1115.org

Our mighty military PR machine just doesn’t seem to ever learn. Confronted with an embarrassing incident, their first instinct is still to generously leaven the truth of the matter with lies that make things look less bad.

The American military admitted Sunday night that a platoon of soldiers raked a car of innocent Iraqi civilians with hundreds of rounds of gunfire and that the military then issued a news release larded with misstatements, asserting that the victims were criminals who had fired on the troops.

Still, there’s a silver lining. The incident occurred on June 25, and barely five weeks later, the military has already come clean. That’s quite a change from such celebrated previous incidents as the shooting of Pat Tillman.

Unless, of course, I’m once again being too credulous. Unless this is just version 1.01 of a long and continuing sequence of The Official Version of Events.

For what it’s worth, this is what they are saying at this point in time:
— The attack on June 25 killed three people, a man and two women, as they drove to work at a bank at Baghdad’s airport.
— Their car had already passed through a major checkpoint leading into the airport, which required the occupants to submit to a thorough search for weapons and other dangerous objects. As they had many times before, the bank employees then drove down the main civilian road to the airport.
— But this time they encountered a four-vehicle military convoy that was not supposed to be there. The convoy had taken the wrong road and failed to turn into a military checkpoint. Instead, the military vehicles had traveled down a road that serves as the main entry for thousands of Iraqis who drive to the Baghdad airport.
— The convoy had stopped on the side of the road to try to fix a problem with a vehicle when the car with the bank employees approached. A soldier guarding the rear of the convoy fired several warning shots. When the car did not stop, 9 of the 18 soldiers in the platoon opened fire.
— The platoon of soldiers raked the car with hundreds of rounds of gunfire.
— The soldiers were not at fault for the killings because they had fired warning shots and exercised proper “escalation of force” measures before they opened fire on the people in the car.

And here are some of the lies that were initially put out (why put out lies when nobody was at fault?):
— A key assertion of the news release issued by the military on the day of the killings was that “a weapon was recovered from the wreckage”. Not true.
— In the initial news release, the military said that after the shooting the car crashed and “exploded.” Not true.
— The initial news release asserted that the victims were criminals who had fired on the troops. Both parts of that are not true.
— The military stated last month that two vehicles in the convoy had sustained “bullet hole damage” from the supposed attack. Not true.

Once upon a time, the standard “give them a break” argument for such inaccuracies in initial reports was “the fog of war”. But it’s funny, isn’t it, how the fog of war always seems to work so one-sidedly.