Haditha, the Big Picture, and the Little Picture

Haditha:

http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/hijacking-haditha.htm

Mike Yon's input. He understands what was going on, and communicates it better than most.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5566
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?f882c1b8-aa42-431f-83a6-0066e7629ace

Two writeups discussing the questionable side of this story. There is a real lack of credible evidence that anything untoward happened in Haditha, other than a bunch of terrorist bastards who attempted a combined IED-Small Arms Fire ambush, killed a bunch of civillians, and then had it go all pear-shaped when the Marines kicked their goat-smelling asses. Read the entire second article, all the way to the end. A simillar stunt was pulled on the British Army, which put two of its own on trial for murder.

Roger Brice, solicitor for defendant Pte Samuel May told BBC News there had never been a case to answer.
"What the judge has done today is stop the case when the prosecution have concluded... there was never a case for any of the defendants to answer.
“He summed up the fact that the evidence as it came out in these last two months has been one of acknowledged lies."

The British Ministry of Defense spent the equivalent of about $18 million on the investigation and the trial which collapsed in November, 2005—29 months after the initial incident.

Funny how all this works.

I'm still withholding judgment until the conclusion of the investigation, but let's face it. Iraqis lie, and anything I am told by an Iraqi is automatically suspect. The fact that all in information that is negative has passed through pro-insurgent Iraqi hands at some point is not a key indicator of its reliability.

http://www.madison.com/post/blogs/militarymatters/87022

Here's a little something on the Big Picture in Iraq.

Today's little picture: I did manage to call my wife. Talked for a bit more than an hour. Apparently I was distracting her from homework. :) My bad.

I'm moving into a halfway decent place (by Iraqi standards) but the area I'm moving into doesn't have interior walls. So tomorrow I'm going to take the cordless saw and drill, hammer and nails, and build myself a barracks room. Bob Villa I am not, but this is going to be simple work. I also gets me out of the arms room for a little while, thus staving off the otherwise inevitable mental atrophy.