This is what American soldiers who are forgotten by their own leaders turn into

When you don't ask any sacrifice of the American people, when you send insufficient troops into a war zone and then stop-loss them into their third, fourth, and fifth tours of duty and never allow them to finally go home, sooner or later these guys are going to take out their frustration on whoever's nearby:

A Pentagon probe into the death of Iraqi civilians last November in the Iraqi city of Haditha will show that U.S. Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," a U.S. lawmaker said Wednesday.

From the beginning, Iraqis in the town of Haditha said U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children.

One young Iraqi girl said the Marines killed six members of her family, including her parents. “The Americans came into the room where my father was praying,” she said, “and shot him.”

On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said the accounts are true.

Military officials told NBC News that the Marine Corps' own evidence appears to show Murtha is right.

A videotape taken by an Iraqi showed the aftermath of the alleged attack: a blood-smeared bedroom floor and bits of what appear to be human flesh and bullet holes on the walls.

The video, obtained by Time magazine, was broadcast a day after town residents told The Associated Press that American troops entered homes on Nov. 19 and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old girl, after a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine.

On Nov. 20, U.S. Marines spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool issued a statement saying that on the previous day a roadside bomb had killed 15 civilians and a Marine. In a later gunbattle, U.S. and Iraqi troops killed eight insurgents, he said.

U.S. military officials later confirmed that the version of events was wrong.

In short -- a lie.

Lies like this don't help the war effort. All they do is further the illusion on the part of an American population that thinks supporting the troops means slapping a ribbon magnet on your SUV and then popping open a Coor's and settling down to see who wins American Idol that what American soldiers do is by definition always wonderful.

This is My Lai Redux, only this time, thanks to blogs, we are able to hear the soldiers in their own words, and we know that what turns American kids into monsters is being trained to kill and then being sent to be sitting ducks in the face of an insurgency, forgotten and trapped there indefinitely.

I'm not excusing what these Marines did. But I'm getting mighty tired of watching kids who have been systematically dehumanized by their own leaders take the rap for the failings of the civilian leadership while that leadership emerges unscathed.