Last week, I berated the bloggers who had already reached a conclusion about the guilt or innocence of the Marine who shot and killed an injured insurgent in a Mosque in Fallujah. There, I also expressed my disgust with some who held cameraman Kevin Sites in such contempt that they believed the Marines present should have turned their weapons on Mr Sites as soon as they realized that he had captured the shooting on videotape.

Now Mr Sites relates the events as they happened from his perspective. He also shares the conflicting impetuses that roiled within him on how to react to what he saw and taped, and how he came to his ultimate decision.

A telling portion of his post is where he quotes the Commanding Officer of the troops involved in this incident, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl of the 3rd Battalion First Marines. In an interview before the battle for Fallujah began, Colonel Buhl told Sites,

We're the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman's war here -- because we don't behead people, we don't come down to the same level of the people we're combating. That's a very difficult thing for a young 18-year-old Marine who's been trained to locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and close combat. That's a very difficult thing for a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel with 23 years experience in the service who was trained to do the same thing once upon a time, and who now has a thousand-plus men to lead, guide, coach, mentor — and ensure we remain the good guys and keep the moral high ground.

Just as it's easy for the uninformed critics to sit back after something happens and criticize our troops for their actions, it's easy to blame Sites for what he did with this videotape. I don't know Sites, and I suppose it's possible that he concocted these words to cover a craven attempt to stab our Marines in the back. But I don't think that's what happened. Just as Marines face tough decisions in combat, Kevin Sites faced a tough decision on how to deal with these circumstances.

And while you may disagree with his decision, I believe it's dead wrong to declare that Sites is a saboteur trying to undermine our success in Iraq. While the difficulty of his job pales in comparison to the job of the Marines he's traveling with, it's a lot harder than the job of the pajamahadeen, sipping Diet Coke and nibbling bon bons safe at home in the United States.

Some folks need to start engaging their brains before they let their emotions vomit words of hate onto their blogs.

Update: Kevin Aylward asks for reactions to Sites' post. Well, here ya go, Kev.

Update 2: James Joyner, while somewhat persuaded by Sites' post, views the journalist as "a warrior wannabe who thinks that he's somehow both 'one of the boys' and a dispassionate journalist." By twice mentioning Rambo in his post, James reveals his disdain for Sites. Personally, I have a hard time believing Sites or any other journalist in that situation can avoid feeling a strong connection with the troops he travels with. These guys are doing a very difficult job, and are undoubtedly keeping Sites safe on frequent occasions. They're sharing some very high-adrenaline moments. And it's his job to be as much of a dispassionate journalist as possible.

I'm no apologist for the mainstream media in general or journalists in particular, but it continues to strike me that folks are, to varying degrees, being unfair to Sites. As I mentioned above, while it's a lot easier for him to do his job in Fallujah than it is for the Marines, it's a lot harder than reading blogs and news sites and expressing one's opinion about them.