What Happened at Haditha?

By Joe Mariani at The American Daily

Never one to lag behind when the US military is being slandered, Representative John Murtha (D-PA) was in the forefront of those making allegations against the US Marines. (To borrow a phrase, I'm ashamed that John Murtha is from Pennsylvania.) Murtha accused the Marines involved of having "killed innocent civilians in cold blood" during the November 2005 incident. While Time magazine portrayed the Marines as barging into houses, throwing grenades around and deliberately shooting anything that moved -- women, children, whatever -- Murtha told reporters, "It's much worse than was reported in Time magazine," and insisted that "There was no firefight." If there was no firefight, he must believe -- or want us to believe -- that this was a deliberate execution of civilians.

Murtha later told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "it looks like it's the policy of our troops to do something like this." Keep in mind that the incident is still under investigation, with statements and evidence still being collected... and that the military launched an investigation a month before the media got wind of the story. Yet Murtha seems pretty comfortable declaring that our military coldly executes civilians en masse as a matter of policy. Read on.