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A Pentagon probe into the death of Iraqi civilians last November in the Iraqi city of Haditha will show that U.S. Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," a U.S. lawmaker said Wednesday.

From the beginning, Iraqis in the town of Haditha said U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children.

One young Iraqi girl said the Marines killed six members of her family, including her parents. “The Americans came into the room where my father was praying,” she said, “and shot him.”

On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said the accounts are true.

Military officials told NBC News that the Marine Corps' own evidence appears to show Murtha is right.

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One military official says it appears the civilians were deliberately killed by the Marines, who were outraged at the death of their fellow Marine.

“This one is ugly," one official told NBC News.

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There is no way you can put weapons of death and destruction in the hands of human beings and then place them in a combat situation without also expecting abuses of civilian populations to be a consequence of those actions.

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Originally posted by Digiteyes:
Too bad the American Government never signed on to the International court.

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Bill Clinton did sign on to the treaty in 2000, without actually ratifying it.

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Originally posted by otter:
Yes, it is a terrible thing. But why the surprise and outrage?

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Originally posted by otter:
[QB]Yes, it is a terrible thing. But why the surprise and outrage? Surely no one in this day and age could ever expect less? Every war scenario has always included scenes of slaughter, torture and rape.

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Surprise? Hardly. Outrage? Surely. I don't expect less, I hope for more.

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Originally posted by otter:
My outrage for Iraqii issues peaked when Iraq was invaded and the population was carpet bombed for weeks. the issue mentioned above is only one of dozens of such atrocities perpetrated each and every day in a variety of communities on this planet.

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So what? They're all wrong, we happen to be talking about this one. The sheer number of them doesn't make them less wrong - that's simply an abuse of mathematics...

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Outrage is easy, recognizing cupability is the hard part.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Not quite correct.

Bill Clinton did sign on to the treaty in 2000, without actually ratifying it.

But GW Bush purported to "withdraw" the signature in 2002.

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The task of carrying out violence, of killing, leads to perversion. The seductiveness of violence, the fascination with the grotesque - the Bible calls it "the lust of the eye" - the god-like empowerment over other human lives and the drug of war combine, like the ecstasy of erotic love, to let our senses command our bodies. Killing unleashes within us dark undercurrents that see us desecrate and whip ourselves into greater orgies of destruction.

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But perhaps mass bombings of civilians innured the US armed forces to "collateral damage" and in the Korean War and in Viet Nam we begin to see an increase in massacres of unarmed civilians. In any case it is apparently a standard feature of US combat training to systematically lower a soldier's reluctance to kill, through various psycholgical means. Bottom line - war is always ugly, but official US war-fighting doctrine pretty much guarantees atrocities and massive civilian death.

[ 19 May 2006: Message edited by: Brett Mann ]

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Originally posted by Brett Mann:
"It's a good thing war is so awful or men would love it too much", said a US civil war general. But it seems plain that US soldiers in Iraq are placed in an untenable situation, fighting a war they are neither trained or sufficiently numerous to fight. While no war is civilized, I dispute the claim that these kinds of atrocities are necessary or the norm. Well trained British, Canadian and Allied troops in the Second World War did not frequently massacre civilians, and this was a strong distinguishing characteristic between allied and axis forces.
[ 19 May 2006: Message edited by: Brett Mann ]

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Actually, I disagree. There are plenty of examples of allied troops masseacring civilians. The difference was that their officers were not ordering them to be part in planned exterminations, as were the Germans. Probably had German soldiers, arguably far more disciplined as most military scholar I have read assert, not been ordered to take part in the officially sponsored campaigns of massacre, they would have committed less massacres, as killing civilians is Generally against military law. It is even possible even that it was the discipline of the Wermacht, which made it possible to for the German officer corp to order massacres without fear of their soldiers disobeying.

So of course there is no way you can make an actual distinction between the massacres committed by German, and those made by Allied troops, in regards to how that relates to discipline in the ranks, as allied troops were not being ordered to massacre civilians as part of policy. You can not make the comparison at all, in any meaningful way.

Unless, that is, one brings up the allied airial bombing of Japan and Germany, in which case we can also say that American and British troops were also ordered to committ wholesale massacres of civilians, and that they readily obliged their commanding officers. And in this your last point (that "official US war-fighting doctrine pretty much guarantees atrocities and massive civilian death") is completely accurate except that it is not the case that this began after World War 2, because it was actually asserted first as a docterine in WW2.

[ 19 May 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

Excerpt:
The piece tells us that 22 US soldiers have committed suicide in Iraq last year, which is the highest suicide rate since the war began.