Who did what?
There is one big thing that we talk about over here that is in the news right now. It’s not the immigration debate, but rather the investigation into what happened many moons ago in Haditha, Iraq. The unfortunate common theme in the news right now is not “innocent until proven guilty,” but “how guilty are they.”
The basic facts are these: Marines respond to IED attack outside Haditha. Sometime after this reponse, Iraqi media has images of civilian casualties.
As much as other people would like to claim otherwise, those are the only verifiable facts at this point, and probably through the entirety of the investigations and circuses. Haditha residents claim that the Marines did it all; we don’t know what the Marines claim yet.
My own personal take is this: Haditha is a known insurgent stronghold, to the point of terrorists running the government. It is highly likely that the insurgents killed the civilians, probably before the IED went off, and are using this as a brutal propaganda ploy that certain unthinking members of the US will swallow without blinking. The residents of Haditha will give the proper response to outside media since the “government” in the local area has already proven itself ready and willing to kill entire families.
The investigations now ongoing are too far behind the events to have any realistic expectation of ever finding even a large portion of the truth. The only way that I think that there is a “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the USMC did it is if someone confesses to it all. Until then, I am far more suspicious of people who have a know track record of killing civilians in as brutal a fashion as possible. In the end though, we’ll never know who did what.
I can kind of relate except the burning question for me is “Who didn’t do that?”. I think about it every day as I check my messages….
IMO (again, the world according to Naye), it really doesn’t even matter at this point what may or may not have happened…only what WILL happen. The media, governments, and every child age 2 and over has learned to manipulate facts, cause enough doubt and confusion to gain sympathy for their cause, and try to not only justify their position, but gain support for it. What goes down in history as what really happened depends upon the out come of the whole situation. The only really important thing to me is making sure you get the desired outcome and that measures are put in place to help prevent the same kind of thing from happening again.
Maybe I oversimply things, but I see it no different than my daughter loosing her mind last summer. If she turns out to be a responsible adult, it won’t matter that she had a summer of terror. If she turns out to be a criminal though, that summer then becomes the start of her life of crime. While I’m concerned about the outcome in the long run, it all depends upon how I handle things from this point forward….and one of the changes I’ve made is to put new rules in place to ensure that Ethan doesn’t have the opportunity to do the same thing Vanessa did.
Granted I’m just a mom worried about my and my family’s reputation rather than a world leader worried about their country’s reputation, but same theory. Just a much larger scale with a whole lot more nosey neighbors ready to jump in with their judgements and opinions.