When Does It Ever End?

Will Marine Show Trials End?
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By: Nathaniel R. Helms
The tarnished image of the Marine Corps continues to darken as more trials, more acquittals and more scandals corrode the brightly burnished steel that armors America’s premier fighting force.
Defense attorneys and beleaguered Marines say their cherished Corps’ surprise decision Friday to dismiss criminal charges against a Marine infantryman accused of mass murder at Haditha, Iraq, is just another billboard announcing the troubles plaguing Marine Corps morale today. Loyalty up and down the ranks, the bedrock on which the 232-year old fighting force was built, is under attack.

“First the Corps takes their innocence and then the enemy tries to take their life, and then when they finally come home the government tries to take their freedom,” said James Culp, a military defense lawyer in Austin, Texas, who worked on the Haditha case for more than a year. “When does it ever end?”

It is an honest question.
The growing list of places in Iraq associated with allegations of Marine Corps misconduct continues to spread across the map like a malignant weed.
This reporter has spoken with dozens of seasoned Marines and soldiers who claim they would rather take a bullet than shoot the wrong person during mortal combat and possibly spend their life in jail. Hyperbole perhaps, but Marines are trained to make the other guy, the bad ones, take the bullet.
The situation of Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum explains the morass the Marine Corps faces.
On Friday he was unexpectedly exonerated of all criminal charges leveled against him for serving at Haditha. The laundry list of charges that ranged from murder to bad judgment were dismissed by Lt. Gen Samuel Helland, the convening authority at Camp Pendleton and final arbiter in his case.
Without explanation Helland dismissed the criminal charges against Tatum just hours before he was to face a general court-martial. Tatum, of Edmond, Okla., is the third enlisted Marine from 3rd Platoon, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines originally charged with murder in the 30-month-old Haditha investigation that has been completely cleared of alleged misdeeds.
Cleared But Charged Anyway
In the run-up to the Tatum court martial proceeding, there was clear evidence that military’s case was based on a tissues of hearsay, face-saving and political expediency.
For example, in the case of another Marine also facing court martial, the military prosecutors tried to block the testimony of the intelligence officer, Lt. Jeff Dinsmore, who monitored the Haditha action via radio transmissions and overhead video surveillance drone. His testimony and the video evidence shows that the Marines did not lie when they said the received hostile file from insurgents occupying civilian buildings.
When the Marines cleared the building using standard military procedures, both the insurgents and civilians were dead.
The Dinsmore evidence and testimony proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that claims by Time magazine and Congressman Jack Murtha, that a platoon of Marines went on a rampage in My Lai fashion after one of their fellow Marines, was killed was an out and out fantasy.
But efforts to prevent Dinsmore from testifying demonstrated the military want a Soviet-style show trial of a hero Marine. Fortunately, the presiding military judged ruled Dinsmore could testify. The prosecution “case” against Tatum began to crumble.
Though preliminary Article 32 hearings had cleared the Marines of most of the allegations, the military has been intent in making an example of them.
Nevertheless, two officers and the enlisted Marines were all charged with slaying civilians at Haditha and sent to court martial.
The military’s floundering case has come to symbolize the Pentagon’s tenacious efforts to turn warriors into policemen. Pointing out that our combat troops are engaged in a war zone makes many of their alleged misdeeds understandable.
But the Pentagon follows the administration line: American troops are simply helpers to the Iraqi civil government. American troops are not an occupying force. American troops are welcomed as liberators by the Iraqis. And so the spin-story spins and spins.
Fueled by specious media claims and driven by rapacious politicians more concerned with face time than preserving precious freedoms, the Marine Corps brass willingly served them up for prosecution rather than admit it was handed a mission it was never trained to perform and never intended to take, so the unfolding of the Haditha case has revealed.
Waiting on the wings of the malevolent stage where the Haditha investigation is still playing out, the Fallujah murder cases are being prepared to take over top billing. In that unrelated case three enlisted Marine infantrymen from the same platoon that Tatum served in have been charged with murdering four Iraqi prisoners of war more than three years ago.
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another snipet from the article:

“Marines are not policeman,” a senior Marine Corps officer said Friday night. He has served multiple tours in Iraq that show in his eyes.

“We are warriors. Occupation duty is the Army’s responsibility. The Marine Corps is our country’s blunt force instrument and we are destroying it – eating our young. Pray we still have Marines in the next war. Sometimes I am not so sure.”

But Fallujah may end up being nothing more than another Haditha where soldiers acted in combat in ways we might find totally unacceptable of they were members of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Two years, thousands of man hours and millions of dollars later nobody charged in the alleged Haditha massacre has been convicted of anything.
In the interim morale plummeted, the Marine Corps rewrote the manual on how it fights, and the Pentagon wants shorter leashes on its frontline troops.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
Good article about what has been going on.
When this kind of thing gets started like it has I wonder what it will take for it to finally stop. I know part of it I think would be a true Conservative for President aka Commander in Chief. But since that is not happening in this next election then it has to come from the top military I would think saying enough is enough.
Being strong about it and more or less laying down the law as to something like ” we are trained to do what we do, we are not the police, this is war against an enemy with no country, and no uniform.
Maybe if several of the top brass would say ” put me on trial, the responsibility starts at the top, we are a brotherhood and you don’t go after one of my men and not think it effects all of us. We go to places you only see in a nightmare, see things you cannot imagine, have an enemy that is not satisfied with only killing us they take great pleasure in chopping us up into pieces, literally pulling our guts out and other horrors that would turn your stomach and you think we are going to ask for permission to take out someone that is bent on killing us? Someone that is connected to the enemy’s camp and will run off and tell them where we are located? Your sitting around in Georgetown or in your offices in D.C. trying to figure out a way to pull amnesty over on true Americans that are concerned about securing borders, and you want to tell us how to fight a war and win while you are perched mentally on every shoulder of every soldier risking all? You better think again Sir/Madam because without us there never has been peace and without us you would not even have a country. ” ….just an idea of what one or heck all of them could say. If the Brass on their uniforms had included balls in the britches.

….Thank you Mark for sending this to me.