This doesn’t seem to have made a splash in the U.S. media yet, but a large number of international newspapers are reporting that a U.S. military intelligence photographer arrived on the scene of the Haditha massacre “moments after the shootings”. Those photographs unambiguously document that the marines of Kilo Company went on a murderous rampage, and butchered Iraqi civilians in cold blood.

How does one begin to make sense of the Marine Corps possessing this evidence, and still choosing to connive at the fabrication and propagation of the two whitewashed versions of events they put out before the NCIS investigation was announced:
Version 1.0 – Fifteen Iraqi civilians were killed by the roadside bomb that killed Cpl. Terrazas, and eight insurgents were killed in a gunfight.
Version 2.0 – The civilians were killed in the crossfire as the marines battled insurgents.

Photographs taken by US military intelligence have provided crucial evidence that up to 24 Iraqis were massacred by marines in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha.

One photograph shows an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor as if in prayer. They have both been shot dead at close range.

The pictures also show other Iraqi victims, shot execution-style in the head and chest in their own homes.

A US government official said the marines involved had “suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership”.
[…]
The pictures of the dead, which are being closely guarded by the US military criminal investigation service, were taken by a military photographer who is believed to have arrived on the scene moments after the shootings.

Many US forces are accompanied by photographers to gather intelligence and to shield soldiers from accusations of torture, intimidation and violence.

But the evidence in this case points to a murder rampage by the US marines.

** UPDATE **, 8 pm

It has only just struck me that the marines of Kilo Company knew perfectly well that they were accompanied by the military intelligence photographer. They knew he would arrive on the scene of the shootings moments after they occurred. Yet, they went ahead and did what they did.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? It’s almost as if they fully expected to get away with it, the evidence of the military intelligence photographer notwithstanding.

Now, what on earth could cause our soldiers in Iraq to develop such beliefs?

And while we are posing questions that we can’t answer, how about this one: between November 19, when the Haditha killings occurred, and early March, when the military finally turned the matter over to NCIS to conduct the first real investigation, what would all the marines stationed at Haditha have been thinking about the probable consequences, in the Bush-Rumsfeld-Pace military, of slaughtering innocent civilians?