Allen West summed it up nicely yesterday....
"The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter."
As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell." Col. Allen West
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sadly, isolated incidents like these are often used to denigrate the military and America and grandstand to score political points by those that I guess "fully understand right and wrong and really know what it means to be an American"?
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings," #^&#^&#^&#^& Durbin said last week.
"On March 19, 2004, President Bush asked, 'Who would prefer that Saddam's torture chambers still be open?'" said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. "Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management: U.S. management."
Speaking with host Bob Schieffer about Iraq, Sen. John Kerry said, "There is no reason ... that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the ... of ... the historical customs, religious customs."
Murtha said on ABC's This Week program in May 2006 there was "no doubt" that the Marines were guilty, claiming a cover-up of their war crimes went "up the chain of command."
Among Murtha's unsubstantiated remarks to ABC: “One woman, as I understand it, in talking to officials in the Marine Corps, was kneeling over a child pleading for mercy and they shot her in cold blood. That’s the thing that’s so disturbing. ”
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it would be nice if we could maintain the perspective that our troops are trying to maintain peace and protect innocents over there every day while the "peed upon" types engage in efforts like this one below every day, I think it is silly to suggest that they will somehow be "more motivated" by an incident like the one in question
BBC News - Iraq suicide bomb kills 50 in Basra pilgrims attack
take the POLL
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...CctP_blog.html