Friday, May 26, 2006

Oopsie

As T-bogg has pointed out, it seems that the idiots over at Powerline were wrong, wrong, wrong, while Murtha was right. Powerline said:

James Taranto makes a great point about the comments of Rep. John Murtha regarding the investigation into whether U.S. troops committed war crimes in a November incident where 15 Iraqi civilians were killed in Haditha, Iraq. Murtha claims that an internal investigation will show "there was no firefight, there was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

As Tananto notes, however, Murtha's description is self-contradictory because if the Marines "overreacted," then the killings were not premeditated. And if the killings were not premeditated, they were not in cold blood.

But it actually seems to be the case that really bad stuff really did happen:

A military investigation into the deaths of two dozen Iraqis last November is expected to find that a small number of marines in western Iraq carried out extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians, Congressional, military and Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Plus note the dumb-ass debaters argument that this guy makes and the Powertools endorse. But this isn't surprising because they do it themselves all the time--form, but no substance.