The media has done a hatch job on my Marines. And somehow we need to hold the media accountable for all the trouble they have caused. 

When it comes to the November 2005 Haditha incident, which the media has characterized as a wanton massacre of 24 innocent civilians, it seems it is the truth that has been massacred by the news media. As Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, long heralded as one of the bravest and most skillful Marine officers in the Corps, faces charges that could send him to prison for failing to adequately investigate the incident, defense attorneys for both the colonel and the other Marines have been unable to cite in open court the evidence that clearly exonerates him and all of the other accused Marines. As a result, the media has emphasized all of the erroneous charges leveled by the prosecution, most of which rely on suspect testimony from anti-American Iraqis -some of them insurgents.

Insurgents are terrorists. When it gets to the point where the word of many US Marines is given less credit than the word of a few terrorists, we are in trouble. This makes me ill: (emphasis mine)

As NewsMax.com has previously revealed, the bulk of that exculpatory evidence is contained in the eight hours of videotaped testimony offered by the battalion intelligence officer (designated S2), all of which up until now has been highly classified and therefore unusable in open court and kept from the notice of the American people.

The Truth Revealed

 

That roadblock has been cleared. The full eight hours is declassified, and because it will be available to the public, NewsMax can now break through the paper curtain erected by the media to report what we have long known but have been unable to reveal. The evidence clearly shows that a great miscarriage of justice has been imposed on a group of some of the bravest and finest of Americans the men of the Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment.

 * Intelligence gathered by Marine S2 officers in advance of the events of Nov. 19th, 2005, revealed that it was known that an insurgent ambush was planned for the day.

* Although exact details of the planned ambush were not known, some important details were revealed most importantly, that some 20 insurgents would take part, and a white car would play an important role in the ambush.

* The intelligence was made available to the officers and men of Kilo Company including Sgt. Frank Wuterich who has been charged with, among other things, murdering the occupants of a white car that came on the scene following the IED explosion that killed one Marine and seriously wounded another. The evidence will show that Wuterich acted appropriately when he shot the passengers of the vehicle.

* Although the media continues to report that 24 innocent civilians were killed that day, the S2’s testimony shows that eight of the dead, including four of the five occupants in the white car killed by Wuterich, were known insurgents and the dead civilians therefore numbered 16, not 24.

* The insurgents whose communications were intercepted and which revealed the planned ambush were the same two men who were the sources of the fallacious and dishonest Time magazine story, which was the source of the accusations against the Marines.

* As previously reported by NewsMax, the battalion S2 officer made a full and complete report based on his monitoring of the day’s events and the intelligence he and others had amassed then and previous days. As we wrote at the time, the PowerPoint after-action report he sent up the command ladder proved to all the higher officers that the incident warranted no further investigation. None!

Read the rest…and see how a few terrorists (insurgents as the media likes to call them) used a known media accomplice to smear the Marines of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment- who were just doing their job. Bruce Kesler has a post about how the media continues to twist this tale into something it is not. He did manage to find one gem about how secure Haditha has become.