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June 2nd, 2006 - Hadithah Deaths:
Marine’s career may have died in Hadithah |
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Hadithah Deaths: Marine’s
career may have died in Hadithah By Mike Soraghan and John Aloysius Farrell Denver Post Friday, June 2, 2006 Washington - Lt. Col.
Jeffrey Chessani was headed for the height of the U.S. Marine Corps until
horrifying deaths in a small Iraqi city stained his distinguished combat
record. For the past 16 years, when
the Marines went to war, so did Chessani, who grew up in northwestern
Colorado. He joined in the U.S. invasion of Panama. He was in Saudi Arabia
for the Persian Gulf War and returned to the region for the war in Iraq. In
2004, Chessani helped plan the military’s assault on the insurgent-controlled
city of Fallujah. And he was considered a
prospect for promotion to general. “In the Marine Corps, you
have to check the boxes. You have to have been in hot spots and have been in
combat,” said Mike Zacchea, a Marine Corps reserve major who served with
Chessani in Iraq. “He was a guy who was certainly in competition for a
(general’s) star.” He called Chessani, 42, “a
man of principle, a conscientious and thoughtful Marine officer.” But Chessani’s soaring
career plunged to earth Nov. 19 in Hadithah, a city in Iraq’s seething Anbar
province 140 miles northwest of Baghdad. He was the commanding
officer of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, when members of its Kilo
Company allegedly shot and killed as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians,
including women and children. Marines reported the
Hadithah deaths the next day as being the result of a roadside bomb blast and
a subsequent firefight with insurgents. But over the past few months,
starting with a Time magazine report in March, eyewitness accounts have
emerged of a rampage by Marines after one of their own was killed. In April, the Marines,
citing “lack of confidence in their leadership abilities,” relieved Chessani
and two of his officers - Capt. Lucas McConnell, who commanded Kilo Company,
and Capt. James Kimber - of their commands. Hadithah was not mentioned
in the public announcement of the Marines’ action. Kimber told The Associated
Press on Thursday that he was a “political casualty,” adding, “I was in a
different city not playing any role in this incident.” There have been no reports
that Chessani participated in the alleged rampage, ordered it or witnessed
it. The colonel, now stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, has not
returned several phone calls from The Denver Post over several days. There are two ongoing
military investigations: of the Hadithah incident itself, and of how
officials reported it. No matter what the
conclusions, Chessani’s fast-track career climb is probably over. “There’s very little history
of people being restored to life professionally” in the Marines after such a
setback, said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military
Justice. “He can finish his 20 (years
before retirement) provided he doesn’t go to jail,” Zacchea said. But “he
will never be in command of anything again. His career is over.” Chessani, who grew up in
Rangely, was commissioned in 1988 and quickly found himself in the thick of
action. As a second lieutenant, he captured several of then-Panamanian leader
Manuel Noriega’s military officers during the Panama invasion in 1989, his
family members say. He was then deployed to
Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War before returning stateside in 1992. In 1998, Chessani was cited
for an “exemplary” record and “command ability” as one of seven captains
nominated for the Marine Corps’ Leftwich Trophy for outstanding leadership. Soon Chessani was “checking
the boxes” of an officer destined for promotion. He attended the Command and
Staff College in Quantico, Va., earning the degree of Master Military
Studies. In 2004, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and was sent to Iraq
as operations officer for the 1st Marine Division. Chessani did much of the
planning for the 1st Marine Regimental Combat Team’s 2004 assault on
Fallujah, Zacchea said. “He would have been working out the rules of
engagement, how do you deal with civilians, when do you give first aid to
foreign fighters,” Zacchea said. Chessani got his first
combat command on May 6, 2005, when he took over the 1,000-man 3rd Battalion.
He inherited a battle- tested unit that had taken many casualties and endured
considerable combat. It was one of the first Marine outfits to deploy for a
third time in Iraq. But the battalion also had
seen controversy over charges of unjustified killing. In the siege of
Fallujah, a video cameraman filmed a member of the battalion who shot an apparently
injured and unarmed Iraqi in a mosque. Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski, the
general who would later relieve Chessani of duty, excused the corporal who
shot the insurgent. At Hadithah, according to
Marine Corps news releases, Chessani joined his forces with Iraqi soldiers
and sent them on sweeps that kept them in a fighting mode rather than a
defensive posture. “It is always best to keep
on the offensive because as Marines, we trained to always be attacking,”
Chessani told a Marine Corps writer, detailing an operation that dug up 75
insurgent weapons caches. Lance Cpl. James Crossan, a
member of Kilo Company, told Seattle television station KING-5 that Hadithah
presented U.S. forces with unrelenting stress and the constant threat of
injury or death from improvised explosives. “One minute you’d be talking
to them, the next they’d be stabbing you in the back,” said Crossan. “You
just can’t tell who the bad guys are.” On Nov. 19, a small Marine
convoy was returning to camp after escorting Iraqi soldiers to an assignment.
A roadside bomb struck a Marine Humvee, killing Lance Cpl. Miguel “T.J.”
Terrazas, 20, of El Paso. Crossan, who was wounded in
the explosion, believes some of his former comrades simply snapped. “I think
it was direct retaliation,” he told KING-5 when asked about the alleged
massacre. “I think they were just blinded by hate … to see T.J. blown to
pieces. … They just lost control.” The initial Marine Corps
report said that 15 Iraqi civilians died in the explosion that killed
Terrazas and that eight Iraqi insurgents were killed in a subsequent
firefight. But “there was no firefight.
There was no (bomb) that killed these innocent people,” Rep. John Murtha,
D-Pa., a Marine veteran who has been briefed by the military on Hadithah,
told reporters May 18. “Our troops overreacted
because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold
blood,” he said. Military investigators are
trying to determine which Marines composed the false report and whether any
of their fellow Marines or superiors knowingly approved a coverup, said John
Sifton, a researcher for Human Rights Watch familiar with the incident. Paul Hackett, a lawyer who
is representing Capt. Kimber, said it was possible that Chessani, back at
headquarters, supervising a thousand Marines on a day that featured violent
engagements involving other units, was left in the dark about what happened
in Hadithah. “It would be very difficult
for a battalion commander to personally go and investigate every reported
action,” Hackett said. According to reports Tuesday
by National Public Radio and The New York Times, Chessani approved payments
to the families of Hadithah’s dead totaling $38,000, at a time when the
military was still asserting that the Iraqis had been killed by the roadside
bomb. Zacchea said such payments
in cases of deaths are an Iraqi custom that the military has adopted in the
war zone. “It may look like hush
money, but it’s not,” Zacchea said. “It’s not an admission of guilt.” Colorado state Treasurer
Mike Coffman, a Marine major who recently returned from a voluntary tour of
duty in Iraq, was assigned to the area around Hadithah after the November
incident and met there with Chessani. As a civil affairs officer, Coffman
said he took Chessani to the Hadithah city council after the shooting. There were many complaints
from Iraqis, but not about a massacre. “He was really focused,
really calm. There was no sign there was a problem,” said Coffman, who talked
to criminal investigators this week. Gary Anderson, a retired
Marine Corps colonel who now consults for the Pentagon, said Chessani didn’t
necessarily have to have done something wrong to be relieved of command. “You don’t have to be guilty
or even negligent,” Anderson said. “The fact that it was his battalion makes
it his problem.” External link:
http://www.denverpostbloghouse.com/washington/category/haditha-deaths/ |