Standing Up for Our Servicemen

Sometimes others are all over a story, and all you need to do is link. That’s the way it is with two thematically related stories in the news today. First, there are the seven Marines and one Navy corpsman who are being held in solitary confinement, sometimes in shackles, on suspicion of having murdered an Iraqi civilian. Michelle Malkin has everything you need to know about this important story. I have just one comment to add.

These eight servicemen have been tried and convicted in the press. This is what ostensibly happened:

[E]vidence found thus far indicates Marines entered the town of Hamdaniya in search of an insurgent and, failing to find him, grabbed an unarmed man from his home and shot him.

I don’t believe it. Seven Marines and a corpsman–not an unstable soldier or two–didn’t find the terrorist they were looking for, so they randomly grabbed an innocent guy and shot him? It’s possible that something bad happened here, but that story makes no sense, and unless and until I see the evidence, I simply don’t believe it.

The second story involves a Marine Corporal, Joshua Belile, who sang a song–a pretty good song, actually–about an American in Iraq who is lured into an ambush and, in self-defense, kills two jihadis who are trying to murder him. Unfortunately, a video of Joshua’s band performing the song showed up on YouTube, and wire services wrote false news stories about the performance. Sorry, but there is no polite way to put it. The wire service stories were deliberately false, and could not have been written in good faith by anyone who watched the video. But that’s no surprise; the worst part of the story is that the Marine Corps brass fell in line with CAIR, and Cpl. Belile is in trouble. Little Green Footballs has all the info. And the tireless Mrs. Malkin is also on the case.

The common thread here seems to be the willingness of military brass to knuckle under to political pressure rather than stand up for our servicemen.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses