Quote Originally Posted by Seabee View Post
Can that thought be stretched to "if you were not there, you have no right to comment"?

The logical extension would then be, only people who were involved, can write histories....

best
Chris
There is a difference between writing a history of what happened and trying someone in the press, which has become a favored pastime in this country. In any case, any historian who would write the history of this event based on what the video footage appears to show, is a poor historian indeed.

I have a real problem with people criticizing operators on the ground based on whatever scant evidence is available in the press. Far more often than not, they are very wrong and in any case personal bias lends far more to many people's opinions in cases like these than facts. Haditha is a pretty good example of just that. There were plenty of people who knew that the Marines were guilty, just knew it. It was obvious, based on all the media reports, that they were blood thirsty murdering psychopaths, except that they were not. How many of those Marines that we knew were guilty were actually found guilty in a court of law rather than the court of public opinion? As far as I know only one is still in custody awaiting trial for negligent homicide which is a much different thing than the brutal cold-blooded murder for which they were originally publically condemned. The conspiracy theorists like to complain that the reason that the military allows the embedding of media is so that they can control them. It's the same theory behind accusing the military of "suppressing the truth" because they don't often release footage like this. In fact, the military is not suppressing the truth they simply understand that many people lack the knowledge and experience to understand what they are even looking at. Context free footage like this begs for people to either jump to whatever conclusion fits their personal bias or to become vulnerable to influence by anyone with a credible sounding theory of what happened, regardless of whether or not that person is in any better a position to know and understand what really happened and why. On the board, there is a wealth of military knowledge and experience going back, in some cases to Korea, and still there is no agreement of what really happened there based on this video. What is John Q. "Never Served" Public supposed to make of it?