The first investigation, a criminal investigation from the Criminal Investigation Division, went after the individual conduct of the soldiers you see in those photographs, ... The second investigation, an administrative investigation, looked into command policies and procedures, and from that there appeared to be issues with military intelligence as well. |
The negotiations, the discussions in the minds of the Marine commanders, continue to proceed, even though we did not see a tremendous number of weapons turned in today, |
the number of attacks on soft targets and civilians continues to rise ... we think this is a change on the part of the enemy. |
There is a brigade [of Iraqis] being formed; we're working on forming the first battalion, |
There is no evidence to support that, and the coalition forces have been asked that specific question, and all deny taking any activities against some of the artifacts inside the mosque, |
There may be civilians being used as human shields and at this point while it was dreadful, while it was unacceptable, while it was bestial, a pre-emptive attack into the city could have taken a bad situation and made it even worse. |
There may have been some kind of celebration, ... Bad people have celebrations too. Bad people have parties too. |
There was a tremendous number of incriminating pocket litter, a lot of telephone numbers to foreign countries, Afghanistan, Sudan and a number of others. |
They realize they can't attack us and defeat us in a conventional sense. What they are trying to do is break our will. They are trying to capture the headlines. But these attacks -- with the exception of a seriously injured civilian -- have had frankly no tactical value and they're militarily insignificant, |
They will be hunted down. They will be captured, |
This is an enemy that cannot defeat us militarily, and in engagement after engagement we see the enemy breaking off, running away, |
trying to intimidate through a barrel of a gun the vast majority of the people of Iraq. |
We are not going to do a pell-mell rush into the city. It's going to be deliberate, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming. We will not rush in to make things worse. We will plan our way through this and we will reestablish control of that city and we will pacify that city. |
we deeply regret the incident. |
We feel that that was an indicator that this was a high risk meeting of high-level anti-coalition forces, |