What is so utterly galling about this story is that the vast majourity of the Amerikan population finds nothing particularly shocking about it. Of course, in our view, that makes that ‘vast majourity’ guilty of war crimes under the terms of Nuremburg. Why does no one recognize that? We laud the results of WWII (end of Hitler and Naziism, exposure of the ‘final solution’) while we conveniently forget so much of what happened in its wake.
Grim images of massacre found on US laptops
Josh White in Washington
January 8, 2007
UNITED STATES investigators have tracked down dozens of gruesome photographs taken by marines of 24 Iraqi civilians massacred in Haditha.
The images, found on laptop computers and digital media drives, provide evidence of a series of shootings beside a taxi and inside three homes that military criminal investigators have alleged were murders.
The images have provided the Naval Criminal Investigative Service with powerful and visceral evidence of what happened in Haditha on November 19, 2005.
Many photographs were on laptop computers that had been shipped back to the US, and deleted images were also recovered from a Sony PlayStation Portable memory drive, investigative documents showed.
Marines were found to have downloaded the images from each other’s devices, traded them and loaded them onto personal websites. One marine told investigators he saw some photographs set to music on another marine’s computer. Some were emailed from Iraq to a civilian in the US.
There were also photographs showing the bomb crater and the destroyed vehicle in which Corporal Miguel Terrazas was killed and which triggered the Haditha killings.
There was a picture of a young boy with a helicopter on the front of his pajamas, slumped over, his face and head covered in blood and in another a mother was lying on a bed, arms splayed, the bodies of three young children huddled against her right side.
The images were contained in thousands of pages of investigative documents obtained by The Washington Post, though it was decided that most of the pictures were too graphic to publish in the newspaper.
A leaked copy of the inquiry quotes a horrified witness as saying that the marines went “crazy” after the roadside bomb.
They took revenge on the occupants of the taxi, which arrived at the scene shortly afterwards. The report described how, after telling the passengers to get out of the vehicle, the marines’ squad leader, Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, allegedly opened fire on the Iraqis even though some of them had their hands up. The men dropped to the ground as an Iraqi soldier attached to the marines unit looked on in horror.
Read the rest here.
