Rusted Sky

I'm gonna have to start paying her.

SueK points out in Part of the Problem that the emphasis in the legal system is on WINNING - not on actually making sure justice is done. In a story she points up at Newsmax concerning the Haditha trials, apparently the prosecution took 8 to 10 hours of drone coverage and edited it down to about one hour.

The Marine intelligence officer who monitored the Scan Eagle’s video transmissions throughout the day told NewsMax that there was continuous video feed from the Scan Eagle for 8 to 10 hours. Yet barely an hour of it was provided to the Marines' defense teams by the prosecution or the Naval Criminal Investigation Service.

“Someone, under the supervision of NCIS, screened this video feed, and made the conscious decision to preserve only four segments of approximately 15 minutes each – according to the defense attorneys who received it upon discovery release,” our intelligence source confided.

“This 8 to 10 hours, viewed in its entirety, shows men in black, with weapons, fleeing the neighborhood of houses 1, 2, 3 and 4 [the area where the civilians and eight of the insurgents were killed]. It follows their route as they meet up with other insurgents throughout the city. It clearly demonstrates the magnitude of the insurgents’ organization, skill, and timing in attacking Marines.”

The video, he recalled, “shows them parking, exiting the vehicle, and entering the housing complex. It shows Marines assaulting the building, insurgents fleeing out the back of the building, and Marines falling back from the assault as the insurgents defend the house.”

Finally, the intelligence officer revealed, the full, undoctored Scan Eagle video “shows an insurgent, at the end of the day, under continuous observation from the air and under continuous pursuit and fire, emerge from a family's home holding their children hostage, in order to protect himself from further air strikes.”

From this article, it looks like there was a hell of a lot of creative editing going on. The facts be damned, the truth is irrelevant. They were playing a game - the objective of which was to get as many convictions as possible. The consequences to the Marines involved didn't matter. The effect on morale, on how the US military was seen on the world stage, on whether their promotion of the 'Haditha Massacre' meme helped the bad guys - that wasn't important at all. The game was all.

I'm not saying we need a star chamber atmosphere, with everything hidden. If Marines do something wrong, they need to be accountable for it. But fighting a war isn't the same thing as fighting a bunch of bank robbers, and Marines aren't policemen who are going to try to keep innocents from being hurt even if it means the bad guys get away. War is NOT clean and sanitary and unambiguious. It never has been.

From a lot of evidence, the Marines did what they were trained to do, and what they should have done. To second-guess every move made in wartime and measure it against the standards of a peacetime military, that way lies madness.

When reporting issues like this, what we need is honesty and the complete story, not some carefully edited version that'll promote the prosecution's side of things. I guess it's too much to expect of the press that they'll be willing to give soldiers the benefit of the doubt, and see them as innocent until proven guilty. After all, how are they going to get good ratings unless there's sensational news to report? And what's better than the US military going bad?

As SueK says.. "...the focus has become one of the individual winning, not on justice" - and that's a real bad sign for all of us.

J.