http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=676&Itemid=1Many observers have compared the methodical murder of 24 innocent civilians by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha – now confirmed by Pentagon and Congressional sources – to the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when American troops slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a bloody rampage. But this is a false equation, one that gravely distorts the overall reality of the Coalition effort in Iraq.
For it is not the small-scale Haditha atrocity that should be compared to My Lai: it is the entire Iraq War itself. The whole operation – from its inception in high-level mendacity to its execution in blood-soaked arrogance, folly, greed and incompetence – is a war crime of almost unfathomable proportions: a My Lai writ large, a My Lai every single day, year after year after year.
Details of the Haditha killings are finally emerging after months of official cover-up and heated denunciations of anyone who questioned the shifting, conflicting stories issued by the Pentagon following the November 2005 incident. The horror speaks for itself: a unit of Marines from Kilo Company, thirsting for revenge after a roadside bomb killed a comrade, broke into homes near the blast area and systematically executed the civilians they found there, along with five men who happened to be passing by in a taxi, Time Magazine reports.