Haditha: four down, four to go
One by one, the charges are being dismissed against the officers involved in the Haditha massacre. The latest is Capt. Lucas McConnell, who wasn’t on the scene of the massacre but had been charged with failure to report and investigate it. Not any more.
His attorney made a couple of fascinating remarks, which I suppose might make sense if he were talking about some other massacre in some other war, in some other galaxy long, long ago. This one, not so much.
“From our perspective he had been the public whipping boy, along with the rest of the Haditha Eight, for a year and a half,” said McConnell’s lawyer, Kevin McDermott.
The defense attorney said the proper focus should be on military commanders who set the basic rules of engagement for U.S. forces.
He wants it to sound sympathetic, like “don’t blame the GIs who are just following orders,” but note that he’s talking about field officers. Field officers are supposed to exercise initiative and to bear responsibility; they’re supposed to be accountable for their actions.
As for making the generals in Washington answer for the “basic rules of engagement,” hey, I’m all for it. Anybody want to take bets on the likelihood of that happening? Ever? For chrissake, in the Abu Ghraib case the charges against everybody above the level of photogenic torturer were dismissed. The message in that case was that accountability only applies to the grunts; the officers can’t possibly be held responsible for what those lower-level types get up to. Gosh, it’s just all so confusing. If I were a cynical person I might think that no matter who is charged in one of these horrific military misdeeds, the argument will be made that somebody else needs to be held accountable.
But back to McDermott, who is just chock full of interesting perspectives:
“You don’t want the lance corporal, the 19-year-old kid with the M-16, thinking twice about pulling the trigger for fear that he’ll end up being investigated if in fact he reasonably believes there are insurgents involved with the attack upon him,” McDermott said.
Oh, is that what happened at Haditha? Just some scared kids making do-or-die decisions to shoot at big bad insurgents? I could have sworn it was this:
During a subsequent search of the house, Mendoza said he received an order from another Marine, Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum, to shoot seven women and children he had found in a rear bedroom.
“When I opened the door there was just women and kids, two adults were lying down on the bed and there were three children on the bed … two more were behind the bed,” Mendoza said.
“I looked at them for a few seconds. Just enough to know they were not presenting a threat … they looked scared.”
After leaving the room Mendoza told Tatum what he had found. “I told him there were women and kids inside there. He said ‘Well, shoot them,’” Mendoza told prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Sean Sullivan.
“And what did you say to him?” Sullivan asked. “I said ‘But they’re just women and children.’ He didn’t say nothing.” Mendoza said he returned to a position at the front of the house and heard a door open behind him followed by a loud noise. Returning later that afternoon to retrieve bodies, Mendoza said he found a room full of corpses.
But that’s old news. We have a whole new set of corpses. We need to hurry up and finish not finding anyone accountable for the old massacre so we can move on to not finding anyone accountable for the new massacre.
