I Don't Know What to Say...

I'm am so sick of this! I was (to my growing shame) one of the first people in my blogging circle to say publicly that I suspected that the Marines had done something wrong in Haditha. At that time I found it easier to believe that a couple of Marines had "gone bad" and done something horrific than to believe that the major world media could be so collossally ignorant and incompetent that they could be completely taken in by an insurgent/terrorist ruse of this level of complexity. Now I'm finding the latter less and less unbelievable, willing to consider that I've seriously underestimated the media's incompetence and the terrorists' abilities.

I don't know why I'm bothering to write this, and I'm not even going to give links to most of it. It's already all out there, but the people who need to hear it are unwilling to listen. This will change no one's mind. Proof and reason mean nothing to people of repulsive ethics who care for nothing more than the ego-gratification of believing they are "right about Iraq" or the destruction of their political enemies by any means possible regardless of the consequences. Appeals to logic and the morality of hard choices fall on deaf ears. They are tearing down the entire Marine Corps and destroying the lives and careers of individual Marines in the leadership, weakening our country's future, and--yes--damaging the rest of the world by their hateful, ignorant, and dangerous words and actions. They are disgusting beyind words, and the knowledge of their power and reach and the consequences of their horrifying stupidity terrify me.

Does anybody find it mere coincidence that while the Haditha story is not splashed across the front pages of Middle Eastern newspapers, terrorist assaults in the last week are still up by orders of magnitude? A couple days ago, two bombs were detonated in a pet market in Baghdad. Today a suicide car bomber killed 28 and wounded 65 in a market in Basra. These are not attacks on coalition troops, but assaults on civilians! Here's more, from the second link:

_Gunmen ambushed a police checkpoint in the capital, killing seven police and wounding five pedestrians.

_Six mortar rounds hit a central Baghdad square, killing a child.

_Drive-by attackers shot and killed two car-parts salesmen and a mechanic as they worked at their shop in Baqouba.

_Gunmen in a car opened fire on two people in another vehicle, killing one and wounding the other, in the predominantly Sunni Dora neighborhood in southern Baghdad.

_Gunmen stopped an ambulance and opened fire in Dora, killing the driver and wounding a passenger.

Don't tell me it's because of Haditha; news of it has hardly created a ripple in the "arab street." No, attacks are up because the terrorists (for one can call those who attack civilians nothing else) sense Americans are discouraged and that the political pressure from dishonorables such as Rep. Murtha who call for abandoning the Iraqis is gaining strength. They believe the more disruption and suffering they can put on our TV screens, the more we will waver and eventually leave the Iraqis to their "tender mercies."

But I'm getting away from my point... As I said, I'm finding the formerly-absurd idea that in this case the insurgents/terrorists have perpetrated a fraud in Haditha and conducted a successful PSYOPS campaign more believable as each day passes. Especially when I read things like this from "respectable" news sources:

In an off-camera conversation with the cameraman, Iman, the 9-year-old survivor, told of hiding under a bed for hours after the shootings. She said Marines finally found her and initially took her for dead when they pulled her out.

The Marines later flew her and her brother Abdul-Rahman to a nearby hospital for treatment of their minor wounds. They were later moved to a Baghdad hospital.

My God! Have these reporters lost their minds? Is this the kind of behavior you would expect of Marines who either massacred her family or were supposedly brought in later to "clean up?!" Yeah, brilliant work if you want to cover up a crime: rescue one of the few witnesses you managed to miss!! Doesn't anybody see this? Are these reporters all so incompetent that they don't even notice the inherent contradiction?!

And more than that, this contradicts another published version of the story, which describes her running to a neighboring house after the soldiers left. But then you can compare even that to the reports by villagers that the Marines sealed off the houses affected until the bodies were removed to the hospital...

When I see things like this and consider the massive power the major media have in this world, I am of two minds: I want to scream and yell and throw things and fight them (literally and metaphorically), or else I just want to give up, ignoring the world for as long as I can because then I can have some time of blissful ignorance before the folly of these kinds of peoples' successful assault on truth, honor and morality bears its horrifying fruit for us all.