of the Marines that had criminal charges that had been subsequently dropped, filed a slander suit against Rep. Murtha. The lawsuit stated that "Sharratt, in being labeled repeatedly by Murtha as a 'cold-blooded murderer', and by Murtha outrageously claiming that the Haditha incident was comparable to the infamous (My Lai) massacre of Vietnam, has suffered permanent, irreversible damage to his reputation." In 2011, Sharratt's lawsuit was dismissed by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. Sharratt killed himself at his home in Pennsylvania on August 3, 2022. He was 37. Comparisons with My Lai massacre and other incidents Many news reports compared the Haditha Killings to the 1968 My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, with some commentators describing it as "Bush's My Lai", or "Iraq's My Lai". Very often, the killings have been described as part of a wider pattern of human rights abuses committed by American forces in Iraq. As a Spiegel reporter notes in an interview with Michael Sallah, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigation of atrocities committed by the Tiger Force unit in Vietnam, "you would have difficulties finding a single newspaper in Germany, or elsewhere in Europe, that does not deal with My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and Haditha in the same commentary." It was suggested that the Haditha killings might, like the My Lai Massacre, have resulted in further reduction of American public support for the conflict. Some rejected that comparison, however, including prominent journalist Christopher Hitchens who stated in a June 5, 2006 essay that: ...all the glib talk about My Lai is so much propaganda and hot air. In Vietnam, the rules of engagement were such as to make an atrocity – the slaughter of the My Lai villagers took almost a day rather than a white-hot few minutes – overwhelmingly probable. The ghastliness was only stopped by a brave officer who prepared his chopper-gunner to fire. In those days there were no precision-guided missiles, but there were "free-fire zones", and "body counts", and other virtual incitements to psycho officers such as Capt. Medina and Lt. Calley. As a consequence, a training film about My Lai – "if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed up" – has been in use for U. S. soldiers for some time. The most frequent parallel drawn between the killing of 504 Vietnamese villagers at My Lai and the two dozen Iraqis killed in