Marines confronted with Haditha pics

[cal04]

Just days after the suspected massacre of two dozen civilians in Haditha in an incident now under investigation, an American photographer confronted US Marines with the images of the dead, including Iraqi children. Freelance photographer Lucian Read, 31, had spent months capturing shots of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine
Regiment. But when Iraqis invited him to photograph their dead two days after the Haditha killings in November 2005, he felt compelled to show the images to the platoon.

"I made a point that day and over the course of the next several days to show all of those pictures to as many of the Marines as possible," Read, who arrived back in Haditha a day after the killings, said in an interview today. "When children are killed, I don't care what the situation is, that's bad, and I wanted those guys to see that so they would keep it in their mind next time something like that happened - hey, we don't want to be killing any more kids." An officer and enlisted men reacted to the images with "regretful frowns", he said. "It was basically, 'man, that's not good'," he said. "A few, a number of the guys had been there on scene, taken the bodies to the hospitals, to the morgue.

Some of those guys already knew what was in the house." "But there were portions of the company - a fairly sizable portion of the company that wasn't even there that day - that had no first-hand knowledge of the fact that there were that many dead people or that there had been children killed." "Those people were a little more taken aback," Read said. Still, Read did not suspect a massacre at the time, and no one made any effort to discourage him from transmitting the images back to his agency in New York. "If they are not saying 'don't send them', then obviously they are comfortable with what happened and comfortable with the narrative," was Read's conclusion from their reaction.

He said soldiers told him that Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, one of the most popular men in the platoon, had died in an explosion. Then "they had taken fire from the surrounding area and ... returned fire from the surrounding area and pursued the contact into the neighbourhood", Read said he was told by the soldiers. "During the course of that there were insurgents killed but in also sort of house-by-house or room-by-room type of fighting - which is the type of fighting I had seen them do in Fallujah - civilians had been killed in the cross-fire," Read said he was told.




http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19402620-1702,00.html

[bahrbearian]

1. He should take the photos to the White House

but that might mess with some "beautiful minds".

[brentspeak]

2. What a jerk

The Marines into whose faces he's shoving his photos in front of are not responsible for actions committed by anybody else. They're no more culpable re. Haditha than the photographer himself is -- or than Howard Stern, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Madonna, or the president of Trinidad and Tobago is.

[MeDemocrat]

3. Surprised

I'm surprised to find someone here with shred of commonsense. Good job!