A Shot Seen Round The World

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Some officials point to other potentially mitigating circumstances. The Marine who shot the Iraqi had been wounded the day before. There were stories circulating of fellow Marines being killed by booby-trapped Iraqi bodies. "These are insane conditions," says Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice and a partner in a Washington law firm that defends soldiers who get in trouble. "Everything you thought was off the chart in terms of enemy behavior is turning out to be possible. Who could think of anything so ghoulish as booby-trapped bodies?"

But booby-trapped bodies are hardly new. U.S. soldiers encountered them in Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War and Afghanistan. The strain of this war may be unimaginable to civilians Stateside, but it is nevertheless what the troops are trained to manage. And they know that under the Pentagon's Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva convention, a soldier who shoots an unarmed, wounded combatant can be found guilty of murder.

This case is not the only shooting in Iraq under U.S. investigation. Several soldiers have been charged in connection with the death of an injured teenager in Baghdad last August. An Army captain is accused of murder for finishing off the wounded driver of an aide to militant leader Muqtada al-Sadr. One of his men has called it a mercy killing.

In interviews with some 20 Iraqis last week in Baghdad, not one gave the Marine in the mosque the benefit of the doubt. "I can only imagine how many other Fallujans were killed like that," said Jassim Abu Hamid, a schoolteacher. The outrage will probably grow once residents return en masse to Fallujah, a deeply conservative place known as the City of Mosques. Dozens of mosques have been hit by heavy fire, and some were obliterated. Journalists embedded with U.S. forces said some soldiers had urinated and defecated in mosque rooms where worshippers ritually cleanse themselves.

In Arab countries last week, the furor over the NBC video drowned out news of the atrocious execution of Margaret Hassan, the director of CARE International in Iraq and the wife of an Iraqi. Al-Jazeera, the most-watched news network in the region, received a tape of Hassan's killing but declined to air it to protect the sensitivities of viewers and of hostages' families, according to spokesman Jihad Ballout. Al-Jazeera has shown parts of other executions before, censoring the gore. The network did air the unedited Marine shooting repeatedly. U.S. channels blacked out the actual killing.

Meanwhile, on U.S. blogs, while many have expressed a complicated compassion for the Marine and the insurgent, some have posted death threats against Sites, accusing him of betraying the Marines by sharing the footage. The accusation stands in vivid contrast to Sites' blog, which shows his clear affection for the troops. He had posted poignant portraits of Marines, and their relatives had thanked him in a message board linked to the site. "Mr. Sites, my son sent me your site so I could see what he is going through," wrote a mother the day before the footage aired. "Thank you for your courage and for being our eyes to what is happening." Last week, that message board was shut down.