Haditha: Is McGirk the new Mary Mapes?

By Aussiegirl

Tim McGirk, the pressitute peddler of lies about Haditha, is exposed as a long time Islamist sympathizer and spinner of tall tales. Proceed with caution -- Haditha may be more of an Iraqi and press created myth than a reality.

Kudos to "Sweetness & Light" and to Clarice Feldman for the excellent reporting on this unfolding story. Now, in addition to the fact that the media have already tried and hanged our troops and are calling this incident a "massacre" without any proof whatsover -- let's get onto the story of WHY our own military brass seems to have swallowed this story hook, line and sinker and is giving the impression that "something bad" happened there. Even the President was less than supportive when all he had to say was -- "people will be punished". I'm afraid that our politically correct "hearts and minds" strategy is going to try to appease Iraqi sentiments and media bias by sacrificing these troops and making them out to be scapegoats for an unpopular war. Already we have men in shackles in solitary confinement in Camp Pendleton who haven't even been CHARGED with a crime, while the military are leaking damaging information to the press even before the lawyers have seen a charge sheet. Something stinks - and if our higher ups think they can appease the politically correct by hanging a few of our troops out to dry unfairly, I think the American people should shout loud and clear and demand answers and fairness.

The American Thinker

Evidence accumulates of a hoax in Haditha. The weblog Sweetness & Light has done an estimable service gathering together the articles which cast substantial doubt on the charge of a massacre of civilians at Haditha . Because the blog is too busy gathering and fisking the news, I offered and the publisher accepted my offer to put what he has uncovered in a narrative form.

Having done so, I can tell you that the story has a whiff of yet another mediagenic scandal like the TANG memos or the Plame “outing.” While the Marines quite correctly will not comment on the case pending the outcome of their investigation, I am not bound by those rules, and I will sum up the story for you.

(a) On November 20, 2005, Reuters reported that on the previous day an IED killed a US Marine and 15 civilians in Haditha, a town known to be a center of the insurgency, a town as hostile to our forces as the better known Fallujah was. Reuters reported that “immediately after the blast, gunmen opened fire on the convoy” and US and Iraqi forces returned fire, killing 8 insurgents and wounding another in the fight. The paper further reported that “A cameraman working for Reuters in Haditha says bodies had been left lying in the street for hours after the attack.” Reuters never named this cameraman but he was almost undoubtedly Ali al-Mashhadani.

(b) Ali al-Mashhadani had been imprisoned for five months before his report because of his ties to insurgents. He was subsequently placed under another 12 days in detention for being a security threat.

(c) Tim McGirk of Time wrote about the incident at Haditha for the March 27 issue of the magazine. He unsuccessfully lobbied his editors to use the term “massacre” in the story. McGirk seems hardly a neutral reporter. He spent the first Thanksgiving after 9/11 in Afghanistan dining with the Taliban and concluding of this celebratory meal:

Our missing colleagues finally arrive, and I leave thinking that maybe this evening wasn’t very different from the original Thanksgiving: people from two warring cultures sharing a meal together and realizing, briefly, that we’re not so different after all.

Right, Tim. We all want to enslave women, bend the world to Sharia law, behead nonbelievers and otherwise carry on the honored traditions of the Taliban.