UK Times Smears Haditha Marines !

Michelle Malkin is reporting that the UK Timeson June 1 had printed a story about the alledged Haditha massacre and posted two photos (shown below)



If you are left with the impression that the dead bodies on the ground were massacred by our Marines, that is exactly what the Times intends. Note the caption: "Victims in al-Haditha. The US is carrying out two inquiries (AP)."

Now, look at this photo closely:





It is clearly the same location. The same set of dead bodies. The second is a wider shot with three additional bodies in the foreground.

But guess what? The photo, according to this Newsweek caption of the scene, is not of the Nov. 19 incident in Haditha involving our Marines, as the UK Times would have you believe.

Read the caption:

"Insurgents in Haditha executed 19 Shiite fishermen and National Guardsmen in a sports stadium."

Our Marines did not kill these people.

The terrorists did.

Here's more from the Newsweek article from last May--that is, six months before the incident involving our Marines:

Hussein Hashimi has a CD-ROM full of pictures of the dead. For the last two months, the young Shiite says, Sunni extremists rampaged through his hometown of Madaen. They torched the local police stations, abducted dozens of members of the local Shiite minority, burned down the mosque and killed not only the imam but his 8-year-old son. Many Shiite families fled; others barricaded themselves in their homes. Last week Iraqi security forces finally came in and restored order. Hashimi has lists of the missing and of the dead who have been identified. He has the names of the alleged perpetrators and a map showing the home of the Sunni he accuses of being responsible for the atrocities.

So is Hashimi fighting back? Not at all. "We just ran away," he says without a trace of embarrassment. "Sistani and the religious authorities in Najaf decided not to use force, so we couldn't do anything." To the Shiites of Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's word is law. "We must obey."

Their obedience was tested yet again last week�and again it held firm. In Madaen and villages nearby, corpses bobbed to the surface of the Tigris River until police counted 60. Hashimi and his friends photographed 55 of the bodies and delivered the pictures and lists to Baghdad. Shiite politicians accused the insurgents of ethnic cleansing, and demanded that the caretaker government act. Insurgents in another town near Baghdad, Haditha, responded by kidnapping 19 Shiite fishermen and National Guardsmen, lining them up against a wall in a sports stadium and shooting them dead.


And more from an LA Times article from April 2005 (reprinted at SFGate.com):

In Baghdad, the Ministry of Defense said that 19 Iraqis who were kidnapped, taken to a soccer stadium in Haditha, lined up against the wall and fatally shot on Wednesday were actually Shiite fishermen, and not Iraqi troops, as previously described by an Interior Ministry official.
Saleh Sarhan, the ministry's chief spokesman, described the victims as fishermen from the Shiite cities of Najaf and Diwaniya who had traveled to the huge Lake Tharthar in the Sunni-dominated Anbar province, northwest of Baghdad and east of Haditha. He offered no explanation for why insurgents would target the fishermen, or how they had been identified.


As Joe G., who blogged his discovery of this obvious, unconscionable error, writes:

"I think this goes beyond a slant, this is slander."
Reader Eric. T adds:

Notice in the photo that the slain people have their hands tied i.e. murdered assassination style. This makes it seem even more of an outrage against the Marines!
This must not stand. And the Times must not be allowed to make a covert correction without a public acknowledgement. The editors must apologize for this blatant smear.

Send a letter to the editor here (include postal address and daytime telephone number for publication):

letters@thetimes.co.uk

Also e-mail:

Gerard Baker, US editor of the UK Times...gerard.baker@the-times.co.uk

And cc:

news@timesonline.co.uk

update: photo removed...***

and an apology has been sent out by the UK Times, however the damage has probably already been done. This may or may not have been done intentionally, but don't you think that along with their journalistic responsibilities, it should also behoove them to make sure all the information they have is acuurate, including photos?.