Monday, August 27, 2007

Targeting U. S. Marines

Denis Keohane at American Thinker says:

If Democrats really do support the troops, they will use their control of Congress to launch one more investigation -- into a series of statements and reported leaks by officials that have severely harmed our troops and their ability to accomplish their mission.

These statements fall into a category of press misinformation that currently has no name, but which deserves one, a neologism to join the ranks of "fisking" and "a lewinsky."

beauchamp (n)

a story or narrative demeaning to or condemnatory of American military personnel that is readily and even eagerly accepted and presented to others as fact without due diligence to customary norms, of critical fact checking or the legal principle of innocent until proven guilty.

Example: "Our troops overreacted [at Haditha] because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood..."
- Congressman John Murtha [Dem. - PA], May 2006
I’m not surprised Congressional Democrats haven’t used their powers to investigate whether leaked and very likely largely false information hurt U. S. Marines. Are you?

Keohane goes on to show us some of what al-Jazeera's Factbox Haditha is telling people in the Middle East and elsewhere:
John Murtha, Democratic congressman and former marine and war critic, says the military attempted a cover-up and accuses the marines of killing "in cold blood".

Some US media compare Haditha to the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when US soldiers ran amok in the village, and killed some 500 people, mostly women, children and old men.

US politicians briefed on the investigation are quoted as saying several marines, led by a sergeant, went from house to house killing people and also killed four students and a taxi driver in a car that approached the scene. Photographs of the corpses suggested some victims had been kneeling when killed." …
There’s a lot more to Keohane’s post. It’s must reading for people who care about our military and holding MSM responsible for telling us the truth.

Hat tip: Mike Williams

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Reading Keohane's analysis is like reviewing a PhD dissertation. It's exhaustively complete and detailed, but furnishes plenty of evidence that the Hatitha and Beauchamp metanarratives come from the same playbook.

Haditha's of course much worse, involving as it does entire squadrons of our domestic MSM and whole battalions of oh-so-distinguished Congresscritters all reading the same script: that 'something happened' in Haditha, the Marines are beasts and 'whatever they did was bad enough', and let's string them up (and the President with them) without the bother of a pesky trial. At the very least, make them prove their innocence.

Oh, you say those evil Marines are doing that, one after another?

Is that why our noble MSM has rushed off to reinforce Senators Clinton and Levin's attempts to pry Mr. Maliki out of his elected office like true colonial masters? The NYT must hate it when their script doesn't turn out properly - but they're sure good at amnesia about their guilty-no-matter-what screechings when someone does as good a job at busting them as Mr. Keohane has done here.

However, he's a bit disingenuous to pretend that the Democrats will lift a finger to 'support the troops' by Congressional investigation of the Haditha metanarrative. Congress is not KC Johnson.

Anonymous said...

Most of our MSM would undoubtedly rush off to see the boats (Marina), or eat psgetti (Marinara) if asked to do an investigative piece on a specific branch of the military.

-AC

Anonymous said...

John, please delete the off-the-wall OT comment but don't know how to communicate otherwise and couldn't help juxtaposing TJN's cartoon

http://johnsville.blogspot.com/2007/08/diversity-version-10.html

with your series of anecdotes about Churchill, comma, Sir Winston, plausibly alleged to actually have a tinge of Native American blood. In ignorance I ask, know ye if he ever mentioned it himself?

-- No, not that Glenn

JWM said...

To IS @ 12:16,

IMO a great comment.

Thanks.

One slight difference with what you say: I think Keohane doesn't really expect the Dems to investigate. He was just trying to highlight what so many of them are really about when they say they say "We support the troops."

AC,

So many in MSM seemed to only want to play "Gotch" with our miliary.

Anon @ 2:06,

I don't understand what "please delete the off-the-wall OT comment" refers to.

On Churchill's possible Am. Indian ancestry I'll post on that near the end of the week or early next week.

I've appreciated other comments you're made and not before said thanks so I do so know, No, not that Glenn.

And I thank IS and AC as well.

Best to all three of you.

John

Denis Keohane said...

Just for clarity....

I most certainly don't expect Democrats to willingly lift a finger to hold hearings on the matter. However, I do fondly hope that enough hue & cry is raised with calls from many others to do so, as well as demands in the House or Senate from the minority party, forces them to allow such hearings to proceed. The minority party can even call and hold hearings themselves, which is a fallback.

The Democrats will never do so unless pushed and pushed hard, and hence, thuggery as they might call it. Push.