You can’t handle the truth
How two-thirds million civilians can die in Iraq while hardly anyone in America notices
From a New York Times story on a military hearing concerning a Marine lawyer’s failure to report a now notorious slaughter of Iraqi civilians, the Haditha massacre:
On Friday Major McCann, an experienced Marine lawyer, interjected some unsettling questions about how many civilian deaths it would take to constitute a violation of military regulations.
Alluding to Haditha, he asked, “At what point do we have to scratch our heads that we killed a lot more civilians than enemy?â€
Because so many witnesses had testified that civilian deaths from “combat action†need not be investigated, Major McCann said, “I’m trying to figure out what authority they are citing.â€
The witness testifying then, Col. Keith R. Anderson, a senior Marine Reserve lawyer now with the Department of the Navy, delivered a succinct and telling answer. “There is no authority,†he said. “I think it’s just a mind-set.â€
Of course, the Times frames this as a legitimate dilemma because the real bad guys are “a ruthless insurgency that uses civilians as cover and disregards the laws of conflict taught in the United States.”
It is just so hard for Americans with the big guns who are sent from half-way around the world to sort all this out using the moral goodness we’ve been taught in our deeply ethical rules of conflict.