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June 4th, 2006 - In Haditha
Killings, Details Came Slowly |
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In Haditha Killings, Details
Came Slowly Official Version Is at Odds With Evidence By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, June 4, 2006; A01 At 5 p.m. Nov. 19, near the
end of one of the most violent days the Marine Corps had experienced in the
Upper Euphrates Valley, a call went out for trucks to collect the bodies of 24
Iraqi civilians. The unit that arrived in the
farming town of Haditha found babies, women and children shot in the head and
chest. An old man in a wheelchair had been shot nine times. A group of girls,
ages 1 to 14, lay dead. Everyone had been killed by gunfire, according to
death certificates issued later. The next day, Capt. Jeffrey
S. Pool, a Marine spokesman in Iraq, released a terse statement: Fifteen
Iraqis "were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in
Haditha. Immediately after the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small
arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight
insurgents and wounding another." Despite what Marine
witnesses saw when they arrived, that official version has been allowed to
stand for six months. Who lied about the killings, who knew the truth and
what, if anything, they did about it are at the core of one of the
potentially most embarrassing and damaging events of the Iraq war, one that
some say may surpass the detainee abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison. The Marine Corps is saying
only that it would be inappropriate to comment while investigations are
underway. But since that Saturday afternoon in November, evidence has been
accumulating steadily that the official version was wrong and misleading. The
more military investigators learned about what happened that day in Haditha,
the more they grew disturbed. On Nov. 29, the Marine unit
in question - Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment - had a
memorial service at a Marine base for Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, a
well-liked 20-year-old from El Paso, Tex. He was killed in a roadside bomb
explosion that appears to have been the trigger for what looks to
investigators like revenge shootings of Iraqi civilians. Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan
Briones said that Terrazas had been "like a brother to me." Staff
Sgt. Travis Fields, Terrazas's platoon sergeant, called him "a man of
heart." Not long after the bodies were discovered, Maj. Dana Hyatt, a
Marine reservist whose job in part was to work with the civilian population
when damage was inflicted by the U.S. military, paid out $38,000 in
compensation to the families of the 15 dead. The Iraqis received the maximum
the United States offers - $2,500 per death, plus a small amount for other
damage. Kilo Company did not dwell
on what happened Nov. 19. Mike Coffman, who was a Marine Reserve officer in
Haditha at the time, recalled that another officer, telling him about the
incident, "indicated to me that he thought from the beginning that it
was overreaction by the Marines, but he didn't think anything criminal had
occurred." When the Haditha city
council met in January for the first time in many months, "none of them
[Iraqi members] ever raised it as an issue," said Coffman, who attended
the meeting. Rather, he said, they complained about how car and truck traffic
in the area had been shut down after two Marines were killed at a checkpoint
bombing. That same month, a top
military official arrived in Iraq who would play a key role in the case: Lt.
Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the new No. 2 military officer in the country. He is
an unusual general in today's Army, with none of the "good old boy"
persona seen in many other top commanders. He had praised an article by a
British officer that was sharply critical of U.S. officers in Iraq for using
tactics that alienated the population. He wanted U.S. forces to operate
differently than they had been doing. Not long after Chiarelli
arrived in Baghdad, an Iraqi journalism student gave an Iraqi human rights
group a video he had taken in Haditha the day after the incident. It showed
the scene at the local morgue and the damage in the houses where the killings
took place. The video reached Time magazine, whose reporters began
questioning U.S. military officials. Pool, the Marine captain, sent the
reporters a dismissive e-mail saying that they were falling for al-Qaeda
propaganda, the magazine said recently. "I cannot believe you're buying
any of this," he wrote. Pool declined last week to comment on any aspect
of the Haditha incident. But Army Lt. Col. Barry
Johnson, a more senior spokesman in Baghdad, notified Chiarelli of the
questions. The general's response to his public affairs office was short:
Just brief the Time magazine reporter on the military investigation into the
incident that Chiarelli assumed had been conducted. The surprising word came
back: There had been no investigation. Chiarelli told subordinates
in early February he was amazed by that response, according to an Army
officer in Iraq. He directed that an inquiry commence as soon as possible. He
wanted to know what had happened in Haditha, and also why no investigation
had begun. Army Col. Gregory Watt was
tapped to start an investigation and by March 9, he told Chiarelli that he
had reached two conclusions, according to the Army officer. One was that death
certificates showed that the 24 Iraqis who died that day - the 15 the Marines
said had died in the bomb blast and others they said were insurgents - had
been killed by gunshot rather than a bomb, as the official statement had
said. The other was that the Marine Corps had not investigated the deaths, as
is the U.S. military's typical procedure in Iraq, particularly when so many
civilians are involved. Individually, either finding would have been
disturbing. Together, they were stunning. On March 10, the findings
were given to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, the
first Marine ever to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rumsfeld told
aides that the case promised to be a major problem. He called it
"really, really bad - as bad or worse than Abu Ghraib," recalled
one Pentagon official. On March 11, President Bush was informed, according to
the White House. At the Marine Corps
headquarters, there was "genuine surprise at high levels," said an
Army officer who has been working with the Marine Corps on the case. "It
caught a lot of people off guard." That weekend, almost four
months after the incident, "we went to general quarters," recalled
one Marine general, using the naval expression for the call to arms. The
following Monday, March 13, Marine officers began briefing key members of
Congress on defense-related committees. Their message was succinct: Something
highly disturbing had happened in Haditha, and its repercussions could be
serious. The alacrity of the Marine response surprised some of Rumsfeld's
aides in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. OSD, as it is called at the
Pentagon, told the Marine Corps a few days later not to say anything to
anyone about the investigation, recalled the general. Too late, the Marines
responded, we've already briefed Capitol Hill. The Marines began their own
investigation almost immediately, following up on Watt's inquiry, but quickly
realized that to credibly examine the acts of their top commanders in Iraq,
they would need someone outside their service. The Army offered up Maj. Gen.
Eldon A. Bargewell, a career Special Operations officer who first saw combat
as a sergeant in the Vietnam War, to look into the matter. The Marines, who
are part of the Navy Department, also turned over the question of criminal
acts to agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Notified on March
12, the NCIS immediately sent a team of three Iraq-based investigators to
Haditha, one of the most violent areas in Iraq. A few days later, as the
scope of the case sank in, it dispatched a team of reinforcements from the
United States. But even then, nothing had
been made public about the November event that might have distinguished it
from Iraq's daily bloodshed. Then, on March 19, the Time magazine article
appeared. "I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and
then in the head," the magazine quoted Eman Waleed, 9, as saying. Most
of the victims were shot at close range, the director of the local hospital
told Time. The first public indication
that the military was taking those allegations seriously came on April 7,
when Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, a reserved, quietly professional officer
from northwestern Colorado, was relieved of command of the 3rd Battalion of
the 1st Marines, Kilo Company's parent unit. Also removed were two of his
subordinates - Kilo's commander, Capt. Luke McConnell, and the commander of
another company. Even then, the Marine Corps didn't specify why the actions
were taken, beyond saying that the officers had lost the confidence of their
superiors. Then, on May 17, Rep. John
P. Murtha (D-Pa.) let the news slip out. In the middle of a rambling
statement at the outset of a news conference on Capitol Hill, he said -
almost as an aside - that what happened in Haditha was "much worse than
reported in Time magazine." He asserted that the investigations would
reveal that "our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and
they killed innocent civilians in cold blood." The reporters present barely
focused on what Murtha had said. When the congressman finished his statement,
the first reporter asked about Iraqi security forces. The second asked about
U.S. troop withdrawals. The third asked about congressional support for
Murtha's resolution calling for a U.S. pullout from Iraq. Finally, the fourth
asked about Haditha. Murtha responded with a bit more detail: "They
actually went into the houses and killed women and children. And there was
about twice as many as originally reported by Time." Even then, his
comments captured little attention and were not front-page news. It took a few days for the
horror of what Murtha was talking about to sink in. "This is just My Lai
all over again," Vaughan Taylor, a former military prosecutor and
instructor in criminal law at the Army's school for military lawyers, said
last week. "It's going to do us enormous damage." The facts of the shooting
incident seem now to be largely known, with military insiders saying that
recent news articles are similar to the internal reports they have received
from investigators. But considerable mystery remains about how Marine
commanders handled the incident and contributed to what some officials
suspect was a coverup. "The real issue is how far up the chain of
command it goes," said one senior Marine familiar with the case.
"Who knew it, and why didn't they do something about it?" The Marine Corps still has
not corrected its misleading Nov. 20 statement asserting that the Iraqi
civilians were killed in a bomb blast. A Marine Corps spokesman didn't return
calls on Friday asking why it had not. Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson
and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. © 2006 The Washington Post
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