Be Most Careful in Judging This Marine

[Sgt. Smitty]

L-n-L The Corps need to train their DI's in the fine art of guerilla fighting like took place in Nam. Booby traps under their wounded, booby traps under our wounded and dead, booby traps EVERYWHERE. That Marine did his job to protect himself and his buddies. Has the Corps forgotten all the hard lessons that were learned in the Nam? I'm afraid so. They need to rethink their 0311 training just a tad bit from what i can tell. Semper Fi, Smitty

[hrscowboy]

yes sgt smitty i agree with you also on the training of booby traps we learned alot about those in the Nam.

[thedrifter]

Photographer of shooting video refusing to comment



Taipei Times
Friday, November 19, 2004

The photographer whose videotape of what appears to be a Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi is generating a storm of outrage in the Arab world maintained his steadfast silence on Wednesday, saying he wanted to continue reporting on the incident before commenting.

"As sensitive as this is, we want to make sure the world has an accurate picture of the events," said the photographer, Kevin Sites, an American freelance cameraman working for NBC News, to a reporter at the military base near Fallujah where he is staying.

The videotape shows a group of Marines entering a mosque in Fallujah, where several wounded Iraqi prisoners lay on the floor last Saturday. One Marine is shown shooting and apparently killing one of the Iraqis. The Marines were members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment, with whom Sites was embedded.

An unedited version of the videotape, which was distributed to other news agencies as part of a pool report, was being aired several times an hour on Arab satellite television stations on Wednesday, and US commanders have said it has already yielded a huge propaganda victory for the anti-American insurgency. Some Arab commentators have even compared it to the scandal surrounding mistreatment of detainees earlier this year at Abu Ghraib prison.

Yet many questions about the shooting remain unanswered, human rights advocates and senior military officials agree. In the videotape, the soldier can be heard yelling that the Iraqi prisoner was only pretending to be dead before firing at the prone body, suggesting that he may have believed he was acting in self-defense. It is unclear from watching it whether the prisoner was moving before the shot.

Sites would appear to be in a unique position to shed some light on what happened, but he declined repeatedly Wednesday to comment.

Sites did say he had received hate mail and threats since the footage aired, in edited form, on the initial NBC report. A comment section on a Web site he maintains has been shut down because of death threats.

A lanky man with shoulder-length hair and a goatee, Sites has maintained a low profile since emerging from the fighting in Fallujah, avoiding the area where other reporters on the base are billeted. Several other reporters said they believed he might be concerned about legal or other complications stemming from the shooting, and was staying silent for that reason. Agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service are conducting an inquiry, and the Marine who fired the shot has been removed from the battlefield.

A spokeswoman for NBC, Allison Gollust, said by e-mail: "Given that there is an investigation on behalf of the Marines into this incident, it just doesn't make sense for Kevin to be commenting on it at this point."

Kevin Sites' blog can be found at http://www.kevinsites.net/

Ellie

[thedrifter]

11-19-2004

From the Editor:

Judging ‘Marine X’





By Ed Offley



To fully understand what happened in that mosque in Fallujah last week, don’t watch the NBC videotape yet again. Rather, go to your local movie rental store and rent “The Longest Day.”



Compared with the harsh, weapons-effect accuracy of later war movies such as “Platoon” or “Saving Private Ryan,” Darryl F. Zanuck’s 1962 (pre-Vietnam innocent) tribute to the Normandy invasion contained one scene lifted directly from Cornelius Ryan’s D-Day history – and based on historical accounts – that provides the kind of context that has been totally missing in most of the news media accounts of the mosque shooting.



This is the scene: After surviving withering German small-arms fire and thrown hand grenades as they climb the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, U.S. Army Rangers attacking one reinforced bunker are suddenly confronted at arm’s length by several enemy soldiers trying to surrender who, just moments earlier, had been trying to kill them. The Rangers instantly gun down the Germans, including one who is yelling, “Bitte, bitte” – German for “please.” One Ranger then asks a buddy, “What’s ‘bitte’ mean?”



This is what Cornelius Ryan and Darryl Zanuck meant to inform us from that incident: In the heat and fury of battle, soldiers kill. In the blur of a moment when death is everywhere and the only thing you have to prevent your own death is your weapon, your response to a perceived threat is to shoot – period. There is no time for indecision, nor is there time for second-guessing.



What images such as the Fallujah mosque convey is more troubling. They present us with a moment without full context, perhaps without *any* framework or perspective at all.



Along with everyone else, I saw the carefully edited videotape of the Fallujah shooting incident. Like the videotape of the Los Angeles police officers violently beating Rodney King in 1992, or the 1968 news film of South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Loc Loan executing Vietcong prisoner Bay Lop in the streets of Saigon with a pistol shot to his head, the image of an armed Marine firing his M-16 at a severely wounded Iraqi insurgent was graphic, stunning and horrible.



And like those two earlier examples, the intensity of the image all but defeats any attempt to place it in a fuller context.



As the I Marine Expeditionary Force legal staff proceeds with its investigation of the Fallujah shooting incident, it is incumbent on all of us – particularly those of us safely watching events in our living room thousands of miles away – to set aside the inevitable emotional reaction from the imagery and consider some additional, much less sensational, facts about Operation Vigilant Resolve, the Iraqi insurgency and Fourth Generation Warfare.



* A few weeks ago in the town of Khaldiya, The Christian Science Monitor noted on Monday, Marines did not fire on a man who approached them in daytime bearing a white flag. Under the rules of engagement, civilians doing that are supposed to be taken into custody without being harmed. “In the suicide blast that followed,” the newspaper reported, “one Marine lost a leg. ‘We didn't shoot him, because of that flag,’ [one Marine] officer said.”



* The shooter in the Fallujah mosque, known only as “Marine X” while the investigation continues, himself was shot in the face by Iraqi insurgents the day before, but was able to return to his unit. The Los Angeles Times reported that a friend of “Marine X” had been killed the previous day by the booby-trapped corpse of an Iraqi insurgent.



* Throughout Iraq during the last 18 months, insurgents have ambushed soldiers with remotely-detonated car bombs or driven bomb-laden vehicles into convoys and military bases on suicide missions; they have kidnapped, tortured, beheaded and disemboweled civilian hostages; they have used other Iraqi civilians, including infants, as human shields; and like the slain insurgent in Fallujah, they fired from and took shelter in mosques. These inhuman killers are the so-called “fighters” that our Marines and soldiers were told to hunt down in the rabbit warrens of Fallujah.



Here’s what did not happen on June 6, 1944: The soldiers involved in the Pointe du Hoc shooting were not relieved of duties pending a legal investigation by their command; the incident was not televised worldwide; a veritable Greek chorus of human-rights activists, journalism professors and retired military officers did not burst into full cry, and the enemy did not instantly mount a propaganda campaign to assert moral equivalence between the 2nd Ranger Battalion and the SS camp guards at Auschwitz.



U.S. officials have confirmed that the body of the slain insurgent and three other dead Iraqis have been sent to the armed forces mortuary at Dover Air Force Base for detailed autopsies. Other news reports indicate that the Marines and coalition commanders are intent on finding out the full truth of what Iraq commander Gen. George W. Casey Jr. has called a “tragic incident.” Well and good.



But how dare we instantly judge and condemn “Marine X” before the facts are in, or without taking into the fullest account the maelstrom of adrenalin, fear and rage that is the psychological burden of every soldier or Marine that our commanders have sent into the streets of Fallujah?



Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/c...16888948137294


Ellie

[Lock-n-Load]

I listen regulary to the Michael Savage Nation talk-radio in the evening...according to Savage, he blurted out that photographer, Kevin Sites, was allocated to this Marine unit with one purpose in mind to film a disclaimer hoping such a situation arose...he was ordered by the big honcho of NBC news, Allan Shapiro, who is a big favorite of the most liberal Hollywood anti-war bashers along with Shapiro's hatred towards our CIC [Pres GW Bush]...has the liberal media [as a whole] no decency or ethics, but to just try and bring a President down??...in this case senario, they could care less about a brave combat Marine, the United States Marine Corps and the Comander-in-Chief..just another angle to think about...Semper Fi, Marines...Semper Fi

[snipowsky]

Well said Cook. You speak for me. They have no souls and should be treated with no mercy! Kill 'em all!

[thedrifter]

Nobody second-guesses beheaders
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kathleen Parker
November 20, 2004

The case of the Marine shooting in Fallujah pits a young warrior in the clutch of terror and nanosecond judgment against the Monday-morning quarterbacking of theoretical second-guessers. War truly is hell.

At issue is whether the shooting of a wounded, unarmed Iraqi insurgent by a young Marine during the siege of Fallujah qualifies as a war crime. On the surface, shooting anyone who is unarmed seems to fit the definition of a war crime.

But if judging a domestic shooting is nuanced and complex, requiring careful analysis of circumstances and intent, surely a wartime shooting is a Byzantine calculation that can't be judged by usual standards.

Strident voices on all sides - from the Arab world to Amnesty International - don't help matters. The Al-Jazeera network repeatedly has aired video of the shooting, prompting responses like this one from an angry Iraqi: "When I saw the video, I wished I had a stronger gun and (could) spray that soldier with 100 bullets in his head."

From Amnesty International we hear charges of potential war crimes as well as an indictment of military leaders who perhaps didn't teach their young well enough. AI spokesman Alistair Hodgett said he was especially concerned with past comments by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld calling the war on terror suspects "killers" and "the worst of the worst."

Forgive me if I beg to agree with Rumsfeld on this point. We've seen enough by now to recognize that insurgents are killers, often of civilians, and barbaric enough in their executions to qualify among "the worst."

The question in this case, as explained to me by a military lawyer, is whether the Marine's actions were "reasonable" under the circumstances. Ironically, film of the incident by an embedded cameraman working for NBC may provide the key to the Marine's exculpation even as it raises new concerns about the distorting power of the media.

As captured on film, the Marine in question and others came upon five insurgents lying inside a mosque. Three of the men were severely wounded; one was apparently dead; a fifth was lying under a blanket. When the Marine under investigation noticed the fifth insurgent breathing, he started yelling:

"He's (expletive) faking he's dead. He's faking he's (expletive) dead." Then he shot him. Note to the children: This is an appropriate use of profanity.

We now know the man was unarmed, though he might have been hiding a weapon under the blanket. We don't know whether he was faking being dead, though one could argue that pretending to be dead in order not to be killed is a reasonable reaction when U.S. Marines have just shot your companions.

What we do know is that Iraqi insurgents frequently fake death, booby-trap dead bodies and perform other ruses that have resulted in many GI deaths. In the context of that knowledge, is it possible that the young Marine acted reasonably? That he was acting in self-defense?

To those of us who can't imagine combat, the notion that war has rules seems odd. All is fair in love and war, right? But indeed there are strict rules of war as outlined by the Hague Convention, which governs the means and methods of warfare, including permissible tricks and ruses.

Among those rules: Don't fake surrender, and don't fake dead or wounded to gain an advantage and kill the enemy.

Meanwhile, at the same time the incident inside the mosque was taking place, a U.S. Marine was killed and five others wounded when the booby-trapped body of a dead insurgent blew up.

Insurgents and terrorists don't play by anyone's rules but their own. They're not held to the same standards, as the Hague Convention applies only to state actors. Technically, I'm told, the United States doesn't have to adhere to the conventions when fighting non-state actors such as terrorists either, but we do "because it's the right thing to do."

The Marine who fired the killing shot, ending the life of a man we now know to have been alive, unarmed and - at least in that instant - no threat, was a kid who obviously did know the rules and was attempting to balance that knowledge against his fear of being killed.

He himself had been shot in the face the day before but was back in the fray. By his words we can conclude that his mind was racing. His rapid-fire thoughts most likely went something like this: The man is faking; he intends to shoot me; if I don't shoot him, I will die.

His decision under those circumstances seems reasonable to me. The gravest concern, however, is that the Marine risked his life to voice his rationale, possibly aware he was being filmed and had to justify his actions for the media.


Ellie

[Namvet67]

I doubt the Marine was trying to justify his actions for the media. Give me a break...that was the last thing on his mind. His actions were "reasonable" and warranted. Marines don't just "turn it on and turn it off"...You put on the war face and your training will take it from there....almost auto-pilot...This is not a swat team going into a civilian neighborhood...those guys have to put up with this sort of crap on a daily basis...You want the Marines to show up..then ask and you shall receive...BUT BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR....SEMPER FI DO OR DIE