Murtha's Dubious Ethics

Update: Well, this is special. Good timing, jerk. The sharks, how they circle when they smell blood.

Gen Batiste has no intention of keeping quiet during his retirement. Instead, the former career soldier, who resigned after commanding 22,000 troops of the US Army's 1st Infantry Division, is planning a sustained public offensive aimed at driving Mr Rumsfeld from office.

What's Murtha's excuse for becoming a cheap political hack who doesn't appear to believe in due process for the military he once served in and now purports to back? Too much pressure from all those defense contractors?

You won’t find it ever mentioned in our one party media that Rep. Murtha is suspected of the very same thing, or worse: steering at least $21,000,000 to defense contractors who just happen to be clients of his brother’s lobbying firm, KSA.

Damn right!

A year ago I was charged with two counts of premeditated murder and with other war crimes related to my service in Iraq. My wife and mother sat in a Camp Lejeune courtroom for five days while prosecutors painted me as a monster; then autopsy evidence blew their case out of the water, and the Marine Corps dropped all charges against me ["Marine Officer Cleared in Killing of Two Iraqis," news story, May 27, 2005].

So I know something about rushing to judgment, which is why I am so disturbed by the remarks of Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) regarding the Haditha incident ["Death Toll Rises in Haditha Attack, GOP Leader Says," news story, May 20]. Mr. Murtha said, "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

In the United States, we have a civil and military court system that relies on an investigatory and judicial process to make determinations based on evidence. The system is not served by such grand pronouncements of horror and guilt without the accuser even having read the investigative report.

Mr. Murtha's position is particularly suspect when he is quoted by news services as saying that the strain of deployment "has caused them [the Marines] to crack in situations like this." Not only is he certain of the Marines' guilt but he claims to know the cause, which he conveniently attributes to a policy he opposes.

Members of the U.S. military serving in Iraq need more than Mr. Murtha's pseudo-sympathy. They need leaders to stand with them even in the hardest of times. Let the courts decide if these Marines are guilty. They haven't even been charged with a crime yet, so it is premature to presume their guilt -- unless that presumption is tied to a political motive.

ILARIO PANTANO

Jacksonville, N.C.

The writer served as a Marine enlisted man in the Persian Gulf War and most recently as a platoon commander in Iraq.

Comments

[Truzenzuzex]

Murtha may be right. He may be wrong. For a fact, however, Murtha is acting in a completely unethical way.

Murtha is entitled to his view of the facts he "knows", but it is ridiculous for him to suggest (as he apparently does in passing summary judgment) that he knows them all. Since he is apparently privy to information the general public is not, his conclusions can't be independently verified or, for that matter, completely debunked.

But one thing that doesn't need verification is his false political conclusion about why the Marines did what they did. About that, he can have no idea, and he darn well knows it. Impuiting guilt to the Administration's execution of the war is simply political spin, and unethical spin at that. Murtha is an embarassment to the code of the Corps, and gives lie to the oft-repeated aphorism, "Once a Marine, always a Marine". Murtha has abandonded the Marine Corps and their code in favor of political ideology.

Let's hope he suffers politically for it.

[Bryce]

These are the sort of things that happen when you are at war, which shows why war should be a last resort, and why poor leadership at the top leads to problems. The worst part about these scandals like Abu Graib and now Haditha is that the enlisted men and women are the only ones who are paying the price, maybe the leadership needs to be on trial.

[tk]

Murtha has become the enemy. If he wants and end to the war he has all the right to call for that. If he wants to say the war is going poorly, ok. But he is tryng to label American troops mass murderers and blaming Bush for it.

And what kind of a stand up guy is he? look at his web site. No e-mail address and will only take mail from someone who lives in his district. Read all the obsticles he has in place. I guess he can pretend people agree with him. What a coward.

[Phoenix]

Bryce,

How far up the chain of command do you mean when you say 'maybe the leadership needs to be on trial'? The CO? The one above him? The one above him? The one above him? Or do you mean Bush? Rumsfeld?

Or maybe you mean the guy in charge right there in Haditha who made the decisions or, at the least, watched as they happened when allegedly all hell broke loose? Maybe he said, "OOO RAAH! Get 'em all boys!" That leadership?

Sure would be nice to know who gave the orders to 'FIRE!' Then we could all shut up, including Turncoat Murtha.

[Ed Kohler]

If Murtha's working to get us out of Iraq, how is he helping his brother's defense contractor clients? Where's the conflict there?