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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