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From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

The article first appeared in Time magazine in March of this year, and it broke the story of an incident in November of 2005.

Allegations that Marines and the Sunni stronghold of Haditha Iraq murdered Iraqi civilians to avenge the death of one of their own in an IED explosion.

The original article placed the number of civilian deaths at

15, a figure that has since been upped to 24. The article spurred two military investigations.

One will determine what happened and whether the incident was covered up, and the second will

weigh whether criminal charges should be brought. For the military and the U.S. government, Haditha is still an open case.

But for the press, it wasn't too soon to compare to an earlier atrocity.

Here's Fox News Channel's John Gibson.

Milai, the name of the place in South Vietnam, where a massacre occurred,

a massacre carried out by American troops.

For many people, the entire war in Vietnam came down to those two words,

...