About Haditha

A while ago, I posted about [yet another] right-wing doughy pantload named Jason Mattera, who went to annoy democratic congressman John Murtha when he heard that charges had been dropped against some of the marines implicated in the Haditha Massacre.

Why? Why did this Mattera person go and bother Murtha upon hearing news about the Haditha accused?

Because when Murtha heard about the Massacre, in which crazed marines (angered at the immediately preceding death of a comrade from the explosion of a road-side bomb) went methodically from one house to another, shooting innocent, unarmed, men, women, and mostly children, sometimes execution style, Murtha said that US soldiers had been put in an impossible situation, in insufficient numbers, and some were cracking and killing people in cold blood and this had to stop.

Obviously, speaking this simple truth meant that Murtha hated the troops, hated America, wanted America to "lose" in Iraq, and on and on.

Murtha, speaking out from his position on the House Appropriations Committee's sub-Committee on Defense, has supposedly compromised these marines' rights to a fair trial. The right-wing is very concerned about due-process dont'cha know, just check out their silence on the case of Jose Padilla. They never called him a terrorist, or a "dirty-bomber," or anything, because the right-wing believes that rules are rules, and principles are principles, and actually, I'm being sarcastic. The right-wing doesn't give a shit about due-process. They wanted to sweep the massacre of innocent civilians, including children as young as two years old, under the carpet, and let the bullshit charade of US military justice against its mass-murdering heroes to do its work and exonerate as many of them as possible and limit punishment to the obviously guilty by as much as possible.

Because they're vermin.

And, because (as I suggested in that earlier post) Mattera and others as contemptibly stupid as he is must believe that those Iraqis shot themselves. (Which would make the marines' earlier lies about a desperate fire-fight all the more inexplicable.)

But what's going on in the trial of the Haditha accused? How have some of these massacre-participants managed to get the charges against them dropped?

Rahul Mahajan has recently written about the trial at his blog: "Empire Notes." Not surprisingly, this trial has been as big a whitewash as the Abu Ghraib trials, the Padilla trial, or any other trial under bush II's war on democracy and human rights:

The hearings have been a circus. First of all, they were held in Camp Pendleton, California, rather than in Iraq, so the Iraqis who witnessed the events couldn’t testify. Second, the families of the victims refused requests by military interrogators to exhume the bodies for forensic evidence. Third, Lt. Col. Paul Ware, who presided over the hearings, has been both excessively sympathetic to the defendants and excessively concerned with the effect that the verdicts will have on future Marine operations. Fourth, some rather odd plea bargains have been made.

Most recently, Ware recommended that all charges of murder (originally 13 counts) against Wuterich be dropped and replaced with charges of negligent homicide only for seven of the murdered women and children (many of them shot in their beds) – and has added that he doesn’t think Wuterich would be convicted on those charges either.

...

Earlier, Ware recommended dropping all charges against Sharratt, accepting his claim that the execution-style killings of the three men shot in the head occurred in self-defense in the heat of combat. He also wanted charges dropped on Tatum, even though fellow Marine Lance Cpl. Humberto Mendoza testified that Tatum had ordered him to shoot the seven women and children, even after being informed of their identity and that they posed no threat.

Charges were dropped against the two captains, Grayson is still under investigation, and Ware recommended that Chessani be charged with dereliction of duty, although with none of the actual murderers on trial, apparently, he was derelict in investigating nothing.

Aboslutely disgusting, and all-too common in bush II's United States.

Now then, in my post on Maretta-Murtha, one commentator ("anonymous") decided that I was blind to the irony of my harsh words about Maretta and my own condemnation of the morons who wanted Murtha hanged for treason:

"You, Maretta, are just some smirking, useless, stupid piece of shit."

Is what I said about Maretta. Following a summary of idiotic ravings about Murtha, I wrote:

"What happens to the "marketplace of ideas" when there's garbage like this in it, screaming louder than all the rest?"

To which "anonymous" wrote:

You wouldn't recognize irony if it bit you on the ass.

Where "anonymous" got confused is his equating a clearly (to an honest person with half a brain anyway) outlined detail of Maretta's stupidity (to whit; that Murtha responded with genuine outrage at the horrifying consequences of bush II's evil and incompetence, and the grave nature of a slaughter of this nature and these proportions, he did not implicate individual marines, he did not say he hated America, he did not jeopardize anyone's right to a fair trial, and that, regardless, marines on the site went on a killing spree and nobody investigated it until TIME Magazine found evidence of the massacre, and the marines clearly lied about the circumstances of the event. Somebody killed those innocent people. And they were among those marines present.)

"anonymous" equated that, with callous, sadistic, cretinous individuals who called for Murtha's hanging for expressing upset at the marines' slaughter of civilians, including some no-doubt hypocritical thugs who defended the slaughter as a fact of war.

So, the moral of that particular little story is that if someone from the reality-based community sees a piece of dogshit on the floor and says "It smells like shit in here. The dog shit on the floor." then that person is describing reality. But the right-wing will accuse that person of making an "ad-hominem attack," and all protestations that they are accurately describing reality will be met with snorts of derision. (The right-winger will try to outlast the normal person, hoping they will leave the room in a huff, whereupon the right-winger can dive towards the lump of dog-shit and merrily eat it.)

When some right-wing moron sees a bouquet of flowers on a table and says "They smell like shit." and you challenge them, "What do you mean? They're flowers. They smell like flowers." and they say, "You're unhinged. You're a moonbat. You hate America. You're an anti-Semite. You smell like shit too." and etc., etc., you'll find that you're experiencing the delight of the right-wing internet in 3-D! And if, in despair at their hopeless stupidity you turn and walk away, they'll crow about how you're unable to debate them, and that censorship is the natural inclination of the left, and how they always consider views from all sides of the spectrum. But by this time, they've proven themselves so completely idiotic that you couldn't care less what they're saying.