Readers will recall that Haditha, Iraq, was the scene of the U.S. massacre of two dozen Iraqis in 2005. Today, according to a report from UPI in the Washington Times, an atrocity of another sort is being perpetrated there: the Sunni town in far northwest Iraq is under complete lockdown, patrolled by an occupying army of U.S. troops and southern Iraqi Shia:

HADITHA, Iraq -- Haditha is like a police state, surrounded by a dirt berm topped with concertina wire, with two tightly controlled entrances and no private cars permitted to drive in the town proper. "That's what it is; that's what it needs to be," said U.S. Lt. Col. Jim Donnellan, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment. ...

The clearing served as an advertisement that the U.S. Marines and the reconstituted Haditha police department -- comprising a charismatic local chief and 200 officers, many of them Shi'ites from southern Iraq -- now would be exerting their will over the city instead of the insurgents.

U.S. Marines serving in the Iraqi city of Haditha still feel the psychological weight of the November 2005 massacre, when a squad of Marines reportedly fatally shot 24 Hadithans shortly after one of their troops was killed by a roadside bomb.

Hadithans don't bring up the incident with the Americans much these days.