posted May 30, 2006 09:05 AM              

HANFORD, Calif. (May 30) - Family members of two Marines say their sons were ordered to photograph and clean up corpses of unarmed Iraqi civilians that members of their unit are suspected of killing, and they have been traumatized ever since.

What Happened in Haditha?

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In separate interviews with The Associated Press on Monday, the parents of Lance Cpl. Andrew Wright, 20, and Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones, 21, said their sons told them the events of last November remain seared in their memories.

Wright and Briones were members of a Marine unit based at Camp Pendleton that was sent into the western Iraqi city of Haditha to help remove the bodies of as many as two dozen Iraqis, including women and children, who were shot.

While there, the two were ordered to photograph the scene with personal cameras they happened to be carrying the day of the attack, the families said. Briones' mother, Susie, said her son told her he saw the bodies of 23 dead Iraqis that day.

"It was horrific. It was a terrible scene," Susie Briones said in a tearful interview at her home in California's San Joaquin Valley.

Navy investigators confiscated Briones' camera, his mother said. Wright's parents, Patty and Frederick Wright of Novato, declined to comment on what might have happened to the photos their son took but said he turned over all of his information to the Navy.

"He is the Forrest Gump of the military," Frederick Wright said. "He ended up in the spotlight through no fault of his own."

Ryan Briones told the Los Angeles Times that Navy investigators had interrogated him twice in Iraq and they wanted to know whether bodies had been tampered with. He turned over his digital camera but did not know what happened to it after that.

Susie Briones called the Nov. 19 incident a "massacre" and said the military had done little to help her son, who goes by his middle name, deal with his post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I know Ryan is going through some major trauma right now," said Susie Briones, 40, an academic adviser at a community college. "It was very traumatic for all of the soldiers involved with this thing."

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The details of what happened in Haditha are still murky. What is known is that a bomb rocked a military convoy and left one Marine dead. Marines then shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot other people, according to Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and decorated war veteran who has been briefed by military officials.

The incident has sparked two investigations -- one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday on CBS's "The Early Show" that "it would be premature for me to judge" the situation.

But, he added, if certain service members are responsible for an atrocity, they "have not performed their duty the way that 99.9 percent of their fellow Marines have."

Briones' best friend, Lance Cpl. Miguel "T.J." Terrazas, had been killed the day of the attack by the roadside bomb, his mother said. Briones was still grieving when he was sent in to clean up the bodies of the Iraqi civilians.

"He had to carry that little girl's body," she said, "and her head was blown off and her brain splattered on his boots."

The Wrights declined to say whether their son witnessed the killings or what he thought of the allegations against other members of his unit.

Wright and Briones are both recipients of the Purple Heart, given to soldiers wounded in battle.

Wright was injured during an assault on Fallujah in January 2005. He voluntarily rejoined his unit at Camp Pendleton the next month. Briones was on his second tour of duty in Iraq. He received a Purple Heart during his first tour.

On Monday, both Marines were back at Camp Pendleton, near Oceanside, where base officials said several members of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division were being confined during the investigations.

Lt. Lawton King, a Camp Pendleton spokesman, declined to comment Monday.

Sgt. Ian Moore, who was relaxing on the base Monday, said he and other Marines in the battalion were waiting to hear results from the investigations.

"A lot of these things are being played out in the court of public opinion and it's unfair on the Marines," said Moore, who spent time in Haditha on his previous tour in Iraq.

Associated Press writers Thomas Watkins in Camp Pendleton and Juliana Barbassa in Novato contributed to this report.

5/30/2006 03:51:23

posted May 30, 2006 11:20 AM              

quote:

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"A lot of these things are being played out in the court of public opinion and it's unfair on the Marines," said Moore, who spent time in Haditha on his previous tour in Iraq.

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Unfair to the Marines? What about the innocent civilians who were killed? I would say it was quite a bit more unfair to them. Especially the children. Oh, I forget. They are just "collateral damage."

But I know what he means. We have to protect the image and we have to protect Rumsfeld and Bush from having to take any accountability for what takes place in their war.

We don't really know what happened and unlike Viet Nam we will never know what really happened because we no longer have a free media with Bush in office. During the Viet Nam war when a massacre happened we heard about it in the news because the reporters were right there and free to report back what they saw. They weren't "guarded" and "embedded." To embed means to surround closely. Which means that the military makes sure that anything they don't want American citizens to know we won't hear about.

In this war the bodies of the dead American soldiers are shipped back home in the dead of night, not allowed to be taped and shown to the American citizens so we can be spared of " wasting our beautiful minds" by knowing what war is really like ( as if we don't know already ) and while Bush and his followers are waving the American flag and displaying it everywhere else, you will never find an American flag draping a coffin of a dead soldier when he is shipped back home. To preserve their image this administration won't even give the dead soldiers the dignity of draping a flag over their coffin as was always customary in the service.

It hasn't served the intended purpose of this administration either to do this in order to maintain the support of Americans for their war because most of us aren't as stupid as the arrogant SOB's in the Bush administration seem to think we are.

Beyond that this frigging administration of hypocrites who tout troop support don't even treat these young soldiers for post-traumatic stress disorder. They give them tranquilizers and send them back into battle.

If a massacre did take place we can't blame the soldiers. The fault lies in Rumsfeld and Bush and Cheney who also see these soldiers as "collateral damage" not worthy themselves of proper treatment from the country they serve. Not in life or death.

Bush only uses his memorial day speeches, not to truly honor the dead soldiers, but to further beat the drums of war. They died for a cause. His cause. To give him more power and more wealth for him and his corporate cronies.

ONLY IMPEACHMENT CAN PUT A STOP TO THE HORRORS COMMITTED IN OUR NAMES

Recently president Bush has taken to lamenting that the "terrorists" can "put horrible images on our TV screens." And he blames THAT for the bottomless landslide of declining support for his atrocity of a war in Iraq. Maybe that is why they have worked so hard to hide the horrible image of his OWN record as commander in chief.

They hide it by sneaking the dead bodies of our service men and women back home under cover of darkness, forbidding all pictures, even for members of their own families, lest the American people have to confront the true cost of war. They will show you endless shots of American flags, just as long as they are not draped over any coffins.

They hide it behind elaborately staged photo ops, with phony prop turkeys, and choreographed chats with rehearsed soldiers, and treating the entire crew of an aircraft carrier like they were movie extras.

The president talks about the insurgents killing innocent people on TV. But when WE kill innocent people, our government and the compromised corporate media conspire in every way possible to keep that OFF our TVs. It is only when something so horrific that it defies human decency finally surfaces, like the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, only then does a glimpse of the truth momentarily break through. And still they hid the worst from us.

Now yet another coverup too gruesome to maintain, the cold-blooded murder of women and children at Haditha, has been exposed by a media voice they could not control. And once again they will try to scapegoat a few "bad apples", who had the tragic destiny of cracking in a pressure cooker they should never have been put in at all.

But the atrocities at Haditha happened because there was no real accountability for the atrocities in Fallujah and a hundred other places. And the atrocities in Fallujah happened because there was no real accountability for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and a thousand other places. And that responsibility goes right to the top of the chain of command, with the vice-president himself campaigning in the halls of Congress to maintain torture as a policy "option", and the president issuing a signing statement claiming he can defy the law Congress just passed to stop him.

Unless there is accountability for the lies and deceptions that underlie the so-called war in Iraq, the atrocities will not only continue, they will continue to get worse. Hiding those lies does not make them true, though they still desperately try, denying they even said things that are in the public record from yesterday.

And that is why we have absolutely no moral choice but to impeach both the president and vice-president now.

Those who are faint of heart, or apologists for atrocity, or have a self interest in maintaining their own power, say it would divide the country.

Let it be so.

Let the country be divided between those who love America and what it's supposed to stand for, and those who do not. And let us come together so that there is no division at all except between those who will face the truth, and those who are the war criminals themselves.