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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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May 6th,
2007 - Propaganda Fear Cited in Account of Iraqi Killings |
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Propaganda Fear Cited in
Account of Iraqi Killings By Paul von Zielbauer New York Times May 6, 2007 Recently unclassified
documents suggest that senior officers viewed the killings of 24 Iraqi
civilians in Haditha in late 2005 as a potential public relations problem
that could fuel insurgent propaganda against the American military, leading
investigators to question whether the officers’ immediate response had been
intentionally misleading. Col. R. Gary Sokoloski, a
lawyer who was chief of staff to Maj. General Richard A. Huck, the division
commander, approved a news release about the killings that investigators
interviewing him in March 2006 suggested was “intentionally inaccurate”
because it stated, contrary to the facts at hand, that the civilians had been
killed by an insurgent’s bomb. According to a transcript of
the interview, Colonel Sokoloski told the investigators, “We knew the, you
know, the strategic implications of being permanently present in Haditha and
how badly the insurgents wanted us out of there.” But Colonel Sokoloski told
them he believed that the news release was accurate as written. “At the time, given the
information that was available to me and the objective to get that out for
the press” before insurgents put out their own information, “that is what we
went with.” The documents also show that
derailing enemy propaganda was important to senior Marine commanders,
including Col. Stephen W. Davis, a highly regarded regimental commander under
General Huck, who played down questions about the civilian killings from a
Time magazine reporter last year, long after the attacks and the civilian
toll were clear to the military. “Frankly, what I am looking
at is the advantage he’s giving the enemy,” Colonel Davis said of the
reporter, Tim McGirk, whose article in March 2006 was the first to report
that marines had killed civilians in Haditha, including women and children.
In their sworn statements, General Huck and his subordinates say they
dismissed Mr. McGirk’s inquiries because they saw him as a naďve conduit for
the mayor of Haditha, whom the Marines believed to be an insurgent. Four officers were charged
with failing to properly investigate the civilian killings. The first hearing
against one of the officers, Capt. Randy W. Stone, is set for Tuesday
morning, in a military courtroom at Camp Pendleton, Calif. Three enlisted
marines are charged with the killings. Their hearings, to determine whether
the charges warrant general courts-martial, are set to begin in the coming
weeks. As Marine Corps prosecutors prepare their evidence against Captain
Stone and his fellow officers, the unclassified documents suggest that senior
Marine commanders dismissed, played down or publicly mischaracterized the
civilian deaths in ways that a military investigation found deeply troubling.
The documents suggest that General Huck ignored early reports that women and
children were killed in the attack, and later told investigators that he was
unaware of regulations that required his staff to investigate further. The documents, including a
report by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell, copies of e-mail messages among
Marine officers in Haditha and sworn statements from several ranking
officers, focus only on how the Marine chain of command handled the killings
and have not been made public. Portions of the report and commanders’
reactions to the killings were reported by The Washington Post in January and
April. The documents were provided to The New York Times by people familiar
with the investigation only on condition that they not be identified. Captain Stone, 34, of
Dunkirk, Md., is accused of failing to investigate reports of the civilian
deaths. In an interview that repeated similar frustrations voiced by lawyers
for other accused officers, Captain Stone said he did not investigate the
killings because his superiors told him not to. “The regimental judge
advocate informed me that we don’t do investigations for ‘troops in contact’
situations,” said Captain Stone, referring to the regiment’s lawyer, Maj.
Carroll Connelly. Troops in contact is military language for combat against
enemy fighters. “That’s my understanding of
what higher wanted,” Captain Stone said, referring to his superior officers,
“and that’s why there was no investigation.” “I don’t think I did
anything wrong,” he went on. But he added, “There is a certain level of
disappointment that the Marine Corps decided that, in the entire chain of
command, that I am the one who should be held accountable.” Major Connelly, who was not
charged with any crime, has been granted immunity to testify at the coming
hearings, said Captain Stone’s civilian lawyer, Charles W. Gittins. After weighing evidence and
arguments from prosecutors and defense lawyers, an investigating officer
presiding over the hearing will determine whether there is sufficient
evidence to recommend a general court martial. The other three officers
facing dereliction charges are: Capt. Lucas M. McConnell, the company
commander; First Lt. Andrew A. Grayson, a Marine intelligence officer; and
Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, the battalion commander. The Haditha investigators
pored over thousands of e-mail messages, slide presentations, sworn
statements and field reports, sifting through sometimes contradictory
information and conflicting points of view to determine what officers at each
level knew and when they knew it. The documents and interviews
produced in the Bargewell investigation indicate that investigators had
suspected possible wrongdoing, at least initially, at even higher levels. “As you go up the chain of
command, the question always becomes, ‘Where do you stop?’” said John D.
Hutson, a former Navy judge advocate general, now the dean of the Franklin
Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire. “You have to be reasonably certain that
you’ll get a conviction.” Intangible considerations
can also influence military lawyers in deciding whether to recommend charges
when wrongdoing is more ambiguous. “If you know the guy and he’s done well
and he’s never done anything dishonest before,” Mr. Hutson said, “you might
give him the benefit of the doubt.” Documents declassified by
the military last week include an e-mail message within three hours of the
Haditha attack from a battalion operations officer to the regiment, a
superior command, saying that 15 civilians had been killed, “seven of which
were women and kids.” Senior commanders told
investigators that such early field reports were passed on to General Huck’s
staff. In a statement he gave at
Camp Lejeune, N.C., in April, nearly five months later, General Huck told
investigators that he could not recall being informed of reports that 15
civilians had been killed. He said he was overseeing several combat
operations at the time, and that he had no reason to believe that the
civilians killed in Haditha were not enemy fighters. “I didn’t know at the time
whether they were bad guys, noncombatants, or whatever,” General Huck said,
according to a transcript of the interview. Later in the interview, he added,
“They may have been guys pulling the trigger, for all I know.” General Huck, who is
expected to testify at the accused officers’ hearings, told investigators he
did not recall orders, called commanders critical information requirements
that required him to alert his superiors and investigate the circumstances of
any attack that killed at least three times as many civilians as American
forces. General Huck said that three
days after the Haditha episode, in the midst of two combat operations, he
visited Colonel Chessani, the battalion commander, who showed him an
electronic slide show of the attacks that, according to investigators, did
not mention the civilian deaths. “I sat there and took the
brief and no bells and whistles went off,” General Huck told investigators. The bells, the general said,
sounded two and a half months later, on Feb. 12, after he sent his boss, Lt.
Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the commander of ground operations in Iraq at the
time, an e-mail message with Colonel Chessani’s slide presentation attached
to it. “I support our account and
do not see a necessity for further investigation,” General Huck wrote in the
message to General Chiarelli in Baghdad, adding: “Allegedly, McGirk received
his info from the mayor of Haditha, who we strongly suspect to be an
insurgent.” Less than five hours later,
records show, General Chiarelli forwarded the e-mail message to his chief of
staff, Brig. Gen. Donald Campbell, with a note. “Don: We need to get
together at the first possible moment tomorrow morning,” he wrote. “We’re
going to have to do an investigation.” Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/middleeast/06haditha.html |