I’ve been on the mend throughout the weekend so I’m a little late to this game. Several people have emailed me this development in the Haditha case which show that the Haditha incident was a set up by Al Qaeda.

“Buried in the mountain of exhibits attached to the once secret Haditha, Iraq murder inquiry prepared by US Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell is an obscure Marine Corps intelligence summary (see pdf) that says the deadly encounter was an intentional propaganda ploy planned and paid for by Al Qaeda foreign fighters.

Veteran military defense attorney Gary Meyers said he never understood why the Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agents leading the Haditha criminal investigation didn’t “examine the linkage” between Al Qaeda, the local insurgency and the events at Haditha. Meyers was an attorney on the defense team that successfully defended Justin Sharratt, a Marine infantryman accused of multiple murders at Haditha.

The report ‚Äì apparently overlooked by a Washington press corps awash in leaked Bargewell documents and secret Naval Criminal Investigative Service reports ‚Äì shows that Marine Corps intelligence operatives were advised of the scheme to demonize the Marines by an informant named Muhannad Hassan Hamadi. The informant was snared by 3/1 Marines on December 11 2005 and decided to cooperate.”

Other bloggers such as Allahpundit over at HotAir seems befuddled by the account:

“Beyond that, the plan‚Äôs too clever by half. U.S. troops had been dodging IEDs and facing enemy fire from the cover of houses for two years by the time of the Haditha incident with nary a massacre to their credit. Why would Al Qaeda expect they could bait them into one now? Moreover, if the jihadis‚Äô intent was to ‚Äúsecret themselves among local civilians‚Äù to maximize collateral damage, why didn‚Äôt Wuterich‚Äôs men find a single enemy combatant during their fateful house-clearing operations on Chestnut? The logical thing would have been to station one or two jihadis in houses on either side of the road and then have them open fire on the convoy after the IED went off, to make the Marines think there were hostiles on all sides and that they should proceed accordingly.”

While I’m too bit bit confused by the account by Helms for some of the same reasons, let’s not forget that we cannot view battle doctrine from a western perspective, thus, “It doesn’t make sense” is understandable.

Enemy insurgents could have been mapping previous patrols of marines and thus had a general idea of just where IED should be placed for the best result. It would seem that they were about getting a “scatter” more than a “fire for effect”, to confuse and spit the marines up - you know - get them shooting at everything that moves.

Of course our marines are more disciplined than that, but it does seem, now as we look back at it, that the whole thing seemed “orchestrated” to some effect, especially noting Time magazine’s Tim McGirk and his sourcing of a fake journalism student.

Note the numerous times we have caught the enemy staging other events and it places this story clearly in the realm of the probable.

Others blogging this, Michelle Malkin with a roundup and Stop the ACLU.