven't made it into the news). Thanks for your vote! As I go through a list of New York Times articles on the Haditha massacre, in which Marines murdered 24 Iraqi civilians, the following phrases keep popping up: “unprovoked attack,” “unprovoked murder,” “unprovoked killings.”. The "Incident" at Haditha ", Such "incidents" were far more common than we care to imagine in Vietnam and are undoubtedly more common in Iraq as well. Charges of murder against squad leader Frank Wuterich were changed to the lesser offense of manslaughter. George Bush wanted to be "commander-in-chief" and, with the help of his Vice President and fervent followers, to create a commander-in-chief presidency. Lew Rockwell Unlike in Greek myth, however, at the bottom of the box wasn't Hope, but another H-word: Haditha. Just last week at a checkpoint in Samarra, Nahiba Husayif Jassim, pregnant, in labor, and being rushed to a hospital by her brother, as well as her cousin Faliha Mohammed Hassan were shot and killed at such a checkpoint. The next year, she began following grievously wounded American soldiers from the moment they came off the battlefield all the way back home. As of May 2016, it remains one of the most exclusively Sunni Arab towns of Iraq under control of the government. War in Context New York Times Defenders of the Iraq occupation will say “no” for their own reasons. Pollster.com From the beginning, the continual slaughter of civilians, as well as the destruction of civilian property and livelihoods, has been the modus operandi of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. You only slaughter the helpless face-to-face when even small children have become aliens, the enemy, so tainted by evil, by the killing of your people, that there's no hope for them. Number one is what happened with the reporting of the incident, and what happened. During the American revolution one British officer complained: “Never had the British army so ungenerous an enemy to oppose; they send their riflemen five or six at a time who conceal themselves behind trees, etc., till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done they immediately retreat. [Note to Tomdispatch readers: Make sure to check out the "sidebar" -- "Talking about Haditha Talking Points," including "Post-Haditha Math" and "Prejudgment at Haditha" -- at the bottom of this dispatch. Tomgram: Lawrence Weschler, A New Mount Rushmore for a World on the Brink? Jim Lobe’s Interpress Archive As a start, you would never have learned about them from the U.S. military. Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, John Feffer's striking new dystopian novel, takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The Guardian In this way, the needs of our media, as presently organized, fit with the damage-control efforts of the Pentagon (although Donald Rumsfeld and his associates would surely be a good deal happier if the "incidents" at Haditha and Ishaqi had never surfaced in the first place). War Is a Crime Macron’s Incitement: ‘Crisis in Islam’ or French Politics? History News Network Juan Cole’s Informed Comment Gen. Mark Kimmit finally admitted festivities were ongoing in this fashion: "There may have been some kind of celebration. With this turbulent history the future was unpredictable. In September 2014, ISIL attacked the dam but were repelled by airstrikes. The Democratic Strategist The Meaning of Haditha 42:58. The Daily Beast When, back in My Lai days, General William R. Peers, heading the official Army investigation of the killings, had a press conference to present his findings, the Pentagon ordered him not to use the word "massacre"; only on threat of walking out was he allowed to refer to a "tragedy of major proportions." Commondreams The city lies near the Buhayrat al Qadisiyyah, an artificial lake which was created by the building of the Haditha Dam, the largest hydroelectric facility in Iraq. Above all, in the damage-control phase of such "incidents," what is being avoided is the phrase "war crimes.". So President Nixon was quick to call My Lai an "isolated incident," particularly when compared to the "250,000 churches, pagodas, and temples" he claimed the Marines alone had built "for the people of Vietnam" (just as the Bush administration cites those schools we've constructed or repainted, and other kinds of "good news" the media supposedly refuses to report). Search comprehensively and find the name meaning of Hadithi and its name origin or of any other name in our database. __________________________________________________________________, Sidebar: Talking about Haditha Talking Points. William Arkin, military analyst. Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha? Environmental Health News Sergeant Hutchins was out there to do his job, to execute his mission and to bring his men home alive, political and diplomatic pressure to make a fall guy on this case, right after Haditha, was palpable. The city lies near the Buhayrat al Qadisiyyah, an artificial lake which was created by the building of the Haditha Dam, the largest hydroelectric facility in Iraq. In early 2014, ISIL launched a successful campaign to seize around 70% of Anbar province from Iraq. Though exact numbers have been much argued about, there can be no question that the unsuccessful American (and British) strategy of strangling Saddam Hussein's regime via severely imposed UN sanctions caused the death rates of Iraqi children to soar before 2003. There are now nine extra "collateral deaths," just as those "insurgents" in the initial military report from Haditha, according to the Time Magazine piece that broke the story, had already turned into civilian "collateral damage" in the first Marine probe of what happened there. English words for حادثة include incident, accident, event, episode, case, occurrence, occasion, happening and fact. If an incident simply won't go away, as at Abu Ghraib, then small fry are generally indicted and, under pressure, prosecuted. Col. Mackubin Thomas Owens, contributing editor to the National Review Online and professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College. The Browser

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