The following statement was written by World Can’t Wait student organizers.
The images are horrific. The lies are outrageous. The story is all
too common.
Dead children are piled into the back of a pickup truck,
dressed in blood soaked and bullet-ridden pajamas. A group of brothers
are forced into a closet and shot at point-blank range. And a young
girl, the lone surviver of her family, wakes up the morning of November
19th, to find her father shot dead while attempting to open the front
door, and her siblings all shot as well as her mother, holding the
youngest in her arms.
We must not allow the killing of twenty-four innocent people in
Haditha to be swept under the rug of “just another incident in war-torn
Iraq.”
The lies and initial cover-up tell us that these Marines felt what they did was wrong. But we add that in Haditha, a war crime was committed that was not only wrong, but immoral.
If people do not realize the enormity of the situation then these
war crimes will no longer be seen as horrific, they will become habit.
Just like the call of the World Can’t Wait states: That which you will not resist, and mobilize to stop, you will learn, or be forced, to accept.
The cold-blooded killings in Haditha brings back images of the
massacre in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, where over 300 people,
mostly women and children, were slaughtered. This was a major turning
point in the American conscience, when people realized that the Vietnam
War was wrong and that it needed to be ended immediately. Because of
the level of protest and political action that preceded it, the My Lai
massacre helped to cement the end of Nixon’s presidency.
The stress of war, the loss of a fellow marine, or simply “losing
it”, can not be used as excuses for the cold-blooded killing of innocent
people. The massacre in Haditha is a manifestation of a program that enforces a culture of hatred of the unknown. From the marines who pulled the trigger, to those who assisted in the cover-up, and top officials who turned a blind eye; all must be held accountable.
Driving out the Bush regime is an important step in creating a
society where the killing of innocent people by Marines is not excused
or tolerated. We know in this current situation, the people of Iraq
can’t wait. We must drive out the Bush regime!