Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Why I Hate The Media



Please read this story about a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan, the last survivor of a botched attack on the Taliban.

The SEAL and his comrades were faced with a tough decision: to kill three Afghani goatherds who might warn the Taliban of their presence, or let them go. The SEALs let the goatherds go, and were betrayed by them to the Taliban, who engaged the force in a firefight, killing all but this lone survivor, Marcus Luttrell.

Why didn't they kill the goatherds? Luttrell tells us the reason why:

Then, Luttrell said, Murphy then warned his men that if they killed the goatherds, they would have to report the deaths, and the Taliban would publicize them, as well.

“[T]he U.S. liberal media will attack us without mercy,” Luttrell quotes Murphy as saying. “We will almost certainly be charged with murder.”

And then, according to the book, Lt. Murphy turned to Luttrell, the petty officer second class. “Marcus, I’ll go with you,” Murphy said. “Call it.”

But, by Luttrell’s own account, Murphy put the petty officer in the position of casting the deciding vote. Swayed by Murphy’s warning that killing the Afghans would lead to the SEALs being charged with murder, Luttrell voted to free the Afghans.

He now believes that decision sealed the fates of his three teammates.

“It was the stupidest, most southern-fried, lamebrained decision I ever made in my life,” he writes in the book. “I must have been out of my mind. I had actually cast a vote which I knew could sign our death warrant. I’d turned into a f---ing liberal, a half-assed, no-logic nitwit, all heart, no brain, and the judgment of a jackrabbit.”



There ya go. Straight out of the mouth of a warrior, who knows well who his friends (and his enemies) are. And he's right; look at the Haditha case for a US media that made its mind up long before any investigation was concluded, and without giving the benefit of the doubt to its own country's Marines.

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