The despicable military-hating Jack Murtha

I wonder does he still have a hat? The equally despicable John Kerry does

Last week's development in the Haditha case -- the dropping of all the charges leveled against Lance Cpl. Stephan Tatum for actions related to Haditha, Iraq -- drives another nail into the shameful accusations made by Time magazine and Rep. John Murtha.

Time magazine, with an assist from the Pennsylvania Democrat, sparked a legal and media inquisition against eight courageous United States Marines. Both Time and Murtha claimed these Marines committed cold-blooded murder in Haditha during a 2005 engagement. They also alleged the Marines participated in covering up their alleged atrocities. But after years of litigation and estimated $40 million in taxpayer funds expended, none of the Marines have been found guilty of committing murder or war crimes.

On Nov. 19, 2005, during an insurgent ambush of the Marines of Kilo Company 3rd battalion 1st Marines, 15 Iraqi civilians and nine suspected insurgent ambushers were killed. One Marine was killed in an IED explosion and two others seriously wounded. Thanks to the battalion intelligence officer, Lt. Jeff Dinsmore, who monitored the daylong engagement, the entire Marine chain of command were given the full story of the engagement that very night and it was agreed that no further action in connection with the civilian casualties was needed.

Months later, a Time story based on the testimony of two known insurgent propagandists and the stories of some Iraqi civilians falsely reported that the Kilo company Marines had wantonly murdered the dead Iraqis as an act of revenge after an IED explosion took the life of a fellow Marine. On the basis of Time's unsubstantiated allegations alone, Murtha publicly charged the Marines had gone on a rampage to avenge the killing of their comrade in the IED explosion and had committed cold-blooded murder. Time has been forced to issue four different retractions of details in their report.

Before any investigation had gotten underway Murtha went on a rampage of his own, attacking the Marines in venue after venue. In his original charges against the Marines, Murtha said there was no gunfire during the incident when there was in fact a daylong battle involving heavy insurgent gunfire directed at the Marines starting at the time of the IED explosion. Typical of Murtha's rantings were his comments on a May 28, 2006, ABC News broadcast. In response to George Stephanopolis' comment that he claimed to have been briefed several times since Nov. 19 and said that that the evidence showed that the Marines had committed cold-blooded murder, Murtha said: "Well there's no question in my mind, what happened was an IED exploded. It killed one Marine. And then a taxi drives up. When the taxi comes up there's four of five people in it. And they shoot . shoot those four or five people unarmed. "And then they go on a rampage throughout the houses and kill people.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Many readers here will probably be aware of the historical role played by Margaret Mead in the Leftist attack on sexual morality. Her influential book "Growing up in Samoa" paraded Mead's libertine ideology as anthropological fact. I have made a few comments on the matter over the years and Prof. Hiram Caton has recently taken me to task over some of my comments. You can read the dialogue here. The dialogue is actually about Derek Freeman, the man principally responsible for exposing Mead's lies. Freeman had to be an unusual character to take on such an acclaimed figure as Mead was and Caton says that Freeman was a nut. I suspect that Freeman simply had a strong ego but that the furious attacks that he sustained from the Left did unnerve him at times. But, as I initially pointed out to Caton, all that is ad hominem anyway.

Maybe there is something good about the U.N. after all!: "Al-QA'IDA number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has launched a blistering attack on the UN, calling it the enemy of Islam and Muslims in an online audiofile. "The United Nations is an enemy of Islam and Muslims: it is the one which codified and legitimised the setting up of the state of Israel and its taking over of the Muslims' lands," Zawahiri said. The audio released via the monitoring group the IntelCenter was the first installment in a two-part series to answer about 100 questions put to Zawahiri, known as al-Qa'ida's ideological thinker, via online militant forums. He grouped his replies into four sections - the killing of innocents, Iran, Egypt and Palestine - and denied that the al-Qa'ida network had been responsible for the loss of innocent Muslim lives."

Even dissolute Ted has some caution: "Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is jumping into the middle of an uproar within the gay community whose causes he has long championed. The Massachusetts Democrat is leading a push in the Senate for a federal ban on job bias against gays, lesbians and bisexuals - but not transsexuals, cross-dressers and others whose outward appearance doesn't match their gender at birth. "We will strongly oppose it," said Roberta Sklar of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "Leaving transgender people out makes that a flawed movement."

CBS lying again: ""At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed." Thus intoned CBS correspondent Scott Pelley on Sunday night in introducing the 60 Minutes report on former Guant namo inmate and book author Murat Kurnaz...... we know from Kurnaz's declassified Combatant Status Review file that US authorities have in fact upheld his original classification as an illegal enemy combatant. More to the point, far from "agreeing" that Kurnaz had no connection to terror, starting in 2002, Germany's Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BKA) - the German equivalent of the FBI - itself classified Kurnaz as a "security risk." This classification was based on a number of pieces of information linking Kurnaz to Islamic extremist circles in Germany, including to the milieu of the "Hamburg cell" that planned the 9/11 attacks."

A coverup? "NASA shut down a massive air-safety survey project without ever properly evaluating, explaining or publicizing its purpose and results, and thus lost a chance for valuable insight into safety issues, the space agency's inspector general said Monday. The watchdog office said NASA should interpret and analyze the results of its interviews with some 30,000 pilots, but NASA in a written response continued to reject that idea. NASA will evaluate the methodology that its staff used in the $11.3 million project, but going further to actually report on the findings isn't worthwhile because the interviews, which were stopped at the end of 2004, are less relevant with the passage of time, wrote the agency's associate administrator, Jaiwon Shin. The intent of the National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service was to help prevent aviation accidents by viewing air safety through the eyes of pilots, flight attendants, mechanics and air traffic controllers. Their insights would add to the picture provided by other aviation monitoring programs, the audit said.

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is a recent example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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