More On The Haditha Marines

TIME and Haditha Lies
Author: Michael KraftPublished: June 23, 2007

The Time Magazine Debacle

It is interesting to note just how erroneous the media’s reporting on that incident was as exemplified by Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer who six months later took the word of a so-called “Iraqi witness” from Haditha and reported that the men in the cab “happened upon the scene inadvertently” while riding in the cab.

Nat Helms is author of a new book, “My Men Are My Heroes” which provides an account of the incredible bravery of Sgt. Brad Kasal in the second battle of Fallujah.
He stated that Knickmeyer wrote about a witness who said that the taxi driver turned onto the street and saw the wrecked Humvee and the Marines, and then the cab driver tried to back away at full speed. The Marines opened fire from about 30 yards away, killing all the men inside the taxi. Dela Cruz reportedly pumped his 30-round M-16 magazine into the car when they tried to run.

Even worse, later media reports said the cab carrying four known insurgents was occupied by four “college students,” along with the cab driver, who were on their way to school.
These false reports however, pale in the face of the role played by Time magazine Tim McGirk and Time itself. According to McGirk’s first story, a “budding journalism student” had given him a video he had taken after the killing of the civilians in the houses near the site of the IED explosion.

Almost immediately, Time had to correct the story, revealing that the “budding journalism student” was actually 43-year-old Taher Thabet al-Hadithi who just happened to be on hand to videotape the aftermath of the killing in the houses.

Time also identified al-Hadithi as head of something called the Hammurabi Organization for Human Rights and Democracy Monitoring. Time reported that the Hammurabi Human Rights group was affiliated with Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch vehemently denied they had any connection or any ties or association with the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, and Time wrote a retraction.

It was then revealed that the Hammurabi Human Rights group was a group of two: Hadithi and Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani, a Reuters News Service reporter who was previously arrested by U.S. Marines in his home town of Ramadi and underwent weeks of interrogation at the infamous Abu Ghraib Prison.

His American warders told Reuters that he was released in a general amnesty in late 2005 along with about 500 other Iraqi prisoners. Reuters also reported that he spent five months in U.S. custody before being released without charges.
Three months later al-Mashhadani was the darling of Time magazine, Nat Helms wrote sarcastically.

NewsMax can now reveal that the battalion S2 knew that the insurgents were following their usual practice of videotaping an ambush. And it was a series of cell phone communications between Hadithi and Mashhadani, both known insurgents, that alerted the Marines to the impending ambush.

False Charges Under False Pretenses

The Marine Corps, however, had discovered al-Hadithi more than a year before Nov. 19, among other anti-government, anti-American Sunni insurgent sympathizers inhabiting Haditha. He was still under their microscope in late February when he gave his video to McGirk after shopping it around for weeks. Helms described it as “ugly and inflammatory, full of dead children and women and blood-covered walls.”

Al-Hadithi claimed the deaths were the handiwork of out-of-control Marines who wantonly charged through the innocent victims’ homes slaughtering women and children in revenge for Terrazas’ gruesome death.

In late March, McGirk released al-Hadithi’s “evidence” to the world. Marines who specialized in signal interception told Helms they were shocked when they heard al-Hadithi and Mashhadani were mixed up in it.

In his testimony Capt. Dinsmore revealed that both men were operating freely throughout the province before purportedly announcing the creation of their human rights organization in early 2006. Marine intelligence officers were aware of their intelligence activities because their frequent cellular telephone conversations were monitored, they said.
McGirk’s sources were known insurgent propagandists and it was McGirk’s Time reports that created the Haditha massacre hoax.

Marine sources told NewsMax that when McGirk first contacted the 3rd Battalion and asked to interview the men of Kilo Company, he was invited to come to Haditha and the men were told by Chessani to answer all his questions fully and truthfully.

On the day before he was due to arrive in Haditha from the safety of Baghdad’s Green Zone, NBC reporter Bob Woodward and his cameramen were badly wounded. McGirk promptly canceled his trip, saying it was too dangerous.

This, incidentally is the same McGirk who partied with the murderous Taliban after 9/11 and proclaimed them to be a fine upstanding bunch of just plain folks.

The courageous McGirk has now refused to testify at Chessani’s Article 32 hearing where defense attorneys insist he would have been torn to pieces in cross examination.

And the left continues to claim there is NO liberal left wing bias in news?

The "Peace Now" kumbaya crowd dancing around the cauldron of deceit and lies project their meaningless, cowardly ideas. In their utter stupidity, they label conservatives....that be us...as kooks.

Well mister liberal lefty, I AM A KOOK and proud of it....all of my friends are kooks and most of my family are kooks by your meaningless definition....but you know what? I'd rather be a kook than walk around suffering from Severe Acquired Leftist Anencephalic Dementia.

You SALAD brains make me sick.

Check out your mascot batty...HMFMBIC....

Sphere: Related Content