Ramadi fell to ISIS in a battle that ran from early May 14th through into the 15th. Americans from the Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter down to talk radio meth heads blamed the Iraqi soldiers: "I hope they develop the will to fight."
Then it came out that US Air Force surveillance had identified the ISIS attack group outside of Ramadi. Someone in the chain of command made the decision not to waste what was the largest concentration of ISIS assets seen in one place since Mosul in June of 2014.
Damning the Iraqis had been created as a cover-up.
For an UPDATE discussion of that situation:
We lost two Marines in April of 2008 to a VBIED similar to the 20 1-ton VBIEDs thrown at Ramadi on the 14th.UPDATE: CENTCOM watched 30 ISIS truck bombs roll on Ramadi and did nothing. May 14th? A bloodbath
Our forces never went up against a weapon like the ten new 15,000 pound truck bombs in Ramadi. That's twice the size of the 1995 Oklahoma City bomb that wasted the Murrah office building.
This diary memorializes the daily reports from CENTCOM for the first three days of this Battle of Ramadi.
Compare/contrast with claims related to a sand storm and other PR artifacts that have appeared in public releases. Below the fold:
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Historical parallels go directly to the policies that produced the Abu Ghraib torture/murder scandal. And back to the institutionalized hatreds of the CIA National interrogation Center in Saigon. Torture and betrayal are close cousins.