LA Times, May 27th, 2006
"The pictures are said to show wounds to the upper bodies of the victims, who included several women and six children. Some were shot in the head and some in the back, congressional and defense officials said."
Expect the usual from many of the war apologists. They often begin by being shocked, I tell you, shocked by these base allegations! “Lies, all lies, made up by America hating commies!” they roar. Then, as the truth becomes more and more undeniable, they mysteriously stop being shocked by the accusations and fake the disgusted bemusement of hard-bitten veterans. “Well, what did you expect war to be, a tea party?” they ask, as though going into houses and shooting unarmed women and children in the head or back is a normal part of basic training for our armed forces.
Veteran John Murtha is already being vilified as a traitor by the right wing blogosphere for saying what the Pentagon probe has apparently already concluded about the deaths in Haditha, that “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood." Gary Gross thunders, “Frankly, this is the actions of a traitor or a sellout. He deserves to be ridiculed, excoriated and frog-marched off Capitol Hill, then remanded to jail. No bail.” Blue Star Chronicles, in a measured piece entitled “Stop Murtha From Killing Our Troops” says, “If he has indeed been in battle himself, then he KNOWS, HE KNOWS what this kind of sedition and treason does to the morale of our men in combat. He knows it leads to lower morale and increased casualties. It gives aid and comfort to the enemy.”
And on Fox News, Sean Hannity declared last Friday:
The issue here is this. This is the issue. If anybody deserves the presumption of innocence in this country, it’s the brave men who put their lives on the line. The world is listening to a United States congressman say definitively that we are killing innocent civilians in cold blood.
A couple of years ago, an exchange took place on Hannity and Colmes that effectively cuts through all this posturing and palaver from the right and casts an ugly light on exactly where it’s coming from. On August 25th, 2004, Hannity and Colmes hosted Jere Hill, a Vietnam vet who’d made the news by turning his back on John Kerry when he made a speech at the 105th VFW convention just a few days before. John Kerry " turned his back us, so I turn my back on him," Hill had explained when asked about the gesture.
How had Kerry “turned his back” on his fellow veterans? What terrible thing had Kerry done? Well, the reason most frequently cited by the Hate Kerry crowd was his testimony back in 1971 before the Foreign Relations Committee about the accounts of human rights abuses he’d heard from fellow veterans:
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
John Kerry Testimony, 1971
It was a statement that Jere Hill claimed “"made me almost feel like he was talking about me.” What’s truly interesting, however, is the following exchange between Jere Hill and Sean Hannity on that same show:
HANNITY: Did you know anybody in Vietnam—we were talking about this with Ollie
—that committed any atrocities?
HILL (continuing directly): Well, you put me on the spot with that one.
HANNITY: Does that mean yes?
HILL: Yes.
HANNITY: You do know. Were you a witness to it?
HILL: Not during the performance of it. Afterwards.
HANNITY: You had heard about it?
HILL: Yes.
Hannity and Colmes, August 27, 2004
You see, Hill explained, “They commit atrocities against you and what do you expect? Capture one of their people and...payback."
So if they commit atrocities it just shows how vile and inhumane they are. And if we commit atrocities, that still shows how vile and inhumane they are, because we just wouldn’t do such things to people who didn’t deserve it. Got it?
Unfortunately, when it comes to matters like war crimes, torture, and other outrages against human rights, this attitude is so common as to be almost universal. It’s been used to justify everything from the massacres of civilians in Vietnam, Central America, and Israel, to the vicious abuse of prisoners both at Abu Ghraib and within our own prison system here in the United States. And how quickly that air of injured innocence adopted by the apologists for brutality can turn vicious, especially if it’s a decorated military veteran who dares to denounce brutalities like Mai Lai or Haditha.
Most of the people who are yelling the loudest about the “traitors” talking publicly about the Haditha Massacre are not, in fact, upset because they think the charges are untrue. They don’t really care much one way or the other. What outrages them is the notion that Americans should be held to the same level of moral accountability they would apply to Arabs who’d engaged in similar atrocities. Some have even coined a term for the dangerous notion that indiscriminately killing Middle Easterners is as bad as indiscriminately killing Americans. They call it “Moral Equivalence.”
The next time you encounter someone, online or off, who is denouncing the “traitorous” individuals who “lie” of American atrocities in Haditha, a tremendous amount of time can be saved by asking simply, “Will it matter to you if the accounts prove to be true?”
You probably won’t get an answer, but the reaction to such a simple and uncomfortably direct question can be quite illuminating.
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