1115.org

In the glare of media coverage received by the allegations of wanton killings at Haditha or the rape-massacre at Mahmudiya or the killings at Salahaddin, the Ishaqi incident quietly disappeared from public view.

At this point, a brief history is probably in order. The incident occurred on March 15, 2006. The initial account given by U.S. authorities was that four people had died — one suspect and three non-combatants — and that they had died when a house collapsed on them after heavy bombing:

The US authorities said they were involved in a firefight after a tip-off that an al-Qaeda supporter was visiting the house.

According to the Americans, the building collapsed under heavy fire killing four people – a suspect, two women and a child.

The allegations were that eleven Iraqis had been shot and killed in cold blood, and the house blown up afterwards to cover up the crime:

But a report filed by Iraqi police accused US troops of rounding up and deliberately shooting 11 people in the house, including five children and four women, before blowing up the building.

At the time, the U.S. military dismissed the allegations as terrorist propaganda. (They had, of course, also dismissed the Haditha allegations initially.)

The Ishaqi allegations received hardly any mention in the U.S. press until the BBC reported on June 1 that they had received a videotape which appeared to corroborate the allegations:

The video tape obtained by the BBC shows a number of dead adults and children at the site with what our world affairs editor John Simpson says were clearly gunshot wounds.

The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces.

It has been cross-checked with other images taken at the time of events and is believed to be genuine, the BBC’s Ian Pannell in Baghdad says.

That same morning (June 1), President Bush had made a stirring speech about the Haditha allegations, in which he declared:

One of the things that happens in a transparent society like ours is that there is — there will be a full and complete investigation. The world will see the full and complete investigation.
[…]
The United States of America has got a willingness to deal with issues like this in an up-front way, in an open way, and correct problems. And that’s what you’re going to see unfold.

Note that he never mentions Haditha there. This is a broad statement about our policy, about how the United States of America generally deals with such allegations, whenever they arise. We conduct a full and complete investigation. And the world sees that we conducted a full and complete investigation. Everything is in the open, and totally above board. (As you will see, someone apparently forgot to tell the Decider-in-Chief that someone had decided not to conduct the Ishaqi investigation this way.)

On June 2, AP reported that they had a videotape shot by an AP cameraman in March which, like the BBC videotape, supported the massacre allegations rather than the official U.S. version of the incident:

But previously unaired video shot by an AP Television News cameraman at the time shows at least five children dead, several with obvious bullet wounds to the head. One adult male is also seen dead.

“Children were stuck in the room, alone and surrounded,” an unidentified man said on the video.

That same afternoon (June 2), Maj. Gen. William Caldwell declared that a U.S. military investigation had cleared U.S. troops of all wrongdoing. Gen. Caldwell revealed absolutely no details of the investigation. The world did not get to see that we had conducted a full, thorough and complete investigation. The world was only told: “Move along now, nothing to see here, nothing happened, move along please.” Gen. Caldwell did not address either the BBC videotape or the AP videotape. Gen. Caldwell essentially declared that the initial account given by U.S. authorities was accurate. He somehow managed to do this even though there were glaring discrepancies between the initial account and that of investigators. For example, the number of deaths were found to match the allegations and not the initial official account. No explanation was provided for how or why the number of deaths were grossly understated, yet the initial account was deemed to be the truth about what had happened.

All of the foregoing is old stuff, and we have written about it before, in detail. So why am I re-hashing it all again now?

Well, I have been waiting patiently since then, expecting that someone in the media would be offended by the appearance of a whitewash, and would do an independent investigation. Although Gen. Caldwell was apparently not asked any awkward questions when he made his exoneration announcement, it seemed reasonable to assume that everyone in the press would not prove to be busy with something else in the next few days or weeks or months. That someone would decide to probe a little further, that the reports of the BBC and AP videotapes were still so fresh that someone would connect the dots.

But it’s been 80 days since then, and there’s been no sign whatsoever of a follow-up piece by anyone. And I’m ready to throw in the towel and declare the following to be the lessons of Ishaqi:

• They (the Bush-men) are pretty good at talking the talk.
• They don’t even bother to pretend to walk the walk.
• That could well be because America buys the talk, and doesn’t care about the walk.
• The media defines their watchdog role as: “keep watching, and just keep wagging that tail”.

Previously:
June 1: Just Gets Worse, Part 2
June 4: Ishaqi: New AP Video Corroborates BBC, Raises Troubling Question
June 5: Still Out Of The Loop?