Friday, June 02, 2006 Did these conditions in Haditha contribute? If you read this from The Daily Telegraph, it could explain what may have contributed to the insanity behind the Haditha massacre: "None of the troops wanted to talk, but even a short stay w/ the men of the 3rd Bn 1st Marine Div in their camp located in Haditha Dam on the town’s outskirts, made clear it was a place where institutional discipline had frayed and was even approaching breakdown. Normally, American camps in Iraq are almost suburban, w/ their coffee shops and polite soldiers who idle away their rest hrs playing computer games and discussing girls back home. Haditha was shockingly different - a feral place where the marines hardly washed; a number had abandoned the official living quarters to set up separate encampments with signs ordering outsiders to keep out." Add to that disturbing account this diary from a combat videographer: From about March - June of 2004, the Haditha dam was my home base of operations. I was there w/ the 3rd Bn, 4th Marines, attached as a combat videographer. Aside from a few operations that took me away from the town, I lived in the dam. I'm not surprised the Haditha Slaughter happened, like the Mai Lai Massacre in the boondoggle before this. I'm not even surprised it happened where it did. I saw signs of it when I was there. Keep in mind this is an entirely different unit of Marines than those that perpetrated the Slaughter. The interrogators were pissed. Such bullshit makes suspect cooperation almost impossible. Think anyone from Haditha is cooperating w/ us now? This is what a war of choice looks like, folks. We've seen it before. We should have been expecting this. Never again, Goddammit. Never again." Unfortunately, America refuses to learn from her own bloody history and is too busy caring about and voting for American Idol to care about and stop a bloodthirsty pack of ghouls in the Oval Office. |