And what do you think they are going to do to you when you are captured by an enemy? Surely we have not forgotten the beheadings that were so widely publicized a few years ago. Do you think this has ceased because our leaders of public thought (media) have decided to stop covering it?

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Go back and research how many women were handcuffed to a urinal at USNA . . . it was a singular incident, not plural like the LTC implies in his article. And if either of you researched it even more you would know it was in response to her stuffing a snowball down a male classmate's pants. And if you cared to research it a little more you would see the actual complaint didnt get filed until several months after she was kicked out of for Academics. Can pretty much gaurantee that no one cares if that happens in a civilian college. Fortunatley, after the media witchhunts ended there was enough understanding of the pettiness of the charges that the DANT's career wasnt hurt.

But that facts like that dont generate as many page views and comments as "stupid Academy grads stories, true or not" does.

That woman at USNA was probably a slut who deserved what she got, right? No doubt she was the only one too, because she was the only one who complained. Nice. Wake up CDR F.

That's a legal presumption that explains the principles on which court hearings on criminal matters run and applies to individual defendants. It's by no means a whole-world idea. As to Haditha, I wasn't there and cannot say exactly what happened, but LEROY argues that because nobody has been found guilty of murder after that incident, then murder wasn't done. Nonsense. Some kind of fraud might have been: a marine lieutenant has been charged with sundry kinds of jiggerypokery about the incident.

While I find the original story on hazing interesting, let's not think this a West Point peculiarity. Rolling Stone -- possibly becoming the national home* of superior reporting on military misconduct -- tells of the Stryker private in an admittedly murderous unit who asked an officer to stop other soldiers from smoking marijuana in his quarters. he was promptly attacked in his room by six other soldiers, beaten severely (but not about the face, so the bruising would be concealed), hit in the genitals and spat upon. We must all be delighted that none of these assailants were West Point men. I've never been assaulted by six battle-fit men at once. It doesn't sound nice.

* Rolling Stone doesn't seem to have particularly brilliant investigative military correspondents. The magazine simply doesn't look away from the bleeding obvious and just about every other publication does. This year's RS report on the unconventional Stryker unit in Afghanistan seems to have been a follow-up to months of intercontinental communications by soldiers proud of things they had done outside the uniform code of military justice -- to be polite -- and lots of people presented with electronic images of things now being presented by prosecuting military attorneys. Just like those merry CDs circulated by the military guards at Abu Ghraib.

As I said above, scribblers fixated on a false meme.

The people charged with reviewing all the evidence, hearing from all the evidence, and rendering a verdict have unanimously exonerated the people you accuse of shooting "babies and kids." War is hell. People die. People get caught in the crossfire. Mistakes happen. But it is not a case of murder, no matter how hard you push this discredited line of attack on our proud Marines who put their lives on the line so you can have the freedom of speech to slander them repeatedly.

Tom,

I'm not going to read your book in time to comment on this discussion after having read those pages. My understanding is that the non-combatants died as a result of Marines clearing rooms IAW the SOP, i.e. mostly through frag grenades. At worst this is a case of Marines clearing a set of buildings too aggressively. That is why CHARGES WERE DROPPED despite extremely intense political pressure for someone to take the blame for this.

I imagine the point of you posting the article was to spur a conversation about the service academies. I tried to steer it back that way in my last post. However, I'm not going to roll over on the Haditha point. Maybe you should post pages 3-8 in another entry and we can comment about that on a different thread to preserve the original intent of this one.

S/F

Everyone has his opinion on the Haditha case. My opinion is that the Marine Corps whitewashed the case. The USMC (my service, by the way) represented by its officers and NCO's appointed to the jury seems to be reluctant today to punish its own and is ever afraid of tarring its reputation with convictions.

If you called my friends murders the first thing I would want to know was on what evidence; getting angry about it would not help me resolve the situation. But you haven't called my friends murderers and neither did the Lt. Col. pick out any of your friends by name (are you considering the Marines investigated over Haditha to be friends because you also served?). If someone makes an argument personal it is going to be rather difficult to appreciate its institutionally oriented character.

On a less contentious note, as a VT student I can agree that the ROTC cadets here are really a spectrum. We have a pretty good array of turds, decent guys, and some real pros. I think in an institution that requires a certain degree of leadership attrition it is going to be more beneficial to have a range in officer quality that you can slowly cull, rather than a binary output of terrible and great. With only two broad levels of officer quality it would seem to open the institution up to a high variability of unit capability which is problematic in several ways. From a planning standpoint it would be better to have a lot of average officers that have a dependable level of performance. I also suspect that best products of the academy would do very well if placed in ROTC or OCS.

If you called my friends murders the first thing I would want to know was on what evidence; getting angry about it would not help me resolve the situation. But you haven't called my friends murderers and neither did the Lt. Col. pick out any of your friends by name (are you considering the Marines investigated over Haditha to be friends because you also served?). If someone makes an argument personal it is going to be rather difficult to appreciate its institutionally oriented character.

On a less contentious note, as a VT student I can agree that the ROTC cadets here are really a spectrum. We have a pretty good array of turds, decent guys, and some real pros. I think in an institution that requires a certain degree of leadership attrition it is going to be more beneficial to have a range in officer quality that you can slowly cull, rather than a binary output of terrible and great. With only two broad levels of officer quality it would seem to open the institution up to a high variability of unit capability which is problematic in several ways. From a planning standpoint it would be better to have a lot of average officers that have a dependable level of performance. I also suspect that best products of the academy would do very well if placed in ROTC or OCS.

I use that term advisedly. Not going to say which ones because I want to respect their privacy and, quite frankly, don't want my name all over the internet either.

...sigh. thanks Tom, I think. My damn paper is already 58 pages and still they come.

As RBB quotes from Fromm "...the Army has yet to define its professional ethic exactly. To me that is an alarming realization after having been shooting at people for a decade."

Yeah I think its a problem too, but that's why I am doing it.

The problem with some of the comments here is that they can't separate the legal from the moral. That is also the military's big problem as well. We do ok dealing with the legalistic side of the equation. It's easy "don't do this or you will get in trouble." The moral side is a lot harder, a lot mushier. "don't do this, because it is wrong." Even more difficult is to rise to the level of "aspiration" Don't do this because it isn't keeping with the military or personal values.

I tend to think that Haditha was a colossal mistake, maybe illegal, most likely immoral. Regardless it isn't the best example to use when there is so many really nasty bits out there like Abu Ghraib, Mahmudiyah, Maymand etc.

Other posters highlight that often the tension is between loyalty and honor or integrity. Say what you will about USMA and its kin, but that is usually something they get quite right - solely because their Honor Code, with the non-toleration clause, demands it. The Army could use both a non-toleration clause and the Spirit of the Code that goes with it.

People often talk about how our people are the military's most important resource, if it were true there would be an understandable, concise professional ethic by now. Professionals are awarded autonomy by their client (the American people) in exchange for the agreement to self-police that ethic. The UCMJ is necessary but not sufficient to do that policing.

Tom, I just realized I could read pages 3-8 on Amazon's "look inside" feature.

Instead of a long-winded debunking of your argument, I'll just leave it at this: given the evidence you presented, why hasn't anyone been convicted?

If you say it's whitewashing you don't deserve your stellar reputation as a defense journalist. The chain of command, especially at senior levels, was out for blood once that Time Magazine article came out. Whitewashing was the last thing on their agenda.

Pages 3-8 are a grippy lead-in but they're incomplete because they rely on facts as presented by the horrendously flawed NCIS report and are written in a jaded "look how f'ed up everything in Iraq was" voice in order to set the tone for the rest of your book I guess.

Perhaps your next book can be about how Marines see the Haditha affair as a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the journalistic establishment and the extent to which Washington is out of touch with the guys on the ground.

Sorry to be continually disrupting the original intent of this thread but again, I'm not rolling over on this.

....are what happen - or not - when people are tried. For the most part charges were dropped in pre-trial hearings.

My reading of the evidence available to us is that there were two separate incidents to consider The first was in the immediate aftermath of the IED attack in which the unit concerned took 5 unarmed men out of a taxi and summarily executed them. The second was the clearance - in accordance with SOP's - of the three houses.

To support the justification of the house clearance the unit later claimed to have been fired upon from one of the houses. In claiming such mitigation I would expect that investigators would require evidence of such. There was no evidence according to the EOD team who attended the scene. None in the houses (there was a single AK in one house and that had not been fired) and none in the taxi. In other words, there is no evidence of justification for the house clearance itself and so whether the procedure carried out in accordance with SOP's is nullified. As for the men in the taxi......

What we're left with is an act of reprisal against unarmed people in the aftermath of an attack on the unit. That is a crime and the fact that the whole unit are not serving life sentences for these killings seems to have more to do with legal deal-making and command cowardice than innocence.

And Iraqi insurgents always stood and fought in place, never policed their brass, and never ran away...right.

Just because the evidence wasn't found doesn't make their claim they were fired upon impossible.

Steve C., don't know where you got your info on them not being fired at, there was an entire video from an Eagle Scan that helped clear them that showed them getting fired at. As for the Taxi, the follow up investigation by CID backed them up too.

I've seen nothing on that.

Are you saying there were weapons in the car?

That isn't what the EOD team reported.

And Wuterich himself has allegedly said they weren't fired on from the house.

Interesting.

The only references found for Haditha and "Eagle Scan" are by..... Eric Stratton III.

Are you the only person in the world who has seen this?

The Video is what helped clear them and weapons don't have to found for the taxi part of it, what the CID backed up was that what the Marines said in regard to the taxi occupants could have happened just the way they said it did even though the bodies laid the way they laid. Wish I had the video on me but I try not to carry that stuff with me ;)

Look, I understand you don't like when I use logic and make counterpoints on topics and usually correctly but try this thing called Google, type in the words Eagle Scan and Haditha. It's this thing called the Internet, it's awesome, try it ;)

Tried that internet searchy thingy and you are the only reference.

As to the disappearing weapons from the taxi: are you suggesting that the EOD team and/or the naval investigators destroyed this vital evidence. Weapons that not even the Marines' defense counsel hadn't heard about before it was mentioned a year or so later by one of the Marines wounded in the initial explosion? You mean to tell me that all those guys who were facing trial for mass murder had neglected to tell their defense counsel that there was physical evidence that pointed to their innocence by corroborating at least a part of their claim of following SOP's in self-defense?

I think you have a great career ahead of you in France or any other country that has Napoleonic law....evidently in your universe it's incumbent on the accused to prove their innocence.

They were subjected to a thorough investigation in which millions of dollars were spent collecting and analyzing evidence. That evidence was presented to a chain of command that REALLY, REALLY, REALLY wanted a scalp to hang on the wall; yet, the accused Marines have all been acquitted, save one, who (I hope) will be exonerated shortly. I say this as someone who has been following the case.

Saying they're not guilty of murder doesn't mean it wasn't wrong that noncombatants died. It doesn't mean that they couldn't have done anything better in the chaos of combat.

It simply means they're not guilty of murder.

Your either fibbing or not good with tech, I just googled it and came up with CNN stories, Stars & Stripes, must be a different Internet I guess ;)

I'm sorry but you can't be acquitted unless you're actually tried. For most of the accused the charges were dropped in pre-trial proceedings.

As to a presumption of innocence. That isn't in question here. All the evidence that's available led investigators to believe that a crime had been committed. Those accused put forward a defense of mitigation - they'd been shot at from the house. It is then up to the defendants to show that those circumstances existed. That was not done, it was only said by the defendants.

Let me give you a clue. When everyone lawyers-up and does a deal to save his own ass that usually means two things: firstly, a crime occurred and secondly, the investigation has broken through the "story". They knew that and their defense counsel knew that.

Getting a lawyer to defend you when you're accused of a crime is proof of guilt? Man, I learn something new every day.

What's the weather like in Belarus this time of year?

It would help if you could get scan and eagle in the right order. "Eagle Scan" produces only your own references.

As to the video: according to CNN the footage is of other incidents in the area before the attack on the Marines and a post-incident operation that began after the civilians had been killed by the squad.

I'm not sure what that is meant to "prove".

I was of course referencing the deal-making part of lawyering-up. But you knew that, didn't you?

Not guilty means: not guilty. If you're not guilty, how can you then be "not innocent"?

We have a terrible problem in the military of defaulting to guilt and forcing people to prove their innocence. Then we wonder why there's bitterness. You tell me a court says I'm not guilty but then you want to turn around and say, "well, that is not a verdict of innocent", and the clear implication is that I'm guilty. In the military we go on to slander, cut off awards, ruin evaluations and so forth without ever proving guilt, because of this mentality that says "not a verdict of innocent".

I'm as "guilty" as anyone else in this regard, I rush to condemn what I view as bad behavior, not what I "know" to be bad/illegal/immoral behavior, etc.

Anyway, we need to fix this. They speak of a profession policing its own ranks, but nowhere in a profession do they judge and punish without proof of guilt yet we seem to find that acceptable in the military. Can you imaging the medical profession running like the military? Dr. Jones is now thrown out of the Plastic Surgey specialty because Dr. Smith believes his latest boob job to be incorrectly done....it would never happen.

Of course this discussion had to dissolve into petty sophistry....

Bottom line, you think it's OK to call people murderers if they haven't been convicted of murder?

Let me get out ahead of you, I'm sure you'll pull out OJ Simpson as an example of why maybe it is.

OJ Simpson didn't say goodbye to his loved ones, get on a plane to Iraq, and repeatedly risk his life in a poorly planned war of dubious strategic importance in which higher-ups repeatedly threw the guys outside the wire under the bus in pursuit of their next promotion.

It also should be mentioned that the Company and BN Co's in the chain of command had their careers killed over this, so it's not like punishment has been spared.

Tom, you got to know LtCol Chessani back when he was a series commander and you were writing "Making the Corps". Did you ever talk to him about Haditha? Would you look him in the eyes today and call his Marines murderers?

Just curious.

S/F

The author is not calling anyone personally a murderer. Bad killings happen and they happened; that's obvious. One cannot get inside the mind of a soldier when he has experienced something so terrible as those Marines did. The objective facts speak for themselves. At least one Marine has not been exonerated. So this whole argument is mute.

If you speak of the case of OJ, no will deny that murders happened. Similarly now, it does not matter how they happened--they did; that is the point. The analogy the "friend" is making is another red herring. When these kinds of situations happened, as at Haditha, no one in his right mind is going to say these people who died were legitimate combatants or were caught in the line of fire. The facts are just too damn glaring. There may be some reason to clear those who pulled the trigger, but it's just crazy to say the deaths of those kids was justified. They may be explainable by the state of mind of those involved, but it's an insult to the humanity of the victims to say they were killed justly.

This line of reasoning is so typical of those who do not want to face reality and try to make it better.

You mean moot?

If the deaths of the children happened UNINTENTIONALLY because they were in rooms being cleared by Marines who were trying to get at an unknown number of insurgents who were firing on them from within the same building, there's a compelling case to be made that the Marines acted appropriately when they prepped rooms with frags.

Terrible things happen in war. If it had been my children killed, I'd be in no mood to philosophize or discuss this. I'm very biased in this discussion because people I know, trust, and admire were accused of war crimes and tried in the court of public opinion by a capricious and cowardly media, aided and abetted by John "Abscam" Murtha.

Pyotyor, you write that, "When these kinds of situations happened, as at Haditha, no one in his right mind is going to say these people who died were legitimate combatants or were caught in the line of fire." Were you there? Do you fully understand the geometries of fire of that engagement? I certainly don't and I've followed everything closely since it hit the news. I guess that means I'm not in my right mind...

Moot applies to, so thanks for the suggestion.

Leroy: About OJ and calling murderers, murderers. And my comment is more along the lines of the theoretical. If you murder, it does not matter what else you have done or what else you have suffered. You murdered. And a murderer deserves to be called such regardless of whether they have been convicted of the crime or not. It is just straight talking to call a person what they are. Your status or experience, good or bad, does not give you a pass on being plainly called what you are. To paraphrase a D.A.'s final argument in a case, you don't get one free murder because you are swell fellow.

so we can only guess how he's looking after his bees. I see he's now reached the eccentric stage of claiming that other people are going to put forward arguments that he imagines, and then masterfully dispelling those imaginary arguments. Phew! All this arising from his seeming misunderstanding of the point made in Mr Ricks' initial poasting. Many other readers seem to have found that easy.