U.S. Has Suspects in Killings of 6 Marines

[thedrifter]

U.S. Has Suspects in Killings of 6 Marines
USA Today | August 10, 2005

WASHINGTON - U.S. and Iraqi forces have apprehended several suspects in the killings of six Marine snipers last week, the Pentagon's top general said Tuesday.

Iraqi civilians in the area where the Marines were killed pointed out the suspects, said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"They're in interrogation right now," Myers told a Pentagon news conference.

He said they were apprehended in the Hadithah area when U.S. and Iraqi forces went there after an explosion killed 14 Marines on Aug. 3. That attack came two days after the snipers were killed by small-arms fire. Myers did not give more details about the suspects.

A statement from Marine spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool said Tuesday that 27 "suspected terrorists" had been captured in the area during the past week. It was not clear whether any were involved in killing the snipers.

The normal procedure when U.S. troops capture suspects is to gather evidence and build a case. The suspects are then turned over to Iraqi criminal courts for trial. Commanders of the units holding the suspects will make the decision on how to proceed in this case, said Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman.

The snipers' killings were part of a flare of fighting in western Iraq last week that left 21 Marines dead, including 19 from one Marine Reserve battalion based in Ohio. Forty-one Marines from the battalion have been killed since the unit arrived in February.

U.S. and Iraqi troops in the area are working to clear out insurgents from their supply lines along the Euphrates River. Hadithah lies along the river near the intersection of three major highways.

Insurgents in the area are constantly on the move, said Maj. Bob Schubert, a Marine intelligence officer. "You can't really pin down the enemy," said Schubert, 35, of Washington.

Myers said the military believes the explosion that killed 14 Marines in an amphibious assault vehicle last week was caused by a bomb made up of three mines wired together and planted in the road.

"There was no way out of the vehicle once it overturned," Myers said.

Such deadly attacks will continue, Myers said. "There is no perfect defense, in this country, in Iraq, anywhere in the world, against people that are bent on doing those kinds of acts," Myers said.

Ellie

[Joseph P Carey]

What surprises me is that the Bastards are still alive!

Also, for you guys that talk of Towelheads, an object lesson, remember it was Iraqis that gave them up as to who they were, and it was Iraqis that helped catch them, and it was Iraqis that turned them over to the Marines. Not everyone is against us in that country; many of them don't like what is happening either, but they have to live there every day of the year for as many years as they live.

Do you really think that they want to bring their families up fearing the 'Bump in the night'?

[Grimmy]

True Mr. Carey but... the insurgancy, any insurgancy can only exist as long as the general public is willing to tolerate it.

If the mass of Iraqis that want it over would stand up for one single week...it'd all be over.

Sd long as the gen pop wants to do the sheep thing and just keep its head down then it'll continue to be preyed upon by those wanting to do the wolf thing.

Of course, nothing in reality is as simple as that but also in reality, violence only exists in a society for as long as the gen pop is more concerned about NIMBA rather than fixing the issue once and for all.

[Sgt Sostand]

I would like to get my Hands on them

[Joseph P Carey]

Originally posted by Grimmy
True Mr. Carey but... the insurgancy, any insurgancy can only exist as long as the general public is willing to tolerate it.

If the mass of Iraqis that want it over would stand up for one single week...it'd all be over.

Sd long as the gen pop wants to do the sheep thing and just keep its head down then it'll continue to be preyed upon by those wanting to do the wolf thing.

Of course, nothing in reality is as simple as that but also in reality, violence only exists in a society for as long as the gen pop is more concerned about NIMBA rather than fixing the issue once and for all.

Grimmy,

I would like to see you live in a small town, and have the Hell's Angels, for want of a better or worst group, come to your town and take control of everything. They would shoot the policemen first! Then they would go around and shoot whomsoever is willing to fight them, if they can not get you, a person that would be willing to fight, they shoot your family. What now? The Police come, or the State Militia comes, and they leave after a while. The authority leave, and they come back, again, they shoot the police. What do you do to protect your family?

[Grimmy]

Mr. Carey:

To protect your family you fight back. If you do you may well die. If you dont your family is still liable to be victomized and you still may well die. no matter how small the town, if you and your neighbors are willing to stand up and fight back, come hell or hi water, the crap heads will move off to easier pickings.

In such times there are only 2 sides. There is no middle except in the minds of cowards and sheeple. You either are fully against, fully for, or you are sure to be slaughtered by both sides.

[Joseph P Carey]

Originally posted by Grimmy
Mr. Carey:

To protect your family you fight back. If you do you may well die. If you dont your family is still liable to be victomized and you still may well die. no matter how small the town, if you and your neighbors are willing to stand up and fight back, come hell or hi water, the crap heads will move off to easier pickings.

In such times there are only 2 sides. There is no middle except in the minds of cowards and sheeple. You either are fully against, fully for, or you are sure to be slaughtered by both sides.

OK! Now, live under a despot of a dictator for the last 25 years that sends his secret police in the middle of the night, and kills 200,000 of his own people! You see, you are still judging by our standards where these things do not happen, where there is a state of law, and a Constitution that protects your rights. What you have is an ethno, geo, and sociocentric look at the world! Try putting yourself in their shoes, and forget that you were a Marine or even a person trained to protect yourself.

[Grimmy]

I spent a great deal of my life far outside the ethno, geo and sociocentric umbrella you speak of.

I fully understand the point you are trying to enlighten me into agreeing with but please understand the point I am attempting to illustrate for you.

Evil only exists where the majority of folk let it exist. If they were not sheeple they would never have been under that tyrant. If they were not sheeple they'd not have stood by anxiously awaiting their turn in the torture chamber.

There are 3 basic groups of folk in any conflict. There are "your people" =that exclusive group of folk that you know are on your side. There are "bonifides" =those you have full will to kill on contact and there are "gilroys" =that great big mass of mindless herd that will not join either side and tends to be slaughtered by both.
If that mindless mass of herd minded folk would just wake the **** up and rise up in mass and turn the bastards out, there'd be no where for the bastards to hide. Until the gilroys do stand up for themselves and continue to view it all as someone elses problem to fix then screw em, they have earned nothing and should be granted nothing.

We've become so indoctrinated into excuse making and weakness justifying by these last few decades of idiocracy that we've lost sight of any actual reality.

A society must be so thouroughly beat down by war that the fight is completely whipped out of them. This kinder gentler type war has not yet succeeded in any of our attempts at it.

War should be avoided but when it can not be, the objective should be to so thouroughly stomp our enemy that they stop wiggling, then and only then can they be dealt with in any kind of peaceful reconstruction.

90% of the Germans were not Nazi, it didnt matter.
90% of the Japanese were not Black Dragon emperial expansionists, it didnt matter
90% of the Soviets were not communist, it wouldnt have mattered.
90% of the Iraqis were not Baath party..and some how we let that matter.

[Joseph P Carey]

War should be avoided but when it can not be, the objective should be to so thouroughly stomp our enemy that they stop wiggling, then and only then can they be dealt with in any kind of peaceful reconstruction.

90% of the Germans were not Nazi, it didnt matter.
90% of the Japanese were not Black Dragon emperial expansionists, it didnt matter
90% of the Soviets were not communist, it wouldnt have mattered.
90% of the Iraqis were not Baath party..and some how we let that matter.

Grimmy,

For the record, I am not a bleeding heart in any way, shape, or form, but I do know about people and apparently you do not!

There was, once upon a time, a person that believed much as do you, but Hitler lost everything in the end.

The Russian Revolution was not fought by, or won by the Soviet, as a matter of fact the Communists had a very small part in the Revolution against the Czar. It was after the Czar was deposed that the Communists came to power. It was an easy affair as the predominance of the Russian People were largely uneducated surfs with a duty of loyalty to the Czar and the Czarina and the Royal Family Romanoff, and when they had no leaders after the fall of the Czar, and the Soviet were the Liberal Elite of the country, who had fine words, and told them what they wanted to hear, but the Liberal elite had very little character, and in the end, they became the new Czar to fill the void, and the people followed.

The Germans, post WWI, were a starving race of people bled dry by the punitive actions of the Treaty of Versailles, which the USA would have no part in. The choice of starvation, or joining with the German National Socialist Workers Party, later called NAZI, that fed their families, was not a hard decision for the People of Germany. One owes an allegiance to the ones that feed your family!

The Emperor of Japan ruled with a civilian government, but he was the ultimate word of the government by the teachings the religion of Shintoism. The Military had long since wrested control of the ear of the Emperor, and were the real power of Japan. The code of Bushido was the code of the warrior, and every since the defeat of the Russians in 1905, they had control of the government. Religion and Tradition were the stalwarts of society in Japan, the Emperor was their God, they would have followed him to death.

Actually, the Ba'ath Party came to power in Iraq with the assistance of the American CIA. They, the Sunni (Ba'ath Party) held the Command of the Armies, the Police, and the Government, and there were many attempts to replace the government by the force of arm of other factions of the country, and they all were beaten down severely by the ruling Ba'ath Party! In other words, your description of power from the end of a gun would have fit well for the Ba'ath, much better than anyone else!

There was an old Russian joke, and truism, during the time of Stalin, which probably served well for the Iraqi people to know. It goes something like this:

There came a knock on the door of Alexi's Cooperative Apartment in the dead of the night. Alexi got up from his bed and was in great fear, because the knock on the door at night was something to be afraid of in the People's Paradise. He went to the door, and ask who it was?

"It is the KGB!" Came the answer in a very military voice. "Are you Alexi Vasillioff?"

"NO!" He replied in a frighten voice, "I am Alexi Gagarin! The man you want is on the floor below this apartment."

The KGB officers said, "Good night!" And, they went to see Alexi Vasillioff. Some noise was heard from the floor below, and Alexi went to sleep with a smile on his face, for one more night.

That was all they wanted, just one more night of life, because the next night it might be their name that was asked for! It is hard for us to fathom how it is to live like that! Wherever it is you have been, I can assure you, I was there before you, and anyplace where there is a fear of the knock on the door, is not a place that fosters Courage in its population! You have to live it to know it! You have to live it to fear the knock on the door in the night!

[Grimmy]

It was not my intention of starting a ****ing contest here but.

You can throw all the detail you want into the issue but the issue is still what it is. My statements were correct. The vast majority of the citizens in every conflict we've ever fought were not wanting to be involved. Most of every citizenry want to pretend that if they keep their heads down the problem will pass them by. Most of the citizenry do not subscribe to nor in their hearts support the tyrants but go along to get along because that's what "normal" folk do.

In all our history as a nation, we've won wars and lost wars. We've won the ones where we went in hard and brutal. We've lost ever single one where we've gone in soft and gentle.

In every single instance in recorded history, the actual adhearants of the philosophies and practices of those that become tyrants is a minority.

Evil wins where ever the mindless mass is spineless and unwilling to stand up and say no and back up that no with force if need be.

Kinder gentler war fighting prolongs the suffering of that same mindless mass. Much in the same way that taking small cuts at a rotten limb would prolong the suffering of an amputee.

Because a general population is made up of spineless cowards that refuse to stand up for themselves precludes us having to take thier needs into account. If they'd taken care of their own business, we wouldnt be having to.

At any point along the chain that leads to tyranny, if that mindless mass would stand the **** up then the chain would be broken and the tyranny would not be established.

PS Referring to those that one disagrees with as Naziesque or Hitlerish is a common tool of the liberal, I didnt consider you one before. Nothing you say now can convince me you are not.

[Joseph P Carey]

PS Referring to those that one disagrees with as Naziesque or Hitlerish is a common tool of the liberal, I didnt consider you one before. Nothing you say now can convince me you are not.

Grimy,

Stick it your ear, Boot! I've had more stitches in me from wounds than you have points on your IQ! I have taken more enemies of this country to their grave than you have ever seen! Just because you reach into the air and come up with ridiculous numbers, don't fault me for a common sense and a logic that you do not possess! It is pretty brave of a guy that never had to face a bullet in his life to tell me that I am a Liberal!

[Grimmy]

LOL yeah right.

I'm sure you had your wounds in the past. As far as ridiculous numbers, those are generalized of course but also accepted as fair account of what portion of popular support tyrannies acquire. I know for a fact that the Germany, Japan and Soviet numbers are damn near gospel. I was guessin on the Iraq but I'll bet it's pretty close.

as far as liberal, you do realize that your entire arguement in this has been to excuse or rationalize cowardice.

If the Alexi's refused to submitt to tyranny there would not have been thugs to knock on the doors. If Alexi and his neighbors had met that and all the other thugs with what ever was to hand every time they came around, the thug population would have quickly declined and tyranny would have evaporated.

I would never consider disparaging your former service. You would be well advised tho to consider that not all fighting is done by those protected and provided by contract to uniformed military service.

I will not hesitate also, to call you on the philosophy of vountary victomization and acceptance of tyranny that you have so vociferously put forward here.

And to your assumption of common sense an logic when you so blithly aligned me with Nazis and Hitler did I ever speak to anything even vaguley resembeling racial purity? invented national history? paganism as new state religion? expansion of empire? no. I have simply stated a real true fact. Tyranny only exists where cowards allow it to grow.

Waite, I also made another statement. We have yet to come out clean on any war we did not go into full force and with the goal of unconditional surrender. If we do not defeat our enemies, they'll never know when, wheather or if they've been beaten and will continue to be a problem hence forth.

[Joseph P Carey]

Grimmy says: Waite, I also made another statement. We have yet to come out clean on any war we did not go into full force and with the goal of unconditional surrender. If we do not defeat our enemies, they'll never know when, wheather or if they've been beaten and will continue to be a problem hence forth.

What are you talking about???? It is no wonder you were an E-3 with Six!

Do you really know what kept the Roman Empire, and the Chinese Dynasties, and the British Empire around for hundreds of years? It was not the fact that they beat their enemies into submission, but rather, they put the best military force on to the field, and, when necessary, they beat their enemies into submission, but, for the most part, they showed their military force, and, through chosen battles, they demonstrated what their forces could do!

What they tried to do was create an outer buffer to Rome, or to the Chinese Forbidden City, or to Great Britain where the other buffer tribes, countries, and colonies protected them. They used diplomacy with just the right amount of force to create these situation, mean while, they exported their culture and laws to the out laying areas, and made them like the central kingdoms, and in exchange created commerce with the outer peoples. It became a Symbiotic Relationship that lasted for many hundreds years.

Hitler had a very powerful Army that could stomp any army that got in its way, but it did not know when to stop pounding, or even how to stop pounding its enemy, and they lasted for less than two decades. The USSR had a very powerful Army, and though they tried to create buffer countries to protect their homeland, they too were too brutal in their approach to the populations under their control, and they lasted for no more than Three score years. The Present day Chinese, again powerful, but unbending, will only last another Five to ten years, and they too will fall by the side as a failed experiment. If History proves anything it proves that the country that can balance Power with Diplomacy will last centuries, and the country that depends on power alone will soon fall by the side!

I would prefer that the USA last another two hundred or more years, after that, I don't know if I could really care. I will not be here, my children will not be here, and the grandchildren will not be here! But, I would hope that the USA will go on forever, and the Marines will continue to be the instrument of diplomacy of a civilian government that uses them judiciously!

Absolute brutality does nothing but create enemies that last for a very long time! The stick and carrot method seems to have done much better in perspective.

We are not trying to win Iraq's war for them! That is not our mission! To fight and defeat their enemy would do nothing to creating an ally for our protection! To train them to fight, and to have them win their battles is how we get an ally. The old proverb: "teach a man to fish..."