This can’t be good (link via Atrios):

FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) — The U.S. military is investigating whether a Marine shot dead an unarmed, wounded insurgent during the battle for Falluja in an incident captured on videotape by a pool reporter.

The man was shot in the head at close range Saturday by a Marine who found him among a group of wounded men. The wounded men were found in a mosque that Marines said had been the source of small-arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire the previous day.

…

Four of the men appeared to have been shot again in Saturday’s fighting, and one of them appeared to be dead, according to the pool report. In the video, a Marine was seen noticing that one of the men appeared to be breathing.

A Marine approached one of the men in the mosque saying, “He’s [expletive] faking he’s dead. He’s faking he’s [expletive] dead.”

The Marine raised his rifle and fired into the apparently wounded man’s head, at which point a companion said, “Well, he’s dead now.”

I’m sure the videogame industry will be blamed for this one any minute now. Shift the blame, shift the blame, until it spreads into a thin enough patina so that we don’t notice those bright lines between right and wrong go all fuzzy and out of focus.

Naturally, this is not a statistical sample. This is not a poll. And because of that, the spin will be, as it was for Abu Ghraib, that this data point has no statistical value. But a single point changes your posterior distribution a lot if your prior gave probability one to the event “no torture, no atrocities.”

This news has put me off my homework for the night.