bag 'em

Matthew Heidt was once a Navy SEAL, and provides some necessary perspective on what the press would just love to make Abu Ghraib II.

Here is your situation Marine. You just took fire from unlawful combatants shooting from a religious building attempting to use the sanctuary status of their position as protection. But you're in Fallujah now, and the Marine Corps has decided that they're not playing that game this time. That was Najaf. So you set the mosque on fire and you hose down the terrorists with small arms, launch some AT-4s (Rockets), some 40MM grenades into the building and things quiet down. So you run over there, and find some tangos wounded and pretending to be dead. You are aware that suicide martyrdom is like really popular with these kind of idiots, and like taking some Marines with them would be really cool. So you can either risk your life and your fireteam's lives by having them cover you while you bend down and search a guy that you think is pretending to be dead for some reason. Also, you don't know who or what is in the next room, and you're already speaking english to each other and its loud because your hearing is poor from shooting people for several days. So you know that there are many other rooms to enter, and that if anyone is still alive in those rooms, they know that Americans are in the mosque. Meanwhile (3 seconds later), you still have this terrorist that was just shooting at you from a mosque playing possum. What do you do?

You double tap his head, and you go to the next room, that's what.

Yes. It's called doing your job. The Fallujah operation is, after all, not about taking the insurgents Sunni fascists and Wahabbi terrorists as prisoners. It's about killing them, so that they can no longer harm either American troops or their fellow Iraqis.

Jeff Goldstein has more worth reading, and links to this appraisal of NBC reporter Kevin Sites, by Rusty Shackleford:

[W]hat should Kevin Sites have done with his story on a lone Marine who murdered a wounded insurgent? The answer is simple: he should have reported the incident up the chain of command, period. […]

Because Kevin Sites could not control his journalistic instincts, we will see another onslaught of beheadings. The terrorists will find that they have a sympathetic population and will find new places to locate their torture chambers.

More young men will join the insurgency, because what choice does one have when a foreign power brutalizes your nation. More Americans will die as a result.

Kevin Sites, you are a traitor. Kevin Sites, you have murdered our friends and neighbors. Kevin Sites, I hope you rot in hell.

I won't go quite as far as does Shackleford; for one, I do not regard the incident as murder. But his anger towards Sites is warranted. The reporter's eagerness to get his scoop has already spawned repercussions, and the progaganda mills of the Arab world are just getting started. And for what end: Dreams of a Pulitzer? A desire to score hot tranzi chicks?

Sites (and by extension NBC) doesn't even have the excuse of domestic politics. When the New York Times featured Abu Ghraib on its front page for nearly two months straight—even when, as on most days, there was very little news to warrant the coverage—it was clearly just another tactic in a media campaign to discredit the war and elect John Kerry. The consequences—for American interests and for the reputation of the legacy media itself—be damned.

And speaking of the erstwhile Democratic candidate: there are rather interesting parallels between this week's incident in Fallujah and the action that netted Lt. Kerry his Silver Star.

For what it's worth.

Dimwit Kevin Sites just peed in his own soup. He was so anxious to get the big scoop that puts our soldiers in a bad light that he has ensured he will never get any another embedded gig. Where do you imagine his next posting will be - whale migrations in Anchorage? Maybe the Apple Festival in Yakima? Or he can go pimp for AFP or Reuters, or be an embed with the Mujies.

Perhaps he's angling to become NBC's answer to Christiane Amanpour? She will never get an imbed job—not like she'd lower herself, anyway—but is still Europe's favorite American war correspondent.

Not such a bad gig, especially if you're predisposed to Chomskyan critiques of American foreign policy anyway. And are willing to burn in hell.

Quoting Heidt's update:

"Remember, in Fallujah there is no yesterday, there is no tomorrow, there is only now. Right NOW. Have you ever lived in NOW for a week? It is not easy, and if you have never lived in NOW for longer than it takes to finish the big roller coaster at Six Flags..."

Nuff said...