Haditha Justice
Marines vs. smears.

By Michelle Malkin

Yet another U.S. Marine, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, had charges dropped Tuesday in the so-called Haditha massacre — bringing the total number of Marines who’ve been cleared or won case dismissals in the Iraq-war incident to seven. “Undue command influence” on the prosecution led to the outcome in Chessani’s case. Bottom line: That’s zero for seven for military prosecutors, with one trial left to go.

I repeat: Haditha prosecution goes 0-7. But you won’t see that headline in the same Armageddon-sized font the New York Times used repeatedly when the story first broke.

The Times, Rep. John Murtha (D., Pa.), and the rest of the antiwar drum-pounders who fueled the smear campaign against the troops two years ago should hang their hands in shame. They won’t, of course. Perpetuating the “cold-blooded Marines” narrative means never having to say you’re sorry.

It means never having to look Lt. Col. Chessani (charges dismissed), Lt. Andrew Grayson (acquitted), Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum (charges dismissed), Capt. Lucas McConnell (charges dismissed), Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt (charges dismissed), Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz (charges dismissed), Sgt. Frank Wuterich (awaiting trial), and their families in the eyes and apologize for the preemptive character assassination they all faced at the hands of the hyperventilating, noose-hanging press.

Murtha and company applied Queen of Hearts (“Off with their heads!”) treatment to our own men and women in uniform while giving more benefit of the doubt to foreign terror suspects at Gitmo. It is worth recalling, because the press won’t do it for you, what they concluded about the now-crumbling Haditha case in the summer of 2006 before a single formal charge had been filed.

MSNBC hangman Keith Olbermann, who couldn’t wait to define the entire war in Iraq by a single moment about which he knew nothing, inveighed that the incident was “willful targeted brutality.” Due process? For convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, of course. For our military? Never mind.

Far-left The Nation magazine railed, “Enough details have emerged . . . to conclude that . . . members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment perpetrated a massacre.” The publication also judged the event “a willful, targeted brutality designed to send a message to Iraqis.” Not content with hanging the troops, The Nation pinned blame on the president and a so-called “culture of impunity” that supposedly permeates the most accountable military in the world.

Singing the same tune as The Nation, the New York Times spilled a flood of front-page ink on the case and took things a step further in a lead editorial blaming not just President Bush, but also top Pentagon brass for the “nightmare” killings in Haditha. Times reporter Paul von Zielbauer filed over 30 stories on the case, which the paper wishfully called the “defining atrocity” of the Iraq war.

Hoping to facilitate a self-fulfilling prophecy, media tools around the world likened Haditha to the Vietnam War’s most infamous atrocity — from the Guardian (“My Lai on the Euphrates?”) to the London Telegraph (“Massacre in Iraq just like My Lai”) to the Los Angeles Times (“What happened at the Iraqi My Lai?”) to the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd (“My Lai acid flashback”) and the Associated Press, which reached into its photo archives to run a 1970 file photo of My Lai to illustrate a Haditha article.

And, of course, there’s the permanent stain left by the slanderous propaganda of Rep. Murtha — the stab in the Marines’ backs heard ‘round the world: “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.”

Relatives of the Haditha Marines have called for Congress to censure Murtha, who cuts and runs to the nearest elevator when questioned about the Haditha dismissals. He and the Haditha smear merchants have skated while the men and their families suffered global whippings on the airwaves and eternal demonization in print. Whose “culture of impunity”?

Labels: Haditha, Iraq, media bias, Murtha, Smearing the Troops

A former member of Bill Clinton's National Security Council, Daniel Benjamin, debunks several myths promoted in large part by Hollywood's latest movie titled "Rendition."

With hearings in Congress, legal cases bouncing up to the Supreme Court and complaints from Canada and our European allies, the issue of rendition is everywhere. There's even a new, eponymously titled movie in a theater near you, starring Reese Witherspoon as a bereft wife whose innocent husband gets kidnapped and Meryl Streep as the frosty CIA chief who ordered the snatch. Like most covert actions and much of the war on al-Qaeda, the practice is shrouded in mystery -- and, increasingly, the suspicion that it's synonymous with torture and lawlessness.
In fact, the term "rendition" in the counterterrorism context means nothing more than moving someone from one country to another, outside the formal process of extradition. For the CIA, rendition has become a key tool for getting terrorists from places where they're causing trouble to places where they can't. The problem is where these people are taken and what happens to them when they get there. As a former director for counterterrorism policy on the National Security Council staff, I've been involved with the issue of rendition for nearly a decade -- and some of the myths surrounding it need to be cleared up.

1. Rendition is something the Bush administration cooked up.

Nope. George W. Bush was still struggling to coax oil out of the ground when the United States "rendered to justice" its first suspect from abroad. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan authorized an operation that lured Lebanese hijacker Fawaz Younis to a boat off the coast of Cyprus, where FBI agents arrested him. (Younis had participated in the 1985 hijacking of a Jordanian plane and was implicated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which left a U.S. Navy diver dead.) President George H.W. Bush approved the kidnapping in 1990 of Mexican physician Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was believed to be involved in the torture and killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration official. Nothing says that renditions can involve only suspected terrorists; Israel's abduction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 could be called a rendition, though the term was not yet in use.

Beginning in 1995, the Clinton administration turned up the speed with a full-fledged program to use rendition to disrupt terrorist plotting abroad. According to former director of central intelligence George J. Tenet, about 70 renditions were carried out before Sept. 11, 2001, most of them during the Clinton years.

2. People who are "rendered" inevitably end up in a foreign slammer -- or worse.

Actually, that's not a foregone conclusion. Alvarez was brought to the United States. So was Mir Aimal Kansi, who killed two CIA employees in their cars outside the agency's Langley headquarters in 1993, and Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Both were apprehended in Pakistan, whose leaders decided that the nation would rather not have those two -- folk heroes to some -- sitting in jail, awaiting extradition. Pakistan's leaders feared that cooperating with the United States would be dangerously unpopular, so they wanted the suspects out of the country quickly. For many pro-U.S. Muslim leaders, that concern has only deepened as anti-Americanism has soared.

By my count, most renditions since 1995 have involved moving individuals from one foreign country to another -- not grabbing someone in Washington and carting them off to North Africa, as happens to Witherspoon's onscreen husband. Such operations typically occur in secret because, again, Muslim leaders (especially in the Arab world) want to shield their cooperation with Washington from their anti-American publics. The CIA has acted as a go-between, arranging the transfers and providing transportation. Usually those being rendered are not brought to the United States because, while the U.S. government may have an abundance of intelligence showing their malfeasance, it doesn't have enough courtroom evidence. There's a big difference between the two.

One other safeguard: During the Clinton years, the United States required the country that received a rendered person to have some kind of legal process against the suspect -- an arrest warrant or indictment, for example. It's not clear whether that is still the case. Perhaps Michael Mukasey, President Bush's attorney general nominee, can check.

3. Step one of a rendition involves kidnapping the suspect.

The individual may feel as though he's being kidnapped, but that's not usually what's going on. Most of the time, the person is detained by the authorities of the country he is in. They will then hand him off to the CIA, which will fly him to his destination.

In rare cases when the country of residence is a hostile one, an "extraordinary rendition" can be carried out: a covert effort to abduct the suspect and spirit him out of the country. The CIA put considerable time into efforts to capture Osama bin Laden this way from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Had it worked, it would have been an extraordinary rendition -- and Americans would have cheered.

4. Rendition is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

Well, not historically. The guidelines for Clinton-era renditions required that subjects could be sent only to countries where they were not likely to be tortured -- countries that gave assurances to that effect and whose compliance was monitored by the State Department and the intelligence community. It's impossible to be certain that those standards were upheld every time, but serious efforts were made to see that they were. At a minimum, countries with indisputably lousy human rights records (say, Syria) were off-limits. Another key difference: Renditions before Bush were carried out to disrupt terrorist activity, not to gather intelligence or to interrogate individuals.

Now, though, the Bush team seems to have dramatically eroded such safeguards. The administration has apparently sent someone to Syria, and Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, was evidently grabbed in Macedonia and interrogated in Afghanistan in a manner that sure sounds like torture. In light of this and other revelations, the criticism that the administration has "defined down" torture looks pretty persuasive. It's probably a good bet that Congress or the next administration will reform the program, or abolish it outright.

5. Pretty much anyone -- including U.S. citizens and green card holders -- can be rendered these days.

Not so, although the movie "Rendition" -- in which Witherspoon's Egyptian-born husband gets the black-hood treatment and is yanked from a U.S. airport and taken to a North African chamber of horrors -- is bound to spread this myth. A " U.S. person" (citizen or legal resident) has constitutional protections against being removed from the country through rendition, and there have been no incidents to suggest the contrary. In fairness, though, the ghastly case of Maher Arar -- a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who convincingly says he was detained at New York's JFK Airport, handed off to Syria and tortured -- is way too close for comfort.

Labels: CIA, civil liberties, Hollywood bias, intelligence, interrogation, media bias, Smearing the Troops, surveillance, tribunals, TSP, war on terror, wiretap

Gateway Pundit and Jules Crittenden both comment on this all too telling and typical New York Times editorial's disappointment that the US Marines didn't actually slaughter civilians in Haditha.

The New York Times
October 6, 2007

Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago.

But on Thursday, a senior military investigator recommended dropping murder charges against the ranking enlisted marine accused in the 2005 killings, just as he had done earlier in the cases of two other marines charged in the case. The recommendation may well have ended prosecutors’ chances of winning any murder convictions in the killings of the apparently unarmed men, women and children.
Call it a "defining atrocity moment" lost. Woe is the NY Times! If only those Marines had actually murdered innocent Iraqis we could all bask in the Vietnam-era peacenik glory of My Lai!!! If only... if only.

These people are just disgusting.

And so is Rep. Jack Murtha (D, PA), who was quick to smear the Marines, individually by name no less, as he endlessly popped up on the Sunday talk show circuit during 2006, but is awfully quiet these days.

Gateway wonders, "Sometimes it's hard to figure out just who they are rooting for." On the contrary, it's not hard at all.

EXTRA: Nathaniel Helms discovers that our mainstream media additionally failed to report: "Buried in the mountain of exhibits attached to the once secret Haditha, Iraq murder inquiry prepared by US Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell is an obscure Marine Corps intelligence summary (see pdf) that says the deadly encounter was an intentional propaganda ploy planned and paid for by Al Qaeda foreign fighters. "

Read the rest.

Labels: Congress, democrats, Haditha, Iraq, Murtha, Smearing the Troops