[Pen-l] Battle for Haditha

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Since so much water has passed under the bridge, I asked for a copy of 
Nick Broomfield’s “The Battle for Haditha” (scheduled to open at the 
Film Forum in N.Y. on May 7; it can be downloaded from BitTorrent as 
well apparently) without realizing that the title was ironic. I entirely 
forgot that there was no “battle” there, as there had been in 
neighboring Fallujah, but only a massacre of civilians that was called 
Iraq’s My Lai.

On the morning of November 19, 2005, an IED attack on a Marine convoy in 
Haditha left 2 soldiers wounded and a third sliced in half. Immediately 
afterwards, the marines stopped a taxi cab in the vicinity and shot the 
driver and 4 young unarmed passengers to death. One of the marines 
urinated on the head of one of his victims. Soon afterwards, the 
marines, who had been joined by reinforcements, went into three 
neighboring houses and shot another 19 civilians to death. A long 
article in the 2006 issue of Vanity Fair by William Langewiesche that 
seems to have a strong influence on Broomfield’s film states:

"Many had been sleeping, and were woken by the land-mine blast. Some 
were shot down in their pajamas. The oldest man was 76. He was blind and 
decrepit, and sat in a wheelchair. His elderly wife was killed, too. The 
dead children ranged in age from 15 to 3."

full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/battle-for-haditha/
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