Marine feels killing ‘right thing’

[babylonsister]

And not a peep from the US media...

http://www.asianage.com/presentation/leftnavigation/news/international/marine-feels-killing-%E2%80%98right-thing%E2%80%99.aspx

Marine feels killing ‘right thing’

By ThomaS Watkins

Camp Pendleton (California), May 31: An officer who saw the corpses of Iraqi women and children sprawled across a bed in a home said in recorded testimony that he believed that "my Marines were doing the right thing" when they killed them.

Marine 1st Lt Max Frank, whose deposition was recorded in March 2007 before his return to Iraq, was the first witness to be heard on Wednesday at a preliminary hearing for Lt Col Jeffrey Chessani, the commander of the Marine battalion involved in the deadly sweep of the village of Haditha.

The sweep led to the deaths of 24 people on November 19, 2005, after a roadside bomb killed a lance corporal driving a Humvee. In the aftermath, Marines went house to house looking for insurgents. "From my perspective at the time, my assumption was my Marines were doing the right thing," Lt Frank said. "I rationalised it to myself as they were taking fire. The Marines could have come in, yelled at them to come out, and when they didn’t come out they cleared the room with a fragmentation grenade."

Lt Frank, a platoon commander, said he saw a total of 24 bodies, including five men who had been shot beside a white car, an elderly man whose leg had been eviscerated, and a woman and child curled up in another home.

Lt Col Chessani, 43, is charged with dereliction of duty on suspicion of failing to investigate the killings. He is the highest-ranking of seven Marines accused in the case. The Marines have said they believed they were taking fire from the houses. They used fragmentation grenades and machine guns to clear the homes, but instead of hitting insurgents, they killed civilians. (AP)

[movonne]

1. File this under "Oh my God!"

[karlrschneider]

2. I think I'll file it under "Insane pricks that somehow became officers"

:mad:

[TwilightGardener]

3. I am going to suspend judgment until the whole story comes out in court,

but it's hard to believe this guy thought killing children is ever the right thing to do, no matter what the circumstances. He must be a very tortured soul right now.

[babylonsister]

6. This is Haditha; a lot is out already, and none of it good. nt

[TwilightGardener]

7. True, I've followed the story to some extent--my gut is that this will

Iraq's My Lai. So many obviously defenseless civilians killed. Big black eye on us, for sure.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. "Ordinary men" and "Hitler's Willing Executioners" are all about similar men.

http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068

"Shocking as it is, this book--a crucial source of original research used for the bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners--gives evidence to suggest the opposite conclusion: that the sad-sack German draftees who perpetrated much of the Holocaust were not expressing some uniquely Germanic evil, but that they were average men comparable to the run of humanity, twisted by historical forces into inhuman shapes. Browning, a thorough historian who lets no one off the moral hook nor fails to weigh any contributing factor--cowardice, ideological indoctrination, loyalty to the battalion, and reluctance to force the others to bear more than their share of what each viewed as an excruciating duty--interviewed hundreds of the killers, who simply could not explain how they had sunken into savagery under Hitler. A good book to read along with Ron Rosenbaum's comparably excellent study Explaining Hitler." --Tim Appelo

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685/ref=pd_sim_b_2/002-5781749-1528828

"Goldhagen's gripping and shocking landmark study transforms our understanding of the Holocaust. Refuting the widespread notion that those who carried out the genocide of Jews were primarily SS men or Nazi party members, he demonstrates that the perpetrators?those who staffed and oversaw the concentration camps, slave labor camps, genocidal army units, police battalions, ghettos, death marches?were, for the most part, ordinary German men and women: merchants, civil servants, academics, farmers, students, managers, skilled and unskilled workers. Rejecting the conventional view that the killers were slavishly carrying out orders under coercion, Goldhagen, assistant professor of government at Harvard, uses hitherto untapped primary sources, including the testimonies of the perpetrators themselves, to show that they killed Jews willingly, approvingly, even zealously. Hitler's genocidal program of a "Final Solution" found ready accomplices in these ordinary Germans who, as Goldhagen persuasively argues, had absorbed a virulent, "eliminationist" anti-Semitism, prevalent as far back as the 18th century, which demonized the Jews and called for their expulsion or physical annihilation. Furthermore, his research reveals that a large proportion of the killers were told by their commanders that they could disobey orders to kill, without fear of retribution?yet they slaughtered Jews anyway. By his careful estimate, hundreds of thousands of Germans were directly involved in the mass murder, and millions more knew of the ongoing genocide. Among the 30 photographs are snapshots taken by the murderers of themselves and their victims."

[patrice]

5. I believe there is so much of this going on that if they do anything

about it, they will have a rebellion in the ranks on their hands.

They have a serious problem to begin with, in that everyone knows the Invasion was based on lies and the dead and wounded died for "nothing" (or at least not for what they were told), so, in addition to a seriously weakened and over-extended military, all of this is going to result in far fewer enlistments. But, I suppose all of that is just fine because the objective is to root War Profiteering in the "private" middle-class jobs base a la Blackwater (and private it ain't since the whole thing runs on our tax dollars).

[gravity]

8. It's hard to make a judgment on this without knowing all the details

Given that there was just a road side bombing and the marines were being fired at, they could have thought that insurgents were in the homes and probably thought that they were doing the right thing at the time.

I think the title of the article is misleading because the marine saying that he thought it was the right thing at the time, is different than feeling it was the right thing to do in hindsight.

[babylonsister]

9. Donate to DU and do a search, or google Haditha; there's plenty of

info out there, much of it about this current trial.