Saturday, August 19, 2006

Normal

The Marine officer who commanded the battalion involved in the Haditha killings last November did not consider the deaths of 24 Iraqis, many of them women and children, unusual and did not initiate an inquiry, according to a sworn statement he gave to military investigators in March.

"I thought it was very sad, very unfortunate, but at the time, I did not suspect any wrongdoing from my Marines," Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines, said in the statement.

The release of the statement was apparently intended to explain why it took so long to report the Haditha massacre (and we'll call it that, okay? Kids were shot in the back of the head.). One of the oddest things is that nobody anywhere in any of these proceedings seems to have any remorse about the killings. It's clinical. It's pathological.

2 comments:

MT said...

I imagine remorse is debilitating when your job is killing people. Surgeons are famous for being cold an uncompassionate too.

helmut said...

Probably. I guess I emphasized something I didn't intend to. What struck me about this was more the "normality" of having killed women and children and the explanation that they provoked it and were thus repsonsible for having themselves died. Add to this bullets in the back of the head, and it struck me as a heinous form of normality.