I posted a short note earlier this week on the video showing a Marine shooting an insurgent in Fallujah who was feigning death.

I'm watching last night's "O'Reilly Factor" and Bill has a naive and dangerous Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch on suggesting that the Marine should face a court-martial for his actions. (Personally, I think the guy should get a medal just for having to put up with this garbage.)

Matthew Heidt over at Froggy Ruminations has two excellent posts on this subject that I suggest everyone read. They can be found here and here:

Let me be very clear about this issue. I have looked around the web, and many people get this concept, but there are some stragglers. Here is your situation Marine. You just took fire from unlawful combatants shooting from a religious building attempting to use the sanctuary status of their position as protection. But you're in Fallujah now, and the Marine Corps has decided that they're not playing that game this time. That was Najaf. So you set the mosque on fire and you hose down the terrorists with small arms, launch some AT-4s (Rockets), some 40MM grenades into the building and things quiet down. So you run over there, and find some tangos wounded and pretending to be dead. You are aware that suicide martyrdom is like really popular with these kind of idiots, and like taking some Marines with them would be really cool. So you can either risk your life and your fireteam's lives by having them cover you while you bend down and search a guy that you think is pretending to be dead for some reason. Also, you don't know who or what is in the next room, and you're already speaking english to each other and its loud because your hearing is poor from shooting people for several days. So you know that there are many other rooms to enter, and that if anyone is still alive in those rooms, they know that Americans are in the mosque. Meanwhile (3 seconds later), you still have this terrorist that was just shooting at you from a mosque playing possum. What do you do?

You double tap his head, and you go to the next room, that's what.

Exactly.

On O'Reilly, Roth has repeatedly made a point which demonstrates just how out of touch with both reality and history he is:

Roth: It is not in the interest of American soldiers to have a rule out there that if you're injured and you move, you get shot. That is not in the Geneva Conventions and that is not in America's interests.

Is Roth really stupid enough to believe that if some of the insurgents came across an injured Marine they wouldn't shoot him because of the Geneva Conventions? Or that they would render him medical aid because that's what our troops do for them? The wounded Marine would be lucky to just be shot -- they'd probably prefer to chop his head off. For some more historical perspective, read this.