Bloodless Coup

Your headline is misleading.

"Americans Alleged to Have Killed Innocents in Haditha" would be more appropriate. Note especially the tense of "kill". You make it sound like a regular practice, which might be politically convenient for certain parties, but isn't supported by the facts as given.

Point taken about the verb tense, so I changed the headline. But I don't get the "alleged" point - well I get it, but the basis for this story seems strong enough to me not to use "alleged".

So where's all your concern for Constitutional due process when it's about bashing the war in Iraq? Oh, that's right, crimes are no longer alleged when Bush's policies are involved. I do find it so amusing that when it's the State Department they're beyond reproach (as with the State Department's opposition to the WMD claim that should have been believed without question), but when it's the Defense Department, Rumsfeld's soldiers are beyond reproach only when they find that our soldiers screw up. What's that about?
Also, you're making it sound as though people killing innocent civilians wouldn't have happened if we hadn't gone to war. I think a hundred something thousand innocent Kurds and Shiites may disagree, if they were still around.

Uh AMERICANS wouldn't have been killing innocent people - Americans who are in Iraq fighting on behalf of our country and government. I find that entirely different that Ba'athists killing fellow Iraqis. Don't you?

And if your point is that innocents would be killed there whether or not we are there - well just why the hell are we still there? I suppose you'd say MORE would be killed if we weren't there, and I'd agree, but I don't know that that makes our presence there morally superior to our absence since 1) this makes Americans complicit in the murder of Iraqis and 2) I still find it an appalling proposition (though I doubt you do) that Americans should be in charge of deciding which innocent Iraqis are killed and which are not.

I have no idea what you are getting at with State/Defense as I didn't mention a thing about that in this context. But again if you are bringing up who actually had a clue about what was going on Iraq pre-March 2003, that would be State, not Defense.

I also didn't say Bush was responsible for this. But if you want to bring him up, sure I guess a case could be made for it.

Finally, where the hell do you get off talking about constitutional due process? I was under the impression that you were of the Bush/Gonzalez/Cornyn mindset and had a very flexible view of when that should and shouldn't apply. I'm glad to hear you finally have some interest in seeing the law followed. It would be nice if you had that view more generally and thought that the nation's CEO should follow the law too - maybe someday you'll come around on it. If what you are getting at is my "alleged" comment - uh, and you saying that the only things we can ever know even semi-definitively are judgments that come from the US court system? And that they are always 100% accurate representations of events that took place? Hmmm - that's ... different. Especially coming from you. I was implying that the investigations into this seem to have solid evidence and that the story is written in such a way as to suggest that this is clear-cut and several Americans will be tried and convicted. If there aren't any convictions out of this, call me on it later. But it appears that lengthy and intensive investigations here have found plenty of evidence and a sprawling conspiracy - and the scope of those investigations appears such that I don't feel compelled to use the word alleged. You don't put "alleged" in front of some much flimsier accusations you make on this blog.

Armand, I don't think you addressed what I take to be Morris's essential point -- I think he is saying that that you seem to have one set of (remarkably forgiving) assumptions you apply to people on "your side" and another set of (nasty) assumptions you apply to those on the "other" side.

This is my point, too. You said:

"the basis for this story seems strong enough to me not to use "alleged""

and I wonder if you would have said that about, say, Clinton in 1998, or some other bad thing that affected or was caused by interests you identify with.

Understand that I'm not suggesting that you should be nonpartisan. There is a way to talk about these things that conveys disapproval and connects it to larger policy failures without descending into gratuitous invective. It's the difference between Josh Marshall and the Kossacks, and I guess it depends on what sort of audience you want to attract. Marshall is generally respected and read by a widely divergent audience despite being clearly left-identified, Kos's crew is red meat for the Democratic Underground crowd.

All I'm saying is that the way this story is written (including verb tenses and plurals) it looks to me like a series of military invesitagtions (multipe investigations) has found this to be the case, and at that point using the word "alleged" seems meaningless, unless we can't trust the military at all to know/investigate the behavior of its own personnel. And unlike my snarky brother's implications, I do assume the Pentagon retains a certain level of competence and an ability to learn what US soldiers are doing.

Multiple investigations have been conducted. And the behavior of senior officials (in the military, and the right-wing Republican chairman of House Armed Services) implies they believe these events occurred as these investigations say they did. So at what point does something go from "alleged" to known or at least accepted? I don't particularly think a court conviction for murder is necessary. When we discuss history we know people are wrongly convicted and we know people who got away with it. And even if that wasn't the case I'm not entirely clear on why court decisions should be at the center of what's known to be historically accurate and what's not - that's not really their job.

Again, I have some faith in the military to figure out what its soldiers are up to (I have less faith when it comes to people at higher levels of the military b/c of inevitable political pressures - but that's not who we are talking about here). So why shouldn't I trust the findings of Pentagon investigations into the behavior of its own personnel.

Btw, I do sometimes wonder why people who read this blog assume I'm enthralled by the members of Clinton family. I respect the ex-president's political skills and think he was a much better president than the one we are stuck with now. But I was hardly a cheerleader. I was a Paul Tsongas man in '92 (the first presidential election I was old enough to get involved in, really) - and that was at one of the centers of Clintonism, Georgetown.

Oh, and as to your last point - I'm not entirely sure what to make of that. You seem to imply that wording and prose style matters as much or more than whether or not a story is accurate or conveys "the facts". Personally, to me, that's not key. Kos is usually factually accurate (definitely more accurate than some things I read at The Corner, to say nothing of Drudge) - and that's what seems important to me.

And I believe that the 2 sentences I wrote are accurate as well. As to the title, I changed it when someone pointed out the problem with my wording. As it stands now, according to the findings of Pentagon investigations, it's accurate. So I don't really see a problem with my wording.

The "someone" was me... sorry about that. I just realized I hadn't entered my name.