Haditha - What You and All of Us Didn't Know

I'm interrupting the posts on WSI topics for a bit of news that I just received from a good friend. Last August, after American Thinker published "The Haditha Libels Require Investigation", I had some contact with the folks at Defend Our Marines. Good people doing a wonderful job of tracking and disseminating all of the information on Haditha, a job the media would not do after it launched its big feeding frenzy with assist from John Murtha.

Few issues about the War in Iraq have gotten me as worked up as the despicable treatment those Marines got from politicians like Murtha, and it has to be said, people in anti-war groups like IVAW. They were found guilty and used for political purposes before, perhaps as Army Sergeant would say, they got to tell their story.

Defend Our Marines reports that FRONTLINE on PBS is to present a one hour show entitled "Rules of Engagement: What Really Happened at Haditha". The show will air on February 19th, at 9:00 pm EST on PBS.

UPDATE: Bruce Kesler of the Democracy Project had been given a pre-release screening and transcript of the show, and gives it a B-, while also stating that an A would be impossible due to time constraints alone. Read the preview.

That this is FRONTLINE and PBS is not a confidence builder. What is, however, is that someone finally took the time to talk to some of the Marines involved and further found that the story was NOT what everyone has been led to believe.

Read the interview with producer Arun Rath at Defend Our Marines. If the folks at DOM are hopeful, this will be worth seeing. Frankly, any more detail on what happened at Haditha cannot help but be better than the garbage, smear and crap that has been disseminated and used by so many.

And before I am countered or questioned on what I claimed about IVAW folks and Haditha, the original IVAW site statement on the upcoming WSI read:

"Once again, war crimes in places like Haditha, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib have turned the public against the war."

Robin at Chickenhawk Express did a fine job last August of demonstrating how IVAW folks "wasted little time tossing the Haditha Marines under the Humvee."

That point, about presenting things, including real tragedies like Haditha, but also real problems like PTSD and veteran medical treatment, in a way that they are spun for political purposes does tie in, however, with what I will later post about WSI topics.