From the once reputable newspaper, the Chicago Tribune:

 

Taking a bath with Ann Coulter

Charles M. Madigan

June 27, 2006

I am visiting Ann Coulter.

Not the real Ann Coulter, with her blond hair and fetching little black cocktail dress, but her Web site. She’s pretty blunt.

Former President Bill Clinton was a rapist, she argues. U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton has fat legs. The unfair MSM (mainstream media) viciously chop at decent conservatives.

I don’t care about any of that, and her themes have changed by now anyhow.

She notes that if she hasn’t offended you just yet, wait. She’s working as fast as she can.

She is pumping her new book, but I am not. See? No title here.

My question is where should I put Ann Coulter in my treasure chest of political figures?

Everything needs its place. William F. Buckley is on a pedestal for his smarts. Such an eloquent man deserves honors, whether one agrees with him or not. He is a hero to me, although we disagree on many things, but not on the beauty of sentences.

What are we to do with this outrageous woman, who has the eloquence of, say, a roofer on a really bad day?

She is despised by many. That is unfair. She is just doing business by being hyperbolic, which is her job description.

She has become the commentary equivalent of a great belly dancer at a men’s smoker. The harder she works it, the more dollars get stuffed here and there.

Perhaps she has no brain-mouth regulator, the little device that keeps most dark thoughts unexpressed.

Or, perhaps she is like an egomaniacal kid-party clown, but with a screw loose.

One balloon wiener dog is not enough. She feels she can twist up an entire Noah’s ark of balloon animals. Before you know it, she’s on "America’s Craziest Clowns" scaring kids with her realistic boa constrictor digesting a balloon-shaped pig that looks like Franklin D. Roosevelt.

On Coulter’s part, I think this hyperbole is brilliant.

I don’t really think she’s nuts, but she sure is playing crazy for her loving audience, which expects it of her. It is, I suspect, a stunt.

She is important in my life.

Because of her, I now know exactly where the right wing stops.

A couple of clicks beyond Coulter on the political scale and you are in a land full of biting reptiles, spiders, peasants with torches and survivalists.

She is a bit like Michael Moore on the left, except he is about 10 times her size, not even vaguely pretty and looks like he could use a danged good scrub.

A couple of clicks beyond him on the left?

People with petitions, righteous rhetoric, rusty 190DL Volvo wagons, wine, cheeses, debates about how Marx (Karl not Groucho) was right on some things.

They won’t take "yes" for an answer and could break in to folk music at any minute.

How could Moore and Coulter be the same thing, then?

Oh, sweet reader, in our beloved, confused country, extremes have become so comfortable that gobs of otherwise sensible, fine folks just slip on over to the left or right and splash right in the ideological bathtub.

It would be fun in Coulter’s bathtub because everything would be so certain.

Here is the water. Here is the soap. Here is the bile. Here is the enemy.

("Do NOT touch my feet with your feet," she would say.)

Exactly the same thing holds true for the filmmaker Moore, but there wouldn’t be as much room in Moore’s tub and maybe just feet would fit in there, probably a blessing.

In a more repressive place, Coulter and Moore would be fabulous in the Ministry of Propaganda, pumping out grist for the mills of hyperbole.

As it is, they are merely iconic to their followers.

I read all about her book and what she had to say, just as I followed Michael Moore’s assessment of American politics during the last presidential campaign.

I’m looking for a model to understand what these characters are about.

I have concluded it’s the hyperbolic, grown-up version of the Howdy Doody show, with the particulars in the role of a mutated, very mean-spirited, politicized Buffalo Bob Smith, the host.

One of the key elements of the show was the peanut gallery, kids sitting on risers who reacted so you would know what was funny in Howdy’s world.

"Hey kids, what time is it?" Buffalo Bob would shout.

"It’s Howdy Doody time!" the peanut gallery would respond.

Same thing here, but Howdy Doody was one sweet puppet.

On the left and right extremes of American politics, it’s the adoring audience that’s the puppet.

The character who is Ann Coulter pulls the strings.

The puppets respond with money.

Mind you, this gentleman is paid for his brilliant insights and trenchant analysis.

Among the subtle differences he failed to discern between Ann Coulter and Michael Moore is that Michael Moore is a notorious liar who purposefully presents disinformation as facts. (He is facing at  multi-million dollar lawsuit for this little peccadillo.)

Whereas Ms. Coulter has never written anything of significance that was found to be in error — let alone a deliberate falsehood.

Oh, and another minor distinction, Michael Moore hates this country.

A poster at Free Republic says he took the time to email Mr. Madigan with some questions. Here is his email:

From: TC Rider
Sent: Tue 6/27/2006 12:54 PM
To: Madigan, Charles
Subject: Coulter

You sir, have a bad case of Venus Envy.

It appears from what you wrote that you haven’t read Coulter’s book, proving once again her theory that liberals don’t wish to debate issues or policy, just attack the messengers.

The larger difference between her and Moore, is that she researches and backs up her writing with facts, and footnotes. Moore tends to just make it up.

TC Rider

And here is what he says was Mr. Madigan’s thoughtful reply:

Subject: RE: Coulter
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:34:05 -0500
From: "Madigan, Charles"
To: "TC Rider"

venus envy? very clever. lets go cut her arms off and that will stop all this. setting aside the argument about issues, the woman looks as though she has a budding eating disorder and should get some help.

her arms, tiny for such a tall person. i would just feed her cheese burgers until she swells up a bit and then i might say, "pretty, in a it’s late at night in the holiday inn bar and there’s no one left to talk to" kind of way.

madigan

This is a photo of the gentleman who is mocking Ms. Coulter’s appearance, from his own column:

Charlie Madigan — "The Rambling Gleaner"

One suspects the only thing "Charlie" would have to say in a late night at the holiday inn bar would be "hello, sailor!"

From the DNC’s Associated Press:

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, left, and Gov. Rick Perry enter a news conference in this Oct. 9, 2003 file photo, in Austin, Texas, where they displayed a new congressional redistricting map, shown on the right. On Wednesday, June 28, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out part of a Texas congressional map engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The court ruled that some of the new boundaries failed to protect minority voting rights.

Justices Back Most G.O.P. Changes to Texas Districts

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

June 28, 2006

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld most of the Texas congressional map engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay but threw out part, saying some of the new boundaries failed to protect minority voting rights.

The fractured decision was a small victory for Democratic and minority groups who accused Republicans of an unconstitutional power grab in drawing boundaries that booted four Democratic incumbents out of office.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said Hispanics do not have a chance to elect a candidate of their choosing under the plan.

Republicans picked up six Texas congressional seats two years ago, and the court’s ruling does not seriously threaten those gains. Lawmakers, however, will have to adjust boundary lines to address the court’s concerns.

At issue was the shifting of 100,000 Hispanics out of a district represented by a Republican incumbent and into a new, oddly shaped district. Foes of the plan had argued that that was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voting rights.

On a different issue, the court ruled that state legislators may draw new maps as often as they like — not just once a decade as Texas Democrats claimed. That means Democratic and Republican state lawmakers can push through new maps anytime there is a power shift at a state capital.

The Constitution says states must adjust their congressional district lines every 10 years to account for population shifts. In Texas the boundaries were redrawn twice after the 2000 census, first by a court, then by state lawmakers in a second round promoted by DeLay after Republicans took control.

That was acceptable, the justices said.

"We reject the statewide challenge to Texas redistricting as an unconstitutional political gerrymander," Kennedy wrote.

However, he said the state’s redrawing of District 23 violated the Voting Rights Act.

The 2003 boundaries were approved by the state Legislature and its Republican majority newly elected with DeLay’s help. In the next congressional elections, Republicans picked up six additional seats in the House. The contentious map drawing also contributed to the downfall of DeLay.

He was charged in state court with money laundering in connection with fundraising for legislative candidates. Although he is fighting the charges and maintains he is innocent, DeLay gave up his leadership post and then resigned from Congress.

After Texas decided to redraw its congressional district boundaries, two other states — Colorado and Georgia — also undertook a second round of redistricting.

"Some people are predicting a rash of mid-decade redistricting. I am skeptical," said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School. "It would be seen as a power grab in a lot of places."

Huh. I thought the US Constitution specifically gave Congress the right to set Congressional districts. I guess I was mistaken about that.

It turns out race trumps the Constitution every time.

Carved out with the aid of a computer, this congressional district was the product of California’s incumbent gerrymandering. This is the district of Democrat Grace Flores Napolitano, who ran unopposed in 2004, obtaining 100 percent of the vote.

The unusual "earmuff" shape of the 4th Congressional District of Illinois connects two Hispanic neighborhoods while remaining contiguous by narrowly tracing Interstate 294. It is represented by Rep. Luis Gutierrez [D].

Funny how gerrymandering for Democrats is alwaysallowed.

This is an excerpt from a Washington Post article published back in March.

The piece concerned the onset of FBI investigations into the egregious leaks of national security secrets at that time, including the "CIA prisons" and the NSA’s monitoring of Al Qaeda calls.

(This investigation probably lead to the the firing of the CIA officer Mary McCarthy, who was the presumed source for Dana Priest’s Pulitzer Prize winning articles on the "CIA prisons.")

But the comments expressed in the article by the Washington Post’s executive editor Leonard Downie seem to perfectly exemplify the hubris felt by the Post, the New York Times and much of our media watchdogs:

Columbia University President George Rupp (left) presents Katherine Boo and Leonard Downie, Jr., of The Washington Post, with the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

White House trains efforts on media leaks

Bush administration targets sources, reporters under espionage laws

By Dan Eggen
March 4, 2006

The Bush administration, seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources. The efforts include several FBI probes, a polygraph investigation inside the CIA and a warning from the Justice Department that reporters could be prosecuted under espionage laws.

In recent weeks, dozens of employees at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have been interviewed by agents from the FBI’s Washington field office, who are investigating possible leaks that led to reports about secret CIA prisons and the NSA’s warrantless domestic surveillance program, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the two cases.

Numerous employees at the CIA, FBI, Justice Department and other agencies also have received letters from Justice prohibiting them from discussing even unclassified issues related to the NSA program, according to sources familiar with the notices…

"There’s a tone of gleeful relish in the way they talk about dragging reporters before grand juries, their appetite for withholding information, and the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public’s business risk being branded traitors," said New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, in a statement responding to questions from The Washington Post. "I don’t know how far action will follow rhetoric, but some days it sounds like the administration is declaring war at home on the values it professes to be promoting abroad."

President Bush has called the NSA leak "a shameful act" that was "helping the enemy," and said in December that he was hopeful the Justice Department would conduct a full investigation into the disclosure.

"We need to protect the right to free speech and the First Amendment, and the president is doing that," said White House spokesman Trent Duffy. "But, at the same time, we do need to protect classified information which helps fight the war on terror." …

Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Post, said there has long been a “natural and healthy tension between government and the media” on national security issues, but that he is “concerned” about comments by Goss and others that appear to reflect a more aggressive stance by the government. Downie noted that The Post had at times honored government requests not to report particularly sensitive information, such as the location of CIA prisons in Eastern Europe.

“We do not want to inadvertently threaten human life or legitimately harm national security in our reporting,” he said. “But it’s important . . . in our constitutional system that these final decisions be made by newspaper editors and not the government.” …

I didn’t know that the framers of the Constitution put the decisions concerning matters of national security in the hands of newspaper editors rather than an elected representatives.

Did you?

Despite these delusions, there are laws against what the our one party media have been so gleefully doing.

Such as US Code Title 18, Part I, Chapter 3, § 793:

Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information:

(e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any… information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it…

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Though prison really is too good for them.

From the Brownsville Herald:

Under honor guard escort, the remains of Army Pfc. Kristian Menchaca are unloaded off an airplane at the Brownsville-South Padre Island International Airport in Brownsville, Texas, Monday, June 26, 2006.

Hundreds turn out for arrival of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca

BY Emma Perez-Treviño, Chris Mahon
and Kevin Sieff

June 27, 2006 — The body of Army Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, arrived at the Brownsville airport Monday in a solemn ceremony broken only by the sobs of his young widow.

Eighteen-year-old Christina Menchaca of Big Spring, Texas received her husband’s body shortly after noon, surrounded by family, her little boy, and Rev. Carlos Villarreal.

They watched as 11 members of the 101st Screaming Eagles Military Funeral Detachment team provided full honors as they carried the varnished brown coffin from a chartered Falcon jet to a waiting hearse.

The coffin was draped with an American flag.

“He was a young man who had dreams and hopes and they just vanished,” U.S. Rep. Solomon P. Ortiz said after watching the arrival of Menchaca’s body with local officials who showed their respect at the Brownsville-South Padre Island International Airport.

“He deserves a hero’s burial,” Ortiz, D-Corpus Christi, said.

Menchaca, a native of Brownsville and Houston, Army Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25 of Madras, Ore., and Army Spc. David J. Babineau, 25 of Springfield, Mass. came under fire June 16 at a traffic control point south of Yusufiyah, Iraq.

Babineau’s body was recovered at the ambush site, but Menchaca and Tucker were kidnapped. Their bodies were found June 19 next to a road near the village of Mufaraji, northwest of Yusufiyah. Several explosive devices were encountered, delaying the recovery of the bodies until the following day. The three soldiers were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, Fort Campbell, Ky.

While in Brownsville in the mid to late 1990s, Menchaca attended Porter High School and Vela Middle School, which is no more than a mile north of the Brownsville Event Center – where his visitation will be held today.

For the last week, the flags — of the United States, Texas, and Mexico — that line Ruben M. Torres Boulevard have all flown at half-mast. They’ve been accompanied by banners and tickers reading “in honor of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca.”

On Tuesday, when Menchaca’s body was returned to Brownsville, hundreds more flags appeared on the boulevard.

In addition to the police procession that accompanied Menchaca’s hearse, hundreds of Brownsville residents, some noticeably weeping, drove slowly to the city’s events center. From city officials to “Los Escondidos,” a biker group, every member of the procession carried his own American flag.

“By coming here I am showing my respect,” said Frank Garza, a former soldier. Even though he doesn’t know Menchaca’s family, Garza’s nephew, who is currently assigned to Border Patrol duty, will be driving in from Arizona for the funeral.

Like Garza, Adelaida Rey showed her support by waving a small flag from the side of the road. She brought her grandchildren along to share the experience.

“El estaba peleando por nuestro freedom, y por eso estamos aqui,” she said. “He was fighting for our freedom and because of that we are here.”

Although Rey speaks only Spanish, she carefully pronounces the word “freedom” in English. For the woman waving both Texas and American flags, it’s a word too important to be translated.

While the procession drove by, Rey’s grandchildren were as solemn as she was. “Es importante que lo vean,” she said. “It’s important that they see this.”

Under a blue sky with foreboding rain clouds on the horizon, stood Henry Valdez, sweating from the 90-plus degree humidity.

He stood far from the small crowds of people that dotted Paredes Line Road up to the event center, the motorcade’s final destination.

“I came to pay my respects,” the former U.S. Marine said.

“So young, man. So young,” he said with a sigh.

“So young.”

Soon afterwards, the convoy of about 100 turned right onto Paredes Line Road from Ruben Torres Boulevard. Its final destination, less than a mile away, was now visible.

Catching sight of the convoy, which wound like a snake around the corner, Irahi Masso whispered to her young son, “Here he comes Brandon, raise the flag.”

He dutifully obeyed, raising a small American flag. It was a mirror image of the dozens of public safety officers parked across the street, holding full-size flags of their own.

In the middle of the motorcade of cars, trucks and motorcycles, was Menchaca’s body in a polished, black hearse, making its way past the Massos and Valdez. Other than the rumble of vehicles, it was quiet.

As the procession entered the center’s parking lot, it passed members of Brownsville American Legion Post 43 and other veterans.

Finally, with the emergency response vehicles that escorted the body finally dispersed, all that was left was the black hearse. It parked beneath the overhang at the center’s entrance.

The only sound as his flag-draped coffin was unloaded was water gurgling in a fountain between two palm trees. The ends of the yellow ribbons attached to the trees fluttered gently in the breeze.

Menchaca’s mother and other immediate family members waited at the Brownsville Event Center for his arrival, instead.

Menchaca will be buried in uniform and with several medals: America’s Meritorious Service Medal, a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and a Prisoner of War medal.

“He earned them, he goes down with them,” Ortiz said.

Thomas Tucker was similarly remembered in Oregon:

A park fence is adorned with memorial items in Madras, Oregon for slain U.S. Army Private First Class Thomas Lowell Tucker, who was killed in Iraq, June 23, 2006.

Funny how these stories weren’t covered by the AP or NYT.

  Update!

Our one party media has finally gotten around to this story. At least I think it is the same story.

From the DNC’s Associated Press:

Bishop At GI’s Funeral: Work For Peace

BROWNSVILLE, Texas, June 28, 2006(AP) The remains of a Texas soldier captured and brutalized in Iraq were buried Wednesday following a funeral Mass celebrated by a Catholic bishop and a dozen priests, and attended by hundreds of veterans, local residents and area dignitaries.

Pfc. Kristian Menchaca was awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and a Prisoner of War medal.

Menchaca, 23, was one of three soldiers to die after a June 16 insurgent attack at the checkpoint they were guarding. He and another soldier, Pfc. Thomas Tucker of Madras, Oregon, went missing for three days before their mutilated and booby-trapped bodies were recovered. The third soldier, Spc. David J. Babineau, of Springfield, Massachusetts, died in the attack.

Diocese of Brownsville Bishop Raymundo Pena spoke during the bilingual Mass of Menchaca’s valor and sacrifice. Some of Menchaca’s relatives crossed the U.S.-Mexico border to be with his family. His mother, Maria Vasquez, was born in Mexico, and his family now lives largely in Brownsville.

“News reports about the circumstances of Kris’ death in Iraq could lead us to an unholy rage and anger, but that would only dishonor Kristian’s very name and Kristian himself,” Pena said. “ We must, as he did, reach for the ideal: to work for peace and an end to conflict wherever we may find it .” …

Thank goodness we have an objective press safeguarding our freedom.

I’d hate to think they had their own separate agenda.

From Accuracy In Media:

  

Time’s Tim McGirk

Time Magazine Massacres the Truth

By Roger Aronoff  |  June 26, 2006

Was Time lied to by the Hammurabi boys, or did they embellish the story on their own?

Time magazine’s story of an alleged Marine massacre in Haditha, Iraq, has been falling apart.

Thanks to Time and Rep. John Murtha, the name "Haditha" has gained signature status as an American atrocity, even though the facts are not in. Haditha has even been compared to the My Lai massacre, in which U.S. forces killed a group of Vietnamese, during the Vietnam War. But as a media story, "Haditha" is beginning to look more like Operation Tailwind, a story that sounded sensational and damaging to U.S. forces before it was exposed as a fraud. The Haditha massacre story could turn out to be as phony as the Bush National Guard documents that scandalized CBS News.

Although Tailwind was primarily a CNN fiasco, one thing both stories have in common is Time magazine, CNN’s partner in the Tailwind story. Another is that they are both stories that make extremely serious allegations against the U.S. military, based on highly questionable sources, presented in a deceitful manner.

Haditha is a town in Iraq that had remained a haven for Sunni insurgents and foreign jihadists. On the morning of November 19, 2005, according to Time, U.S. forces were involved in deliberately killing Iraqi civilians. But Time has already had to correct and amend its coverage on several occasions, and on issues that are very substantive, and that raise serious questions about the likely truth of the charges. There are also serious questions about the motives behind the reporting.

What everyone agrees on is that at 7:15 a.m. that morning, a powerful improvised explosive device (IED) exploded as a convoy of Marine Humvees was passing by, killing Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, said to be the most popular member of the squad of Kilo Company. What happened next is that in a series of combat actions, 24 Iraqis were killed. According to the lawyer for Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, an eight-year Marine who led the squad, 23 died at a traffic stop, and in three nearby houses. A 24th was killed while fleeing from a house. This is where the stories diverge.

According to alleged eyewitnesses who spoke to Time magazine reporters, the killings were in cold blood, sometimes point blank, and included women, children and the elderly. But according to Wuterich and other Marines, the deaths resulted from a firefight with terrorists. Following the IED explosion, he says, they set up a defensive perimeter. A car drove by with five Iraqi men inside, and when ordered, in Arabic, to halt, they got out of the car and began to run. The Marines shot and killed them all. They had considered their running to indicate hostile intent.

Then a shot came from one of the houses. They then decided to clear the houses along that block. They used grenades to "prep" the first house, before going in. They acknowledged killing the Iraqis over a period of several hours, but deny charges that civilians were lined up and executed. They reported the incident up the chain of command, and said there had been collateral damage, meaning civilian deaths. The next day, the 2nd Marine Division issued a statement saying that 15 Iraqis had been killed by an IED and firefight. That story, based on apparent miscommunication, wasn’t true. Wuterich insists that he never said the Iraqis had been killed as a result of an IED.

Time broke the story in March, some four months after the incident. One of their sources was described as a "journalism student" and "a young local man" who said he shot video of the aftermath of the incident and at the morgue. Time originally reported that "The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared with TIME." They later amended the story, and said in note at the end of the article that "In fact, Human Rights Watch has no ties or association with the Hammurabi Human Rights Group."

It turns out that the "young" journalist is 43-year-old Taher Thabet al Hadithi, and a co-founder of the Hammurabi Human Rights Group. At the time, he was also one of its only two members. Many have questioned the timing—why the charges were made much later. In an editorial, the Washington Times noted that although Hadithi claims to have witnessed the Marines killing civilians, and that he videotaped the aftermath on the following day, he waited at least two months before bringing his tape to the attention of the media. The Times noted that Hammurabi’s other founder, Abdul-Rahman al Mashhadani, failed to mention the alleged massacre during an interview with the Institute for War and Peace in December.

A Reuters article quoted a lawyer for one of the Marines being investigated as saying that that the two "employees" of Hammurabi have family members "in local prisons for insurgent activities." They deny this but questions remain about the nature of this "human rights" organization. At this point, it would not be beyond the pale to suggest that it could be a terrorist front organization. But all the facts are not in.

Was Time lied to by the Hammurabi boys, or did they embellish the story on their own? How well did Time vet the source of the tape they were shown before going forth with the story?

Making the initial charges sound extremely damaging, Time had reported that "one of the most damning pieces of evidence investigators have in their possession, John Sifton of Human Rights Watch told Time’s Tim McGirk, is a photo, taken by a Marine with his cell phone that shows Iraqis kneeling—and thus posing no threat—before they were shot." Sifton later said that he has no first-hand knowledge of that photo, and that it appears to him that "Time Magazine mixed up their reporting, possibly conflating and then confusing what I said with what others had reported."

When Time showed the video to military officials in January, it set in motion a series of investigations. One reportedly concluded that Marine officers failed to ask the right questions, but that nothing in the report indicated a "knowing cover-up." Instead, it said, that the officers involved up the chain-of-command had not demanded "a thorough investigation" of the events that took place.

As to what took place and how this happened, it has been turned over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which will determine whether or not the troops broke any laws, or acted within the parameters of their duty and training.

It has become clear that the terrorists don’t hesitate to use women and children as human shields, and that they have learned how to manipulate the media to gain sympathy in a campaign to break the will of the U.S. and its allies. Clearly, such a campaign could utilize fake videos and bribing or threatening people to tell lies about the Americans.

If the Time account completely collapses, much credit will have to go to the blog Sweetness & Light, which has been analyzing every twist and turn, noting how Time has been forced to repeatedly correct aspects of the story. It has focused some critical attention on the curious performance of Time reporter Tim McGirk, who "broke" the Haditha massacre story.

The American Thinker website has gone so far as to ask, "Is Tim McGirk the new Mary Mapes?" Mapes, of course, is the former CBS News producer who fell for the bogus Bush National Guard document and put it on the air. She left the network in disgrace, and her accomplice, Dan Rather, who narrated the Mapes report for the CBS 60 Minutes II program, is leaving under a cloud as well.

Time magazine insists that it engages in professional journalism, but Accuracy in Media recently caught its top reporters fabricating part of an interview conducted with National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. No apology was offered in that case.

This information is already familiar to the readers here.

But it can’t be repeated enough.

Behold this editorial from the Solons of the New York Times, just thirteen days after 9/11:

Finances of Terror

September 24, 2001

rganizing the hijacking of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took significant sums of money. The cost of these plots suggests that putting Osama bin Laden and other international terrorists out of business will require more than diplomatic coalitions and military action. Washington and its allies must also disable the financial networks used by terrorists.

The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track terrorists through their money-laundering activity and is readying an executive order freezing the assets of known terrorists. Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also must be closer coordination among America’s law enforcement, national security and financial regulatory agencies.

Osama bin Laden originally rose to prominence because his inherited fortune allowed him to bankroll Arab volunteers fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Since then, he has acquired funds from a panoply of Islamic charities and illegal and legal businesses, including export-import and commodity trading firms, and is estimated to have as much as $300 million at his disposal.

Some of these businesses move funds through major commercial banks that lack the procedures to monitor such transactions properly. Locally, terrorists can utilize tiny unregulated storefront financial centers, including what are known as hawala banks, which people in South Asian immigrant communities in the United States and other Western countries use to transfer money abroad. Though some smaller financial transactions are likely to slip through undetected even after new rules are in place, much of the financing needed for major attacks could dry up.

Washington should revive international efforts begun during the Clinton administration to pressure countries with dangerously loose banking regulations to adopt and enforce stricter rules. These need to be accompanied by strong sanctions against doing business with financial institutions based in these nations. The Bush administration initially opposed such measures. But after the events of Sept. 11, it appears ready to embrace them.

The Treasury Department also needs new domestic legal weapons to crack down on money laundering by terrorists. The new laws should mandate the identification of all account owners, prohibit transactions with "shell banks" that have no physical premises and require closer monitoring of accounts coming from countries with lax banking laws. Prosecutors, meanwhile, should be able to freeze more easily the assets of suspected terrorists. The Senate Banking Committee plans to hold hearings this week on a bill providing for such measures. It should be approved and signed into law by President Bush.

New regulations requiring money service businesses like the hawala banks to register and imposing criminal penalties on those that do not are scheduled to come into force late next year. The effective date should be moved up to this fall, and rules should be strictly enforced the moment they take effect. If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one.

But that was then.

It is absolutely laughable that this is news to the "Paper Of Treason," the New York Times:

Unused FEMA trailers.

'Breathtaking' Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid

By ERIC LIPTON

June 27, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 26 — Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion.

A hotel owner in Sugar Land, Tex., has been charged with submitting $232,000 in bills for phantom victims. And roughly 1,100 prison inmates across the Gulf Coast apparently collected more than $10 million in rental and disaster-relief assistance.

There are the bureaucrats who ordered nearly half a billion dollars worth of mobile homes that are still empty, and renovations for a shelter at a former Alabama Army base that cost about $416,000 per evacuee.

And there is the Illinois woman who tried to collect federal benefits by claiming she watched her two daughters drown in the rising New Orleans waters. In fact, prosecutors say, the children did not exist.

The tally of ignoble acts linked to Hurricane Katrina, pulled together by The New York Times from government audits, criminal prosecutions and Congressional investigations, could rise because the inquiries are under way. Even in Washington, a city accustomed to government bloat, the numbers are generating amazement.

"The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, the scale of the waste — it is just breathtaking," said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Such an outcome was feared soon after Congress passed the initial hurricane relief package, as officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross acknowledged that their systems were overwhelmed and tried to create new ones on the fly.

"We did, in fact, put into place never-before-used and untested processes," Donna M. Dannels, acting deputy director of recovery at FEMA, told a House panel this month. "Clearly, because they were untested, they were more subject to error and fraud."

Officials in Washington say they recognized that a certain amount of fraud or improper payments is inevitable in any major disaster, as the government's mission is to rapidly distribute emergency aid. They typically send out excessive payments that represent 1 percent to 3 percent of the relief distributed, money they then ask people to give back.

What was not understood until now was just how large these numbers could become.

The estimate of up to $2 billion in fraud and waste represents nearly 11 percent of the $19 billion spent by FEMA on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as of mid-June, or about 6 percent of total money that has been obligated.

"This started off as a disaster-relief program, but it turned into a cash cow," said Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, a former federal prosecutor and now chairman of a House panel investigating storm waste and fraud.

The waste ranged from excessive loads of ice to higher-than-necessary costs on the multibillion-dollar debris removal effort. Some examples are particularly stark.

The $7.9 million spent to renovate the former Fort McClellan Army base in Anniston, Ala., included fixing up a welcome center, clinic and gymnasium, scrubbing away mold and installing a protective fence between the site and a nearby firing range. But when the doors finally opened, only about 10 people showed up each night, leading FEMA to shut down the shelter within one month.

The mobile homes, costing $34,500 each, were supposed to provide temporary housing to hurricane victims. But after Louisiana officials balked at installing them inland, FEMA had no use for them. Nearly half, or about 10,000, of the $860 million worth of units now sit at an airfield in Arkansas, where FEMA is paying $250,000 a month to store them.

The most recent audit came from the Government Accountability Office, which this month estimated that perhaps as much as 21 percent of the $6.3 billion given directly to victims might have been improperly distributed.

"There are tools that are available to get money quickly to individuals and to get disaster relief programs running quickly without seeing so much fraud and waste," said Gregory D. Kutz, managing director of the forensic audits unit at the G.A.O. "But it wasn't really something that FEMA put a high priority on. So it was easy to commit fraud without being detected."

The most disturbing cases, said David R. Dugas, the United States attorney in Louisiana, who is leading a storm antifraud task force for the Justice Department, are those involving government officials accused of orchestrating elaborate scams.

One Louisiana Department of Labor clerk, Wayne P. Lawless, has been charged with issuing about 80 fraudulent disaster unemployment benefit cards in exchange for bribes of up to $300 per application. Mr. Lawless, a state contract worker, announced to one man he helped apply for hurricane benefits that he wanted to "get something out of it," the affidavit said. His lawyer did not respond to several messages left at his office and home for comment.

"The American people are the most generous in the world in responding to a disaster," Mr. Dugas said. "We won't tolerate people in a position of public trust taking advantage of the situation."

Two other men, Mitchell Kendrix of Memphis and Paul Nelson of Lisbon, Me., have pleaded guilty in connection with a scheme in Mississippi in which Mr. Kendrix, a representative for the Army Corps of Engineers, took $100 bribes in exchange for approving phantom loads of hurricane debris from Mr. Nelson.

In New Orleans, two FEMA officials, Andrew Rose and Loyd Holliman, both of Colorado, have pleaded guilty to taking $20,000 in bribes in exchange for inflating the count on the number of meals a contractor was serving disaster workers. And a councilman in St. Tammany Parish, La., Joseph Impastato, has also been charged with trying to extort $100,000 from a debris removal contractor. Mr. Impastato's lawyer, Karl J. Koch, said he was confident his client would be cleared.

A program set up by the American Red Cross and financed by FEMA that provided free hotel rooms to Hurricane Katrina victims also resulted in extraordinary abuse and waste, investigators have found.

First, because the Red Cross did not keep track of the hundreds of thousands of recipients — they were only required to provide a ZIP code from the hurricane zone to check in — FEMA frequently sent rental assistance checks to people getting free hotel rooms, the G.A.O. found.

In turn, some hotel managers or owners, like Daniel Yeh, of Sugar Land, exploited the lack of oversight, investigators have charged, and submitted bills for empty rooms or those occupied by paying guests or employees. Mr. Yeh submitted $232,000 in false claims, his arrest affidavit said. His lawyer, Robert Bennett, said that Mr. Yeh was mentally incompetent and that the charges should be dismissed.

And Tina M. Winston of Belleville, Ill., was charged this month with claiming that her two daughters had died in the flooding in New Orleans. But prosecutors said that the children never existed and that Ms. Winston was living in Illinois at the time of the storm. The public defender representing Ms. Winston did not respond to a request for comment.

Charities also were vulnerable to profiteers. In Burbank, Calif., a couple has been charged with collecting donations outside a store by posing as Red Cross workers. In Bakersfield, Calif., 75 workers at a Red Cross call center, their friends and relatives have been charged in a scheme to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in relief.

To date, Mr. Dugas said, federal prosecutors have filed hurricane-related criminal charges against 335 individuals. That represents a record number of indictments from a single hurricane season, Justice Department officials said. Separately, Red Cross officials say they are investigating 7,100 cases of possible fraud.

Congressional investigators, meanwhile, have referred another 7,000 cases of possible fraud to prosecutors, including more than 1,000 prison inmates who collected more than $12 million in federal aid, much of it in the form of rental assistance.

Investigators also turned up one individual who had received 26 federal disaster relief payments totaling $139,000, using 13 Social Security numbers, all based on claims of damages for bogus addresses.

Thousands more people may be charged before the five-year statute of limitations on most of these crimes expires, investigators said.

There are bigger cases of government waste or fraud in United States history. The Treasury Department, for example, estimated in 2005 that Americans in a single year had improperly been granted perhaps $9 billion in unjustified claims under the Earned-Income Tax Credit. The Department of Health and Human Services in 2001 estimated that nearly $12 billion in Medicare benefit payments in the previous year had been based on improper or fraudulent complaints.

Auditors examining spending in Iraq also have documented hundreds of millions in questionable spending or abuse. But Mr. Kutz of the accountability office said that in all of his investigative work, he had never encountered the range of abuses he has seen with Hurricane Katrina.

R. David Paulison, the new FEMA director, said in an interview on Friday that much work had already been done to prevent such widespread fraud, including automated checks to confirm applicants' identities.

"We will be able to tell who you are, if you live where you said you do," Mr. Paulison said.

But Senator Collins said she had heard such promises before, including after Hurricane Frances in 2004 in which FEMA gave out millions of dollars in aid to Miami-Dade County residents, even though there was little damage.

Mr. Kutz said he too was not convinced that the agency was ready.

"I still don't think they fully understand the depth of the problem," he said.

It seems like only yesterday this same New York Times was self-righteously clucking about how the government wasn't throwing enough money at the (overblown by them) problems of Katrina.

The Times should stick to what they do best.

Betraying our national defense secrets and helping to kill our soldiers.

From the Denver Post:

CU plans to fire Churchill

By Jennifer Brown
Denver Post Staff Writer

The interim chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder announced today that CU wants to fire ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill.

"Today I issued to Professor Churchill a notice of intent to dismiss him from his faculty position here at the University of Colorado," said Phil DiStefano at a press conference.

Churchill has 10 days to appeal.

"A university is a marketplace of ideas, a place where controversy is no stranger…indeed one of our most cherished principals is academic freedom, the right to pursue and disseminate knowledge without threat of sanction," said DiStefano. "But with freedom comes responsibility."

A university committee that investigates academic misconduct recommended two weeks ago that Churchill be fired for a "pattern of repeated, intentional misrepresentation."

In a secret ballot, six committee members recommended dismissal and three recommended suspension without pay. Two of the three recommended a five-year suspension and one a two-year suspension.

In a 20-page report, the committee agreed with a May investigative committee report that Churchill intentionally falsified his research, plagiarized other people’s work and ghostwrote articles and then cited them to buttress his work.

Churchill and his attorney have threatened to sue CU if he is fired. They accuse the university of retaliating against the tenured professor because of his essay saying some World Trade Center terrorism victims were not innocent and comparing them to a Nazi bureaucrat.

Churchill said at the time that the investigative committee’s report read like a warning to other scholars to "lay low."

"Do not challenge orthodoxy," Churchill wrote in his response to the committee. "If you do, expect to be targeted for elimination and understand that the university will not be constrained by its own rules – or the Constitution – in its attempts to silence you."

Of course Churchill will have to be dragged off the academic reservation kicking and screaming.

At least I hope so.

Now here is a shock.

From the ABC affiliate the Denver Channel:

Victims, Suspect In Safeway Shooting Rampage Identified

Gunman Tentatively Identified As Michael Ford

June 26, 2006

DENVER — An investigation is under way to determine why a Safeway warehouse employee walked into work and opened fire on his coworkers Sunday afternoon, killing one person and injuring five, including a Denver police officer.

The suspect, identified as Michael Julius Ford, was shot and killed during a shootout with SWAT officers inside the massive Safeway Denver Distribution Center, located near Interstate 70 and Colorado Boulevard.

He shot randomly at coworkers, and when he shot SWAT officer Derick Dominguez, the other SWAT team heard Dominguez cry out, and fired back, police said.

"(Ford) was unprovoked and shot Officer Dominguez — unprovoked. That’s when the other officers came to Dominguez’ aid and were shot at," Denver police Chief Gerry Whitman said at a Monday afternoon press conference. "They were exchanging quite a few rounds in there … He shot at us six times and we returned fire 17 rounds. It was a gun battle that he started."

Ford’s mother and sister told a local TV reporter that Ford was a kind, caring person, who wouldn’t hurt anyone but that he said he was being teased at work because he’s a Muslim and he couldn’t take it anymore.

However, police said that they couldn’t find any motive for the shootings and not heard about the possible religious conflict that his family say provoked the attack.

Safeway spokesman, Jeff Stroh, said that there were no early signs of any trouble.

"In all of our investigations yesterday and this morning, we can find no problems of any kind that were brought forward involving Mr. Ford. None whatsoever, " Stroh said. "No complaints to supervisors. No calls to the employee assistance program hotline. Nothing whatsover to predict this kind of outcome."

Stroh said that the company has a program that offers a 24-hour hotline to help employees with personal or work-related issues.

Michael Ford

No. Nothing predictable about this at all.

(Maybe we should replace "going postal" with "going Muslim.")

Maybe Al Gore should forget about Global Warming, which might have an effect on the world in a few thousand years, and do something about the slave labor his company is engaged in — today.

(Al Gore is a member of the board of directors at Apple Computers.)

From the UK’s Daily Mail via Macworld Daily News:

I-Pod dormitories

Inside Apple’s iPod factories

Monday – June 12, 2006

By Macworld staff

Apple’s iPods are made by mainly female workers who earn as little as £27 ($49 US) per month, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday yesterday.

The report, ‘iPod City’, isn’t available online. It offers photographs taken from inside the factories that make Apple music players, situated in China and owned by Foxconn.

The Mail visited some of these factories and spoke with staff there. It reports that Foxconn’s Longhua plant houses 200,000 workers, remarking: "This iPod City has a population bigger than Newcastle’s."

The report claims Longhua’s workers live in dormitories that house 100 people, and that visitors from the outside world are not permitted. Workers toil for 15-hours a day to make the iconic music player, the report claims. They earn £27 per month. The report reveals that the iPod nano is made in a five-storey factory (E3) that is secured by police officers.

Another factory in Suzhou, Shanghai, makes iPod shuffles. The workers are housed outside the plant, and earn £54 ($98 US) per month – but they must pay for their accommodation and food, "which takes up half their salaries", the report observes.

A security guard told the Mail reporters that the iPod shuffle production lines are staffed by women workers because "they are more honest than male workers".

The report also explains that the nano contains 400 parts, and that its flash memory is the most expensive component. The report looks at several salient components of the nano, and describes the product as a reflecting the global way business works today. This is because the iPod nano contains parts developed by technology companies from across the planet.

Apple is just one of thousands of companies that now use Chinese facilities to manufacture its products, the report observes. Low wages, long hours and China’s industrial secrecy make the country attractive to business, particularly as increased competition and consumer expectations force companies to deliver products at attractive prices.

Update, June 14: Since this report, Apple has issued a statement regarding the Mail’s claims. The company referes to its code of practice for suppliers and says it is investigating the claims.

But now we have this from ChinaCSR:

Foxconn Admits Breaking Labor Laws In China

Posted On 26th June 2006 @ 07:02

Foxconn, an original equipment manufacturer for Apple’s iPod, has admitted that their employees work about 80 extra hours each month, which is against the law in China.

According to Chinese labor laws, a company breaks the law if it asks employees to work more than 36 extra hours each month.

However, Li Zong, a spokesperson from Foxconn, says Foxconn’s complicated salary structure has caused misunderstanding among the media, and the company has paid the workers according to the minimum salary standards of the Shenzhen local government.

Li also says Apple has sent a special team to investigate, but has found no problem with Foxconn.

It was reported earlier that Apple’s iPod OEM paid very little to the workers and provided very poor working conditions for them in their Chinese factories.

So according to this report Apple’s investigation is over and they are satisfied with the working and living conditions there.

How progressive of them.

From (sadly, not always reliable) Newsmax:

New Evidence Emerges in Haditha Case

Phil Brennan, NewsMax
Monday, June 26, 2006

New evidence continues to emerge that U.S. Marines did not wantonly kill Iraqi civilians in Haditha last November – and the soldiers’ accounts of what happened are backed up by videotape shot by an ultralight vehicle, NewsMax has learned.

According to media reports, last Nov. 19 members of a Marine Corps company killed some 24 innocent civilian Iraqis in Haditha, a town 140 miles northwest of Baghdad and near the Syrian border.

In the ensuing media firestorm that broke out after the story was revealed, many news reports here and abroad compared the Haditha deaths to the infamous My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.

Michael Sallah, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his My Lai reporting, has said: "You would have difficulties finding a single newspaper in Germany or elsewhere in Europe which does not deal with My Lai."

But the facts and accounts from Marines and others on the ground tell another story.

What is not in dispute is that the Marines’ engagement in Haditha began when an IED (improvised explosive device) detonated, killing a Marine from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division.

In the aftermath of the action two investigations were launched, one by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell, who was charged with investigating how the incident was reported through the chain of command. A second investigation, headed by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), is looking into any possible criminal aspects of the incident.

The Bargewell report has not been released and is still being reviewed by Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, a top U.S. commander in Iraq. But military officials told the Los Angeles Times that although it concludes there was no deliberate cover-up by senior Marine officers, the Corps failed to follow up and ask questions that the known details should have provoked them to ask.

The NCIS investigation is still ongoing.

In May, when Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, appeared on "Good Morning America," he accused the Marines of K Company of killing innocent civilians "in cold blood" and said that the killings had been covered up by higher officers.

The Bargewell report has disproved that allegation, and with the NCIS investigation so far incomplete and no soldier charged with a crime, how would Murtha know?

Intelligence sources tell NewsMax the facts of the Haditha incident paint an entirely different picture from the one Murtha and others are propagating.

Military sources familiar with the incident have told NewsMax:

# Within minutes of the early morning IED explosion, a firefight erupted between insurgents and Marines. Civilians were caught in the middle of the firefight. Also, although civilians did die, their deaths were the result of door-to-door combat as the Marines sought to clear houses and stop the insurgent gunfire.

# Ample evidence proves that a firefight took place. For example, every second of the ensuing firefight was monitored by numerous people at company, battalion, and regimental HQs via radio communications.

# Video evidence supports the Marines’ claims. Within a very few minutes, battalion, regimental, and division headquarters were able to watch the action thanks to an overhead ultralight aircraft that remained aloft all day. Photos of some of the action were downloaded and in the hands of Marines and the NCIS.

# Some of the insurgents involved in planning the attack and firing at Marines during a daylong engagement have been apprehended and are in custody.

Much of the story claiming what really happened in the aftermath of the IED explosion was reported by the Washington Post on June 11. NewsMax can now reveal the rest of the story about what really happened at Haditha.

In order to fully understand what happened last Nov. 19, it is important to know what kind of city Haditha is.

"We require more manpower to cover this area the way we need to," one military official told the Los Angeles Times. One Knight Ridder reporter called Haditha, a town of about 100,000 people, "an insurgent bastion," reporting that "insurgents blend in with the residents, setting up cells in their homes next to those belonging to everyday citizens, some of them supportive."

Knight Ridder said that around the time of an August attack, when a total of 20 U.S. Marines were killed in two days, "several storefronts were lined with posters and pictures supporting al-Qaida. … "There is no functioning police station and the government offices are largely vacant. The last man to call himself mayor relinquished the title earlier this year after scores of death threats from insurgents."

According to an August 2005 story in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Haditha, under the nose of an American base, "is a miniature Taliban-like state. Insurgents decide who lives and dies, which salaries get paid, what people wear, what they watch and listen to."

When the Marines first went into the city, they were aware of the tight control insurgents exercised over Haditha. They discovered that the insurgents had freshly paved over dirt roads leading into town under the auspices of civic works projects.

They were, according to a NewsMax source, "beautiful asphalt-surfaced roads" that even included painted lines. The only problem, the source recalled, was that insurgents had laid more than 100 mega-IEDs under that asphalt. And, in order to avoid having to change batteries in the triggering devices, they had wired them into the city power lines lining the road.

It is important to remember that the so-called details of the alleged massacre came from Iraqis and residents of Haditha, a city run by insurgents who have those residents not allied with them under their bloody thumbs.

In the Post story, an attorney for Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, 26, said that his client told him that several civilians were killed Nov. 19 when his squad went after insurgents who were firing at them from inside a house. He insisted there was no vengeful massacre, but he described a house-to-house hunt that went tragically awry in the middle of a chaotic battlefield.

"It will forever be his position that everything they did that day was following their rules of engagement and to protect the lives of Marines," Neal A. Puckett, who represents Wuterich in the ongoing investigations into the incident, told the Post. "He’s really upset that people believe that he and his Marines are even capable of intentionally killing innocent civilians."

According to the Post, Wuterich told his attorney in initial interviews over nearly 12 hours that the shootings were the unfortunate result of a methodical sweep for enemies in a firefight. Two attorneys for other Marines involved in the incident said Wuterich’s account is consistent with those they had heard from their clients.

Wrote the Post: "On Nov. 19, Wuterich’s squad left its headquarters at Firm Base Sparta in Haditha at 7 a.m. on a daily mission to drop off Iraqi army troops at a nearby checkpoint. "It was like any other day, we just had to watch out for any other activity that looked suspicious," said Marine Cpl. James Crossan, 21, in an interview from his home in North Bend, Wash. He was riding in the four-Humvee convoy as it turned left onto Chestnut Road, heading west at 7:15 a.m.

"Shortly after the turn, a bomb buried in the road ripped through the last Humvee. The blast instantly killed the driver, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20. Wuterich, who was driving the third Humvee in the line, immediately stopped the convoy and got out, Puckett told the Post, adding that while Wuterich was evaluating the scene, Marines noticed a white unmarked car full of "military-aged men" lingering near the bomb site. When Marines ordered the men to stop, they ran; Puckett said it was standard procedure at the time for the Marines to shoot suspicious people fleeing a bombing, and the Marines opened fire, killing four or five men.

"The first thing he thought was it could be a vehicle-borne bomb or these guys could be ready to do a drive-by shooting," Puckett said, explaining that the Marines were on alert for such coordinated, multistage attacks.

According to Puckett, as Wuterich began briefing the platoon leader, AK-47 shots rang out from residences on the south side of the road, and the Marines ducked.

A corporal with the unit leaned over to Wuterich and said he saw the shots coming from a specific house. After a discussion with the platoon leader, they decided to clear the house, according to Wuterich’s account.

"There was a threat, and they went to eliminate the threat," Puckett said.

A four-man team of Marines, including Wuterich, kicked in the door and found a series of empty rooms, noticing quickly that there was one room with a closed door and people rustling behind it, Puckett said. They then kicked in that door, tossed a fragmentation grenade into the room, and one Marine fired a series of "clearing rounds" through the dust and smoke, killing several people, Puckett said.

The Marine who fired the rounds – Puckett said it was not Wuterich – had experience clearing numerous houses on a deployment in Fallujah, where Marines had aggressive rules of engagement.

Although it was almost immediately apparent to the Marines that the people dead in the room were men, women, and children – most likely civilians – they also noticed a back door ajar and believed that insurgents had slipped through to a house nearby, Puckett said. The Marines stealthily moved to the second house, kicking in the door, killing one man inside and then using a fragmentation grenade and more gunfire to clear another room full of people, he said.

Wuterich, not having found the insurgents, told the team to stop and headed back to the platoon leader to reassess the situation, Puckett said, adding that his client knew a number of civilians had just been killed.

As already stated, the Haditha massacre story reported by Time magazine was based entirely on accounts from Iraqis with an ax to grind. The facts of what happened tell a different story. The real story, it will eventually be revealed, is backed up by evidence Time didn’t know existed. It gives the lie to the idea that there was anything like a massacre in Haditha on Nov. 19. Here, for the first time, is the truth about what happened.

NewsMax can verify Wuterich’s account. The site of the IED explosion was in an area well known as an insurgent stronghold, where as many as 50 IEDs were found previously, and from where, on two previous occasions, insurgents launched small-arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortar attacks on K Company.

Within five minutes of the blast, Marines on the scene reported they were receiving small-arms fire. Within 30 minutes of the blast, and while the house-clearing was still under way, an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team en route to the site came under small-arms fire in a known insurgent tactic to ambush first responders.

At the same time, just 30 minutes after the house-clearing, an intelligence unit arrived to question the Marines involved in the house-clearing operation. NewsMax sources say the behavior of the Marines involved gave them no reason to believe anything but what they had been told.

At about the same time a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) arrived over the blast area and from that moment on, for the entire day, the UAV transmitted views of the engagement to the company command site, battalion headquarters, the regimental HQ, and the division HQ. What the UAV captured was a view of Marines in their perimeter, as they went about doing house-clearing. It was then vectored to the surrounding area to catch any fleeing insurgents. It showed four insurgents fleeing the neighborhood, loading weapons into their car, and linking up with their partners (the ones that had conducted the ambush on the EOD team).

Knowing what we now know about Wuterich’s account, these fleeing insurgents were most likely the same ones who left through the back door of the house he was clearing.

There are photos of this, and they show the insurgents getting back into their car after loading the weapons.The UAV then followed them south to their safe house. From that point forward, until about 6 p.m., the safe house was hit by bombs and an assault by a K Company squad. The UAV followed the insurgents who had been inside through town.

The final tally for these engagements was two insurgents killed by direct fire, one killed by GBU bombs, and one detained. The entire action was followed by the UAV overhead.

Keep in mind, the entire action was followed by keeping the UAV overhead all day.

The Haditha "massacre" being referred to is the 30 minutes to one hour that took place first thing in the morning. The rest of the day’s activities, in fact, confirmed the nature of the morning’s attack.

It is clear that the entire incident was planned and carried out by insurgents who detonated the IED, and then, in a familiar tactic, attacked the Marines responding to the blast – deliberately putting civilians at risk.

This is what happened in Haditha that day. It was a daylong engagement with armed insurgents that involved civilian casualties who died as a result of being caught in the middle of a firefight. It had been reported as a blast followed by a TIC – Marine Corps terminology for "Troops in Contact." In other words, gunfire directed at the Marines.

As the battalion went about compiling information on the insurgents’ identities and determining who had been involved in the attack, its actions in the ensuing weeks resulted in the detention of several insurgents who masterminded the attack, and who remain incarcerated in Abu Ghraib prison today.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

If what Newsmax says they have been told by "military sources" is true, then there has been some very selective leaking going on hitherto.

It has been previously reported (by the even less reliable Washington Post) that there was a UAV on the scene and that it did video much of the events:

Drone’s Video May Aid Marine Inquiry

Footage Shot on Day of Iraq Incident

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 30, 2006 ; Page A03

Military investigators piecing together what happened in the Iraqi town of Haditha on Nov. 19 — when Marines allegedly killed two dozen civilians — have access to video shot by an unmanned drone aircraft that was circling overhead for at least part of that day, military defense lawyers familiar with the case said in interviews.

It is unclear whether the video obtained from that day’s flight captured the violence, said the lawyers, who have consulted with Marines who were there. One lawyer said investigators have reviewed surveillance footage taken hours after the shootings, which showed the Marines returning to the town to remove the bodies of the Iraqis.

(See the full WP article in the comments below.)

But I have to say that all of this sounds almost too good to be true.

From the Associated Press:

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, left, stands with Chief Justice John Roberts as they pose for photos on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington in this Feb. 16, 2006, file photo.

Alito breaks tie, Kan. death penalty stays

By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer

New Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito broke a tie Monday in a ruling that affirmed a state death penalty law and also revealed the court’s deep divisions over capital punishment.

Justices split 5-4 in the term’s oldest case, which was argued in December before Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement and then again with Alito on the bench.

The justices are in the final week of their term and handling some of the most contentious and important cases. They meet again Wednesday to announce more decisions.

The Kansas case was unique. The state law says juries should impose death sentences if aggravating evidence of a crime’s brutality and mitigating factors explaining a defendant’s actions are equal in weight.

Justice David H. Souter, writing for the liberals, said the law was "morally absurd."

But the five conservatives, including Alito, overturned a Kansas Supreme Court ruling that found the law violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas disputed the claim by critics that the law created "a general presumption in favor of the death penalty in the state of Kansas."

The ruling affirms the court’s long-held position that states should determine how juries weigh factors presented by the prosecution and defense in capital cases.

Fifteen states filed friend-of-the-court briefs, predicting that a ruling for former death row inmate Michael Lee Marsh would have required states with capital punishment to set up systems for juries to weigh evidence at sentencing.

Souter said that "in the face of evidence of the hazards of capital prosecution," maintaining a system like the one in Kansas "is obtuse by any moral or social measure."

Marsh was convicted in the June 1996 killings of Marry Ane Pusch and her 19-month-old daughter, Marry Elizabeth. Pusch was shot, stabbed and her throat was slit. Her body was set on fire. The toddler died several days later from severe burns.

In its December 2004 ruling striking down the death penalty law, the Kansas court also invalidated Marsh’s capital murder conviction for the child’s death, saying Marsh’s attorneys should have been allowed to present evidence that someone else was connected to the murders.

No one has been executed since the law took effect in 1994 and the last execution in Kansas was in 1965.

"I’m pleased this issue is resolved, and the status of our death penalty is settled," Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said. "Without this ruling, the decisions the juries made concerning the eight Kansas death-row inmates would be in jeopardy. I hope this will bring some closure to the families who have been waiting for this issue to be resolved."

Bill Lucero, the leader of a Kansas-based anti-capital punishment group, Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, called Monday’s ruling disappointing. It "just doesn’t make sense" to mandate death when aggravating and mitigating circumstances are equal, he said, adding that capital cases — and the pressure they put on prosecutors to win death sentences — lead to errors.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a separate opinion on Monday to defend the death penalty and the court’s ruling in the Kansas case.

"The American people have determined that the good to be derived from capital punishment — in deterrence, and perhaps most of all in the meting out of condign justice for horrible crimes — outweighs the risk of error. It is no proper part of the business of this court, or of its justices, to second-guess that judgment, much less to impugn it before the world …," Scalia wrote.

The case is Kansas v. Marsh, 04-1170.

In case anyone wonders whether it is important to vote for people who will put people like Alito on the bench.