Marines dismiss charges in Haditha killings.
The Washington Post reports that the “Marine Corps today dismissed all charges against one of the Marines who was accused of killing women and children in the Iraqi town of Haditha in late 2005.” This is “the third time the service has decided not to pursue a criminal trial in one of the most notorious episodes of the war”:
Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum, who has admitted shooting civilians inside their homes as part of a pursuit of insurgents, was exonerated and granted immunity to testify in further hearings related to the Haditha investigation. The move leaves just one Marine — Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich — facing charges in connection with the shootings Nov. 19, 2005. As many as two dozen civilians were killed that day after a roadside bomb hit the Marines’ convoy and killed a member of their unit.
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It’s so sad that I’m not a bit surprised.
March 28th, 2008 at 6:10 pmAnd this guy is IMMEDIATELY shipped back to the front. How many times does this have to happen before it’s apparent how DESPERATE they are to maintain troop levels?
March 28th, 2008 at 6:11 pmThis is bound to have some blowback somewhat east, north, south and west of Haditha…
March 28th, 2008 at 6:12 pmDale Carnegie is rolling in his grave.
March 28th, 2008 at 6:15 pmThis is certainly not the way to win friends and influence Iraqis.
Haditha = My Lei
March 28th, 2008 at 6:16 pmRather than dismiss the charges against all of them at once, in typical Bush fashion they are did it piece meal. A cynical tactic designed to limit outrage both here and abroad. Methinks it will be quite some time before Staff Sgt. Wuterich takes the stand.
-AF
Andrew Sullivan Is A Fraud
March 28th, 2008 at 6:23 pmIt’s sad these young men and women have to serve as bloody props in their Commander’s absurd political theater.
March 28th, 2008 at 6:27 pmThose MOFOS !!!!!!!!
They wont learn a F@cking Lesson until somebody
Haditha-izes THEIR family…
F the Marines.
March 28th, 2008 at 6:31 pmWe own the world.
March 28th, 2008 at 6:40 pmWe don’t care.
As independent journalist Darh Jamail and others, especially Iraqis, have observed, what happened at Haditha is not unusual. The Iraqis know that the atrocities at Haditha are an all too common occurrence in Iraq. The only difference is that the unjustified killings at Haditha received attention [finally] at Haditha while the daily outrages against the Iraqi people go unnoticed. The most effective way for these war crimes to stop is for the soldiers to stop participating in them. As the documentary Sir! No Sir! proved, the best way to bring a war and an occupation to a halt is to have it happen from within.
March 28th, 2008 at 6:46 pmDid any of you bother to watch PBS Frontline’s Haditha Rules of Engagement ?
March 28th, 2008 at 7:04 pmIt is available to watch online in high quality flash video.
This is facking bullshite. The Haditha situation was the most stomach-turning, messed up, horrifying, atrocity-tragedy that was actually publicized. (I know lots more happens that flies under the radar).
March 28th, 2008 at 7:05 pmThis really sucks. These Marines are criminals. I’m ashamed of America!
March 28th, 2008 at 7:05 pmAnd we wonder why they shout “Death to America” under their breath in Iraq but in the streets elswhere.
March 28th, 2008 at 7:21 pmYep. Rape innocents, kill innocents, destroy innocents. Now that is the Marine way of life. I wonder what kind of effect this news will have on our brave partners: The Iraquis. When you illegally invade and occupy their country, then rape, kill, and destroy the population, it is hard to continue to take the high road. We have sunken so low, pretty soon we will need scuba equipment just to beathe.
March 28th, 2008 at 7:27 pmAnd may they be forever held in reserve for the defense of our country and never be used illegally again.
March 28th, 2008 at 7:28 pmHopefully, this is a sign the case is working it’s way UP the chain of command, rather than down (again) - for a change.
March 28th, 2008 at 7:34 pmYOur headline frames this incorrectly, and in the way that RW blogs do.
The charges were not simply “dropped” - they were “dropped in exchange for testimony against other guilty parties.” They “cut a deal.”
Congrats on all the links for your one mistake. Hilarious.
March 28th, 2008 at 7:40 pmLT - something wrong with “fighting fire with fire”??
March 28th, 2008 at 7:46 pm…test
March 28th, 2008 at 7:58 pmWell what else would you expect. That is what Dahr Jamail does, regardless of whether those atrocities happened or not. Dahr Jamail was the reporter who promoted Jesse MacBeth’s lies about atrocities.
MacBeth claimed US troops executed hundreds of civilians praying in a mosque and hung them from the rafters. Jamail promoted this propaganda while doing quite a lot of reporting on Fallujah and claiming to have many contacts there. Any one of which would have undoubtedly told him such a thing never occurred and how ridiculous it would be to assume such a thing could occur without any Iraqi mentioning or even noticing it.
You all like to complain about MSM reporting on Iraq. However, whatever motivations and bias you think MSM journalists have when reporting on Iraq, none of them compare to Dahr Jamail.
This is a man who took a story of 2 US soldiers being killed in Iraq by an insurgent and under the headline of “killer of US soldiers a hero” promoted an unsupported claim that the insurgent killed these soldiers because they refused to stop beating a pregnant Iraqi woman on the streets of Iraq.
Never again complain about any lie you have been told about Iraq if you buy this shit. Because if you can’t ID this as propaganda, you’ve never met a lie you didn’t buy. Or at least, never met any blatant anti-US propaganda you wouldn’t buy.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:01 pmSo your point is that this one guy did all of the killing?
March 28th, 2008 at 8:03 pmThat is perhaps the strangest mystery surrounding the killings at Haditha. If TIME magazine and their sources are to be believed:
1. TIME identifies their source for the story as a human rights organisation who they had been in contact with previously on other stories.
2. That 2 man human rights organisation had 1 man on the spot and aware of the killings at Haditha when they took place.
3. He not only claims to be a witness, but also someone who wants to be a journalist.
4. He videotaped the scenes the day after the event.
5. With this video in hand, a desire to be involved in journalism, he being a resident of Haditha and 50% of a human rights org dedicated to bringing events like this to public attention and someone who already had contacts at TIME…… he waited 4 months to pass it to them.
To me, that’s seems a little suspect. It does to you too, but you won’t admit that. What motivation is involved in withholding this tape becomes less confusing so if you look into who these men are and where that tape did circulate before this human rights org passed it to the media.
Things really come into focus when you discover why the marine intel units operating around Haditha were referring to insurgents producing a propaganda video in the week after the incident (as explained by fellow captured insurgents) when this story didn’t become one for 4 more months.
It didn’t help those 4 men killed fleeing from the white taxi in Haditha that the marines were provided the following intel before this incident that:
1. There would be insurgent ambushes.
2. Be on the lookout for a white car involved in carrying out these ambushes.
3. That this information was developed by monitoring the communications of insurgents, like the phone of the man who produced that videotape.
The reaction of US troops and the death of civilians at Haditha was exactly what insurgents wanted to engineer with these 3 ambushes.
Once you figure out that the same insurgents who organised this attack also organised the videotape and therefor the TIME reporting of this, you’ll have a little more perspective.
And when I say they organised the portrayal of this to TIME magazine, I of course mean 4 months after the fact, during which time this videotape did the rounds as recruiting material for insurgents.
That is perspective simply into what occurred and how it was portrayed. You cannot have any perspective into the legality/criminality of what occurred at Haditha until you watch that Frontline examination linked above.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:07 pmKilo, you are so full of shiit. Why can’t we just have a real investigation and justice?
Why are you so sure we are doing the right thing by killing 10’s of thousands of people and creating a war zone for people to live in.
One in which, since it is a war zone….terrible things will be done by both sides….give your apologizing for criminals a rest.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:09 pmLook at what you have written.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:11 pmWho was shooting in each house has been well established.
If this wasn’t his point is your only option to go back to not bothering to read what happened ?
You are kidding, right? You think our people got duped into killing up to 24 people by the “insurgents”. Seriously, you need help. In the next breath you will talk about how dumb these insurgents are.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:14 pmThat already happened. For the 3rd time, watch the online PBS Frontline examination linked above if you want your opinion to be informed by anything other than sheer ignorance.
Or would you like to get into an argument with me about the forensic evidence, contradictions in witness statements and even the basic facts of how this occurred, while not knowing of the existance of these ?
March 28th, 2008 at 8:14 pmat the end of the day Iraq is still full of graves where there should be people (who wouldn’t be dead if we hadn’t unnecessarily invaded their country)
March 28th, 2008 at 8:18 pm“lingering questions about the facts” won’t bring any dead Iraqis back, and it won’t un-break the minds of the young men and women we’ve sent into these doomed scenarios time and time again.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:19 pmFred, you’re not going to have anything worth saying, let alone replying to until you actually find out what it is you are talking about.
Was this not proven in the 2 weeks following ?
All the insurgents from these ambushes were either killed or captured and the next group to try the same thing in the same place got turned over to US troops by the civilians they were using as cover.
The thing is Fred, that could be a lie.
You don’t know whether I’m making a fool out of you or whether I’m lying. So what do I care what you think ? I know all you can do here is guess about facts and question whether people are joking, because you don’t actually know whether they are.
This won’t change until you take some time out to find out about a topic you are pretending to care about. And I’m encouraging you to.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:24 pmKilo, I’ve never seen you admit you were wrong about anything..you must be about the smartest sob on the planet…..wonder why I just don’t give a big rats ass what you think about anything….
March 28th, 2008 at 8:30 pmFred, we just established that you can’t tell the difference between right and wrong when it comes to reciting basic facts about news stories, because you can’t be bothered informing yourself about those stories to begin with.
You’ve claimed here people are wrong, you just can’t offer any suggestion of what they might be wrong about. And when encouraged to inform yourself, free of charge, so that you might be able to post something less pathetic, you’ve instead opted to remain ignorant.
March 28th, 2008 at 9:01 pmNice sanctimony there Kilo - religious upbringing??
March 28th, 2008 at 9:02 pmThe only thing we have established is your departure from the real world. Get some help.
March 28th, 2008 at 9:08 pmWhat Kilo does not refute [because he cannot] is that what happened at Haditha [ and Fallujah and Ramadi, etc.], is simply the tip of the iceberg. Other independent journalists such as Nir Rosen, Robert Fisk, and Patrick Cockburn have confirmed what Dahr Jamail has reported, despite Kilo’s attempt to smear Jamail. Writers such as Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali, John Pilger, as well as international lawyers such as Richard Falk and Dennis Brutus, know the atrocities that the Iraqis have endured at the hands of the United States military. It would not be surprising to discover that Kilo believes that the testimony given by the Winter Soldiers is not to be believed. After all, for people like Kilo, American Exceptionalism, not international justice, must always prevail.
March 28th, 2008 at 9:17 pmThe few, the proud, the immune :-{
March 28th, 2008 at 10:55 pmYou tell me.
March 29th, 2008 at 12:09 amWhile you’re at it, you might want to explain why a healthy scepticism of dubious stories and encouraging people to educate themselves rather than wallow in ignorance, would peg me as being religious.
Er…. okay. And why would I or anyone else need/want/think to refute this ? It’s a war. Soldiers killing people is one of the characteristics that gives it away as being a war.
You’ve left out the part where you qualify what you think “this” is. You can read above that the courts don’t believe it to be murder any that nobody been deemed guilty of violating rules of engagement.
No, they haven’t. You will find this out should you wish to verify what he wrote with any other journalist of reputation. Try it.
That would appear to irrelevant to what I was discussing. Being fake atrocities suffered at the hands of nobody and claimed to have been committed by the US, for insurgent propaganda purposes.
Either you are claiming these people are brothers in arms with our insurgent propagandist in fabricating stories, or you get the point that defense of this does nothing but damage the reputations of any legitimate journalist you cite.
Someone calling in a bomb threat hoax isn’t supporting evidence for real the threat of terrorist attacks. If anything, perhaps unjustifiably so, it should make you more sceptical about that threat. Very rarely though would you expect to see someone defending a bomb hoax by citing actual bombings.
When Fisk writes about civilians being killed, this is the complete opposite of what Dahr Jamail writes about, not the same thing.
Yes the “Winter Soldier” gathering was held recently by IVAW. IVAW was of course the Iraq veterans group where Jesse MacBeth was a member, where he was peddling stories of atrocities he witnessed in Iraq, even though he never set foot in the country, nor even passed boot camp. Interestingly, this still makes him elligible for membership of “Iraq Veterans Against the War”. That is neither a lie or a joke, I shit you not.
What may be surprising about IVAW’s Winter Soldier testimonies is that many of those peddling stories of atrocities in Iraq to the media for the past few years, now given a forum to put their stories on record in a friendly environment…… failed to show up. Hmmm….. wonder why ?
As noted elsewhere, this may be because this was the first time that IVAW got around to fact checking the validity of these stories. A situation that might also be surprising until you remember Jesse MacBeth’s membership and continuing eligibility and the fact that one of the co-founders of the organisation has also been caught fabricating stories about killings of civilians.
March 29th, 2008 at 12:39 amKilo states that “Soldiers killing people is one of the characteristics that gives it away as being a war.” First, this pseudo expert may want to acknowledge that this is not a war but an occupation. Second, the pseudo expert wishes to discount the entire testimony of the Winter Soldiers because of the questionable authenticity of two of its participants. Of course, the pseudo expert would also wish to discount the testimony of the original Winter Soldiers in 1971, most likely because in his eyes the United States could never be guilty of committing atrocities against another country.
But perhaps the most egregious error the pseudo expert has committed is to shrug off the killing of civilians during a time of war. As the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles and the Army Field Manual [27-10 Section II 498-504]makes abundantly clear, “Any person, as a member of the armed forces, who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.” These offenses, as the Army Field Manual indicates, constitutes:
a. Crimes against peace.
b. Crimes against humanity.
c. War crimes.
Renowned scholars such as Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and expert on international relations, law of war and global institutions, Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law at the Univ. of Toledo and expert on law war, Harvey Tharp, former U.S. Navy Lieutenant and Judge Adjutant General [JAG] stationed in Iraq and the first officer to resign due to the war, Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild and Associate Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, have all, among others, agreed that the killing of civilians during a time of war or occupation is expressly forbidden by the above mentioned sources.
I would rather trust the judgment of the previously referenced scholars as well as the testimony of U.S. soldiers of what they had witnessed and/or participated in than that of the pseudo expert named Kilo.
March 29th, 2008 at 2:45 amI remember reporters asking nearby residents what they thought of the killing of the 24 innocent civilians. They answered “It happens every day! Why do you just care about one?”.
March 29th, 2008 at 3:25 amNope. I’ll wait for you to claim this is a somehow meaningful distinction and a problem that has been carried on every page of this website for quite a few years without protest. Also that the Iraq Veterans Against the War should never have been founded given that the war, presumably, only lasted a month.
Or we can simply not waste space with crap like this.
It’s not one or two. IVAW are quoted as saying they expected in excess of 100 testimonies based on those willing to tell these stories to and on behalf of the group.
40 showed up to testify.
Of those not showing up, many have subsequently had their member pages and claims scrubbed from the IVAW website. You’re not going to lie to me and claim you don’t know what this means, everyone here does. You’re also not going to lie and say you believe that proportion of them is insignificant and worthy of referring to as “a couple”.
I’d like you to, but you’re won’t.
I quite frequently cite the US committing atrocities against other countries here. I would however discount the testimony of the Vietnam Winter Soldiers on the basis that it’s 2008.
I haven’t shrugged them off, I’ve stated that they happen in war. This is guaranteed. In fact, there are few concepts short of physics where such guarantees are proven 100% of the time, every time.
Am I the one shrugging off the issue of civilian deaths in war when I come here and remind you all — to howls of protest — that this is precisely what was being voted for when authorising the Iraq invasion in both 1998 and 2002 ?
No kidding. The Army Field Manual also talks about the rules of engagement, which is what is in question in these trials here and which you haven’t even referred to let alone addressed anywhere in this or any other post.
Why ? If your motivation is to waste space then bravo, job well done. Otherwise you’ve posted nothing of relevance.
I mean FFS. What have you suggested here other than “war crimes are a legal matter” ? Well no fkn shit sherlock. What you now need to do is IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM RELATE THIS TO WHAT HAPPENED.
Again, no kidding. But surely when you know civilians are guaranteed to be killed in all wars and that all such killings do not amount to war crimes, that such statements cannot be referring to the death of civilians without qualification.
They can only be referring to the deliberate killing of civilians. Otherwise those legal scholars you refer to wouldn’t hold the positions you credit them with. Because they would never have passed the bar exam to begin with.
You aren’t even making a false claim or even a poor one. You are making no claim at all that what occurred in Haditha amounts to a war crime.
If you think this then FFS, let’s get on with it already. Otherwise you have nothing of relevance to contribute here.
Except it is not a matter of you trusting them or not, it is a matter of you reading their comments on a concept and incorrectly attributing that concept to this case, without any basis for doing so. In fact, without even claiming a basis for doing so.
I would trust the advice of a range of concurring lawyers on what properly constitutes money laundering under international law. If I recited this here and named names, I would be proving nothing other than Money laundering is not a fictional concept.
This however does not make it a crime that I can attribute to someone without reference to the facts of what they have done.
This is not complicated. As such, I’ll be referring to you as a pedophile in all subsequent posts (the definition of which I can cite legal agreement on) if you continue to waste my time with stuff like this.
March 29th, 2008 at 3:34 amIt seems I was lacking some facts when I wrote this above….
Dahr Jamil’s source for this claim was the Assoc of Muslim Scholars. I’ve referred to them here or elsewhere on TP as simply “an anti-American sunni group”. This is not accurate.
The Association of Muslim Scholars, who is a source for Dahr Jamail’s reporting in such a clear piece of propaganda, is more accurately described as “the leading Sunni religious establishment that supports al Qaeda in Iraq.”
Would we like to continue our defense of this reporter and his fabricated stories, published at the behest of those supporting al Qaeda in Iraq ?
March 29th, 2008 at 5:35 amI am sick of US murdering people to liberate them and bring them democracy. Death is now the Freedom Sleep, thanks to US.
We had to kill them to save them. We had to bomb the fu(king world to save it. What heroes we are. All hail US.
Fu(king karma in the shitter for eons. Sob and weep.
FTMarines, lying, asscovering, testosterated simps that they are.
March 29th, 2008 at 9:47 amKilo’s main thrust of his argument, as far as I can determine, is that the killing of civilians happen during a time of war, and even though these are war crimes, this is to be expected during war time. He is trying to absolve the Marines of what happened at Haditha, despite the fact that 24 Iraqi civilians were killed, seven of whom were women and three were children. Is he attempting to claim that all these civilians shot themselves and each other? The Iraqis have said that relatives of those killed by American service members have received $2,500 by the U.S. government while the relatives of a dead American service member receives over $200,000. That is how much an Iraqi life is worth to the United States- a paltry $2500.
It certainly seems credible that a bomb went off killing a few Marines before this incident took place. It would then appear that the Marines killed these civilians as an act of vengeance as retaliation for their comrades being killed, even though there is absolutely no evidence linking the Iraqi civilians to the deaths of those Marines who were blown up. But according to the pseudo expert, any testimony given by an Iraqi is not to be believed because he or she is Iraqi while the testimony of an American serviceman is to be given credence because that person is American. The bottom line, as Tombaker at #29 has observed “… Iraq is still full of graves where there should be people [who wouldn’t be dead if we hadn’t unnecessarily invaded their country].”
But, as I previously mentioned, what happened at Haditha does not surprise the Iraqis at all since they know that atrocities take place against them on a daily basis. They also know that the words of the occupiers will always be believed and accepted in the vast majority of the cases over that of the oppressed. As long as the United States continues to illegally occupy Iraq, there will be more atrocities committed against the Iraqi people. The difference is that those daily outrages will not receive the attention that the massacre at Haditha did [as evidenced when the American military killed and harassed Iraqis at the hospital in Fallujah in 2004, I believe]. Unfortunately, the wanton slayings of the 24 Iraqis who were massacred at Haditha has gone unpunished, apparently proving that international law does not apply to anyone wearing an American uniform.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:42 amFred
That’s not what I’m saying at all. Do you understand what “cut a deal” means? It means they admit guilt. You don’t have to cut a deal if you’re not guilt of something.
That’s my point. There were several people who made deals in this case. When the Right reports those stories they shout “CHARGES DISMISSED” - as if it means “found innocent.” That’s my point to ThinkProgress.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:56 amStavrakios Says:
Long live the US Marine Corp!
Stav: Its Corps, unless you meant that it is a corporation, which may be more correct….
March 29th, 2008 at 11:50 amKilo at #41 rips into the IVAW and the Winter Soldiers Testimony, trying to somehow claim that their presence is not to be taken seriously because only 40 showed up out of 100. On the contrary, that should prove just the opposite, in that the IVAW wanted to make sure that those who did testify were credible and that if there was any doubt about the authenticity, then those people would not testify, which is exactly what happened. What he is unwilling to do is to listen to the testimony of these veterans, who had committed atrocities against the Iraqis and those in the military such as Suzanne Swift who have been sexually assaulted, not by Iraqis, but by her superior officer while being in Iraq. I would rather take the words of those who have been in a war zone like those in the IVAW than someone like Mr. KIlo who, I suspect, has never been in a combat zone while wearing a military uniform.
He also bizarrely states that the IVAW should not have been founded because the war lasted only a month. If they would have named their organization the IVAO-Iraq Veterans Against the Occupation- would that have somehow made it more valid? Their name does not take anything away from what they witnessed and/or participated in while being in Iraq. The pseudo expert may wish to avail himself of a book which deals with what Iraq veterans have gone through, entitled Mission Rejected-U.S. Soldiers Who Say NO to Iraq by Peter Laufer. That is, unless the pseudo expert is going to claim that Laufer and these Iraq veterans have made up what they went through in Iraq for absolutely no justifiable reason whatsoever.
Kilo, like so many of the other super patriotic Americans, cannot possibly conceive that the U.S. military could be culpable of committing war crimes. Twenty four Iraqi civilians were killed at Haditha, seven women and three children, and not one American was held responsible for this atrocity. The U.S. did it during World War II, in Vietnam, and is certainly doing it now in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, as previously mentioned, for flag wavers like Kilo, American Exceptionalism must always win out.
March 29th, 2008 at 12:28 pmNo. First of all I didn’t state killing civilians in war time *wasn’t* a war crime. I simply said this doesn’t qualify it as a war crime, the circumstances in which it occurred does.
Secondly, this couldn’t be my arguement, since stating civilians get killed in war isn’t an arguement or point. It’s just reference to a fact.
After clearly being prompted to state how you think this qualifies as a war crime, you’ve opted not to.
I’m going to take that as an admission from you that you don’t think a war crime happened at Haditha, just because without you making a case to that end, I can.
We haven’t even discussed whether a crime occurred yet, let alone got around to making a case one way or the other.
That appears to have been a discussion you had by yourself inside your head.
Bet you did better there than here eh.
Well aren’t you Captain Pathetic.
Unlike you, I’ve already referred to the fact that who was shooting inside each building and that these cross-referenced testimonies have also been cross examined with forensic evidence.
If you don’t want to discuss that evidence then piss off, you have nothing of relevance to say here. Neither I nor anyone else is going to take a fictional scenario you dreamed up seriously.
There were 3 separate IED and small arms fire ambushes from insurgents. This incident involved one of those.
No, it wouldn’t appear this way unless you never bothered checking how it looked and just made an ignorant guess.
It looks that way, except for the distinct lack of anything that suggests it looks that way, no findings on that basis, concurring undisputed testimony and forensics to the contrary and literally nothing other that an ignorant assumption on your part that this is what occurred.
You literally haven’t bothered learning any details about what happened beyond “IED bang = marine dead = Iraqis shot”, have you.
This has never been suggested by anyone, including the defense attorneys. Surely you should get the idea that you are missing some relevant facts if that defense never happened, but charges have never been brought or have since been dropped in all cases.
Liar. I’ve said no such thing.
You reveal yourself to be no better than Fred. Making random guesses as to what is being discussed because you have never bothered to inform yourself of what happened, to the point where you could post anything else.
Usually this might involve some effort, however in this case the incident is documented in hundreds of news articles and recounted in witness statements, in detail, straight from the horses mouths from everyone who was there.
You’ve bothered to read none of it.
This is the bottom line is it ? That it’d be just grand to have a time machine. Super.
Well why not just post that in each and every thread about Iraq rather than pretending you are willing to discuss any aspect of it in detail, and wasting everyone’s time.
And when the occupation stops, that’ll still happen.
Much like your buddy Jamail, when 40 people are dismembered in a car bombing of a local market this never makes the grade of being worthy of referencing as “an atrocity against the Iraqi people”.
Quit pretending you give a toss about international law when you just showed you couldn’t be bothered spending 15min looking into how it applies here.
Either you don’t think international law has been violated here, have been lying and don’t want that to be exposed, or you just don’t care enough to give it anything other than a token, passing mention.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:12 amNo, I made no reference to those who did testify. Just that a lot of them who had been peddling stories of atrocities in the press for the past few years as IVAW members, weren’t now testifying that those same things happened. For obvious reasons.
Or to put it another way: “what Kilo said”
On what are you basing this statement ? The astonishing powers of presumption you’ve displayed so far no doubt.
I’m puzzled by why, when we were talking about fake vs real atrocities, have you chosen to cite 1 example in rebuttal that doesn’t consist of that.
Looks like I’m not the only one here who hasn’t bothered watching those testimonies eh.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:32 amBTW it never fails to astonish me that so many of you can read my posts and convince yourselves that I’m a conservative, republican-voting, Bush loving Americian (who never gives a toss about any story involving abortion, immigration, gay rights etc for as yet unexplained reasons), when there is nothing more consistent in my posts than timestamps reading 1am-5am.
Could you all STFU until you come up with a backstory for that as well, if the obvious reason is going to continue to elude you.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:38 am