Fourth Estate, Fifth Column
Friday, June 9, 2006 at 06:39PM 
From Lucianne.com (hat tip Ann):
Haditha: Is McGirk the New Mary Mapes?
June 9th, 2006
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
<http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:uRXcaBv4zQUJ:www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,185644,00.html+McGirk+Thanksgiving&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1>
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.
A key source for McGirk’s report that US Marines in Haditha had
deliberately attacked civilians was Thaer al-Hadithi. whom McGirk
inexplicably described as “a budding journalism student”. He is a
middle-aged man, and was subsequently described by the AP as an “Iraqi
investigator.”
McGirk also failed to note that Hadithi is “a member and spokesman for
the Hammurabi.” The chairman of Hammurabi Organization and Hadithi’s
partner in publicizing the “massacre” is Abdul–Rahman al-Mashhadani. It
is unknown if he is related to Ali al-Mashhadani but their names suggest
a possible relationship, and it beggars belief that as /Sweetness&
Light/ notes,
“Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani just happened to be given a video by and
unnamed local. And that he then turned it over to Ali al-Mashhadani
who just happens to make videos for Reuters.”
Hadithi’s story is that was staying near to one of the two houses where
the massacre occurred and saw it with his own eyes. According to his
version of events he waited one day to videotape what had occurred,
though apparently nothing prevented his doing so from the very window he
“watched” it from as it took place. More troubling is why he waited
months to turn the tape over to anyone.
The actions of his partner al-Mashhadani are equally puzzling. On
December 15, 2005 Mashhadani was interviewed by the Institute for War
and Peace which described him as “an election monitor.” In that
interview he expressed great satisfaction with the election turnout
(which in fact was terribly low in Haditha). Why did he not mention to
this apparently sympathetic group one word about the supposed “atrocity”
which he claimed had occurred three months earlier?
Hammurabi apparently did share the video in March with the largely
Soros-funded Human Rights Watch which in turn provided it to /Time/.
(d) The videotape. On March 21, 2006 Reuters reported that Hadithi and
Mashhadani’s organization, the Hammurabi Organization, had provided the
organization was a copy of a videotape showing corpses lined up in the
Haditha morgue, claiming these were the bodies of civilians deliberately
killed by the Marines. Aside from the suspiciously-timed release of the
video and the fact that chairman al-Mashhadani had never mentioned the
incident or the tape in December when he was interviewed, the video
shows people removing bodies from a home, a report at odds with the
Reuters report the day after the incident which spoke of bodies lying in
the street.
(e) The witnesses to the “massacre”
(1) The Doctor.
In the March 27 report, McGirk quotes the local doctor:
Dr. Wahid, director of the local hospital in Haditha, who asked
that his family name be withheld because, he says, he fears
reprisals by U.S. troops, says the Marines brought 24 bodies to
his hospital around midnight on Nov. 19. Wahid says the Marines
claimed the victims had been killed by shrapnel from the
roadside bomb. “But it was obvious to us that there were no
organs slashed by shrapnel,” Wahid says. “The bullet wounds were
very apparent. Most of the victims were shot in the chest and
the head–from close range.”
Another report however, indicates
<http://www.sweetness-light.com/archive/haditha-doctor-was-arrested-hates-us-too>
the doctor bore considerable animus to the US troops.
(2)The Iraqi eye-witnesses.
In “Haditha: Reasonable Doubt,” Andrew Walden describes
<http://www.hawaiireporter.com/> how a similar case against British
soldiers fell apart , describing the Arabic “blood money” tradition
which hardly is as exotic as it sounds. Ask the American Trial
Lawyers Association.
Reports of the eyewitnesses are conflicting and incredible.
Al-Haditha was the source of a report by the AP on the death of a
man whom the /Washington Post/ quoted 10 times as an eyewitness on
May 27,six months after his reported death, and the young girl
“survivor” has given between two and four utterly inconsistent
versions
<http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/06/haditha_lies_ex.html>
of the events.
(3) The American eye witnesses.
There are two American witnesses who have spoken out. Despite the
press spin, neither has a first hand account of the events.
Lance Cpl. James Crossan is the source of some very selective quotes
on the incident. He, however, was wounded in the IED explosion which
killed the US Marine Martin Terrazas. He was evacuated from the
scene and saw none of the after-action.
And then there is Lance Cpl. Ryan Briones. He helped evacuate
Crossnan and took bodies to the morgue. He was not an eyewitness. He
claims he took pictures of the bodies at the morgue and has made
various statements about what happened to the pictures and his
camera. Aside from the fact that he is not an eyewitness, and his
claims about his photographs seem unlikely, his story remained
unuttered until he was arrested for stealing a truck, driving under
the influence and crashing the stolen vehicle into a house. It was
then for the first time that he claimed post traumatic distress and
pointed to Haditha as the source of that stress. (His report of
taking the bodies to the morgue, moreover, seems inconsistent with
the first Reuters report that there were 15 bodies left lying in the
street the day after the incident.)
The sum and substance of this thumbnail sketch on the Haditha claims is
that it follows so closely the template for the TANG and Plame stories.
Take a reporter with an anti-Administration agenda, an interested group
(think of the Mashhadanis as the VIPS in the Plame case or Burkett and
Lucy Ramirez in the TANG case) and a story too good to be checked and
circumstances where the people attacked are limited in what they can
quickly respond to and you get a story which smells to me like it will
soon be unraveled.
This time, I’m betting the consequences to the press which rushed to
judgment will be more disastrous than it was to Dan Rather. I surely
hope so.
Clarice Feldman is an attorney in Washington, DC and a frequent
contributor to Lucianne.com
Tony Blankley has also written an excellent commentary about the media and Haditha.
[...]But what further cuts is to listen to media people casually perpetrate libel against not just the still-presumed-innocent Marines but against our services more generally. To see the gleam in the eyes of reporters happily cackling on about "other possible incidents" -- about which they know not whether they even exist -- is to be filled with a fury that we have a system of journalism that permits people with such mentalities to poison the minds of the world with their malice.
Of course if an American soldier, sailor, Marine or airman is found by a court martial made up of seasoned officers with a practical understanding of the exigencies of combat to have violated the standards of combat, he or she must face American military justice. But in time of war, there is no reason why military censorship should not be enforced to shroud the carrying out of justice from the eager eyes and ears of enemy propagandists -- domestic and foreign.
Pending the implementation of such a policy, journalists should sharply limit their reporting to the bare established facts, preferably reported once on page A36. (You know, the way they report Democratic Party scandals.)
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