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June 8th,
2007 - Marine Tells of Orders to Erase Photos News article by the San Diego
Union-Tribune |
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Marine Tells of Orders to Erase
Photos By Alex Roth San Diego Union-Tribune June 8, 2007 Camp Pendleton - A Marine
who took pictures of 24 Iraqis killed by U.S. forces testified yesterday that
one of his commanders later ordered him to erase the photos, including those
showing dead women and children. “I just kind of looked at
him with shock,” Staff Sgt. Justin Laughner said about the instructions from
1st Lt. Andrew Grayson. “It just didn't seem right.
... To me, it looked like destroying evidence,” Laughner testified in a Camp
Pendleton courtroom. He said Grayson told him in
February 2006 to delete the images from his computer and that he promptly did
so. By then, a journalist's inquiry had prompted top military brass to start
investigating the killings, which occurred Nov. 19, 2005, in the city of
Haditha. “How did you feel about
that?” Lt. Col. Sean Sullivan, a military prosecutor, asked Laughner about
Grayson's order to delete the pictures. “Not good ... because I knew
it was wrong,” Laughner responded. “Did you feel you had just
obstructed justice with Lt. Grayson?” Sullivan continued. “Yes,” Laughner replied. The testimony came during
the pretrial hearing for Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, who oversaw Laughner
and Grayson as commander of Camp Pendleton's 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine
Regiment. Chessani and three other
officers, including Grayson, are accused of failing to properly investigate
the 24 deaths. Grayson's attorney couldn't be reached for comment yesterday. In addition, three enlisted
Marines are charged with murder in the Haditha incident. Prosecutors have
said these servicemen went on a revenge-motivated attack against civilians
after a makeshift bomb killed a fellow Marine. The defendants have said
that the civilians got caught up in legitimate combat between Marines and
insurgents. Laughner arrived at the
scene shortly after the 24 Iraqis were killed. Yesterday, he testified that
he photographed the bodies – some of them lying in the street and others in
two houses. Several Marines told him
they went on the offensive after coming under attack from insurgents, he
testified. But Laughner recalled finding no weapons or other evidence to
suggest that any of the dead were insurgents. In one house, Laughner said,
he photographed a woman “slumped over a child,” her arm wrapped around the
youngster, as if in protection. The woman and child were dead, he testified. Laughner said he didn't know
whether the pictures were ever shown to Chessani, whose lawyers contend that
their client never heard about the photos. Although Laughner eventually
deleted the images from his computer, copies of them remained elsewhere.
Those photos were introduced as evidence during yesterday's hearing. Also yesterday, Maj. Dana
Hyatt, a civil-affairs officer for the battalion, testified that Chessani
attended a Haditha City Council meeting about a week after the killings to
try to soothe tensions among Iraqi officials, who were irate about the
deaths. At the time, Hyatt said,
Chessani was under the impression that at least some of the victims were
insurgents and thus the killings were justified. “He told them his Marines
aren't out there targeting civilians and that they're not killers,” Hyatt
testified. The Marines eventually paid relatives of some of the victims a
total of $38,000, which Hyatt classified as “a condolence payment” rather
than “an admission of guilt.” Prosecutors and defense
lawyers are presenting evidence to Col. Chris Conlin, who will recommend
whether Chessani, 43, should face court-martial. If Chessani is tried and
convicted, he could be dismissed from the military and be sentenced to two
years in prison. External link: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/20070608-9999-7m8chessani.html At Haditha Hearing, Dueling
Views of a Battalion Commander By Paul von Zielbauer New York Times June 8, 2007 Camp Pendleton, Calif., June
7 - Through three combat deployments in Iraq, a Bronze Star and numerous
combat ribbons, Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani’s Marine Corps career has been
defined, it seems, by terrorist bombs. In October 1983, news of the
attack by Muslim extremists on a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut that killed
241 service members compelled Colonel Chessani, then a teenager from Rangely,
Colo., to embrace Christianity and, later, to follow two brothers into the
service. In November 2005, Colonel Chessani was a battalion commander in
Haditha, Iraq, when a roadside bomb planted by Sunni Arab insurgents killed
one of his marines and wounded two others. Infantrymen under his
command, seeking to engage the enemy, instead killed 24 civilians. Last year,
the Marine Corps charged Colonel Chessani, 43, and three other officers with
dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the episode properly and
relieved him of his command. In a military hearing into
whether he should face a formal court-martial, witnesses and military
documents have helped paint two contradictory portraits of Colonel Chessani,
the highest-ranking Marine officer charged since the Iraq war began more than
four years ago. On one side, battalion
officers and enlisted men testifying under oath described Colonel Chessani,
who at the time of the Haditha killings was on his third combat tour in Iraq,
as a physically courageous leader whose integrity was beyond question. “Lieutenant Colonel Chessani
is by far the strongest moral leader I’ve ever worked with,” Sgt. Maj. Edward
T. Sax, the battalion’s senior noncommissioned officer, testified last week.
Maj. Samuel H. Carrasco, the Third Battalion’s operations officer, said
Colonel Chessani’s “truthfulness is beyond reproach.” On Tuesday, Colonel
Chessani’s adjutant, First Lt. Mark E. Towers, called him “a godly man” who
spent a half-hour every morning in Iraq quietly reading the Bible in his
quarters. On the other side, Marine
prosecutors have used testimony from Colonel Chessani’s subordinate and
superior officers to portray him as a touchy and incurious field commander
who, instead of investigating, sent deceptive reports about the Haditha
killings up the chain of command. Colonel Chessani never asked
for a detailed briefing about how and why the marines killed 24 civilians,
according to testimony, and did not inspect the scene of the killings,
despite a report to superiors that he had. Three months later,
responding to questions about the civilian deaths from a Time magazine
reporter, Colonel Chessani sent an e-mail message to his regimental commander
that inaccurately stated that several AK-47s were found in a home where
marines had killed several women and children, military documents show. Major Carrasco, under
questioning from prosecutors, also described Colonel Chessani as angrily
shouting, “My men are not murderers!” after Major Carrasco and another
battalion officer advised him, on Jan. 29, 2006, to open an inquiry into the
killings. Amid all the courtroom
characterizations of him during the past week, Colonel Chessani, slightly
built and with thinning gray hair, sat stone-faced at the defense table in
his desert fatigues, jotting notes but rarely talking even to his lawyers. By all accounts, including
his own sworn statements to military investigators examining his response to
the civilian killings, Colonel Chessani anguished over the casualties his
marines suffered that day in Haditha - the most violent and chaotic day in
the battalion’s combat tour. From a command post about
seven miles from Haditha, he viewed insurgent movements via video from an
aerial drone and directed several attacks and counterattacks by marines
against insurgents in residential areas around the city, according to
testimony this week. Colonel Chessani visited one battle site later that day,
but did not inspect the homes where 19 of the 24 civilians were killed by
grenades and rifle fire. In a sworn statement to
military investigators in March 2006, Colonel Chessani said he never
suspected that the killings were improper under the American laws of war,
because they followed an attack by insurgents that, he believed, was intended
to provoke lethal return fire by marines in a residential area. “I believe the enemy picked
the ground where he wanted to attack us,” Colonel Chessani said in a
statement dated March 20, which has not been officially released. “They were
- they had set this up so that there would be collateral damage.” He later added, “Enemy had
picked the place, he had picked the time and the location for a reason. I
believed he made a definite choice in where it was and thought that, you
know, he wanted to make us look bad.” Marine prosecutors have
suggested that Colonel Chessani was, in fact, so intent on not letting
insurgents use the civilian deaths against the marines that he ignored
evidence that his troops, under sporadic small-arms fire, had violated rules
of engagement in killing civilians in their homes. In a statement he gave on
March 26, 2006, to an investigator from Naval Criminal Investigative Service
from the base in Asad, Iraq, Colonel Chessani admitted, in stoical,
confessional language, that he could have trained his marines better. “Looking back, I could have
done a better job preparing the marines for this deployment as it relates to
R.O.E. training,” his statement said, using the abbreviation for rules of
engagement. That might have included using live-fire training that required
infantrymen to discern enemy targets from civilians. Perhaps the most important
arbiter of Colonel Chessani’s actions in Haditha is Col. Christopher Conlin,
the investigating officer who will recommend whether the charges should
proceed to a court-martial. Colonel Conlin, a former Iraq battalion commander
presiding over his first military hearing, has made several comments that
suggest a critical view of Colonel Chessani. For example, last week,
Colonel Conlin told a witness that many other battalion commanders would have
joined their troops in the battle area on the day of combat in November 2005,
instead of remaining miles away. On Tuesday, Colonel Conlin
asked Lieutenant Towers, who was a battalion legal adviser in Iraq in 2005,
if a report by Colonel Chessani’s staff to the regiment stating that the
colonel had examined the scene of the civilian casualties “implied that he
went there.” Lieutenant Towers answered
firmly, “Yes, sir.” Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/washington/08haditha.html |