The way the MSM let themselves be used by the enemy is revolting. Every time they cooperate with the enemy’s propaganda machine, they arguably get Americans killed as a result. They embolden the enemy, hurt the morale of our troops, and assist in the recruiting of others who want to murder us all. That’s what we were thinking as we read this account in the WaPo of Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich of the Haditha incident, versus the lurid depictions offered by the MSM:

Wuterich told his attorney in initial interviews over nearly 12 hours last week that the shootings were the unfortunate result of a methodical sweep for enemies in a firefight. Two attorneys for other Marines involved in the incident said Wuterich’s account is consistent with those they had heard from their clients….

On Nov. 19, Wuterich’s squad left its headquarters at Firm Base Sparta in Haditha at 7 a.m. on a daily mission to drop off Iraqi army troops at a nearby checkpoint. “It was like any other day, we just had to watch out for IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and any other activity that looked suspicious,” said Marine Cpl. James Crossan, 21, in an interview from his home in North Bend, Wash. He was riding in the four-Humvee convoy as it turned left onto Chestnut Road, heading west at 7:15 a.m. Shortly after the turn, a bomb buried in the road ripped through the last Humvee….

Marines noticed a white, unmarked car full of “military-aged men” lingering near the bomb site. When Marines ordered the men to stop, they ran; Puckett said it was standard procedure at the time for the Marines to shoot suspicious people fleeing a bombing, and the Marines opened fire, killing four or five men….

Wuterich officially reported to his headquarters that there had been a makeshift bomb and called for a Quick Reaction Force, Puckett said. The first group encountered an unexploded bomb on another route — fueling concerns that insurgents were mounting an attack on the daily morning convoy — and a second force headed out. That group, including Marines with the 3rd Squad and the platoon’s leader, a young second lieutenant, arrived minutes later….

AK-47 shots rang out from residences on the south side of the road, and the Marines ducked….A corporal with the unit leaned over to Wuterich and said he saw the shots coming from a specific house…A four-man team of Marines, including Wuterich, kicked in the door and found a series of empty rooms, noticing quickly that there was one room with a closed door and people rustling behind it, Puckett said. They then kicked in that door, tossed a fragmentation grenade into the room, and one Marine fired a series of “clearing rounds” through the dust and smoke, killing several people, Puckett said.

The Marine who fired the rounds — Puckett said it was not Wuterich — had experience clearing numerous houses on a deployment in Fallujah, where Marines had aggressive rules of engagement. Although it was almost immediately apparent to the Marines that the people dead in the room were men, women and children — most likely civilians — they also noticed a back door ajar and believed that insurgents had slipped through to a house nearby, Puckett said. The Marines stealthily moved to the second house, kicking in the door, killing one man inside and then using a frag grenade and more gunfire to clear another room full of people, he said.

Sounds pretty routine, if violent, scary and nasty. We sure as heck appreciate the awesome men who take on such awful jobs. But we have had intervening events in the Sunni insurgent strongold of Haditha over the last six months, events we described yesterday. Now everything that happened has to be fed into the giant maw of the military justice system in order to be sliced and diced and micro-managed, with second-guessing galore:

The defense attorneys said the rules of engagement — which vary depending on the mission, level of danger and other factors — are likely to become a central element of their cases because those rules guide how troops can use deadly force on the battlefield. One Marine official said such rules usually require positive identification of a target before shooting but noted that the rules are often circumstantial. “Once you go back over it, you have to determine if they applied the rules,” the Marine official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the Marine Corps does not discuss rules of engagement. “Did they feel threatened? Did they perceive hostile intent or hostile action?”

Can you believe this? Dozens if not hundreds or thousands of military men, attorneys, PR flacks, bureaucrats, MSM hangers-on, and ne’er-do-wells, among others, are going to spend months or years reliving and micro-managing what Marines “perceived” or “thought” or “felt” on a moment by moment basis in battle, all while they were taking fire. What do you think this does to recruitment or retention — both in the US Armed Forces, and in the insurgents’ and terrorists’ armed forces. That’s right: bad for us, good for them, and every Marine from now on second-guessing if some enemy agent will come forward with a DVD in a few months, and some terrorized civilians to back him up. And it’s not just the enemy and the loathsome MSM we have to watch out for; the list includes what Bruce Kesler calls the “politicized officers in the Pentagon,” some of whom are all too ready to use “undue command influence” to railroad good men to make bad publicity go away from the MSM’s headlines and front pages. That’s no way to fight a war. (We want to underscore our view that if bad men committed atrocities, of course they deserve punishment; this rant is against the institutionalized guilt machine that appears to have been operating in this case.)

Obviously we meant to be provocative in the title of this piece: “Can the MSM be put on trial for getting our men killed?” But it is not impossible to imagine such a scenario, is it? We have reproduced this chart before. It shows that 74% of Americans have a lot of confidence in the military, while only 28% have confidence in the MSM.

In a straight-up, open confrontation of credibility between the military and the MSM, the military wins 3 to 1. So the MSM have put themselves in treacherous waters with their treacherous behavior. But that’s not the half of it. There’s a dirty little secret in the American heart that the MSM mess with at their peril. Americans of course want their military men to conduct themselves with honor at all times; but most Americans understand that their particular job involves killing and the threat of being killed on a daily basis, and are willing to cut these men slack that goes well beyond what the “rules of engagement” are. The hearts and minds that these Americans care most about are the hearts and minds of our men and their families. Many Americans would be glad to see Haditha incinerated and blown off the map tomorrow if it would save American lives.

There is a disconnect in this strange war. We praise killing Zarqawi from 30,000 feet and everyone is okay with killing women and children in the process, and yet somehow we’re suipposed to care that women and children get killed after Marines get blown up and shot at in a skirmish? In what world does such hair-splitting make sense?

The MSM would do well to remember, as would the overly politically correct in the Pentagon and elsewhere, that one reason the polls have fallen for the Iraq War is that so many Americans want to unleash hell on our enemies, and use the full ferocity and power of the US military to wipe them off the planet. There is, in our view, a deep undercurrent of resentment at political correctness and the MSM’s haughty self-regard as impartial observers in matters of war and American interests. This hubris and the MSM’s attendant complicity in making themselves conduits for enemy propaganda could very well untimately work against the press freedoms we all cherish. The MSM appear to us to possibly be on a glide path to a very bad outcome; they would do well to pull up while they can.

UPDATE

A Marine for Life opines that a PC Marine Corps will be a non-existent Marine Corps. His point is well taken.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 11th, 2006 at 9:44 am and is filed under General, Law, MSM, War, art, culture, idiots!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.