Thir, the main reason the cases against these marines largely collapsed is that the prosecution witnesses were telling a very different story to the one the prosecution wanted. In a sense, it's a miracle they pinned any charges on at all, given the facts.

The main problem seems to be that the late Congressman John Murtha leapt to conclusions unsupported by facts, claiming "It's much worse than reported in Time magazine. There was no fire fight. There was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood. And that's what the report is going to tell." Nobody knows why he claimed this; he was even sued for defamation, but escaped on a technicality.

I find it interesting that anyone thinks civilian fatalities are up. This so-called "massacre" involved 24 non-combatant fatalities. It was likened to the Vietnam War's My Lai, which involved between 15 and 20 times as many. Go back a few decades more, we find the bombing of Dresden, with a current estimate of 25,000 (versus 50,000 in Hamburg and 18,000 in Pforzheim during the same war). In terms of total bloodshed, the Civil War was the worst the US has fought, even before adjusting for the much lower population in those days (almost as many fatalities from that conflict alone as in the second century of America's existence, which encompasses their part in both WWI and WWII). Far from increasing, I would say fatalities have reduced enormously - they just get much more attention now than they ever could have in the past.