CNN’s Defamation of the US Military
This article, Troops Disregard Rules of War, was recently on the front page of CNN and is a total hit piece against the US military in Iraq:
Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by U.S. troops against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.
The documents, released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 incidents. They show repeated examples of troops believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens.
This article leads the reader to believe that these incidents are some how new incidents that have not been reported before and only because of the ACLU have they been uncovered. The truth is that these incidents the ACLU has supposedly uncovered have been well documented before and to top it off are extremely old.
Take this incident for example:
The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris River as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi general believed to be helping insurgents.
I know about this incident because I worked with this battalion before while I was in Iraq and know many of the people involved in what happened. These were good people who used some bad judgment and were held accountable for it by the US military. However, this incident is not anything knew the details about what happened are widely available. The New York Times for example has a 12 page article on it entitled, The Fall of the Warrior King. The other examples in the article are also all old and well documented.
This is what the ACLU had the nerve to claim in the article:
Nasrina Bargzie, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said the documents also show that there is information being withheld from public scrutiny.
"Withheld from public scrutiny?" There is a 12 page article in the New York Times on the very first incident they list as being supposedly "withheld from public scrutiny".
The article also brings up the Haditha case and makes no mention of the acquittal of the Marines involved in it.
Why is CNN considering this news worthy enough of being on the front page of their website? There is absolutely nothing new in this article other then recycling old stories and trying to make them out as if they have been uncovered by the ACLU and that the military is covering up even more civilian deaths in Iraq.
This is clearly another hit piece by the media right before General Petraeus’ report to Congress that perpetuates the continuing theme by the liberal media to portray US soldiers as uneducated low lives that are committing war crimes all over Iraq and thus not worthy of the nation’s respect. Yes I question their patriotism; CNN and the ACLU do not support the troops and they never did.
