Murtha and MSM Haditha Smear Merchants

Michelle Malkin reminds us today of "the slanderous propaganda of [Democrat] Rep. Murtha -- the stab in the Marines' backs heard 'round the world: "Our troops [at Haditha] overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

Then she cites others in MSM who did likewise:

MSNBC hangman Keith Olbermann, who couldn't wait to define the entire war in Iraq by a single moment about which he knew nothing, inveighed that the incident was "willful targeted brutality."

Due process? For convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, of course. For our military? Never mind.

Far-left The Nation magazine railed, "Enough details have emerged ... to conclude that ... members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment perpetrated a massacre." …

Singing the same tune as The Nation, The New York Times spilled a flood of front-page ink on the case and took things a step further in a lead editorial blaming not just President Bush, but also top Pentagon brass for the "nightmare" killings in Haditha.

Times reporter Paul von Zielbauer filed over 30 stories on the case, which the paper wishfully called the "defining atrocity" of the Iraq war.

Hoping to facilitate a self-fulfilling prophecy, media tools around the world likened Haditha to the Vietnam War's most infamous atrocity -- from The Guardian ("My Lai on the Euphrates?") to the Daily Telegraph ("Massacre in Iraq just like My Lai") to the Los Angeles Times ("What happened at the Iraqi My Lai?") to The New York Times' Maureen Dowd ("My Lai acid flashback") and the Associated Press, which reached into its photo archives to run a 1970 file photo of My Lai to illustrate a Haditha article.

There’s more of that kind of MSM libel in Malkin’s column which also includes this:

Yet another U.S. Marine, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, had charges dropped Tuesday in the so-called Haditha massacre -- bringing the total number of Marines who've been cleared or won case dismissals in the Iraq war incident to seven.

"Undue command influence" on the prosecution led to the outcome in Chessani's case. Bottom line: That's zero for seven for military prosecutors, with one trial left to go.

Today not even the disgraced Murtha claims there was a massacre at Haditha.

But will Murtha and those in MSM who screamed “massacre” now apologize for their false claims which stirred the passions of millions of Iraqis against our military forces, thereby making their already very dangerous service even more dangerous?

I doubt it.

I hope you read all of Malkin’s column.

But I want to caution regarding Malkin’s statement My Lai was “the Vietnam War's most infamous atrocity.”

Infamous it was, with American troops deliberately killing an estimated 350 innocent civilians.

And My Lai is certainly the Vietnam War’s most widely known atrocity. American news organizations and leftists eager to make our military out to be the war's bad guys have seen to that.

But the most infamous atrocity of the war was the Viet Cong’s deliberate slaughter of defenseless civilians, including children, in Hue during the 1968 Tet offensive.

That massive atrocity involving the killing of an estimated 2,300 has never received anything like the publicity My Lai has because the Hue massacre doesn’t fit the bash-America agenda of so much of MSM.