Our Marines Are In Shackles!!
Reprinted with permission by Heidi EuphoricReality.net
I am shaking with fury right now. I just listened on the radio to the father of one of the Marines and the wife of the Navy corpsman incarcerated in Camp Pendleton - UNCHARGED -after Haditha. Let me tell you what’s going on with OUR Marines right at this moment:

While “detainees” (not “terrorists”, not “prisoners”, not “criminals”, mind you) at Gitmo are accorded every privilege - including playing soccer in the sun, praying whenever they want, white-glove Koran service, and halal meals…our Marines, who have NOT been charged with any crime whatsoever are in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT and wearing leg and wrist SHACKLES. They are allowed no exercise, and can only go outside for one hour per day - unable to move around because of their SHACKLES. They are not allowed to hug their wives or their children - and they are only allowed to speak to them through thick glass, again immobilized while in SHACKLES. They are being treated worse than the terrorist scum lounging around Gitmo on the American dime!!

Yes, goddamn it, you read that right. They have not been charged with any crime, yet they are treated as GUILTY until proven innocent. They are confined in solitary like the worst criminals, and THEY. ARE. NOT.

They are seven Marines and one Navy corpsman from one of the most storied, illustrious units in the Corps: the Dark Horse 3rd Battalion 5th Marines. Their unit motto is “Consummate Professionals” - which every Marine in that unit does his best to embody. They are not slackers, they are not newbies, they are not psychotic, and they are not untried or unblooded. They have lost their brothers in Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul and Haditha. The Marines under investigation for the events at Haditha were on their second or even third deployment - they were not raw recruits.

You already know exactly where we stand on the events of Haditha. We will not ever waver from that viewpoint. We will do everything in our power to fight for the freedom and exoneration of those Marines. They are OUR BOYS, and while they’ve shed their blood into the filthy dust of Iraq, we will now cover them with our care and unequivocal support. And we will fight, fight, FIGHT until they are released.

I’ve been collecting info on Haditha since Murtha’s asinine accusations but I haven’t had time to post the entire trove in one article. Now is as good a time as any, and I’ll update it as new info is released.

Some of the following details may be stuff you’ve heard over the past week, but I GUARANTEE that some of it is so NEW and UNPUBLICIZED that you have NOT heard it before.

You are about to learn more about that shithole called Haditha than you ever cared to know. You are about to learn details about this case that the media is hushing up. The media has finally found their fuckin’ My Lai, and they will do their damnedest to ensure they get to keep it. Well, over my dead body.

Haditha The Hellhole

The Guardian, notoriously anti-American in its coverage, was allowed access to Haditha last year, while it was under the control of the terrorists. They were no doubt allowed access because they have been a ready propaganda tool in the hands of the terrorists. The resultant may or may not have been what the terrorists had in mind, but it does a good job of giving us an eyeful of what our Marines were contending with. Here’s the Haditha our media won’t tell you about:

The executions are carried out at dawn on Haqlania bridge, the entrance to Haditha. A small crowd usually turns up to watch even though the killings are filmed and made available on DVD in the market the same afternoon.

One of last week’s victims was a young man in a black tracksuit. Like the others he was left on his belly by the blue iron railings at the bridge’s southern end. His severed head rested on his back, facing Baghdad. Children cheered when they heard that the next day’s spectacle would be a double bill: two decapitations. A man named Watban and his brother had been found guilty of spying.
[…]
A year ago Haditha was just another sleepy town in western Anbar province, deep in the Sunni triangle and suspicious of the Shia-led government in Baghdad but no insurgent hotbed.

Then, say residents, arrived mostly Shia police with heavyhanded behaviour. “That’s how it began,” said one man. Attacks against the police escalated until they fled, creating a vacuum filled by insurgents.

Alcohol and music deemed unIslamic were banned, women were told to wear headscarves and relations between the sexes were closely monitored. The mobile phone network was shut down but insurgents retained their walkie-talkies and satellite phones. Right-hand lanes are reserved for their vehicles.
[…]
The court caters solely for divorces and marriages. Alleged criminals are punished in the market. The Guardian witnessed a headmaster accused of adultery whipped 190 times with cables. Children laughed as he sobbed and his robe turned crimson.

Two men who robbed a foreign exchange shop were splayed on the ground. Masked men stood on their hands while others broke their arms with rocks. The shopkeeper offered the insurgents a reward but they declined.

DVDs of beheadings on the bridge are distributed free in the souk. Children prefer them to cartoons. “They should not watch such things,” said one grandfather, but parents appeared not to object.

One DVD features a young, blond muscular man who had been disembowelled. He was said to have been a member of a six-strong US sniper team ambushed and killed on August 1. Residents said he had been paraded in town before being executed.

The US military denied that, saying six bodies were recovered and that all appeared to have died in combat. Shortly after the ambush three landmines killed 14 marines in a convoy which ventured from their base outside the town.
[…]
Now their strategy appears to be to wait out the Americans, calculating they will leave within a few years, and then escalate what some consider the real war against a government led by Shias, a rival sect which Sunni extremists consider apostasy.
[…]
The constitution talks, the referendum due in October, the election due in December: all are deemed collaboration punishable by death. The task now is to bleed the Americans and destabilise the government. Some call that nihilism. Haditha calls it the future.

Media Begs For “Testimonies”

The accusations against our Marines have been leveled by Sunni Iraqis, after the media went around begging for stories. These requested anecdotes come from the very same people who, while under Saddam’s regime, froze their dead babies so that they could wave them around when the world press showed up to “document” the Iraqis’ “starvation by sanction”. What bullshit. I’d think twice - no, a helluva lot longer than that - before I gave one shred of credence to the claims of the radical Sunnis. But they gave the media exactly what it was looking for, made-to-order. But even the media has had to reluctantly admit that their anonymous sources are iffy:

Four people who survived the killings in Haditha, including some who had never spoken publicly, described the killings to an Iraqi writer and historian who was recruited by The New York Times to travel to Haditha and interview survivors and witnesses of what military officials have said appear to be unjustified killings of two dozen Iraqis by marines.
[…]
The four survivors’ accounts could not be independently corroborated, and it was unclear in some cases whether they actually saw the killings. But much of what they said was consistent with broad outlines of the events of that day…

Yeah, you give me the framework, and I can fill in any details you want.

Children “survivors” - Coached?

Here’s a video of an interview with several of the child “survivors”. During the interview, an older child, Safa Younis, calmly enumerates (looking remarkably familiar - Jill Carroll, anyone?) how many times the people in her family were shot, and where, and what their locations in the house were when shot. I have to ask, in a firefight - if she’s supposedly scrambling for her life and her family is supposedly being shot up around her - how did she have the presence of mind to know that her sister had been “shot seven times in his head”, etc.? The detail is uncanny in its precision. And the child is seemingly unscathed by the horrors of the day.

The British newscaster has a hard time explaining away the “perhaps confused testimony” of the next child, also a girl, but younger. Eman Walid has provided multiple testimonies to the media that have varied widely in their details. (She was probably having a harder time keeping her script straight.) This child uses such phrases as “U.S. military forces” and “American forces” instead of a more child-like term like “soldiers” and she seems concerned that she can’t distinguish whether the vehicle that exploded was an “armored vehicle”, or a “Humvee” - a distinction most likely lost on any child “under heavy fire” adn with family dying around her everywhere. What’s most important though, is that she states -twice - that she KNEW the bomb was going to explode - she was expecting it.

Who Knew About The Insurgent Attack? Everyone!

The reporter on the video ends with the question, “Did somebody in Haditha know the Marines were going to be attacked?” Well, hell yeah, we already know that! LCPL Crossan, whom I mentioned a few days ago as one of the Marines wounded in the IED explosion, has already reported (video footage here) that the Marines knew and expected an attack from about 20 insurgents that day. He was on the convoy that was escorting more Iraqi police to the Command Outpost, for that exact reason. Crossan said that he saw a child signal their passing, and that he saw two guys standing not five feet away from where the IED exploded. He said there was no way that they didn’t know about the IED. When the IED exploded, the Marines were already primed for it, since their intel had indicated an attack that very day. Furthermore, it has now been reported that the men of Kilo Company did not know that Sgt. Terrazas had died until they returned to their unit that night. That kind of lets the air out of the alleged “crazed Marines on a rampage for revenge” scenario.

The Video Is A Fraud!

Obviously, the people in that neighborhood knew about the attack - they expected it - and were thus quite possibly involved with it. If the girl Eman knew, then it’s conceivable that her family was directly involved. And, by the way, whatever happened to the people standing next to the IED? If all the bodies on Ali Mashhadani’s video footage that day were killed by gunshots, then what happened to the guys five feet away from the explosion? And speaking of Ali’s video footage, why are there bodies on it described as “burned and missing limbs”? Gunshots don’t do that, and it clearly doesn’t jibe with the Iraqi doctor’s testimony that all 24 Iraqis died from execution-style gunshots.

Also, about a third of the way through the video clip, watch one of the Iraqis in the video suddenly scrunch his face up into a grimace and slap his hands over his face like he’s weeping. When he removes his hands a second later, his face is normal again. Rehearsal, maybe? We’ve seen that hundreds of times in Pallywood.

Also, the video clip shows Iraqis themselves removing the dead bodies and piling them into a truck in bags. That did not happen! The Marines did that. They called in a crew that had to take pictures and collect the bodies and remove them to the morgue. Haven’t we already heard at length about how traumatized the Marines were who had to do such a grisly job? Al-Mashhadani’s video is clearly a fraud!

This whole Haditha thing is starting to sound disturbingly like a set-up. There is much more to this than meets the eye, and the media’s not doing a very good job of digging it out and connecting the dots. So I’ll do it for them, with some help from fellow bloggers.

The Iraqi Doctor With An Agenda

Let’s talk about that doctor who signed the death certificates of the dead Iraqis. So far, he’s the only one that has corroborated that they were killed by gunshot. Sweetness and Light has found something that I haven’t seen anyone else out there connect - certainly not the media itself.

In the Time Magazine exclusive which brought the murky events of Haditha to the world’s attention, a doctor was quoted:

Dr. Walid, director of the local hospital in Haditha, who asked that his family name be withheld because, he says, he fears reprisals by U.S. troops, says the Marines brought 24 bodies to his hospital around midnight on Nov. 19. Wahid says the Marines claimed the victims had been killed by shrapnel from the roadside bomb. “But it was obvious to us that there were no organs slashed by shrapnel,” Wahid says. “The bullet wounds were very apparent. Most of the victims were shot in the chest and the head–from close range.”

Sweetness and Light found his family name (Al-Obeidi) - it ain’t a secret anymore, chump! - in this article from the Brussels Tribunal - the Anti-Occupation Network. I guess it was safe to give his name out to an anti-American publication. But we got it now! Here’s the anti-American doctor in his own words:

Dr. Walid Al-Obeidi, the director of Haditha General Hospital and Dr. Jamil Abdul Jabbar, the only surgeon in the Haditha area, were arrested for a week, very badly beaten and threatened to face the same treatment in the future by the American troops.

Dr.Walid said “they arrested me in my house in front of my family, covered my eyes, and tied my hands to the back on Oct 5 2005 morning, during the last attack on Haditha (360 kilometers west of Baghdad). They occupied the hospital for 8 days and made it their office. The first day they beat me on my eyes, nose, back, hands, legs… My face was covered with blood. I could not wash my face because bleeding would start again. When they removed the tie I could not see. They investigated me until the afternoon. I realized later that I was arrested in the hospital store. Then they tied my hands to the front, and left me for two days. I was moved then to the pharmacy department. They accused me of treating terrorists, and asked for their names.

Dr. Walid Al-Obeidi then goes on to enumerate a score of complaints about beatings and what-not at the hands of the evil Americans. Sound familiar? Now, if he’s telling the truth – highly improbable, but work with me here - then he’s got a serious big-ass axe to grind with the American troops. His anti-American prejudice makes his stories suspect. And if he’s lying, then he’s got a history of hate propaganda against Americans; he’s got an agenda, and doesn’t think any story is too wild to be believed by the anti-American press. (Not to mention he shares a name, Walid, with young Eman of “confused testimony” above. Another coincidence?)

The Sunni Brothers With A Plan

Now, let’s take a little closer look at one of the integral reporters who broke the Haditha story, courtesy of Sweetness and Light. It’s Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani, a Sunni who had been detained for five months because of images found on his camera and because of his “ties to the insurgents“. He had only been released a couple of weeks before he “stumbled upon” his big “scoop” on Haditha. (In fact, he had recently been arrested again, and was only released on May 31st.) Conveniently, Ali al-Mashhadani is the reporter who supplied video footage of the corpses that were supposedly killed by the Marines. His video footage is solely responsible for prompting the investigation by the military. Here’s his first report via Reuters:

HADITHA, Iraq (Reuters) - A video of civilians who may have been killed by U.S. Marines in an Iraqi town in November showed residents describing a rampage by U.S. soldiers that left a trail of bullet-riddled bodies and destruction.

A copy of the video, given to Reuters by Iraq’s Hammurabi Organisation for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy, showed corpses lined up at the Haditha morgue. The chief doctor at Haditha’s hospital, Waleed al-Obaidi, said the victims had bullet wounds in the head and chest.
[…]
The video given to Reuters shows bodies piled in the back of a white pickup truck outside the morgue. Among them was a girl who appeared to be about three years old.

One man wept and leaned against a wall as he identified a relative and other residents inspected bodies in the morgue. One man’s face had been torn apart by bullets, while a blackened corpse was missing legs and forearms.

The video also showed houses with bullet holes in the walls, pieces of human flesh, pools of blood and clothes and pots scattered across floors.
[…]
Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani, head of Hammurabi, said U.S. Marines had killed 15 people in Haditha after the roadside bomb attack. The group’s Haditha branch said it got the video from a local man.

Mashhadani said he had brought the case to the attention of the United Nations office in Baghdad. “These violations of human rights happen every day in Iraq,” he told Reuters.

But wait! Now there’s TWO anti-American al-Mashhadanis that are intricately involved and directly responsible for breaking the Haditha story! TWO - what are the odds of that? Sweetness and Light asks the obvious questions which the media has refused to ask: “What is the relationship if any between this news-making journalist Ali al-Mashhadani and Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani of Iraq’s Hammurabi Organisation for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy? [Abdel] al-Mashhadani is the person who first brought these “human rights violations” to public attention. And how odd it is that Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani just happened to be given a video by an “unnamed local”. And that he then turned it over to Ali al-Mashhadani who just happens to make videos for Reuters. And had anyone ever heard of Iraq’s Hammurabi Organisation for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy before this?”

So far, the al-Mashhadani news report and the video footage is THE centerpiece of the media’s frenzy over Haditha - and these two men are at the core of it. They deserve a little more scrutiny, right? Well, get this: as mentioned above, Ali al-Mashhadani was arrested in Ramadi last August because of his ties to insurgents. Guess who was detained with him - his BROTHER. There’s something there…

Pro-Terrorist Time Magazine Reporter Jumps Into The Mix

Let’s now take a little closer look at Time Magazine reporter Tim McGirk, the willing accomplice of the al-Mashhadani brothers. It appears that he’s quite enamored of the Islamist terrorists. He’s written quite a few pro-insurgent slanted pieces but the most alarming one was when he spent a chummy Thanksgiving dinner with none other than the Taliban:

Thanksgiving With the Taliban

Saturday, Nov. 24, 2001

TIME correspondent Tim McGirk shares bread, raisins, and thoughts about the afterlife with some Taliban fighters, and finds some common ground

By TIM MCGIRK

With a few colleagues, I spent my Thanksgiving meal squatting on the floor of an Afghan passport office, talking to Taliban fighters about miracles and Judgement [sic]Day.
[…]
There was a genuine Thanksgiving glow about the meal. The bread is good, and more Taliban fighters come in to partake.
[…]
The Le Monde correspondent asks what it would take to reach peace in Afghanistan. “We had peace,” Haqqani insists. “The Taliban were on the verge of defeating these bandits, until America helped them out. Now, there are robberies and killings everywhere. The Taliban will have to start all over again.”

Our missing colleagues finally arrive, and I leave thinking that maybe this evening wasn’t very different from the original Thanksgiving: people from two warring cultures sharing a meal together and realizing, briefly, that we’re not so different after all.

Pretty goddamn cozy, right? Did you notice the date on his article? He had dinner with the Taliban, who directly supported and shielded al Qaeda, only TWO MONTHS after 9/11!!! I don’t know about you, but he’s alarmingly empathetic with the enemy so soon after the devastation of 9/11. His article is written like a Pallywood wet dream. There is no doubt in my mind that when the al-Mashhadanis were looking for a willing mouthpiece for their story, they figured Tim McGirk was about as sweet a deal as it gets!

Putting It All Together

The Marines had hot intel that warned them of an attack from at least 20 terrorists that day. They were fortifying the Command Outpost accordingly.
Several children knew about the attack ahead of time, and there were quite a few people in the vicinity of the IED when it exploded. Their dead bodies are not accounted for in any Iraqi statement thus far.
When the IED exploded, the Marines began taking heavy small arms fire (as corroborated by the surveillance drone in the area). The Iraqi “eyewitnesses” claim the Marines were never fired upon. THEY ARE LYING. There are radio records of what happened that day, and they will come out. I have no doubt whatsoever that they will prove that the Marines were under fire from the terrorists. The Marines reacted swiftly, having already been briefed to expect such an attack. At the time, they did not know that one of their own had been killed, thus removing the media’s pet motive of “uncontrolled revenge triggered by Sgt Terrazas’ death” from the scenario.
Marine brass knew that a high number of civilians were killed that day, both when the IED exploded and during heavy crossfire. Nothing raised an alarm. *A reuters reporter on the scene hours after the attack noted no reports or signs of a “massacre” (scroll to bottom). The climate of the community did NOT change in the days, weeks, or months after the incident. In fact, nothing really cropped up until Tim McGirk of Time Magazine was given a scoop by Ali and Abdel al-Mashhadani, conveniently ready-made with video footage and weeping “survivors” in an insurgent stronghold.
The highly questionable video of a Sunni photojournalist and known insurgent sympathizer, combined with the questionable testimony of a known anti-American Sunni doctor are the sole reasons any investigation was launched. The sources are suspect and their motives are obvious.
Anonymous Iraqis provided emotional but conflicting testimony of what happened that day. And in a page torn right out of the Pallywood handbook, children are shoved forward to tell stories about what happened. One is curiously calm and unemotional (in a Jill Carroll-style interview) while describing an uncanny knowledge of the precise nature of her family’s killings, while the younger child, more confused, offers conflicting details, uses adult military terminology (likely coached by an adult), and volunteers foreknowledge of the attack.
The Iraqis in Haditha refuse to allow the military to exhume the bodies of those killed that day. A simple examination will prove how those people died, and the Iraqis won’t allow it. There is no doubt in my mind that they cannot allow the truth to be discovered. They will hide behind their religion on this one and babble about dishonoring the burials of the dead. And we’d better cry bullshit - these people have been dumped into mass graves for decades on end, and have never protested the exhumation of the bodies for identification purposes after Saddam’s regime was toppled. We cannot allow their hypocrisy to blind this investigation. Get those bodies out of the ground NOW!!
The media ignores all the context above and chooses instead to believe that these Iraqis are incapable of lying, when they’ve already been proven liars on numerous details. The media also chooses to believe the statistical impossibility that seven of our Marines and one Navy corpsman all simultaneously cracked and rampaged through the town massacring “innocent” civilians!!
CONCLUSION

Based upon such utter crap as I’ve outlined for you above, our Marines are today SHACKLED like the worst sort of criminals even though they’ve not been charged with any crimes; they are barred from their families; and they are enduring a massive witch-hunt - and already presumed GUILTY by our politicians and media alike!

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP

A legal defense fund for the Navy Corpsman has been set up at The Patriot Defense Fund. Here’s an excerpt written by his wife:

My husband is a 20 year-old Hospital Corpsman Third Class. He graduated from high school in June 2003. He began his first combat deployment to Iraq in July 2004. During his first deployment, 19 Marines from his Battalion gave their lives as the ultimate sacrifice for our country. Nine Marines from his Company were killed, five of them in one firefight. Two Marines died in my husband’s arms. My husband was awarded the Purple Heart during his first deployment. He returned home in April 2005, in time for the birth of our daughter. In January 2006, after spending a very short time at home, my husband left again for his second combat tour in Iraq.

I proudly stood by my husband each time he deployed because I am also an active duty Hospital Corpsman Third Class proudly serving our country.

And here is a letter written to Michael Savage (who is also raising funds for the Marines) from the corpsman’s attorney, Jeremiah Sullivan III:

Dear Dr. Savage:

My Secretary handed me a document this evening which stunned me. It was a document from the investigation which had been scanned and e-mailed to my office by a member of the media. I don’t know who leaked the document- - whether it was an “unnamed Pentagon official,” NCIS, or a politician with an agenda- - but I do know that it is an outrage that the only piece of documentary evidence I’ve seen so far in this case came from a member of the media and not from the Marine Corps. As my client sits shackled in solitary confinement in the Marine Corps Brig with charges yet to be filed, the Marine Corps has stooped to leaking portions of the investigation in order to advance their case in the media.

This maneuver calculated solely for the benefit of an agenda constitutes a miscarriage of justice to the prejudice of my client and all involved. The intentional circulation of this document should shock the conscience of all Americans concerned with the fair treatment of our men and women in uniform. I am outraged that government officials would trample on the constitutional rights of a decorated military member in an effort to meet an agenda. This type of malicious action jeopardizes any chance my client and these Marines might have had for a fair trial. An independent congressional inquiry should commence to investigate this impermissible conduct.

In a similar vein, I am troubled by the “unlawful command influence” at the highest levels.

When the commander-in-chief and other high level military officials are passing on the guilt of these men and making statements regarding punishment based on pure conjecture, what message is that sending to their military subordinates who will be charged with rendering a fair judgment in this case?

Any potential military juror has already seen and heard their superiors at the highest levels intimate their personal verdicts. That kind of influence is patently unjust and, I’m afraid, will operate to taint the judgment of what is supposed to be an impartial fact-finder. My client’s opportunity for justice has been irreparably compromised even before the first charge has been filed.

It is a sad day in military justice when honor on the battlefield takes a back seat to political agendas.

Thanks again for your support. You are a true American.

Jeremiah J. Sullivan, III
Law Offices of Jeremiah J. Sullivan, III

Likely, there will be more legal defense funds set up for the other Marines, and I’ll let you know as I find them.

Also, this is one of those things that is well worth faxing and calling your Congressional representatives about. See the contact utility in our right sidebar for quick access to their contact info. Feel free to post your emails or letters below in comments, or fill us in on your phone calls.

UPDATE: More from Sweetness and Light - a CNN embed does not believe the Haditha accusations.

I know the Marines that were operating in western al Anbar, from Husayba all the way to Haditha. I went on countless operations in 2005 up and down the Euphrates River Valley. I was pinned on rooftops with them in Ubeydi for hours taking incoming fire, and I’ve seen them not fire a shot back because they did not have positive identification on a target. (Watch a Marine’s anguish over deaths — 2:12)

I saw their horror when they thought that they finally had identified their target, fired a tank round that went through a wall and into a house filled with civilians. They then rushed to help the wounded — remarkably no one was killed.

I was with them in Husayba as they went house to house in an area where insurgents would booby-trap doors, or lie in wait behind closed doors with an AK-47, basically on suicide missions, just waiting for the Marines to come through and open fire. There were civilians in the city as well, and the Marines were always keenly aware of that fact. How they didn’t fire at shadows, not knowing what was waiting in each house, I don’t know. But they didn’t.

And I was with them in Haditha, a month before the alleged killings last November of some 24 Iraqi civilians.

UNBELIEVABLE UPDATE via Atlas Shrugs:

US details Haditha shoot-out
Sunday, November 20, 2005.

A roadside bomb that killed a US Marine in the restive town of Haditha on Saturday also killed 15 Iraqi civilians and led to intense clashes with insurgents.

The powerful bomb detonated as a US military convoy was passing through the town, which is 220 kilometres north-west of Baghdad.

The US military says immediately after the blast, gunmen opened fire on the convoy.

US and Iraqi soldiers returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another in a firefight.

A cameraman working for Reuters in Haditha says bodies had been left lying in the street for hours after the attack.

He says the town has been virtually shut down for the past two days as US and Iraqi forces try to impose order.

US troops have been trying for months to quell the insurgency in Haditha and other Sunni Arab towns on the Euphrates.

It was suspected several months ago that Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was hiding out in the area.

The casualties from Saturday’s blast raised the death toll from attacks across Iraq over the past three days to at least 166.

Sunni-led insurgents are stepping up their battle against US and Iraqi forces ahead of parliamentary elections in December.

- Reuters

Why is this particular update so amazing? Apparently, Reuters had a reporter on the scene shortly after the Haditha incident in November. Guess what? No mention of a massacre. What else? Reuters hasn’t offered up any info from said reporter since the accusations against our Marines surfaced. Unfortunately, said reporter is unnamed or we could hunt him down and shake him up for info on what he saw that day.

If two dozen innocent people had been blown away that day, and the military had put out a false statement, a reporter on the ground at the scene would’ve heard about it. Secondly, if all the innocent civilians were “executed in their bedclothes” inside their homes, why were there bodies in the street for hours afterward??! Thirdly, the bomb was reported as a powerful blast - we know it practically turned the Humvee inside out - so why has the Haditha docter now claimed that NO ONE died from the IED explosion and they were all killed by gunshot? And that, of course, doesn’t jibe with the reports of blackened bodies with their limbs blown off. Whatever happened to the people who were on the street, some as close as five feet from the blast? The Iraqis can’t seem keep all the moving parts of their story in sync.

Last question that this update raises: why has Reuters been so goddamn silent about the fact that they had a reporter on the scene within hours after the fact??! Why hasn’t the reporter there that day stepped up to tell what he knows? It would be a huge scoop for Reuters, which apparently they are willing to suppress in order to see our Marines shackled and in prison. They must not want to be the ones to topple this carefully constructed My Lai story!

Reuters has info that could exonerate our Marines and they are holding it back.

UPDATE 3: Riehl World View has an incredible collection of inconsistent “eyewitness” testimony and outright inaccurate reporting. He took the time to compare accounts, something the media has failed to do, and has discovered a boatload of inconsistencies and outright lies. Either the entire media is too stupid and unwilling to get it right (quite possible) or the Iraqis can’t keep their lies straight (quite probable considering everything I outlined above).

See, it’s hard to coordinate all the details between adults and children that are trying to corroborate each other’s bogus accounts of the so-called “massacre” that day. A little enthusiastic embellishment here, and little ad-lib there, a little on-air slip up, and some Sunni mastermind has got himself a raging headache. It’s starting to look more and more like a very clumsy set-up.

Go read it for yourself, there’s too much to summarize here.

PISSED YET?

FREE OUR MARINES!!!

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Stacy has the Carnival up at
Christian Persecution Blog
Some darn good reading!

At the hospital yesterday, I was speaking to a young man on fire for politics.
Well actually he said he was on fire for God.

He said he was called to rally Christians to political truths.

For a change I kept my mouth shut and listened…

He said that political activism is a correct form of worship.

God has called him to be an activist who will transform the lives of Christians.

So I wondered?
When did the apostle Paul lobby members of the Roman senate?
When did Stephen evangelize the Sanhedrin to soften the persecution of the church?
When did the apostle John hold public rallies in protest to the abuse of Christian slaves, women and children?
When did Peter teach it was alright to riot in protest to the Pharisees?

The Apostles counted the cost. They preached the Gospel in spite of the persecution.
They lived by faith.

When Christians substitute their politics for faith, how do they fulfill the need for daily Spiritual food? From what bread do they eat? From what river do they drink?

Romans 12:1-2 “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

I believe there is a place for the ministry that focuses on watchdog activities, for lobbying for causes that concern Christians.
For Christian political bloggers or Christians who work or volunteer in the political realm.

I also think when you forget the power of the cross, become distracted from sharing The Good News; it’s easy to start testifying to the power of the political action group.

It’s so important for the Body of Christ, The Church to understand one basic truth relative to the Gospel.

No one has found eternal life through the passing of a ballot. You cannot legislate someone to Jesus.

Ephesians 2:8, 9 “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast. “

See Basil’s Blog for other tidbits!
StopTheAcLu