Tim McGirk, Parrhesiastic Rhetoric, and Mass-Mediated Representations of Haditha

Abstract

This essay provides readers with a critical analysis of some of journalistic parrhesiastic framings of the Haditha “incident.” On November 19, 2005, a squad of Marines killed some 24 Iraqis in a town in the Anbar region in Iraq, and for several months many members of the press tried to compare this incident to the My Lai Massacre. The essay highlights some of the parrhesiastic strategies that were used by Tim McGirk and other critics of the Bush administration who tried to argue that Haditha may have truthfully been a revengeful “massacre” that was perpetrated by enraged Marines. These critics may have hoped that the work by Tim McGirk of Time Magazine would signal the beginning of the end of this Iraqi war, but the author argues that Haditha was recontextualized and domesticated as either lawfare or as a counterinsurgency narrative.

Notes

1. ¹The heuristic value of parrhesiastic analyses has attracted the attention of a growing number of scholars, who have applied some variants of the study of parrhesia in their critiques of the roles played (or potentially played) by prisoners of conscience, members of investigatory commissions that could look into executive branch overreaching (Simon, 2005), and environmental critics (Skinner, 2011).

2. ²For more elaborate timelines of the Haditha incident, see Robertson (2006) and Helms and Allender (2012).