Politics & Science
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PBS Frontline tackles Haditha. The whole episode is available for online viewing at this URL:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/haditha/

I put off watching this for a couple of weeks because I assumed it would be pretty ugly and uncomplimentary of the Marines. Boy was I wrong. They completely destroyed Iraqi eyewitness testimony and in the end seemed to support the overall exoneration of the Marines, focusing instead on the complexities of ground combat. And John Murtha does not make out well in this at all.

I tell you what, anybody who believes in liberal bias in the media should watch this.

And of course anybody who thinks Haditha was a massacre should watch it as well. They will not be pleased.

But the main thing is that what ultimately exonerates these Marines is scientific investigation and evidence. A brief example of this can be seen in the situation with House 4, which Marines claimed contained men who were aiming AK-47s at them. Iraqi eyewitnesses claimed that the men were unarmed and shot execution-style in another building and then dragged into House 4. But those eyewitnesses had an obvious motivation for deception, and bullet holes in the walls of the room the men were found in directly contradict their testimony. Another example of this surrounds the men who were in the white car, where eyewitness claims were refuted by live video shot from a drone circling above the area at the time.

Science trumps human eyewitnesses. As it should be.