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The War Profiteers - War Crimes, Kidnappings,
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December 21st,
2006 - Eight Marines Charged in Haditha Case |
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Eight Marines Charged in
Haditha Case By Mark Walker, Will Bennett & Teri Figueroa North County Times December 21, 2006 Camp Pendleton - Marine
Corps officials on Thursday charged eight Camp Pendleton Marines in
connection with the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha in
November 2005. The charges vary by
individual, and include accusations of unpremeditated murder, dereliction of
duty, false official statements and obstruction of justice. Four enlisted men were
charged with unpremeditated murder and other crimes; four officers face
charges for allegedly failing to report or investigate the deaths of the
Iraqi civilians after the Nov. 19, 2005 incident, which happened after a
roadside bomb exploded in a convey of Humvees carrying U.S. troops. One of
the troops was killed, two others were injured. In the aftermath of the
explosion, 24 Iraqis, including woman and children, in nearby homes and a
taxi were killed. The Marine Corps announced
this afternoon that it has charged the 26-year-old squad leader, Staff Sgt.
Wuterich, with 13 counts of unpremeditated murder, as well as with charges
related to soliciting another to commit an offense and making a false
official statement. Unpremeditated murder is the
rough equivalent of second-degree murder charges. The others charged include: - Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz, 24,
was charged with five counts of unpremeditated murder, as well as making a
false official statement. - Lance Cpl. Stephen B.
Tatum, 25, faces two counts of unpremeditated murder, and one count of
negligent homicide (related to the deaths of four victims), and one count of
assault. - Lance Cpl. Justin
Sharratt, 22, is charged with three counts of unpremeditated murder. - Each of the four officers
facing charges are accused of dereliction of duty. The charges also accuse
Lt. Col Jeffrey Chessani of wrongfully failing to accurately report and
investigated a suspected violation of the law of war. The 42-year-old also
has two counts of dereliction of duty. - Capt. Randy Stone is charged
with violating a lawful order, in that he allegedly failed to insure accurate
reporting. the 34 year old also faces two counts of dereliction of duty. - Capt. Lucas McConnell, 31,
faces one charge of dereliction of duty. - First Lt. Andrew Grayson,
25, is charged with dereliction of duty, false officials statements and
obstruction of justice. Attorneys for the some of
the men from Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment have said
for months that the killings were the result of a legitimate action following
a massive explosion that killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas of El Paso, Texas. The Iraqi victims included
six children and five women, all of whom died inside homes near the site of
the bombing. The accused Marines returned
from Iraq in April. They were not taken into custody, but were assigned to
tasks at Camp Pendleton as the investigation into what happened in Haditha, a
city 125 miles northwest of Baghdad, ran its course. Neal Puckett, the attorney
for Wuterich, said his client "does not think the Marine Corps is
abandoning him." He also said his client, from Meriden, Conn., has no
plans to cooperate with prosecutors because "he didn't do anything
wrong." "Everything he did that
day was in an effort to protect his Marines after the IED (improvised
explosive device) went off," Puckett said. "We maintain the tactics
used that day were within his right to use." Puckett also noted that
Wuterich's wife, Marisol, is in the hospital today, expecting to deliver the
couple's third child. Tatum's attorney confirmed
Thursday morning that his client would be charged in the matter. However,
that attorney, Jack Zimmerman said Tatum was not at Camp Pendleton today and
has not had the charges read to him yet. Gary Myers, attorney for
Sharratt, said his client was also notified this morning of the charges. Sharratt, Myers said, will
not be jailed at this point but he did not know if his client would have
other restrictions, such as not being allowed to leave base. "Our position is now
and always has been that these were combat-related deaths," Myers said. The Haditha incident spawned
two investigations, one looking into whether the Marines had committed war
crimes, the other probing the reporting of the incident up the chain of
command. Dozens of reporters and
camera crews descending on the base today for the formal charging
announcement against the men and about what actions are being taken against
Marine commanders, whose handling of the initial report of the civilian
deaths and their subsequent investigation of what happened came under
question. The leveling of murder
charges is not a surprise, according to one military legal expert. "If we want to have a
justice system that is taken seriously around the world, then we have to be
capable of disciplining our own, of at least trying our own," said
Kathleen Duignan, executive director of the Institute of Military Justice in
Washington. She said the likelihood of
any plea deals for any of the men will depend on the strength of the evidence
the prosecution has against the men. If the evidence is strong
against the men, then defense attorneys may be inclined to negotiate, she
said. "But, it will depend on
whether the defense thinks it's in their best interests to roll the
dice," Duignan said. Reached by phone in
Washington on Thursday, former military attorney and retired West Point
Professor Gary Solis said that a lack of forensic evidence will complicate
things for the prosecution. "The lack of a body
will make it difficult to prove the cause of death," Solis said,
referring to the fact that U.S. officials were unable to obtain permission
from the families of those who died to exhume and conduct autopsies on the
bodies of those who were killed in the incident. He said that he knows Wuterich's
attorney Gary Puckett, who he referred to as an "outstanding legal
mind." "He is a first-rate
defense council," Solis said. He added that while he
wouldn't be surprised to see plea deals worked out between prosecutors and
some of the "lesser players" in the case. Solis said that maximum
penalty that the accused could face for unpremeditated murder would be life
in prison. The Haditha case unfolded
when the Marine patrol aboard four Humvees was passing through the city about
7:30 a.m. on Nov. 19, 2005. Several of the Marines there
that day have told investigators and the civilian attorneys they have hired
have said they were told that minutes after the explosion the men were attacked
by insurgents armed with AK-47 assault rifles, shots they said were coming
from one or more nearby homes. The first Iraqis to die were
five men who emerged from a car and began running. None of those men have
been determined by investigators to be insurgents. The squad radioed word of
the attack to commanders, and over the next few hours stormed through several
homes in what they said was a search for their attackers. The shooting that took place
in two of the homes appeared justified, sources close to the case have said,
but the assault on a third home may have violated the Marine Corps' rules of
engagement. Those rules allow a combat
operation against any source of fire or suspected insurgent stronghold, but
are clear in directing that lethal force not be used against children or
apparent civilians unless absolutely necessary. One week after major
elements of the 3rd Battalion returned from Iraq in April, then-1st Marine
Division Maj. Gen. Richard Natonksi, announced he was relieving the now-accused
Chessani of his post as commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine
Regiment also known as the "Thundering Third." The mix of politics and the
military justice system has been a major component in the Haditha story since
it was first reported. Anti-war voices point to Haditha as the Iraq war
comparison to the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War in which U.S. Army
troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese villagers. As in the My Lai case,
politicians say the stress faced by U.S. troops in Iraq facing an uniformed
enemy in an urban environment is a major factor in what happened at Haditha. Two months after Time
magazine wrote the first story on the Haditha incident, U.S. Rep. John
Murtha, D-Penn., in May said the Marines overreacted to the death of Terrazas
and, acting in rage, "killed innocent civilians in cold blood." A leading voice in Congress
for repositioning some U.S. troops to Kuwait and bringing the rest home,
Murtha's remarks prompted a firestorm on Capitol Hill and led to a libel lawsuit
filed against him by Wuterich. Murtha, a former Marine, has refused an offer
to settle the suit by issuing a public apology and it is uncertain if his
position as a federal lawmaker shields him from the suit. Theresa Sharratt, mother of
one of the enlisted Marines said to be facing charges, Lance. Cpl. Justin
Sharratt, also is expected to be on the base and speak to the media this
afternoon. Sharratt's sister, Jaclyn
Sharratt, reached by phone as she checked in at the base Thursday, said that
she has faith that things will turn out well for her brother. "We have faith and
belief in them and know they did the right thing," she said. "They
just followed the rules of engagement." She said her family has been
under the stress of not knowing what was coming since March. "It's real now, not
something hypothetical," she said. "Now that it's reality, we are
just going to have to deal with it." In his lawsuit, Wuterich
provided the public account from any of the troops there that day about what
happened. In the lawsuit, Wuterich
said five men in a taxi that came upon the scene shortly after the bombing
were shot when they fled the vehicle and ignored orders in Arabic. The suit
said the military's rules of engagement allowed troops to "shoot
suspicious people fleeing a bombing. Therefore in following that policy the
Marines opened fire killing the men." A short time later,
Wuterich's suit contends, AK-47 shots were heard and Marines saw bullets
striking the ground near their position. A four-man team that included
Wuterich entered one of the homes, tossed a fragmentation grenade into a room
where they heard voices and then fired a series of "clearing
shots." That pattern was repeated in two other homes. "Any accusation that
the Marines 'executed' civilians or deliberately targeted noncombatants is
either a horrendous misunderstanding or intentional lie," Wuterich's
suit contends. Lawyers for other Marines
involved in the incident have said Wuterich's account is consistent with what
their clients have told them. Critics of the case have
contended that witnesses at Haditha, located in the heart of the dangerous
Anbar province known as the Sunni Triangle and peppered with insurgents, have
misled investigators. The critics also point to
the fact that none of the victims have been exhumed for autopsy because of
resistance from their families and therefore no concrete forensic evidence of
how they died is available. Earlier news stories had
reported that one of the men who would be charged would be 1st Lt. William T.
Kallop - the commanding officer of Kilo Company who was the only officer at
the scene of the Haditha incident. Kallop was not targeted in the charges
filed Thursday. External link: http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2006/12/21/news/top_stories/1_02_2912_20_01.txt By Martin Asser BBC News December 21st, 2006 Haditha is an agricultural
community of about 90,000 inhabitants on the banks of the Euphrates
north-west of Baghdad. It lies in the huge western
province of Anbar, which has been the heartland of the insurgency since US
troops led the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003. It is a dangerous place for
the US marines who control this part of Iraq - and for the inhabitants,
caught between insurgents and American troops. On the morning of 19
November 2005, the Subhani neighbourhood was the scene of an event that has
become like the regular pulse beat of the insurgency - a roadside bomb
targeting a US military patrol. It killed 20-year-old Lance
Corp Miguel ("TJ") Terrazas, driving one of four humvee vehicles in
the patrol, and injured two other marines. A simple US military
statement hinted at the bloody chain of events which the attack started -
though subsequent scrutiny showed it to be far from the truth. It said: "A US marine
and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in
Haditha. "Immediately following
the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army
soldiers and marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding
another." Video footage The tragedy of Haditha may
have been left at that - just another statistic of "war-torn" Iraq:
a place too dangerous to be reported properly by journalists, where openness
is not in the interests of political and military circles, and the sheer
scale of death numbs the senses. However, a day after the
incident, local journalist Taher Thabet got his video camera out and filmed
scenes that - whatever they were - were not the aftermath of a roadside
bombing. The bodies of women and
children, still in their nightclothes, apparently shot in their own homes;
interior walls and ceilings peppered with bullet holes; bloodstains on the
floor. Mr Thabet's tape prompted an
investigation by the Iraqi human rights group Hammurabi, which passed details
onto the US weekly magazine Time in January 2006. Before publishing its
account on 19 March, the magazine passed the tape to US military commanders
in Baghdad, who initiated a preliminary investigation. Following their findings,
the official version was changed to say that, after the roadside bomb, the 15
civilians had been accidentally shot by marines during a gun fight with
insurgents. Nevertheless, on 9 March the
top US commanders in Baghdad began a criminal investigation, led by the Naval
Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS). On 7 April three officers in
charge of troops in Haditha were also stripped of their command and
reassigned. ‘Pretended to die’ Eyewitness accounts suggest
that comrades of TJ Terrazas, far from coming under enemy fire, went on the
rampage in Haditha after his death. Twelve-year-old Safa Younis
appears in a Hammurabi video saying she was in one of three houses where
troops came in and indiscriminately killed family members. "They knocked at our
front door and my father went to open it. They shot him dead from behind the
door and then they shot him again," she says in the video. "Then one American soldier
came in and shot at us all. I pretended to be dead and he didn't notice
me." Hammurabi says eight people
died in the house, including Safa's five siblings, aged between 14 and two. In another house seven
people including a child and his 70-year-old grandfather were killed. Four
brothers aged 41 to 24 died in a third house. Eyewitnesses said they were
forced into a wardrobe and shot. Outside in the street, US
troops are said to have gunned down four students and a taxi driver they had
stopped at a roadblock set up after the bombing. Damage The Pentagon has said little
publicly about the Haditha deaths, and in Iraq the incident has caused little
controversy - US troops there are already viewed by most Iraqis as
trigger-happy and indifferent to civilian casualties. Now four marines in that
group, including Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich, 26, are facing charges of
unpremeditated murder. A further four face lesser
charges over alleged failures in investigating and reporting the incident. The US military has
confirmed that 24 Iraqi civilians died in Haditha that day, none of them
killed by a roadside bomb. Col Stewart Navarre,
announcing the charges on 21 December 2006, said: "The reporting of the
incident up the chain of command was inaccurate and untimely." The chairman of the US
Senate armed services committee, John Warner, says it will hold hearings into
the incident and how it was handled. Media commentators have
spoken of it as "Iraq's My Lai" - a reference to the 1968 massacre
of 500 villagers in Vietnam. Democrat congressman John
Murtha, a former marine and war veteran, has said the Haditha incident could
turn out to be an even bigger scandal than the Abu Ghraib prison abuse
scandal. External link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5033648.stm |