http://www.suntimes.com/output/iraq/cst-nws-marines28.html
U.S. braces for 'Iraq's My Lai'
May 28, 2006
BY ROBERT H. REID
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The U.S. military is getting ready for a major scandal over the alleged slaying of Iraqi civilians by Marines in Haditha -- charges so serious they could threaten President Bush's effort to rally support at home for an increasingly unpopular war.
Although the case has attracted little attention so far in Iraq, it still could inflame hostility to the U.S. presence just as Iraq's new government is getting established, and complicate efforts to quell the insurgency.
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the criminal investigation should be completed by next month. A report on the probe will be available then, Pace said Saturday in a visit to Chicago.
A Pentagon official said investigators think Marines committed unprovoked murder in the deaths of about two dozen in November.
Regardless of the outcome, top U.S. Marine Gen. Michael Hagee has been sent to Iraq and will be visiting several parts of the United States "to remind all the [Marine] leaders and to instill in our Marines the fundamental understanding of what Marines do and not do in combat," Pace said.
Haditha is not the only case pending: Wednesday, the military announced an investigation into allegations that Marines killed a civilian April 26 near Fallujah. The statement said "service members" had been sent back to the United States "pending results of the criminal investigation."
Last July, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations accused the Marines of killing his 21-year-old cousin during a search of his family's home in Haditha. Results from a criminal investigation have not been announced.
Together, the cases present the most serious challenge to U.S. handling of the Iraq war since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
"What happened at Haditha appears to be outright murder," said Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch. "The Haditha massacre will go down as Iraq's My Lai," a reference to the Vietnam War incident in which American soldiers slaughtered up to 500 civilians in 1968.
AP with Sun-Times Staff Reporter Rummana Hussain contributing
Full Version: Haditha
Common Ground Common Sense > Issues that Affect Our Lives > U.S. Military Issues > U.S. Military Issues Archive
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,...2201470,00.html
The Times May 29, 2006
Times Investigation
Marines and the 'massacre': a neighbour tells of aftermath
From Ali Hamdani in al-Haditha and Ned Parker in Baghdad
GRAPHIC accounts of the apparent slaughter of unarmed civilians have been obtained by The Times as Washington braces itself for the results of an investigation into what threatens to be the most damaging military scandal in Iraq.
On Saturday Iman Hassan, a 10-year-old Iraqi girl, told The Times how she had watched US marines kill her mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, four-year-old cousin and two uncles.
Residents in the insurgent stronghold of al-Haditha have now stepped forward to corroborate elements of Iman’s story and to describe to The Times the murder of a second family, which included five children, the youngest of whom were two and three years old.
The events threaten to land a major blow to the US military’s reputation in Iraq.
An official investigation has already resulted in the removal of Lieutenant-Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, the commanding officer, and Captain Luke McConnell and Captain James Kimber, two company commanders, from their duties in the 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment of the 1st Marine Division.
Three marines are to face criminal charges, including homicide, while nine other marines may also face court martial, according to Pentagon sources.
Fallout from the inquiry, which is expected to be made public next month, is already being felt in Washington and the military establishment in Iraq. One US officer speaking anonymously in Iraq said what happened in al-Haditha was “clearly pretty awful”.
In Washington, Congressman John Murtha, a former Marine and a harsh critic of the war, said that the episode might prove to be America’s darkest hour in Iraq.
“This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people. And we’re set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib,” he told ABC television.
The trouble started when Marine Corporal Miguel Terrazas, 20, was killed by a roadside bomb on the morning of November 19 last year in alHaditha, where the US military and rebels have clashed regularly since the 2003 invasion.
What ensued is the subject of controversy. At the time the Marines said that 15 civilians were killed in the bombing along with Terrazas.
They later amended their story to say that the civilians had died during a gunbattle between troops and insurgents.
The case was reopened after a video made by a trainee Iraqi journalist was handed to Time magazine in January. The footage showed bloodstains, bullet holes and shrapnel marks inside Iman’s home and triggered a US Marine inquiry.
“Who covered it up? Why did they cover it up? Why did they wait so long?” Mr Murtha said.
The latest accounts given to The Times paint a gruesome picture of events on November 19. About a quarter of an hour after the attack on Iman’s house, Mohammed Basit, 23, an engineering student, said that he watched as Marines entered the home of his neighbour, Salim Rasif, He peered from a window as the family, including Salim’s wife, sister-in-law and their five children, rushed into a bedroom.
“I saw them all gathering in their parents’ room, then we heard a bang which was most likely a hand grenade, then we heard shooting,” he said.
Fearing for his life, he moved away from the window.
Throughout the next day the Americans cordoned off Salim and Iman’s homes, which are located about 20 metres apart. The next night Basit and his father slipped inside Salim’s house.
“The blood was everywhere in Salim’s bedroom,” Basit said. “I saw organs and flesh on the ground and a liver on the bed. Blood splattered the ceiling. The bullet holes were in the walls and in different parts of the house.
“We found an unexploded grenade in the bathroom, which had been set on fire. There was shrapnel and a crater on the floor and the wall of the bathroom.”
Later Basit joined relatives and friends who went to al-Haditha mortuary to pick up the bodies of those whom the Marines had killed. The corpses were zipped in plastic bags. “They were all shot, even the kids. They were shot more than one time, mostly in the chest and the head,” he claimed.
Salim’s daughters — A’isha, 3, Zainab, 2, Noora, 15, and Saba’a, 11 — and his eight-year-old son, Mohammed, were among the dead.
In a separate development, a resident of al-Haditha came forward with an account corroborating the story told by 10-year-old Iman about the murder of her family.
Abdul Basit, 45, Iman’s neighbour and cousin, gave details that matched the girl’s description of watching her uncle being shot dead.
About 15 minutes after hearing an explosion in Iman’s home just 30 metres away, Abdul Basit said that the girl’s aunt, Hiba, raced outside crying “they slaughtered them, they slaughtered them” and rushed into Abdul’s home.
Congressmen who have been briefed on the investigation expect it to conclude that up to 24 civilians were killed. While the claims are contentious, the US military has not disputed the seriousness of the allegations.
“The bottom line is there was enough evidence presented to warrant a criminal investigation . . . There was enough credibility there to warrant a criminal investigation,” said Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, the US military spokesman in Iraq.
The Times May 29, 2006
Times Investigation
Marines and the 'massacre': a neighbour tells of aftermath
From Ali Hamdani in al-Haditha and Ned Parker in Baghdad
GRAPHIC accounts of the apparent slaughter of unarmed civilians have been obtained by The Times as Washington braces itself for the results of an investigation into what threatens to be the most damaging military scandal in Iraq.
On Saturday Iman Hassan, a 10-year-old Iraqi girl, told The Times how she had watched US marines kill her mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, four-year-old cousin and two uncles.
Residents in the insurgent stronghold of al-Haditha have now stepped forward to corroborate elements of Iman’s story and to describe to The Times the murder of a second family, which included five children, the youngest of whom were two and three years old.
The events threaten to land a major blow to the US military’s reputation in Iraq.
An official investigation has already resulted in the removal of Lieutenant-Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, the commanding officer, and Captain Luke McConnell and Captain James Kimber, two company commanders, from their duties in the 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment of the 1st Marine Division.
Three marines are to face criminal charges, including homicide, while nine other marines may also face court martial, according to Pentagon sources.
Fallout from the inquiry, which is expected to be made public next month, is already being felt in Washington and the military establishment in Iraq. One US officer speaking anonymously in Iraq said what happened in al-Haditha was “clearly pretty awful”.
In Washington, Congressman John Murtha, a former Marine and a harsh critic of the war, said that the episode might prove to be America’s darkest hour in Iraq.
“This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people. And we’re set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib,” he told ABC television.
The trouble started when Marine Corporal Miguel Terrazas, 20, was killed by a roadside bomb on the morning of November 19 last year in alHaditha, where the US military and rebels have clashed regularly since the 2003 invasion.
What ensued is the subject of controversy. At the time the Marines said that 15 civilians were killed in the bombing along with Terrazas.
They later amended their story to say that the civilians had died during a gunbattle between troops and insurgents.
The case was reopened after a video made by a trainee Iraqi journalist was handed to Time magazine in January. The footage showed bloodstains, bullet holes and shrapnel marks inside Iman’s home and triggered a US Marine inquiry.
“Who covered it up? Why did they cover it up? Why did they wait so long?” Mr Murtha said.
The latest accounts given to The Times paint a gruesome picture of events on November 19. About a quarter of an hour after the attack on Iman’s house, Mohammed Basit, 23, an engineering student, said that he watched as Marines entered the home of his neighbour, Salim Rasif, He peered from a window as the family, including Salim’s wife, sister-in-law and their five children, rushed into a bedroom.
“I saw them all gathering in their parents’ room, then we heard a bang which was most likely a hand grenade, then we heard shooting,” he said.
Fearing for his life, he moved away from the window.
Throughout the next day the Americans cordoned off Salim and Iman’s homes, which are located about 20 metres apart. The next night Basit and his father slipped inside Salim’s house.
“The blood was everywhere in Salim’s bedroom,” Basit said. “I saw organs and flesh on the ground and a liver on the bed. Blood splattered the ceiling. The bullet holes were in the walls and in different parts of the house.
“We found an unexploded grenade in the bathroom, which had been set on fire. There was shrapnel and a crater on the floor and the wall of the bathroom.”
Later Basit joined relatives and friends who went to al-Haditha mortuary to pick up the bodies of those whom the Marines had killed. The corpses were zipped in plastic bags. “They were all shot, even the kids. They were shot more than one time, mostly in the chest and the head,” he claimed.
Salim’s daughters — A’isha, 3, Zainab, 2, Noora, 15, and Saba’a, 11 — and his eight-year-old son, Mohammed, were among the dead.
In a separate development, a resident of al-Haditha came forward with an account corroborating the story told by 10-year-old Iman about the murder of her family.
Abdul Basit, 45, Iman’s neighbour and cousin, gave details that matched the girl’s description of watching her uncle being shot dead.
About 15 minutes after hearing an explosion in Iman’s home just 30 metres away, Abdul Basit said that the girl’s aunt, Hiba, raced outside crying “they slaughtered them, they slaughtered them” and rushed into Abdul’s home.
Congressmen who have been briefed on the investigation expect it to conclude that up to 24 civilians were killed. While the claims are contentious, the US military has not disputed the seriousness of the allegations.
“The bottom line is there was enough evidence presented to warrant a criminal investigation . . . There was enough credibility there to warrant a criminal investigation,” said Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, the US military spokesman in Iraq.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski153.html
What May Come of the Haditha Massacre?
by Karen Kwiatkowski
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer again bumbles into old news and proudly reports it. He’s shocked, shocked, that Marines in Haditha murdered as many as 24 Iraqi civilians in cold blood last November and then tried to cover it up.
Also shocked is Senator John Warner, one of many war-loving old bastards residing comfortably in the US Capitol. Warner, icon of the aging, do nothing and morally challenged Senate that has cursed this country throughout the late 20th and early 21st century, looked very serious today after being briefed by the Pentagon brass on a horrendous bit of terroristic brutality committed by US Marines in the name of freedom, democracy, human rights, and anti-terrorism.
Warner, and McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden all stand in sharp contrast to another aging politician, Representative John Murtha, who has single-handedly made what happened in Haditha a major domestic news story. Murtha has been willing to act morally in the face of grave political danger. God bless him, and the Walter Jones, and the Ron Pauls and others in Congress who have bucked the administration and tried to do the right thing to remedy this illegal invasion, ongoing U.S. quagmire, and unnatural disaster for 25 million Iraqis.
The Haditha story has been on the internet for months. Knight Ridder seems to have broken the story here in March. The Marine Corps has likely known since last year, or perhaps they only discovered it when they read the Iraqi police report. Murders happen, you know.
Blitzer’s dismay is probably not sincere. It is, after all, a great news story. American military leaders are also expressing consternation. Are they unhappy that the evidence was not completely covered up? Are they saddened about a tarnished image for the Marine Corps? Are they concerned about what this may portend for the even less well-trained and disciplined US Army? Are they worried that Americans might begin to look more closely at contracted US mercenaries, unbound by law or tradition?
No flag officer seems interested in going to the mat for any of the young men in the US military who stand accused of war crimes – and who very likely will be found guilty on most counts. This is a perfect replay of the lack of any responsibility – not even the most infinitesimal drop of responsibility – exhibited by senior military and civilian leaders after the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.
Instead, modern American military leaders, like trained dogs, sit silently alert. They are not alert to the physical, psychological and moral damage to Americans in uniform brought on by enforcing a wrongheaded police state in a shattered Iraq. Instead, they are alert only to any sign that their political masters may be displeased. Barring that, our great military leaders are as silent as the tombs in which nearly 2,500 Americans already rest.
No emperor or king, no Stalin or Pol Pot, could be more delighted with the state of our current military leadership.
The recent short-lived case of several retired generals calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation was met by a blast of official Pentagon talking points defending their man. Our doe-eyed mainstream media thanked the Pentagon for the talking points, and went on to far more important human-interest stories. The administration counterattack did not attempt to take on the truth. The generals were absolutely right. Rumsfeld has overwhelmingly proven himself to be the most incompetent, discredited, disliked, and ineffective Secretary of Defense since McNamara. Instead, the administration counterattack on the dissenting generals was aimed at the character of those so impertinent that they first retired, and then carefully, honestly spoke their mind.
Haditha is the story of what happens in war. It’s cruel, unjust, ugly, and criminal. Babies get shot, old women massacred. Get used to it. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
And yet, the Haditha horror is a golden opportunity. The American people and the American military brass might use it to ask why American soldiers and Marines are even in Iraq, and what is our mission there? Is it policing? Is it Chapter 7 peacekeeping? Is it nation-building? Is it to provide security for American civilians and politicos in the Green Zone? Is it to occupy and secure the world’s largest (and clearly least needed) embassy, or perhaps the world’s biggest and nicest new military bases? If so, why? Are we there to win? What are we winning? How can we tell? Is there really a prize at the bottom of this Cracker Jack box called Iraq, or just a sticky crumbly mess? Does anyone perceive the prize may actually be the continued destruction, chaos and hate in the region? If this is true, can that be in any way defensible or moral?
Every American needs to really think about each of these questions. We are living with someone’s agenda in Iraq – but is it truly our agenda? Can we say we own it?
A few months after the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush landed on the USS Lincoln and said, "Mission accomplished!" Upon this Bush command, every U.S. general in Iraq should have packed up his troops and sent them home.
Instead, we are building mega-bases, monstrous embassies, forcing false unity governments, and killing children in their homes. We are not picking up garbage, pumping oil, hiring Iraqis, repairing water systems or electric grids, or roads, bridges, and factories.
While the truth of what I have written here is verifiable by every American soldier and Marine in Iraq, and every general officer they serve, not a single flag officer on active duty will risk his reputation as a good boy who sits and stays.
We will figuratively hang those Marines who participated in the slaughter at Haditha. We will also crucify those who did not participate, but failed to stop it, and those who helped to cover it up. We will not pity those young Americans we trained to kill when they failed to show mercy in a place they don’t understand, on a mission as frivolous as it is insincere. We will hold them responsible.
We ought to set our sights a bit higher, and begin in a serious way to politically destroy those people in Washington who placed our young men and women in Iraq, on such a frivolous and insincere mission. Those worthy of a criminal punishment include much of the Senate, many in the House, and of course, our great decider, his untrustworthy Vice President, and their Pentagon senior staff.
Amazingly, mainstream Americans have failed to hold our leadership accountable – for fear of being called traitorous, or ill-informed, or fanciful, or terrorist-lovers. We have been afraid to see what we are really doing. We have been reluctant to recognize what we as a nation have become, and we don’t really want to know what it has cost. Haditha is a wakeup call, not only for the Marine Corps, but for every American.
Will we now rise and shine, connect with our neighbors and our congressmen and our political parties to challenge our continued military presence in Iraq and truly define our real purpose there? Or will we, like the American generals on their gilded leashes, roll over, sit and stay?
May 27, 2006
Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for militaryweek.com, hosts the call-in radio show American Forum on Saturday nights, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com. To receive automatic announcements of new articles and upcoming guests on her American Forum radio program, click here.
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
What May Come of the Haditha Massacre?
by Karen Kwiatkowski
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer again bumbles into old news and proudly reports it. He’s shocked, shocked, that Marines in Haditha murdered as many as 24 Iraqi civilians in cold blood last November and then tried to cover it up.
Also shocked is Senator John Warner, one of many war-loving old bastards residing comfortably in the US Capitol. Warner, icon of the aging, do nothing and morally challenged Senate that has cursed this country throughout the late 20th and early 21st century, looked very serious today after being briefed by the Pentagon brass on a horrendous bit of terroristic brutality committed by US Marines in the name of freedom, democracy, human rights, and anti-terrorism.
Warner, and McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden all stand in sharp contrast to another aging politician, Representative John Murtha, who has single-handedly made what happened in Haditha a major domestic news story. Murtha has been willing to act morally in the face of grave political danger. God bless him, and the Walter Jones, and the Ron Pauls and others in Congress who have bucked the administration and tried to do the right thing to remedy this illegal invasion, ongoing U.S. quagmire, and unnatural disaster for 25 million Iraqis.
The Haditha story has been on the internet for months. Knight Ridder seems to have broken the story here in March. The Marine Corps has likely known since last year, or perhaps they only discovered it when they read the Iraqi police report. Murders happen, you know.
Blitzer’s dismay is probably not sincere. It is, after all, a great news story. American military leaders are also expressing consternation. Are they unhappy that the evidence was not completely covered up? Are they saddened about a tarnished image for the Marine Corps? Are they concerned about what this may portend for the even less well-trained and disciplined US Army? Are they worried that Americans might begin to look more closely at contracted US mercenaries, unbound by law or tradition?
No flag officer seems interested in going to the mat for any of the young men in the US military who stand accused of war crimes – and who very likely will be found guilty on most counts. This is a perfect replay of the lack of any responsibility – not even the most infinitesimal drop of responsibility – exhibited by senior military and civilian leaders after the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.
Instead, modern American military leaders, like trained dogs, sit silently alert. They are not alert to the physical, psychological and moral damage to Americans in uniform brought on by enforcing a wrongheaded police state in a shattered Iraq. Instead, they are alert only to any sign that their political masters may be displeased. Barring that, our great military leaders are as silent as the tombs in which nearly 2,500 Americans already rest.
No emperor or king, no Stalin or Pol Pot, could be more delighted with the state of our current military leadership.
The recent short-lived case of several retired generals calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation was met by a blast of official Pentagon talking points defending their man. Our doe-eyed mainstream media thanked the Pentagon for the talking points, and went on to far more important human-interest stories. The administration counterattack did not attempt to take on the truth. The generals were absolutely right. Rumsfeld has overwhelmingly proven himself to be the most incompetent, discredited, disliked, and ineffective Secretary of Defense since McNamara. Instead, the administration counterattack on the dissenting generals was aimed at the character of those so impertinent that they first retired, and then carefully, honestly spoke their mind.
Haditha is the story of what happens in war. It’s cruel, unjust, ugly, and criminal. Babies get shot, old women massacred. Get used to it. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
And yet, the Haditha horror is a golden opportunity. The American people and the American military brass might use it to ask why American soldiers and Marines are even in Iraq, and what is our mission there? Is it policing? Is it Chapter 7 peacekeeping? Is it nation-building? Is it to provide security for American civilians and politicos in the Green Zone? Is it to occupy and secure the world’s largest (and clearly least needed) embassy, or perhaps the world’s biggest and nicest new military bases? If so, why? Are we there to win? What are we winning? How can we tell? Is there really a prize at the bottom of this Cracker Jack box called Iraq, or just a sticky crumbly mess? Does anyone perceive the prize may actually be the continued destruction, chaos and hate in the region? If this is true, can that be in any way defensible or moral?
Every American needs to really think about each of these questions. We are living with someone’s agenda in Iraq – but is it truly our agenda? Can we say we own it?
A few months after the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush landed on the USS Lincoln and said, "Mission accomplished!" Upon this Bush command, every U.S. general in Iraq should have packed up his troops and sent them home.
Instead, we are building mega-bases, monstrous embassies, forcing false unity governments, and killing children in their homes. We are not picking up garbage, pumping oil, hiring Iraqis, repairing water systems or electric grids, or roads, bridges, and factories.
While the truth of what I have written here is verifiable by every American soldier and Marine in Iraq, and every general officer they serve, not a single flag officer on active duty will risk his reputation as a good boy who sits and stays.
We will figuratively hang those Marines who participated in the slaughter at Haditha. We will also crucify those who did not participate, but failed to stop it, and those who helped to cover it up. We will not pity those young Americans we trained to kill when they failed to show mercy in a place they don’t understand, on a mission as frivolous as it is insincere. We will hold them responsible.
We ought to set our sights a bit higher, and begin in a serious way to politically destroy those people in Washington who placed our young men and women in Iraq, on such a frivolous and insincere mission. Those worthy of a criminal punishment include much of the Senate, many in the House, and of course, our great decider, his untrustworthy Vice President, and their Pentagon senior staff.
Amazingly, mainstream Americans have failed to hold our leadership accountable – for fear of being called traitorous, or ill-informed, or fanciful, or terrorist-lovers. We have been afraid to see what we are really doing. We have been reluctant to recognize what we as a nation have become, and we don’t really want to know what it has cost. Haditha is a wakeup call, not only for the Marine Corps, but for every American.
Will we now rise and shine, connect with our neighbors and our congressmen and our political parties to challenge our continued military presence in Iraq and truly define our real purpose there? Or will we, like the American generals on their gilded leashes, roll over, sit and stay?
May 27, 2006
Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for militaryweek.com, hosts the call-in radio show American Forum on Saturday nights, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com. To receive automatic announcements of new articles and upcoming guests on her American Forum radio program, click here.
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/printpage...9290252,00.html
US lawmaker to probe Iraq deaths
From correspondents in Washington
29may06
A SENIOR Republican senator vowed today to hold hearings on the role of US marines in the killings of up to two dozen Iraqi civilians in November as a leading Democratic war critic alleged a military cover-up.
The US military is investigating the November 19 incident in the town of Haditha, a case some American media are comparing to the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam when US soldiers slaughtered up to 500 villagers.
The military has said 15 civilians were killed in Haditha, about 220km north-west of Baghdad, while other accounts put the number at about 24.
Senator John Warner told an ABC news program the Senate committee he heads would probe "what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it".
"I can assure the American public this morning, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, I'll do exactly what we did with Abu Ghraib", where detainees were photographed enduring abuse at the hands of their US guards.
The Virginia Republican spoke on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
Senator Warner said the Marine Corps was investigating the killings and the US Army Central Command was analysing how the incident was handled.
A US defence official said on Saturday US marines could face criminal charges, possibly including murder, in what would be the worst case of abuse by US soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
A criminal probe by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which handles criminal inquiries involving marines, has not been completed and no decisions on charges have been made, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Los Angeles Times reported that investigators were expected to call for charges including murder, negligent homicide, dereliction of duty and filing a false report.
The Times reported that military investigators have concluded that a dozen marines acted improperly in an incident in which US troops responded to a roadside bomb that killed a marine by killing unarmed civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover it up.
Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and retired, decorated marine who has been a staunch critic of the Iraq war, told ABC there was "no question" the US military tried to cover up the incident.
"First of all, they tried to say the IED is what killed these people," he said, using a term for roadside bombs - improvised explosive devices. "The next day, there was a team out there investigating, as they always do, and then nothing happened."
Asked about Mr Murtha's allegations, Marine Corps spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Fazekas said: "To comment on an ongoing investigation is inappropriate" because it could jeopardise those involved or compromise the investigation.
Mr Murtha, who said he based his assertions on briefings he received from high-level military officials, added: "There was an investigation right afterward, but then it was stifled."
Time magazine, whose report on Haditha in March sparked a first investigation, reported today members of the 13-member Marine unit involved in the incident had begun "rolling on each other" as contradictions emerged in the initial accounts given by those soldiers and their superiors.
Three marine officers, including the company commander and battalion commander, were relieved of duty in part for actions related to the Haditha killings, the magazine said.
Newsweek magazine today quoted an unnamed officer as saying Marine Corps commander General Michael Hagee saw a need for senior officials to be removed.
Mr Murtha said he did not know how far up the chain of command responsibility for the alleged cover-up goes.
"But we cannot allow something like this to fester," said Mr Murtha, who warned that the Haditha killings would undermine the war effort in Iraq and be used as propaganda by radical Islamists fighting the US.
"We're set back every time something like this happens," he said.
There are 21,000 Marines serving in Iraq in one of the most violent regions of the country; more than 700 have died since the war began in 2003.
US lawmaker to probe Iraq deaths
From correspondents in Washington
29may06
A SENIOR Republican senator vowed today to hold hearings on the role of US marines in the killings of up to two dozen Iraqi civilians in November as a leading Democratic war critic alleged a military cover-up.
The US military is investigating the November 19 incident in the town of Haditha, a case some American media are comparing to the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam when US soldiers slaughtered up to 500 villagers.
The military has said 15 civilians were killed in Haditha, about 220km north-west of Baghdad, while other accounts put the number at about 24.
Senator John Warner told an ABC news program the Senate committee he heads would probe "what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it".
"I can assure the American public this morning, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, I'll do exactly what we did with Abu Ghraib", where detainees were photographed enduring abuse at the hands of their US guards.
The Virginia Republican spoke on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
Senator Warner said the Marine Corps was investigating the killings and the US Army Central Command was analysing how the incident was handled.
A US defence official said on Saturday US marines could face criminal charges, possibly including murder, in what would be the worst case of abuse by US soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
A criminal probe by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which handles criminal inquiries involving marines, has not been completed and no decisions on charges have been made, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Los Angeles Times reported that investigators were expected to call for charges including murder, negligent homicide, dereliction of duty and filing a false report.
The Times reported that military investigators have concluded that a dozen marines acted improperly in an incident in which US troops responded to a roadside bomb that killed a marine by killing unarmed civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover it up.
Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and retired, decorated marine who has been a staunch critic of the Iraq war, told ABC there was "no question" the US military tried to cover up the incident.
"First of all, they tried to say the IED is what killed these people," he said, using a term for roadside bombs - improvised explosive devices. "The next day, there was a team out there investigating, as they always do, and then nothing happened."
Asked about Mr Murtha's allegations, Marine Corps spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Fazekas said: "To comment on an ongoing investigation is inappropriate" because it could jeopardise those involved or compromise the investigation.
Mr Murtha, who said he based his assertions on briefings he received from high-level military officials, added: "There was an investigation right afterward, but then it was stifled."
Time magazine, whose report on Haditha in March sparked a first investigation, reported today members of the 13-member Marine unit involved in the incident had begun "rolling on each other" as contradictions emerged in the initial accounts given by those soldiers and their superiors.
Three marine officers, including the company commander and battalion commander, were relieved of duty in part for actions related to the Haditha killings, the magazine said.
Newsweek magazine today quoted an unnamed officer as saying Marine Corps commander General Michael Hagee saw a need for senior officials to be removed.
Mr Murtha said he did not know how far up the chain of command responsibility for the alleged cover-up goes.
"But we cannot allow something like this to fester," said Mr Murtha, who warned that the Haditha killings would undermine the war effort in Iraq and be used as propaganda by radical Islamists fighting the US.
"We're set back every time something like this happens," he said.
There are 21,000 Marines serving in Iraq in one of the most violent regions of the country; more than 700 have died since the war began in 2003.
Murtha: Scandal may undermine Iraq effort
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer
Sun May 28, 6:22 PM ET
The fallout from the killing of as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians by Marines could undermine U.S. efforts in Iraq more than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal did, a lawmaker who is a prominent war critic said Sunday.
The shootings last November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, were covered up, said Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa.
"Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?" Murtha said on "This Week" on ABC. "We don't know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command."
A bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Marines then shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot other people, according to Murtha, who has been briefed by officials.
Murtha said high-level reports he received indicated that no one fired upon the Marines or that there was any military action against the U.S. forces after the initial explosion. Yet the deaths were not seriously investigated until March because an early probe was stifled within days of the incident, he said.
"I will not excuse murder, and this is what happened," Murtha said. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterward and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it."
Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas, a Marine Corps spokesman, told The Associated Press that the investigation was ongoing and he would have no comment.
Murtha, a former Marine and a prominent critic of Bush administration policies in Iraq, repeated his view that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily and needs political solutions, which he said were damaged by such incidents involving the U.S.
"This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," he said. "And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib."
The U.S. effort to win over Iraqis and others in the Arab world by fostering a democratic government was severely damaged when it was revealed that U.S. military personnel had abused and humiliated people held at Abu Ghraib, a prison outside of Baghdad.
The incident at Haditha has sparked two investigations — one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up.
The second, noncriminal investigation is examining whether Marines sought to cover up what actually occurred that day and, in doing so, lied about having killed civilians without justification. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.
A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Associated Press on Friday that evidence gathered so far strongly indicated that the Haditha killings were unjustified.
Early this year, a videotape of the aftermath of the incident, showing the bodies of women and children, was obtained by Time magazine and Arab television stations. The military then undertook another investigation.
Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would hold hearings on the killings but cautioned against reaching conclusions until the military concluded its investigation.
"There is this serious question, however, of what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it," Warner said.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into the shootings is not expected to be completed earlier than in June. Whether violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including murder, would be pursued would be determined by a senior Marine commander in Iraq.
The NCIS also is conducting a criminal investigation into another incident, the death of an Iraqi civilian on April 26, involving Marines in Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer
Sun May 28, 6:22 PM ET
The fallout from the killing of as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians by Marines could undermine U.S. efforts in Iraq more than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal did, a lawmaker who is a prominent war critic said Sunday.
The shootings last November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, were covered up, said Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa.
"Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?" Murtha said on "This Week" on ABC. "We don't know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command."
A bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Marines then shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot other people, according to Murtha, who has been briefed by officials.
Murtha said high-level reports he received indicated that no one fired upon the Marines or that there was any military action against the U.S. forces after the initial explosion. Yet the deaths were not seriously investigated until March because an early probe was stifled within days of the incident, he said.
"I will not excuse murder, and this is what happened," Murtha said. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterward and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it."
Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas, a Marine Corps spokesman, told The Associated Press that the investigation was ongoing and he would have no comment.
Murtha, a former Marine and a prominent critic of Bush administration policies in Iraq, repeated his view that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily and needs political solutions, which he said were damaged by such incidents involving the U.S.
"This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," he said. "And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib."
The U.S. effort to win over Iraqis and others in the Arab world by fostering a democratic government was severely damaged when it was revealed that U.S. military personnel had abused and humiliated people held at Abu Ghraib, a prison outside of Baghdad.
The incident at Haditha has sparked two investigations — one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up.
The second, noncriminal investigation is examining whether Marines sought to cover up what actually occurred that day and, in doing so, lied about having killed civilians without justification. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.
A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Associated Press on Friday that evidence gathered so far strongly indicated that the Haditha killings were unjustified.
Early this year, a videotape of the aftermath of the incident, showing the bodies of women and children, was obtained by Time magazine and Arab television stations. The military then undertook another investigation.
Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would hold hearings on the killings but cautioned against reaching conclusions until the military concluded its investigation.
"There is this serious question, however, of what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it," Warner said.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into the shootings is not expected to be completed earlier than in June. Whether violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including murder, would be pursued would be determined by a senior Marine commander in Iraq.
The NCIS also is conducting a criminal investigation into another incident, the death of an Iraqi civilian on April 26, involving Marines in Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/20...legations_x.htm
Analysis: Alleged killing of civilians by Marines could enrage Iraqis
Updated 5/29/2006 6:20 AM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this
BAGHDAD (AP) — The U.S. military is bracing for a major scandal over the alleged slaying of Iraqi civilians by Marines in Haditha — charges so serious they could threaten President Bush's effort to rally support at home for an increasingly unpopular war.
And while the case has attracted little attention so far in Iraq, it still could enflame hostility to the U.S. presence just as Iraq's new government is getting established, and complicate efforts by moderate Sunni Arab leaders to reach out to their community — the bedrock of the insurgency.
U.S. lawmakers have been told the criminal investigation will be finished in about 30 days. But a Pentagon official said investigators believe Marines committed unprovoked murder in the deaths of about two dozen people at Haditha in November.
With a political storm brewing, the top U.S. Marine, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, is headed to Iraq to personally deliver the message that troops should use deadly force "only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful."
Haditha is not the only case pending: On Wednesday, the military announced an investigation into allegations that Marines killed a civilian April 26 near Fallujah. The statement gave no further details except that "several service members" had been sent back to the United States "pending the results of the criminal investigation."
Last July, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Samir al-Sumaidaie, accused the Marines of killing his 21-year-old cousin in cold blood during a search of his family's home in Haditha, a city of about 90,000 people along the Euphrates River 140 miles northwest of Baghdad.
The military ordered a criminal investigation but the results have not been announced.
Together, the cases present the most serious challenge to U.S. handling of the Iraq war since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which Bush cited Thursday as "the biggest mistake that's happened so far, at least from our country's involvement in Iraq."
"What happened at Haditha appears to be outright murder," said Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch. "It has the potential to blow up in the U.S. military's face."
He said that "the Haditha massacre will go down as Iraq's My Lai," a reference to the Vietnam War incident in which American soldiers slaughtered up to 500 civilians in 1968.
The Haditha case involves both the alleged killing of civilians and a purported cover-up of the events that unfolded Nov. 19.
That day, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, was killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha, a Sunni Arab city considered among the most hostile areas of Iraq.
After the blast, insurgents attacked a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol with small-arms fire, triggering a gunbattle that left eight insurgents and 15 Iraqi civilians dead, the Marines said in a statement issued the following day.
That version stood for four months until a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student surfaced, obtained by Time magazine and then by Arab television stations. The tape showed the bodies of women and children, some in their nightclothes.
Although the tape did not prove Marines were responsible, the military began an investigation. Residents came forward with claims that Marines entered two homes and killed 15 people, including a 3-year-old girl and a 76-year-old man — more than four hours after the roadside bombing.
It isn't clear if questions have been raised about the eight slain people that the Marines described as insurgents.
In March, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, said about a dozen Marines were under investigation for possible war crimes in the incident. Three officers from the unit involved have been relieved of their posts.
Such incidents have reinforced the perception among many Iraqis who believe American troops are trigger-happy — a characterization U.S. officers strongly dispute.
"America in the view of many Iraqis has no credibility. We do not believe what they say is correct," said Sheik Sattar al-Aasaf, a tribal leader in Anbar province, which includes Haditha. "U.S. troops are a very well-trained and when they shoot, it isn't random but due to an order to kill Iraqis. People say they are the killers."
Ayda Aasran, a deputy human rights minister, said Iraqis should be allowed to investigate such cases — something the U.S. command has refused to permit.
Sunni political leaders will find it difficult to defend U.S. actions, even those aimed at establishing the truth, if they want to maintain their position as leaders of the Iraqi minority that provides most of the insurgents.
Even if criminal charges are brought in the Haditha incident, Sunni insurgents are likely to claim the case is simply a charade and argue that the Marines will escape serious punishment.
Haditha, site of a major hydroelectric dam, has long been considered a tough case. It is among a string of Euphrates Valley towns used by insurgents and foreign fighters to infiltrate from Syria to reach Baghdad and the Sunni heartland.
Many Marines have complained to journalists that they conduct repeated sweeps through villages to drive out the insurgents, who then reappear when the Americans leave. That has bred a sense of frustration among troops fighting a difficult war with no end in sight.
Reporters who embedded in Haditha several months before the alleged massacre said Marines considered the town as enemy territory, with frequent roadside bombings. During patrols inside the city, Marines treated inhabitants like terrorists, raiding their homes.
An Associated Press journalist who traveled in Haditha last June with a Marine unit not involved in the November killings saw a Marine urinate on the kitchen floor of a home and on another occasion saw insults chalked in English on the gate of an Arab home. The reporter asked a Marine commander about the incident and was told it would be investigated.
Last August, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that Haditha was under the control of religious extremists who enforced their own strict interpretation of Islamic law — including decapitations of people suspected of collaborating with the Americans.
"This is a war in which the distinction between killing the enemy and massacring civilians is not always completely obvious," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. "Counterinsurgency operations are particularly prone to the killing of people who, in retrospect, are judged to have been innocent civilians, but who in the heat of battle seemed to be the enemy."
Some analysts, however, say the killings of civilians also reflect frustration among young troops fighting a difficult war with no end in sight. They say these young fighters have been thrust into an alien culture for repeated tours in a war whose strategy many of them do not understand.
"What we're seeing more of now, and these incidents will increase monthly, is the end result of fuzzy, imprecise national direction combined with situational ethics at the highest levels of this government," said retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner, a former planner at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Posted 5/27/2006 6:00 PM ET
Analysis: Alleged killing of civilians by Marines could enrage Iraqis
Updated 5/29/2006 6:20 AM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this
BAGHDAD (AP) — The U.S. military is bracing for a major scandal over the alleged slaying of Iraqi civilians by Marines in Haditha — charges so serious they could threaten President Bush's effort to rally support at home for an increasingly unpopular war.
And while the case has attracted little attention so far in Iraq, it still could enflame hostility to the U.S. presence just as Iraq's new government is getting established, and complicate efforts by moderate Sunni Arab leaders to reach out to their community — the bedrock of the insurgency.
U.S. lawmakers have been told the criminal investigation will be finished in about 30 days. But a Pentagon official said investigators believe Marines committed unprovoked murder in the deaths of about two dozen people at Haditha in November.
With a political storm brewing, the top U.S. Marine, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, is headed to Iraq to personally deliver the message that troops should use deadly force "only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful."
Haditha is not the only case pending: On Wednesday, the military announced an investigation into allegations that Marines killed a civilian April 26 near Fallujah. The statement gave no further details except that "several service members" had been sent back to the United States "pending the results of the criminal investigation."
Last July, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Samir al-Sumaidaie, accused the Marines of killing his 21-year-old cousin in cold blood during a search of his family's home in Haditha, a city of about 90,000 people along the Euphrates River 140 miles northwest of Baghdad.
The military ordered a criminal investigation but the results have not been announced.
Together, the cases present the most serious challenge to U.S. handling of the Iraq war since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which Bush cited Thursday as "the biggest mistake that's happened so far, at least from our country's involvement in Iraq."
"What happened at Haditha appears to be outright murder," said Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch. "It has the potential to blow up in the U.S. military's face."
He said that "the Haditha massacre will go down as Iraq's My Lai," a reference to the Vietnam War incident in which American soldiers slaughtered up to 500 civilians in 1968.
The Haditha case involves both the alleged killing of civilians and a purported cover-up of the events that unfolded Nov. 19.
That day, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, was killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha, a Sunni Arab city considered among the most hostile areas of Iraq.
After the blast, insurgents attacked a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol with small-arms fire, triggering a gunbattle that left eight insurgents and 15 Iraqi civilians dead, the Marines said in a statement issued the following day.
That version stood for four months until a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student surfaced, obtained by Time magazine and then by Arab television stations. The tape showed the bodies of women and children, some in their nightclothes.
Although the tape did not prove Marines were responsible, the military began an investigation. Residents came forward with claims that Marines entered two homes and killed 15 people, including a 3-year-old girl and a 76-year-old man — more than four hours after the roadside bombing.
It isn't clear if questions have been raised about the eight slain people that the Marines described as insurgents.
In March, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, said about a dozen Marines were under investigation for possible war crimes in the incident. Three officers from the unit involved have been relieved of their posts.
Such incidents have reinforced the perception among many Iraqis who believe American troops are trigger-happy — a characterization U.S. officers strongly dispute.
"America in the view of many Iraqis has no credibility. We do not believe what they say is correct," said Sheik Sattar al-Aasaf, a tribal leader in Anbar province, which includes Haditha. "U.S. troops are a very well-trained and when they shoot, it isn't random but due to an order to kill Iraqis. People say they are the killers."
Ayda Aasran, a deputy human rights minister, said Iraqis should be allowed to investigate such cases — something the U.S. command has refused to permit.
Sunni political leaders will find it difficult to defend U.S. actions, even those aimed at establishing the truth, if they want to maintain their position as leaders of the Iraqi minority that provides most of the insurgents.
Even if criminal charges are brought in the Haditha incident, Sunni insurgents are likely to claim the case is simply a charade and argue that the Marines will escape serious punishment.
Haditha, site of a major hydroelectric dam, has long been considered a tough case. It is among a string of Euphrates Valley towns used by insurgents and foreign fighters to infiltrate from Syria to reach Baghdad and the Sunni heartland.
Many Marines have complained to journalists that they conduct repeated sweeps through villages to drive out the insurgents, who then reappear when the Americans leave. That has bred a sense of frustration among troops fighting a difficult war with no end in sight.
Reporters who embedded in Haditha several months before the alleged massacre said Marines considered the town as enemy territory, with frequent roadside bombings. During patrols inside the city, Marines treated inhabitants like terrorists, raiding their homes.
An Associated Press journalist who traveled in Haditha last June with a Marine unit not involved in the November killings saw a Marine urinate on the kitchen floor of a home and on another occasion saw insults chalked in English on the gate of an Arab home. The reporter asked a Marine commander about the incident and was told it would be investigated.
Last August, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that Haditha was under the control of religious extremists who enforced their own strict interpretation of Islamic law — including decapitations of people suspected of collaborating with the Americans.
"This is a war in which the distinction between killing the enemy and massacring civilians is not always completely obvious," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. "Counterinsurgency operations are particularly prone to the killing of people who, in retrospect, are judged to have been innocent civilians, but who in the heat of battle seemed to be the enemy."
Some analysts, however, say the killings of civilians also reflect frustration among young troops fighting a difficult war with no end in sight. They say these young fighters have been thrust into an alien culture for repeated tours in a war whose strategy many of them do not understand.
"What we're seeing more of now, and these incidents will increase monthly, is the end result of fuzzy, imprecise national direction combined with situational ethics at the highest levels of this government," said retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner, a former planner at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Posted 5/27/2006 6:00 PM ET
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/sf/nyt5_29_06_2.htm
New York Times
May 29, 2006
Iraqis' Accounts Link Marines to the Mass Killing of Civilians
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and MONA MAHMOUD
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 28 — Hiba Abdullah survived the killings by American troops in Haditha last Nov. 19, but said seven others at her father-in-law's home did not. She said American troops shot and killed her husband, Rashid Abdul Hamid. They killed her father-in-law, Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali, a 77-year-old in a wheelchair, shooting him in the chest and abdomen, she said.
Her sister-in-law, Asma, "collapsed when her husband was killed in front of her eyes," Ms. Abdullah said. As Asma fell, she dropped her 5-month-old infant. Ms. Abdullah said she picked up the baby girl and sprinted out of the house, and when she returned, Asma was dead.
Four people who survived the killings in Haditha, including some who had never spoken publicly, described the killings to an Iraqi writer and historian who was recruited by The New York Times to travel to Haditha and interview survivors and witnesses of what military officials have said appear to be unjustified killings of two dozen Iraqis by marines. Some in Congress fear the killings could do greater harm to the image of the United States military around the world than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
The four survivors' accounts could not be independently corroborated, and it was unclear in some cases whether they actually saw the killings. But much of what they said was consistent with broad outlines of the events of that day provided by military and government officials who have been briefed on the military's investigations into the killings, which the officials have said are likely to lead to charges that may include murder and a cover-up of what really happened.
The name of the Iraqi who conducted the interviews for The Times is being withheld for his own safety, because insurgents often make a target of Iraqis deemed collaborators.
Haditha, a sand-swept farming town flecked with date palms on the upper Euphrates River, is in one of Iraq's most dangerous areas, ridden with insurgents in the heart of Sunni-dominated Anbar Province.
Three months earlier, 20 Marines from a different unit were killed around Haditha over a three-day span. Fourteen were killed by a bomb that destroyed their troop carrier. Six others, all snipers, were ambushed and killed on a foot patrol. Insurgents appeared later to rejoice and boast about the sniper ambush, releasing a video over the Internet that appeared to show the attack and the mangled and burned body of a dead American serviceman.
Haditha is under the control of insurgents that include Tawhid and Jihad, a name that has been used by the terrorist organization of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said Miysar al-Dulaimi, a human rights lawyer who has relatives in Haditha and who returned there two days after the killings and spoke to witnesses and neighbors. Mr. Dulaimi said that outside their bases, the Americans control almost nothing.
"People are so scared," he said. "They have lost confidence in the Americans. If the Americans show up in the neighborhood the insurgents will come and take away people they accuse of being stooges of the Americans."
But just over six months ago, 24 people in the Subhani district of Haditha faced a different death, witnesses and survivors say.
The killings began after 7:15 a.m., as the neighborhood was stirring awake, when insurgents detonated a roadside bomb in Subhani that killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas of El Paso, Tex., as his patrol drove through the area.
According to one United States defense official, who declined to be named because details of the investigation are not supposed to be revealed, most of the subsequent killings are believed to have been committed by a handful of Marines led by a staff sergeant who was their squad leader, although other Marines are also under investigation.
In the home Ms. Abdullah escaped from, she said American troops also shot in the chest and killed a 4-year-old nephew named Abdullah Walid. She said her mother-in-law, Khumaysa Tuma Ali, 66, died after being shot in the back. Two brothers-in-law, Jahid Abdul Hamid Hassan and Walid Abdul Hamid Hassan, were also killed, she said.
In addition to Ms. Abdullah and Asma's baby, two others survived: One, 9-year-old Iman Walid Abdul Hamid, said she ran quickly, still clad in her pajamas, to hide under the bed covers with her younger brother, Abdul Rahman Walid Abdul Hamid, when she saw what was happening.
. "We were scared and could not move for two hours. I tried to hide under the bed," she said, but both her and her brother, Abdul Rahman, were hit with shrapnel.
Abdul Rahman, 7, said very little about that day. "When they killed my father Walid, I hid in bed," he said.
Hiba Abdullah assumed the two children had died, but she said they were later found at a local hospital.
One Haditha victim was an elderly man, close to 80 years old, killed in his wheelchair as he appeared to be holding a Koran, according to the United States defense official, who described information collected during the investigation. An elderly woman was also killed, as were a mother and a child who were "in what appeared to be a prayer position," the official said. Some victims had single gunshot wounds to the head, and at least one home where people were shot to death had no bullet marks on the walls, inconsistent with a clearing operation that would typically leave bullet holes, the official added. Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, pledged Sunday to hold hearings on the Haditha killings as soon as the military investigation is concluded.
"I'll do exactly what we did with Abu Ghraib," he said on ABC's "This Week," referring to hearings. He added that there were serious questions of "what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps."
Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and former marine who has become a fierce critic of the Iraq war, said he has no doubt marines killed innocent civilians in Haditha and tried to cover up the deaths. Marine Corps officials, he said on the same TV program, have told him that troops shot one woman "in cold blood" who was bending over her child begging for mercy.
In all, 19 people were killed in three separate homes in Haditha, and 5 were killed after they approached the scene in a taxi, survivors and people in the neighborhood said.
Hiba Abdullah said that after the killings in her father-in-law's home the American troops moved to the house of a neighbor, Younis Salim Nisaif. She said he was killed along with is wife, Aida, and Aida's sister, Huda. She said five children were also killed at that home, all between ages of 10 and 3.
There was one survivor, Safa Younis Salim, 13, who in an interview said she lived by faking her death. "I pretended that I was dead when my brother's body fell on me and he was bleeding like a faucet," she said. She said she saw American troops kick her family members and that one American shouted in the face of one relative before he was killed.
Military officials declined Sunday to comment on details of the killings described by survivors. "The investigations are ongoing, therefore any comment at this time would be inappropriate and could undermine the investigatory and possible legal process," said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marine spokesman.
David P. Sheldon, a defense lawyer advising a marine under investigation in the case, said what is publicly known about the case "raises a disturbing picture, but I think the situation was very confusing." He added that "the insurgent pressure in that part of Iraq has been particularly virulent" which caused "a very stressful environment."
Three days before a roadside bomb attack that preceded the Nov. 19 killings, another marine from the same unit had been killed when a bomb detonated under his vehicle in Haditha. It was the first combat death that the unit, the First Marine Regiment's Third Battalion, had suffered on that deployment to Iraq.
Neighbors said that in the third home assaulted on Nov. 19, four brothers were killed by American troops. The wife of one of the brothers, who would only identify herself as the widow of a brother named Jamal, said the four victims were all between the ages of 20 and 38.
The troops forced women in the home to leave at gunpoint, the widow said. Afterward, she said the women heard gunshots coming from the home, but the troops forbade them from returning. Eventually, she said, they went inside and found the bodies of Jamal and three brothers, Marwan, Jassib and Kahatan.
Mr. Dulaimi, the human rights lawyer who traveled to Haditha two days after the killings, said neighbors told him the father of the four victims and owner of the home was Ayad Ahmed al-Gharria, who does odd jobs and has a shop in Haditha. The neighbors, Mr. Dulaimi said, told him the troops killed Marwan first. The three other brothers were killed after they came to see what was happening, he said.
Five more Iraqi men died that day after they approached the American troops in a taxi, according to people in the neighborhood. Four of the men were students and the fifth was the driver of the taxi, and all were between the ages of 18 and 25, they said.
After the killings, Mr. Dulaimi said Haditha clerics and elders led a protest march on the American base near a dam on the Euphrates. From the city's mosques, Mr. Dulaimi said, clerics condemned the killings and said the Americans "promise they will bring peace and security to this country, but what has happened is they are spreading panic, fear and terror among the people."
One person from the neighborhood, Salim Abdullah, said relatives from two of the families had taken compensation payments of as much as $2,500 per victim from American officials who later visited. Relatives of other victims have not taken payments, he said.
The United States defense official said the payments were also a focus of investigators trying to determine whether the killings were improperly covered up. On "This Week," Representative Murtha suggested that the decision to make payments was strong evidence that Marine officers up the chain of command had knowledge of the events. "That doesn't happen at the lowest level," he said. "That happens at the highest level before they make a decision to make payments to the families."
The Marines also face an inquiry into the killing of an Iraqi man on April 26 near Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad. A preliminary inquiry found "sufficient information" for a criminal investigation, the Marines said. Representative Murtha said a marine fired an AK-47 rifle so there would be spent cartridges near the body, making it look as if the victim had been firing a weapon.
A spokesman for the First Marine Division, Lt. Lawton King, said several marines suspected of involvement in the incident have been put in the brig at Camp Pendleton, Calif., or restricted to the base.
An Iraqi employee of The New York
Timescontributed reporting from Haditha for this article, and David S. Cloud and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
New York Times
May 29, 2006
Iraqis' Accounts Link Marines to the Mass Killing of Civilians
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and MONA MAHMOUD
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 28 — Hiba Abdullah survived the killings by American troops in Haditha last Nov. 19, but said seven others at her father-in-law's home did not. She said American troops shot and killed her husband, Rashid Abdul Hamid. They killed her father-in-law, Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali, a 77-year-old in a wheelchair, shooting him in the chest and abdomen, she said.
Her sister-in-law, Asma, "collapsed when her husband was killed in front of her eyes," Ms. Abdullah said. As Asma fell, she dropped her 5-month-old infant. Ms. Abdullah said she picked up the baby girl and sprinted out of the house, and when she returned, Asma was dead.
Four people who survived the killings in Haditha, including some who had never spoken publicly, described the killings to an Iraqi writer and historian who was recruited by The New York Times to travel to Haditha and interview survivors and witnesses of what military officials have said appear to be unjustified killings of two dozen Iraqis by marines. Some in Congress fear the killings could do greater harm to the image of the United States military around the world than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
The four survivors' accounts could not be independently corroborated, and it was unclear in some cases whether they actually saw the killings. But much of what they said was consistent with broad outlines of the events of that day provided by military and government officials who have been briefed on the military's investigations into the killings, which the officials have said are likely to lead to charges that may include murder and a cover-up of what really happened.
The name of the Iraqi who conducted the interviews for The Times is being withheld for his own safety, because insurgents often make a target of Iraqis deemed collaborators.
Haditha, a sand-swept farming town flecked with date palms on the upper Euphrates River, is in one of Iraq's most dangerous areas, ridden with insurgents in the heart of Sunni-dominated Anbar Province.
Three months earlier, 20 Marines from a different unit were killed around Haditha over a three-day span. Fourteen were killed by a bomb that destroyed their troop carrier. Six others, all snipers, were ambushed and killed on a foot patrol. Insurgents appeared later to rejoice and boast about the sniper ambush, releasing a video over the Internet that appeared to show the attack and the mangled and burned body of a dead American serviceman.
Haditha is under the control of insurgents that include Tawhid and Jihad, a name that has been used by the terrorist organization of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said Miysar al-Dulaimi, a human rights lawyer who has relatives in Haditha and who returned there two days after the killings and spoke to witnesses and neighbors. Mr. Dulaimi said that outside their bases, the Americans control almost nothing.
"People are so scared," he said. "They have lost confidence in the Americans. If the Americans show up in the neighborhood the insurgents will come and take away people they accuse of being stooges of the Americans."
But just over six months ago, 24 people in the Subhani district of Haditha faced a different death, witnesses and survivors say.
The killings began after 7:15 a.m., as the neighborhood was stirring awake, when insurgents detonated a roadside bomb in Subhani that killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas of El Paso, Tex., as his patrol drove through the area.
According to one United States defense official, who declined to be named because details of the investigation are not supposed to be revealed, most of the subsequent killings are believed to have been committed by a handful of Marines led by a staff sergeant who was their squad leader, although other Marines are also under investigation.
In the home Ms. Abdullah escaped from, she said American troops also shot in the chest and killed a 4-year-old nephew named Abdullah Walid. She said her mother-in-law, Khumaysa Tuma Ali, 66, died after being shot in the back. Two brothers-in-law, Jahid Abdul Hamid Hassan and Walid Abdul Hamid Hassan, were also killed, she said.
In addition to Ms. Abdullah and Asma's baby, two others survived: One, 9-year-old Iman Walid Abdul Hamid, said she ran quickly, still clad in her pajamas, to hide under the bed covers with her younger brother, Abdul Rahman Walid Abdul Hamid, when she saw what was happening.
. "We were scared and could not move for two hours. I tried to hide under the bed," she said, but both her and her brother, Abdul Rahman, were hit with shrapnel.
Abdul Rahman, 7, said very little about that day. "When they killed my father Walid, I hid in bed," he said.
Hiba Abdullah assumed the two children had died, but she said they were later found at a local hospital.
One Haditha victim was an elderly man, close to 80 years old, killed in his wheelchair as he appeared to be holding a Koran, according to the United States defense official, who described information collected during the investigation. An elderly woman was also killed, as were a mother and a child who were "in what appeared to be a prayer position," the official said. Some victims had single gunshot wounds to the head, and at least one home where people were shot to death had no bullet marks on the walls, inconsistent with a clearing operation that would typically leave bullet holes, the official added. Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, pledged Sunday to hold hearings on the Haditha killings as soon as the military investigation is concluded.
"I'll do exactly what we did with Abu Ghraib," he said on ABC's "This Week," referring to hearings. He added that there were serious questions of "what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps."
Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and former marine who has become a fierce critic of the Iraq war, said he has no doubt marines killed innocent civilians in Haditha and tried to cover up the deaths. Marine Corps officials, he said on the same TV program, have told him that troops shot one woman "in cold blood" who was bending over her child begging for mercy.
In all, 19 people were killed in three separate homes in Haditha, and 5 were killed after they approached the scene in a taxi, survivors and people in the neighborhood said.
Hiba Abdullah said that after the killings in her father-in-law's home the American troops moved to the house of a neighbor, Younis Salim Nisaif. She said he was killed along with is wife, Aida, and Aida's sister, Huda. She said five children were also killed at that home, all between ages of 10 and 3.
There was one survivor, Safa Younis Salim, 13, who in an interview said she lived by faking her death. "I pretended that I was dead when my brother's body fell on me and he was bleeding like a faucet," she said. She said she saw American troops kick her family members and that one American shouted in the face of one relative before he was killed.
Military officials declined Sunday to comment on details of the killings described by survivors. "The investigations are ongoing, therefore any comment at this time would be inappropriate and could undermine the investigatory and possible legal process," said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marine spokesman.
David P. Sheldon, a defense lawyer advising a marine under investigation in the case, said what is publicly known about the case "raises a disturbing picture, but I think the situation was very confusing." He added that "the insurgent pressure in that part of Iraq has been particularly virulent" which caused "a very stressful environment."
Three days before a roadside bomb attack that preceded the Nov. 19 killings, another marine from the same unit had been killed when a bomb detonated under his vehicle in Haditha. It was the first combat death that the unit, the First Marine Regiment's Third Battalion, had suffered on that deployment to Iraq.
Neighbors said that in the third home assaulted on Nov. 19, four brothers were killed by American troops. The wife of one of the brothers, who would only identify herself as the widow of a brother named Jamal, said the four victims were all between the ages of 20 and 38.
The troops forced women in the home to leave at gunpoint, the widow said. Afterward, she said the women heard gunshots coming from the home, but the troops forbade them from returning. Eventually, she said, they went inside and found the bodies of Jamal and three brothers, Marwan, Jassib and Kahatan.
Mr. Dulaimi, the human rights lawyer who traveled to Haditha two days after the killings, said neighbors told him the father of the four victims and owner of the home was Ayad Ahmed al-Gharria, who does odd jobs and has a shop in Haditha. The neighbors, Mr. Dulaimi said, told him the troops killed Marwan first. The three other brothers were killed after they came to see what was happening, he said.
Five more Iraqi men died that day after they approached the American troops in a taxi, according to people in the neighborhood. Four of the men were students and the fifth was the driver of the taxi, and all were between the ages of 18 and 25, they said.
After the killings, Mr. Dulaimi said Haditha clerics and elders led a protest march on the American base near a dam on the Euphrates. From the city's mosques, Mr. Dulaimi said, clerics condemned the killings and said the Americans "promise they will bring peace and security to this country, but what has happened is they are spreading panic, fear and terror among the people."
One person from the neighborhood, Salim Abdullah, said relatives from two of the families had taken compensation payments of as much as $2,500 per victim from American officials who later visited. Relatives of other victims have not taken payments, he said.
The United States defense official said the payments were also a focus of investigators trying to determine whether the killings were improperly covered up. On "This Week," Representative Murtha suggested that the decision to make payments was strong evidence that Marine officers up the chain of command had knowledge of the events. "That doesn't happen at the lowest level," he said. "That happens at the highest level before they make a decision to make payments to the families."
The Marines also face an inquiry into the killing of an Iraqi man on April 26 near Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad. A preliminary inquiry found "sufficient information" for a criminal investigation, the Marines said. Representative Murtha said a marine fired an AK-47 rifle so there would be spent cartridges near the body, making it look as if the victim had been firing a weapon.
A spokesman for the First Marine Division, Lt. Lawton King, said several marines suspected of involvement in the incident have been put in the brig at Camp Pendleton, Calif., or restricted to the base.
An Iraqi employee of The New York
Timescontributed reporting from Haditha for this article, and David S. Cloud and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politi...ticle621253.ece
War crimes: My Lai is a lesson from history
The killing of 24 civilians in Haditha has reminded America of another massacre that tarnished its reputation 38 years ago. Rupert Cornwell reports
Published: 29 May 2006
To Americans of a certain generation, the news this weekend must have seemed dreadfully familiar: an endless war, whose rationale is ever harder to understand, and where "victory" is gradually drained of meaning; a group of soldiers enraged by the loss of a comrade to an invisible enemy, running amok and exacting revenge on civilians, whose only crime was to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Today, the name that threatens to besmirch an entire war is Haditha, a town on the Euphrates river, north-west of Baghdad, deep in the "Sunni Triangle". A generation and a half ago, the place was My Lai, a hamlet in South Vietnam.
At Haditha, it is US Marines who are under accusation, soldiers from K or Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. In Vietnam, the troops who carried out the massacre at My Lai were from C, or Charlie Company, of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. But though separated by 37 years, the similarities abound.
No one disputes that what happened at Haditha on 19 November 2005, when as many as 24 civilians, including families complete with women and children, may have been shot by rampaging US soldiers, was provoked by the death of the 20-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, killed in a roadside bomb. In Vietnam, dozens of members of Charlie company had been killed and wounded by insurgents in the weeks before the atrocity in the hamlet of My Lai 4 (then known in military jargon as Pinkville).
A couple of days earlier, on 14 March, a Vietnamese version of the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) of the variety that took L/Cpl Terrazas's life had killed one C Company sergeant and wounded others. Military intelligence concluded that a crack unit of the Viet Cong was holed up in My Lai, and C Company was ordered to destroy them. Three platoons were assigned to the operation, one led by a lieutenant named William Calley, an unemployed college drop-out who had been rushed through officer training before being sent to lead soldiers in a full-scale guerrilla war.
Lt Calley's platoon entered the hamlet with guns blazing at around 8am on the morning of 16 March. There was no hostile fire and the men found only 700 residents: old men, women, and children ("we never saw a male of military age," one participant later confessed).
Over the next three hours, the men ran amok. Villagers were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the back of their heads as they prayed, at least one girl was raped and murdered. Lt Calley himself is said to have personally slaughtered dozens of villagers whom he rounded up and ordered into ditch, mowing them down with a machine-gun. By 11am it was all over. The exact number of victims is unknown to this day, anywhere from 300 to over 500. A monument at the site lists the names of 504 people, their ages ranging from 1 to 82.
My Lai, in fact, was far from the sole example of such barbarity in Vietnam. During 1967 a unit called the Tiger Force is said to have murdered hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children in the Quang Ngai province of the former South Vietnam, that country's equivalent of the Sunni Triangle, where guerrillas melted into the local population, as indistinguishable to the unqualified eye of the ordinary American soldier then as Iraqi insurgents in Haditha today.
An initial investigation was quietly put to rest some 30 years ago. The full story was laid bare by the Toledo Blade newspaper in several articles in October 2003. Published at a moment when public support for the Iraq war was still strong, they attracted relatively little attention. But, apparently just like Haditha now, My Lai was proof of the ghastly things that can happen in wars fought by young troops who have lost close friends to an enemy they cannot see, in another skirmish in a conflict seemingly with no end, where every victory is fleeting, which unfolds amid a civilian population whose language the young soldiers cannot speak, whose true sympathies they cannot fathom.
Part of the blame undoubtedly attaches to commanders who failed to impress upon trained soldiers the difference between right and wrong, even under such pressure. But should we be surprised that this group of US Marines seems to have snapped? Can we all put our hands on our hearts and say that under such appalling stress, when a fighting man's greatest loyalty is not to his country or his commander-in-chief, but to his buddies alongside him in the heat and the dust and the carnage, we could not have done something similar?
Rarely, alas, do such considerations cross the minds of the presidents and prime ministers who send their armies into war. Delivering the commencement speech at West Point military academy this weekend, George Bush invoked the Cold War as the comparison for the "war on terror", of which the White House has long proclaimed that Iraq is the central front. But more clearly with every passing day, the war that Iraq resembles is Vietnam.
In this electronic age, of course, everything in war is speeded up, including cover-ups. The first official version of My Lai spoke of a signal victory, in which the Americans had killed 128 insurgents and suffered only one casualty. But, in March 1969, an ex-soldier who had heard eyewitness accounts of what had really happened sent letters detailing what he had heard to President Nixon, the top commanders at the Pentagon, and members of Congress.
Slowly the military was prodded into action, but only on 5 September 1969, almost 18 months after the massacre, was Lt Calley charged with premeditated murder. The wider public knew none of the details until the story was broken by Seymour Hersh, the same investigative journalist who, in April 2004, first disclosed the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib - which was, at least until Haditha, the greatest single blot on America's reputation left by the Iraq War.
A cover-up was attempted at Haditha too, but it has unravelled far more quickly. Within two months, Time magazine was informing the military of allegations of an atrocity and, in mid-March, published the first details.
The criminal investigation should be wrapped up by late June; some Marines are already reported to be in custody, likely to face murder charges that could carry the death penalty. General Michael Hagee, commander of the US Marine Corps, is already in Iraq, impressing upon his men the overriding need to observe the rules of war. But it may already be too late.
If the worst accounts are true, Haditha could be devastating on three separate scores. It can only further erode the trust of ordinary Iraqis in the invaders who were supposed to bring them peace, democracy and human decency. Second, it could eat into public affection for the troops - one of the most pernicious legacies of the Vietnam war and of incidents like My Lai, where returning veterans found little honour even in their own land. Today, whatever his or her view of the war, no American will speak ill of soldiers at the sharp end in Iraq. But now, who knows? Most important, Haditha could affect the US prosecution of the war. The death toll may not be on the scale of My Lai. But the incident has occurred when public opinion here has already turned against the war, far more decisively than when details of the slaughter at "Pinkville" became public knowledge.
Even before the latter, opinion was shifting, evidenced a fortnight earlier, on 6 March 1968, when the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite had broken the reporters' code of neutrality and spoken out on air against the war. "If I've lost Cronkite," President Lyndon Johnson mused, "I've lost the American people." And so it would ultimately prove.
But not until after Hersh published his account of My Lai did polls first reveal a majority against the Vietnam war. Today, six out of 10 Americans already believe the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake - a disillusion that even that peddler of illusions George Bush had to acknowledge at his rather downbeat press conference with Tony Blair last Thursday.
Conceivably, Haditha could be the stone than unleashes an avalanche of clamour for a speedy American exit from Iraq, not matter what. It is no co-incidence that the congressman who has spoken out most loudly about the affair is John Murtha, a normally hawkish Pennsylvania republican, highly respected and with close ties to the Pentagon. Last November, he created a sensation by demanding a swift US withdrawal from Iraq, arguing that the war was doing America more harm than good.
Haditha has only strengthened that conviction. "This will be very, very bad for America," the former Marine and combat veteran from Vietnam noted earlier this month as he reported that his Pentagon contacts had told him that the incident was even more savage and inexcusable than first thought.
"This is the kind of war when you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," Mr Murtha told ABC's This Week programme yesterday. "And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib."
For Mr Murtha, what happened was murder, pure and simple. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterwards, and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it." And that perhaps will be the final acid test of Haditha. Who will be held responsible? Will it be like My Lai, where Lt Calley was the only person of consequence to be convicted (and then released on parole a few years later)? Or will heads roll higher up, among commanders who did not sufficiently impress upon their men the need to obey the law? The precedents of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, for which no senior officer has yet faced charges, is not encouraging. But My Lai helped destroy a country's faith in its military and the judgement of its leaders. Thirty-seven years later, Haditha may do the same.
To Americans of a certain generation, the news this weekend must have seemed dreadfully familiar: an endless war, whose rationale is ever harder to understand, and where "victory" is gradually drained of meaning; a group of soldiers enraged by the loss of a comrade to an invisible enemy, running amok and exacting revenge on civilians, whose only crime was to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Today, the name that threatens to besmirch an entire war is Haditha, a town on the Euphrates river, north-west of Baghdad, deep in the "Sunni Triangle". A generation and a half ago, the place was My Lai, a hamlet in South Vietnam.
At Haditha, it is US Marines who are under accusation, soldiers from K or Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. In Vietnam, the troops who carried out the massacre at My Lai were from C, or Charlie Company, of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. But though separated by 37 years, the similarities abound.
No one disputes that what happened at Haditha on 19 November 2005, when as many as 24 civilians, including families complete with women and children, may have been shot by rampaging US soldiers, was provoked by the death of the 20-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, killed in a roadside bomb. In Vietnam, dozens of members of Charlie company had been killed and wounded by insurgents in the weeks before the atrocity in the hamlet of My Lai 4 (then known in military jargon as Pinkville).
A couple of days earlier, on 14 March, a Vietnamese version of the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) of the variety that took L/Cpl Terrazas's life had killed one C Company sergeant and wounded others. Military intelligence concluded that a crack unit of the Viet Cong was holed up in My Lai, and C Company was ordered to destroy them. Three platoons were assigned to the operation, one led by a lieutenant named William Calley, an unemployed college drop-out who had been rushed through officer training before being sent to lead soldiers in a full-scale guerrilla war.
Lt Calley's platoon entered the hamlet with guns blazing at around 8am on the morning of 16 March. There was no hostile fire and the men found only 700 residents: old men, women, and children ("we never saw a male of military age," one participant later confessed).
Over the next three hours, the men ran amok. Villagers were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the back of their heads as they prayed, at least one girl was raped and murdered. Lt Calley himself is said to have personally slaughtered dozens of villagers whom he rounded up and ordered into ditch, mowing them down with a machine-gun. By 11am it was all over. The exact number of victims is unknown to this day, anywhere from 300 to over 500. A monument at the site lists the names of 504 people, their ages ranging from 1 to 82.
My Lai, in fact, was far from the sole example of such barbarity in Vietnam. During 1967 a unit called the Tiger Force is said to have murdered hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children in the Quang Ngai province of the former South Vietnam, that country's equivalent of the Sunni Triangle, where guerrillas melted into the local population, as indistinguishable to the unqualified eye of the ordinary American soldier then as Iraqi insurgents in Haditha today.
An initial investigation was quietly put to rest some 30 years ago. The full story was laid bare by the Toledo Blade newspaper in several articles in October 2003. Published at a moment when public support for the Iraq war was still strong, they attracted relatively little attention. But, apparently just like Haditha now, My Lai was proof of the ghastly things that can happen in wars fought by young troops who have lost close friends to an enemy they cannot see, in another skirmish in a conflict seemingly with no end, where every victory is fleeting, which unfolds amid a civilian population whose language the young soldiers cannot speak, whose true sympathies they cannot fathom.
Part of the blame undoubtedly attaches to commanders who failed to impress upon trained soldiers the difference between right and wrong, even under such pressure. But should we be surprised that this group of US Marines seems to have snapped? Can we all put our hands on our hearts and say that under such appalling stress, when a fighting man's greatest loyalty is not to his country or his commander-in-chief, but to his buddies alongside him in the heat and the dust and the carnage, we could not have done something similar?
Rarely, alas, do such considerations cross the minds of the presidents and prime ministers who send their armies into war. Delivering the commencement speech at West Point military academy this weekend, George Bush invoked the Cold War as the comparison for the "war on terror", of which the White House has long proclaimed that Iraq is the central front. But more clearly with every passing day, the war that Iraq resembles is Vietnam.
In this electronic age, of course, everything in war is speeded up, including cover-ups. The first official version of My Lai spoke of a signal victory, in which the Americans had killed 128 insurgents and suffered only one casualty. But, in March 1969, an ex-soldier who had heard eyewitness accounts of what had really happened sent letters detailing what he had heard to President Nixon, the top commanders at the Pentagon, and members of Congress.
Slowly the military was prodded into action, but only on 5 September 1969, almost 18 months after the massacre, was Lt Calley charged with premeditated murder. The wider public knew none of the details until the story was broken by Seymour Hersh, the same investigative journalist who, in April 2004, first disclosed the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib - which was, at least until Haditha, the greatest single blot on America's reputation left by the Iraq War.
A cover-up was attempted at Haditha too, but it has unravelled far more quickly. Within two months, Time magazine was informing the military of allegations of an atrocity and, in mid-March, published the first details.
The criminal investigation should be wrapped up by late June; some Marines are already reported to be in custody, likely to face murder charges that could carry the death penalty. General Michael Hagee, commander of the US Marine Corps, is already in Iraq, impressing upon his men the overriding need to observe the rules of war. But it may already be too late.
If the worst accounts are true, Haditha could be devastating on three separate scores. It can only further erode the trust of ordinary Iraqis in the invaders who were supposed to bring them peace, democracy and human decency. Second, it could eat into public affection for the troops - one of the most pernicious legacies of the Vietnam war and of incidents like My Lai, where returning veterans found little honour even in their own land. Today, whatever his or her view of the war, no American will speak ill of soldiers at the sharp end in Iraq. But now, who knows? Most important, Haditha could affect the US prosecution of the war. The death toll may not be on the scale of My Lai. But the incident has occurred when public opinion here has already turned against the war, far more decisively than when details of the slaughter at "Pinkville" became public knowledge.
Even before the latter, opinion was shifting, evidenced a fortnight earlier, on 6 March 1968, when the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite had broken the reporters' code of neutrality and spoken out on air against the war. "If I've lost Cronkite," President Lyndon Johnson mused, "I've lost the American people." And so it would ultimately prove.
But not until after Hersh published his account of My Lai did polls first reveal a majority against the Vietnam war. Today, six out of 10 Americans already believe the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake - a disillusion that even that peddler of illusions George Bush had to acknowledge at his rather downbeat press conference with Tony Blair last Thursday.
Conceivably, Haditha could be the stone than unleashes an avalanche of clamour for a speedy American exit from Iraq, not matter what. It is no co-incidence that the congressman who has spoken out most loudly about the affair is John Murtha, a normally hawkish Pennsylvania republican, highly respected and with close ties to the Pentagon. Last November, he created a sensation by demanding a swift US withdrawal from Iraq, arguing that the war was doing America more harm than good.
Haditha has only strengthened that conviction. "This will be very, very bad for America," the former Marine and combat veteran from Vietnam noted earlier this month as he reported that his Pentagon contacts had told him that the incident was even more savage and inexcusable than first thought.
"This is the kind of war when you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," Mr Murtha told ABC's This Week programme yesterday. "And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib."
For Mr Murtha, what happened was murder, pure and simple. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterwards, and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it." And that perhaps will be the final acid test of Haditha. Who will be held responsible? Will it be like My Lai, where Lt Calley was the only person of consequence to be convicted (and then released on parole a few years later)? Or will heads roll higher up, among commanders who did not sufficiently impress upon their men the need to obey the law? The precedents of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, for which no senior officer has yet faced charges, is not encouraging. But My Lai helped destroy a country's faith in its military and the judgement of its leaders. Thirty-seven years later, Haditha may do the same.
War crimes: My Lai is a lesson from history
The killing of 24 civilians in Haditha has reminded America of another massacre that tarnished its reputation 38 years ago. Rupert Cornwell reports
Published: 29 May 2006
To Americans of a certain generation, the news this weekend must have seemed dreadfully familiar: an endless war, whose rationale is ever harder to understand, and where "victory" is gradually drained of meaning; a group of soldiers enraged by the loss of a comrade to an invisible enemy, running amok and exacting revenge on civilians, whose only crime was to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Today, the name that threatens to besmirch an entire war is Haditha, a town on the Euphrates river, north-west of Baghdad, deep in the "Sunni Triangle". A generation and a half ago, the place was My Lai, a hamlet in South Vietnam.
At Haditha, it is US Marines who are under accusation, soldiers from K or Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. In Vietnam, the troops who carried out the massacre at My Lai were from C, or Charlie Company, of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. But though separated by 37 years, the similarities abound.
No one disputes that what happened at Haditha on 19 November 2005, when as many as 24 civilians, including families complete with women and children, may have been shot by rampaging US soldiers, was provoked by the death of the 20-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, killed in a roadside bomb. In Vietnam, dozens of members of Charlie company had been killed and wounded by insurgents in the weeks before the atrocity in the hamlet of My Lai 4 (then known in military jargon as Pinkville).
A couple of days earlier, on 14 March, a Vietnamese version of the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) of the variety that took L/Cpl Terrazas's life had killed one C Company sergeant and wounded others. Military intelligence concluded that a crack unit of the Viet Cong was holed up in My Lai, and C Company was ordered to destroy them. Three platoons were assigned to the operation, one led by a lieutenant named William Calley, an unemployed college drop-out who had been rushed through officer training before being sent to lead soldiers in a full-scale guerrilla war.
Lt Calley's platoon entered the hamlet with guns blazing at around 8am on the morning of 16 March. There was no hostile fire and the men found only 700 residents: old men, women, and children ("we never saw a male of military age," one participant later confessed).
Over the next three hours, the men ran amok. Villagers were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the back of their heads as they prayed, at least one girl was raped and murdered. Lt Calley himself is said to have personally slaughtered dozens of villagers whom he rounded up and ordered into ditch, mowing them down with a machine-gun. By 11am it was all over. The exact number of victims is unknown to this day, anywhere from 300 to over 500. A monument at the site lists the names of 504 people, their ages ranging from 1 to 82.
My Lai, in fact, was far from the sole example of such barbarity in Vietnam. During 1967 a unit called the Tiger Force is said to have murdered hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children in the Quang Ngai province of the former South Vietnam, that country's equivalent of the Sunni Triangle, where guerrillas melted into the local population, as indistinguishable to the unqualified eye of the ordinary American soldier then as Iraqi insurgents in Haditha today.
An initial investigation was quietly put to rest some 30 years ago. The full story was laid bare by the Toledo Blade newspaper in several articles in October 2003. Published at a moment when public support for the Iraq war was still strong, they attracted relatively little attention. But, apparently just like Haditha now, My Lai was proof of the ghastly things that can happen in wars fought by young troops who have lost close friends to an enemy they cannot see, in another skirmish in a conflict seemingly with no end, where every victory is fleeting, which unfolds amid a civilian population whose language the young soldiers cannot speak, whose true sympathies they cannot fathom.
Part of the blame undoubtedly attaches to commanders who failed to impress upon trained soldiers the difference between right and wrong, even under such pressure. But should we be surprised that this group of US Marines seems to have snapped? Can we all put our hands on our hearts and say that under such appalling stress, when a fighting man's greatest loyalty is not to his country or his commander-in-chief, but to his buddies alongside him in the heat and the dust and the carnage, we could not have done something similar?
Rarely, alas, do such considerations cross the minds of the presidents and prime ministers who send their armies into war. Delivering the commencement speech at West Point military academy this weekend, George Bush invoked the Cold War as the comparison for the "war on terror", of which the White House has long proclaimed that Iraq is the central front. But more clearly with every passing day, the war that Iraq resembles is Vietnam.
In this electronic age, of course, everything in war is speeded up, including cover-ups. The first official version of My Lai spoke of a signal victory, in which the Americans had killed 128 insurgents and suffered only one casualty. But, in March 1969, an ex-soldier who had heard eyewitness accounts of what had really happened sent letters detailing what he had heard to President Nixon, the top commanders at the Pentagon, and members of Congress.
Slowly the military was prodded into action, but only on 5 September 1969, almost 18 months after the massacre, was Lt Calley charged with premeditated murder. The wider public knew none of the details until the story was broken by Seymour Hersh, the same investigative journalist who, in April 2004, first disclosed the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib - which was, at least until Haditha, the greatest single blot on America's reputation left by the Iraq War.
A cover-up was attempted at Haditha too, but it has unravelled far more quickly. Within two months, Time magazine was informing the military of allegations of an atrocity and, in mid-March, published the first details.
The criminal investigation should be wrapped up by late June; some Marines are already reported to be in custody, likely to face murder charges that could carry the death penalty. General Michael Hagee, commander of the US Marine Corps, is already in Iraq, impressing upon his men the overriding need to observe the rules of war. But it may already be too late.
If the worst accounts are true, Haditha could be devastating on three separate scores. It can only further erode the trust of ordinary Iraqis in the invaders who were supposed to bring them peace, democracy and human decency. Second, it could eat into public affection for the troops - one of the most pernicious legacies of the Vietnam war and of incidents like My Lai, where returning veterans found little honour even in their own land. Today, whatever his or her view of the war, no American will speak ill of soldiers at the sharp end in Iraq. But now, who knows? Most important, Haditha could affect the US prosecution of the war. The death toll may not be on the scale of My Lai. But the incident has occurred when public opinion here has already turned against the war, far more decisively than when details of the slaughter at "Pinkville" became public knowledge.
Even before the latter, opinion was shifting, evidenced a fortnight earlier, on 6 March 1968, when the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite had broken the reporters' code of neutrality and spoken out on air against the war. "If I've lost Cronkite," President Lyndon Johnson mused, "I've lost the American people." And so it would ultimately prove.
But not until after Hersh published his account of My Lai did polls first reveal a majority against the Vietnam war. Today, six out of 10 Americans already believe the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake - a disillusion that even that peddler of illusions George Bush had to acknowledge at his rather downbeat press conference with Tony Blair last Thursday.
Conceivably, Haditha could be the stone than unleashes an avalanche of clamour for a speedy American exit from Iraq, not matter what. It is no co-incidence that the congressman who has spoken out most loudly about the affair is John Murtha, a normally hawkish Pennsylvania republican, highly respected and with close ties to the Pentagon. Last November, he created a sensation by demanding a swift US withdrawal from Iraq, arguing that the war was doing America more harm than good.
Haditha has only strengthened that conviction. "This will be very, very bad for America," the former Marine and combat veteran from Vietnam noted earlier this month as he reported that his Pentagon contacts had told him that the incident was even more savage and inexcusable than first thought.
"This is the kind of war when you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," Mr Murtha told ABC's This Week programme yesterday. "And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib."
For Mr Murtha, what happened was murder, pure and simple. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterwards, and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it." And that perhaps will be the final acid test of Haditha. Who will be held responsible? Will it be like My Lai, where Lt Calley was the only person of consequence to be convicted (and then released on parole a few years later)? Or will heads roll higher up, among commanders who did not sufficiently impress upon their men the need to obey the law? The precedents of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, for which no senior officer has yet faced charges, is not encouraging. But My Lai helped destroy a country's faith in its military and the judgement of its leaders. Thirty-seven years later, Haditha may do the same.
To Americans of a certain generation, the news this weekend must have seemed dreadfully familiar: an endless war, whose rationale is ever harder to understand, and where "victory" is gradually drained of meaning; a group of soldiers enraged by the loss of a comrade to an invisible enemy, running amok and exacting revenge on civilians, whose only crime was to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Today, the name that threatens to besmirch an entire war is Haditha, a town on the Euphrates river, north-west of Baghdad, deep in the "Sunni Triangle". A generation and a half ago, the place was My Lai, a hamlet in South Vietnam.
At Haditha, it is US Marines who are under accusation, soldiers from K or Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. In Vietnam, the troops who carried out the massacre at My Lai were from C, or Charlie Company, of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. But though separated by 37 years, the similarities abound.
No one disputes that what happened at Haditha on 19 November 2005, when as many as 24 civilians, including families complete with women and children, may have been shot by rampaging US soldiers, was provoked by the death of the 20-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, killed in a roadside bomb. In Vietnam, dozens of members of Charlie company had been killed and wounded by insurgents in the weeks before the atrocity in the hamlet of My Lai 4 (then known in military jargon as Pinkville).
A couple of days earlier, on 14 March, a Vietnamese version of the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) of the variety that took L/Cpl Terrazas's life had killed one C Company sergeant and wounded others. Military intelligence concluded that a crack unit of the Viet Cong was holed up in My Lai, and C Company was ordered to destroy them. Three platoons were assigned to the operation, one led by a lieutenant named William Calley, an unemployed college drop-out who had been rushed through officer training before being sent to lead soldiers in a full-scale guerrilla war.
Lt Calley's platoon entered the hamlet with guns blazing at around 8am on the morning of 16 March. There was no hostile fire and the men found only 700 residents: old men, women, and children ("we never saw a male of military age," one participant later confessed).
Over the next three hours, the men ran amok. Villagers were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the back of their heads as they prayed, at least one girl was raped and murdered. Lt Calley himself is said to have personally slaughtered dozens of villagers whom he rounded up and ordered into ditch, mowing them down with a machine-gun. By 11am it was all over. The exact number of victims is unknown to this day, anywhere from 300 to over 500. A monument at the site lists the names of 504 people, their ages ranging from 1 to 82.
My Lai, in fact, was far from the sole example of such barbarity in Vietnam. During 1967 a unit called the Tiger Force is said to have murdered hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children in the Quang Ngai province of the former South Vietnam, that country's equivalent of the Sunni Triangle, where guerrillas melted into the local population, as indistinguishable to the unqualified eye of the ordinary American soldier then as Iraqi insurgents in Haditha today.
An initial investigation was quietly put to rest some 30 years ago. The full story was laid bare by the Toledo Blade newspaper in several articles in October 2003. Published at a moment when public support for the Iraq war was still strong, they attracted relatively little attention. But, apparently just like Haditha now, My Lai was proof of the ghastly things that can happen in wars fought by young troops who have lost close friends to an enemy they cannot see, in another skirmish in a conflict seemingly with no end, where every victory is fleeting, which unfolds amid a civilian population whose language the young soldiers cannot speak, whose true sympathies they cannot fathom.
Part of the blame undoubtedly attaches to commanders who failed to impress upon trained soldiers the difference between right and wrong, even under such pressure. But should we be surprised that this group of US Marines seems to have snapped? Can we all put our hands on our hearts and say that under such appalling stress, when a fighting man's greatest loyalty is not to his country or his commander-in-chief, but to his buddies alongside him in the heat and the dust and the carnage, we could not have done something similar?
Rarely, alas, do such considerations cross the minds of the presidents and prime ministers who send their armies into war. Delivering the commencement speech at West Point military academy this weekend, George Bush invoked the Cold War as the comparison for the "war on terror", of which the White House has long proclaimed that Iraq is the central front. But more clearly with every passing day, the war that Iraq resembles is Vietnam.
In this electronic age, of course, everything in war is speeded up, including cover-ups. The first official version of My Lai spoke of a signal victory, in which the Americans had killed 128 insurgents and suffered only one casualty. But, in March 1969, an ex-soldier who had heard eyewitness accounts of what had really happened sent letters detailing what he had heard to President Nixon, the top commanders at the Pentagon, and members of Congress.
Slowly the military was prodded into action, but only on 5 September 1969, almost 18 months after the massacre, was Lt Calley charged with premeditated murder. The wider public knew none of the details until the story was broken by Seymour Hersh, the same investigative journalist who, in April 2004, first disclosed the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib - which was, at least until Haditha, the greatest single blot on America's reputation left by the Iraq War.
A cover-up was attempted at Haditha too, but it has unravelled far more quickly. Within two months, Time magazine was informing the military of allegations of an atrocity and, in mid-March, published the first details.
The criminal investigation should be wrapped up by late June; some Marines are already reported to be in custody, likely to face murder charges that could carry the death penalty. General Michael Hagee, commander of the US Marine Corps, is already in Iraq, impressing upon his men the overriding need to observe the rules of war. But it may already be too late.
If the worst accounts are true, Haditha could be devastating on three separate scores. It can only further erode the trust of ordinary Iraqis in the invaders who were supposed to bring them peace, democracy and human decency. Second, it could eat into public affection for the troops - one of the most pernicious legacies of the Vietnam war and of incidents like My Lai, where returning veterans found little honour even in their own land. Today, whatever his or her view of the war, no American will speak ill of soldiers at the sharp end in Iraq. But now, who knows? Most important, Haditha could affect the US prosecution of the war. The death toll may not be on the scale of My Lai. But the incident has occurred when public opinion here has already turned against the war, far more decisively than when details of the slaughter at "Pinkville" became public knowledge.
Even before the latter, opinion was shifting, evidenced a fortnight earlier, on 6 March 1968, when the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite had broken the reporters' code of neutrality and spoken out on air against the war. "If I've lost Cronkite," President Lyndon Johnson mused, "I've lost the American people." And so it would ultimately prove.
But not until after Hersh published his account of My Lai did polls first reveal a majority against the Vietnam war. Today, six out of 10 Americans already believe the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake - a disillusion that even that peddler of illusions George Bush had to acknowledge at his rather downbeat press conference with Tony Blair last Thursday.
Conceivably, Haditha could be the stone than unleashes an avalanche of clamour for a speedy American exit from Iraq, not matter what. It is no co-incidence that the congressman who has spoken out most loudly about the affair is John Murtha, a normally hawkish Pennsylvania republican, highly respected and with close ties to the Pentagon. Last November, he created a sensation by demanding a swift US withdrawal from Iraq, arguing that the war was doing America more harm than good.
Haditha has only strengthened that conviction. "This will be very, very bad for America," the former Marine and combat veteran from Vietnam noted earlier this month as he reported that his Pentagon contacts had told him that the incident was even more savage and inexcusable than first thought.
"This is the kind of war when you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," Mr Murtha told ABC's This Week programme yesterday. "And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib."
For Mr Murtha, what happened was murder, pure and simple. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterwards, and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it." And that perhaps will be the final acid test of Haditha. Who will be held responsible? Will it be like My Lai, where Lt Calley was the only person of consequence to be convicted (and then released on parole a few years later)? Or will heads roll higher up, among commanders who did not sufficiently impress upon their men the need to obey the law? The precedents of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, for which no senior officer has yet faced charges, is not encouraging. But My Lai helped destroy a country's faith in its military and the judgement of its leaders. Thirty-seven years later, Haditha may do the same.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/IraqCoverage/sto...=2015052&page=1
New Witness Describes Alleged Iraq Atrocity
Girl, 12, Was Sole Survivor When Her Family Was Killed in Haditha; Congressman Says 'Mass Murder' Was Covered Up
ABC News has obtained an interview with Safa Younis, 12, on killings purportedly by U.S. Marines in her family's Haditha, Iraq, home. (ABCNEWS.com)
By JONATHAN KARL
May 28, 2006 — After a small group of Marines stormed the Younis family home in Haditha last November, everybody inside was killed — except one person.
ABC News has obtained an interview with the sole survivor, 12-year-old Safa Younis. The interview was done by a local Iraqi journalism student about one week after the killings on Nov. 19, 2005.
The U.S. military continues to investigate what happened in Haditha, where a total of 24 civilians died. But one congressman, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said today that he's convinced the incident was mass murder and that it was covered up.
"There has to have been a cover-up," Murtha told ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." "There's no question about it."
'I Pretended to Be Dead'
On the new tape shot by an Iraqi journalism student and given to ABC News by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group in Iraq, Younis, soft-spoken, with rounded cheeks and a headscarf, begins by calmly telling the interviewer, "My name is Safa Younis. I'm 12 years old."
The interviewer asks, "What did the American soldiers do when they broke into the house?"
"They knocked at the door," Younis says. "My father went to open it, they shot him dead from behind the door, and then they shot him again after they opened the door."
She describes hearing the Marines go through the rest of the house, shooting and setting off a grenade before getting to the bedroom where she was with her mother and siblings.
"Then comes one American soldier and shot [at] us all," she says. "I pretended to be dead … and he did not know about me."
Changing Story
All of this happened after a small Marine convoy was struck by a roadside bomb, killing Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas. At first, the Marines acknowledged civilian deaths, but said they were caused by the roadside bomb. Later, they said the civilians were caught in the crossfire of a gunfight with insurgents.
Now, military investigators believe the only gunfire came from the Marines themselves
Murtha, a former Marine, recently was briefed on the investigation by Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee.
"The reports that I have," Murtha said, "from the highest level: No firing at all. No interaction. No military action at all in this particular incident. It was an explosive device, which killed a Marine. From then on, it was purely shooting people."
Military investigators have collected bullet shells and other forensic evidence found in these homes and determined they came from a small number of rifles belonging to a team of Marines that included, ABC News has learned, Sgt. Frank Wuterich.
Pentagon officials are worried the allegations will severely damage America's effort to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. The only way to minimize that damage, officials say, is to conduct a thorough investigation, hold a fair trial and to severely punish anybody found guilty.
New Witness Describes Alleged Iraq Atrocity
Girl, 12, Was Sole Survivor When Her Family Was Killed in Haditha; Congressman Says 'Mass Murder' Was Covered Up
ABC News has obtained an interview with Safa Younis, 12, on killings purportedly by U.S. Marines in her family's Haditha, Iraq, home. (ABCNEWS.com)
By JONATHAN KARL
May 28, 2006 — After a small group of Marines stormed the Younis family home in Haditha last November, everybody inside was killed — except one person.
ABC News has obtained an interview with the sole survivor, 12-year-old Safa Younis. The interview was done by a local Iraqi journalism student about one week after the killings on Nov. 19, 2005.
The U.S. military continues to investigate what happened in Haditha, where a total of 24 civilians died. But one congressman, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said today that he's convinced the incident was mass murder and that it was covered up.
"There has to have been a cover-up," Murtha told ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." "There's no question about it."
'I Pretended to Be Dead'
On the new tape shot by an Iraqi journalism student and given to ABC News by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group in Iraq, Younis, soft-spoken, with rounded cheeks and a headscarf, begins by calmly telling the interviewer, "My name is Safa Younis. I'm 12 years old."
The interviewer asks, "What did the American soldiers do when they broke into the house?"
"They knocked at the door," Younis says. "My father went to open it, they shot him dead from behind the door, and then they shot him again after they opened the door."
She describes hearing the Marines go through the rest of the house, shooting and setting off a grenade before getting to the bedroom where she was with her mother and siblings.
"Then comes one American soldier and shot [at] us all," she says. "I pretended to be dead … and he did not know about me."
Changing Story
All of this happened after a small Marine convoy was struck by a roadside bomb, killing Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas. At first, the Marines acknowledged civilian deaths, but said they were caused by the roadside bomb. Later, they said the civilians were caught in the crossfire of a gunfight with insurgents.
Now, military investigators believe the only gunfire came from the Marines themselves
Murtha, a former Marine, recently was briefed on the investigation by Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee.
"The reports that I have," Murtha said, "from the highest level: No firing at all. No interaction. No military action at all in this particular incident. It was an explosive device, which killed a Marine. From then on, it was purely shooting people."
Military investigators have collected bullet shells and other forensic evidence found in these homes and determined they came from a small number of rifles belonging to a team of Marines that included, ABC News has learned, Sgt. Frank Wuterich.
Pentagon officials are worried the allegations will severely damage America's effort to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. The only way to minimize that damage, officials say, is to conduct a thorough investigation, hold a fair trial and to severely punish anybody found guilty.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/stor...5852847,00.html
Gen. Pace: Wait for Probe of Iraq Deaths
Monday May 29, 2006 1:46 PM
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday ``it would be premature for me to judge'' the outcome of a Pentagon investigation into the killing of as many as a dozen Iraqi civilians by Marines.
But at the same time, Marine Gen. Peter Pace said he believes its critically important to make the point that if certain service members are responsible for an atrocity there, they ``have not performed their duty the way that 99.9 percent of their fellow Marines have.''
Interviewed on CBS's ``The Early Show'' as the nation observed Memorial Day honoring men and women lost in war, Pace pledged that ``we'll get to the bottom of the investigation and take the appropriate action.''
Pace's interview came a day after Rep. John Murtha, a decorated Marine war veteran and prominent critic of Iraq policy, said the incident could undermine U.S. efforts there more than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal did.
Murtha, D-Pa., also charged that the shootings last November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, were covered up.
``Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?'' Murtha said on Sunday ``This Week'' on ABC. ``We don't know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.''
A bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Marines then shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot other people, according to Murtha, who has been briefed by officials.
Murtha said high-level reports he received indicated that no one fired upon the Marines or that there was any military action against the U.S. forces after the initial explosion. Yet the deaths were not seriously investigated until March because an early probe was stifled within days of the incident, he said.
``I will not excuse murder, and this is what happened,'' he said. ``This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterward and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it.''
Said Pace: ``This investigation is ongoing. It would be premature for me to judge the outcome.''
Asked how such a thing could have happened, he replied, ``Fortunately, it does not happen very frequently, so there's no way to say historically why something like this might have happened. We'll find out.''
Pace's predecessor, retired Gen. Richard Myers, told ABC's ``Good Morning America'' that he had ``no idea'' what happened but that ``has been and there is an ongoing, thorough investigation.''
Murtha repeated his view that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily and needs political solutions, which he said were damaged by such incidents involving the U.S.
``This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people,'' he said. ``And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib.''
The U.S. effort to win over Iraqis and others in the Arab world by fostering a democratic government was severely damaged when it was revealed that U.S. military personnel had abused and humiliated people held at Abu Ghraib, a prison outside of Baghdad.
The incident at Haditha has sparked two investigations - one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up.
The second, noncriminal investigation is examining whether Marines sought to cover up what actually occurred that day and, in doing so, lied about having killed civilians without justification. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.
A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Associated Press on Friday that evidence gathered so far strongly indicated that the Haditha killings were unjustified.
Early this year, a videotape of the aftermath of the incident, showing the bodies of women and children, was obtained by Time magazine and Arab television stations. The military then undertook another investigation.
Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would hold hearings on the killings but cautioned against reaching conclusions until the military concluded its investigation.
``There is this serious question, however, of what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it,'' Warner said.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into the shootings is not expected to be completed earlier than in June. Whether violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including murder, would be pursued would be determined by a senior Marine commander in Iraq.
The NCIS also is conducting a criminal investigation into another incident, the death of an Iraqi civilian on April 26, involving Marines in Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad.
Gen. Pace: Wait for Probe of Iraq Deaths
Monday May 29, 2006 1:46 PM
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday ``it would be premature for me to judge'' the outcome of a Pentagon investigation into the killing of as many as a dozen Iraqi civilians by Marines.
But at the same time, Marine Gen. Peter Pace said he believes its critically important to make the point that if certain service members are responsible for an atrocity there, they ``have not performed their duty the way that 99.9 percent of their fellow Marines have.''
Interviewed on CBS's ``The Early Show'' as the nation observed Memorial Day honoring men and women lost in war, Pace pledged that ``we'll get to the bottom of the investigation and take the appropriate action.''
Pace's interview came a day after Rep. John Murtha, a decorated Marine war veteran and prominent critic of Iraq policy, said the incident could undermine U.S. efforts there more than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal did.
Murtha, D-Pa., also charged that the shootings last November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, were covered up.
``Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?'' Murtha said on Sunday ``This Week'' on ABC. ``We don't know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.''
A bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Marines then shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot other people, according to Murtha, who has been briefed by officials.
Murtha said high-level reports he received indicated that no one fired upon the Marines or that there was any military action against the U.S. forces after the initial explosion. Yet the deaths were not seriously investigated until March because an early probe was stifled within days of the incident, he said.
``I will not excuse murder, and this is what happened,'' he said. ``This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterward and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it.''
Said Pace: ``This investigation is ongoing. It would be premature for me to judge the outcome.''
Asked how such a thing could have happened, he replied, ``Fortunately, it does not happen very frequently, so there's no way to say historically why something like this might have happened. We'll find out.''
Pace's predecessor, retired Gen. Richard Myers, told ABC's ``Good Morning America'' that he had ``no idea'' what happened but that ``has been and there is an ongoing, thorough investigation.''
Murtha repeated his view that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily and needs political solutions, which he said were damaged by such incidents involving the U.S.
``This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people,'' he said. ``And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib.''
The U.S. effort to win over Iraqis and others in the Arab world by fostering a democratic government was severely damaged when it was revealed that U.S. military personnel had abused and humiliated people held at Abu Ghraib, a prison outside of Baghdad.
The incident at Haditha has sparked two investigations - one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up.
The second, noncriminal investigation is examining whether Marines sought to cover up what actually occurred that day and, in doing so, lied about having killed civilians without justification. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.
A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Associated Press on Friday that evidence gathered so far strongly indicated that the Haditha killings were unjustified.
Early this year, a videotape of the aftermath of the incident, showing the bodies of women and children, was obtained by Time magazine and Arab television stations. The military then undertook another investigation.
Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would hold hearings on the killings but cautioned against reaching conclusions until the military concluded its investigation.
``There is this serious question, however, of what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it,'' Warner said.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into the shootings is not expected to be completed earlier than in June. Whether violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including murder, would be pursued would be determined by a senior Marine commander in Iraq.
The NCIS also is conducting a criminal investigation into another incident, the death of an Iraqi civilian on April 26, involving Marines in Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad.
Methinks 'tis amazin' how those accused of atrocities like those referred to above are convicted and condemned here and elsewhere before they've had their day in court! Just because they're members of the American military 'twould seem there be folks that don't think the premise of our system of justice, innocent until proven guilty, applies, eh? Do they think people in our armed forces don't deserve the same constitutional guarantees and protections the rest of us have?
Let the system do its job! Methinks they should complete the investigation, bring appropriate charges against those implicated, let them be tried in court before their peers and, if convicted, give them sentences commensurate with their crimes. Is that too much to ask?
Why not let the investigation be completed, then charges preferred and adjucated before going back to the days folks in the armed forces are labeled as baby killers? Methinks 'tis 'cause the juices are flowin', the fervor risin', and them wantin' to attack and/or spit on members of our armed forces just can't wait, eh?
Readin' this thread I thought what a truly wonderful way to begin my Memorial Day on CGCS!
Let the system do its job! Methinks they should complete the investigation, bring appropriate charges against those implicated, let them be tried in court before their peers and, if convicted, give them sentences commensurate with their crimes. Is that too much to ask?
Why not let the investigation be completed, then charges preferred and adjucated before going back to the days folks in the armed forces are labeled as baby killers? Methinks 'tis 'cause the juices are flowin', the fervor risin', and them wantin' to attack and/or spit on members of our armed forces just can't wait, eh?
Readin' this thread I thought what a truly wonderful way to begin my Memorial Day on CGCS!
I couldn't access a particular article, but the charges that the DOD is contemplating here couldn't be more severe: they are thinking this is a death penalty case! Given that, you bet everyone is going to be weighing in on this one, and watching it closely. And unfortunately its going to get tried in the press. I am curious to know what impact a military death penalty case is going to have. People better be very careful about being too quick to judge.
In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Iraqi townspeople describe the slaying of 24 civilians by Marines in Nov. 19 incident.
To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Iraqi townspeople describe the slaying of 24 civilians by Marines in Nov. 19 incident.
To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle
Coverup of Iraq Incident By Marines Is Alleged
By Thomas E. Ricks
A powerful member of Congress alleged yesterday that there has been a conscious effort by Marine commanders to cover up the facts of a November incident in which rampaging Marines allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians.
To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle
By Thomas E. Ricks
A powerful member of Congress alleged yesterday that there has been a conscious effort by Marine commanders to cover up the facts of a November incident in which rampaging Marines allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians.
To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle
Baghdad Numb to Reports of Massacre
By Ellen Knickmeyer and Omar Fekeiki
BAGHDAD, May 28 -- After three years of war that has been fought in their streets and claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians, people in Baghdad could spare little more than subdued expressions of sympathy Sunday after hearing reports of a U.S. Marine massacre of 24 men, women and...
To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle
By Ellen Knickmeyer and Omar Fekeiki
BAGHDAD, May 28 -- After three years of war that has been fought in their streets and claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians, people in Baghdad could spare little more than subdued expressions of sympathy Sunday after hearing reports of a U.S. Marine massacre of 24 men, women and...
To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle
Gen. Pace: Wait for probe of Iraq deaths
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer
The chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday "it would be premature for me to judge" the outcome of a Pentagon investigation into the killing of as many as a dozen Iraqi civilians by Marines.
But at the same time, Marine Gen. Peter Pace said he believes its critically important to make the point that if certain service members are responsible for an atrocity there, they "have not performed their duty the way that 99.9 percent of their fellow Marines have."
Interviewed on CBS's "The Early Show" as the nation observed Memorial Day honoring men and women lost in war, Pace pledged that "we'll get to the bottom of the investigation and take the appropriate action."
Pace's interview came a day after Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), a decorated Marine war veteran and prominent critic of Iraq policy, said the incident could undermine U.S. efforts there more than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal did.
Murtha, D-Pa., also charged that the shootings last November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, were covered up.
"Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?" Murtha said on Sunday "This Week" on ABC. "We don't know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command."
A bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Marines then shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot other people, according to Murtha, who has been briefed by officials.
Iraqis who identified themselves as survivors of the killings described Marines shooting to death 19 people in three homes, among them a 77-year-old man in a wheelchair and a 4-year-old boy in one home and five children, ages 3 to 14, in another home, The New York Times reported Monday.
Those interviewed for the Times story said the men killed in the taxi were four students and the driver, all between the ages of 18 and 25. In one of the homes, according to the people interviewed for the Times story, Marines forced all the women to leave and then killed the four brothers they had detained.
Murtha said high-level reports he received indicated that no one fired upon the Marines or that there was any military action against the U.S. forces after the initial explosion. Yet the deaths were not seriously investigated until March because an early probe was stifled within days of the incident, he said.
"I will not excuse murder, and this is what happened," he said. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterward and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it."
Said Pace: "This investigation is ongoing. It would be premature for me to judge the outcome."
Asked how such a thing could have happened, he replied, "Fortunately, it does not happen very frequently, so there's no way to say historically why something like this might have happened. We'll find out."
Pace's predecessor, retired Gen. Richard Myers, told ABC's "Good Morning America" that he had "no idea" what happened but that there "has been and there is an ongoing, thorough investigation."
Murtha repeated his view that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily and needs political solutions, which he said were damaged by such incidents involving the U.S.
"This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," he said. "And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib."
The U.S. effort to win over Iraqis and others in the Arab world by fostering a democratic government was severely damaged when it was revealed that U.S. military personnel had abused and humiliated people held at Abu Ghraib, a prison outside of Baghdad.
The incident at Haditha has sparked two investigations — one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up.
The second, noncriminal investigation is examining whether Marines sought to cover up what actually occurred that day and, in doing so, lied about having killed civilians without justification. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.
A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Associated Press on Friday that evidence gathered so far strongly indicated that the Haditha killings were unjustified.
Early this year, a videotape of the aftermath of the incident, showing the bodies of women and children, was obtained by Time magazine and Arab television stations. The military then undertook another investigation.
Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would hold hearings on the killings but cautioned against reaching conclusions until the military concluded its investigation.
"There is this serious question, however, of what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it," Warner said.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into the shootings is not expected to be completed earlier than in June. Whether violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including murder, would be pursued would be determined by a senior Marine commander in Iraq.
The NCIS also is conducting a criminal investigation into another incident, the death of an Iraqi civilian on April 26, involving Marines in Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer
The chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday "it would be premature for me to judge" the outcome of a Pentagon investigation into the killing of as many as a dozen Iraqi civilians by Marines.
But at the same time, Marine Gen. Peter Pace said he believes its critically important to make the point that if certain service members are responsible for an atrocity there, they "have not performed their duty the way that 99.9 percent of their fellow Marines have."
Interviewed on CBS's "The Early Show" as the nation observed Memorial Day honoring men and women lost in war, Pace pledged that "we'll get to the bottom of the investigation and take the appropriate action."
Pace's interview came a day after Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), a decorated Marine war veteran and prominent critic of Iraq policy, said the incident could undermine U.S. efforts there more than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal did.
Murtha, D-Pa., also charged that the shootings last November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, were covered up.
"Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?" Murtha said on Sunday "This Week" on ABC. "We don't know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command."
A bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Marines then shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot other people, according to Murtha, who has been briefed by officials.
Iraqis who identified themselves as survivors of the killings described Marines shooting to death 19 people in three homes, among them a 77-year-old man in a wheelchair and a 4-year-old boy in one home and five children, ages 3 to 14, in another home, The New York Times reported Monday.
Those interviewed for the Times story said the men killed in the taxi were four students and the driver, all between the ages of 18 and 25. In one of the homes, according to the people interviewed for the Times story, Marines forced all the women to leave and then killed the four brothers they had detained.
Murtha said high-level reports he received indicated that no one fired upon the Marines or that there was any military action against the U.S. forces after the initial explosion. Yet the deaths were not seriously investigated until March because an early probe was stifled within days of the incident, he said.
"I will not excuse murder, and this is what happened," he said. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterward and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it."
Said Pace: "This investigation is ongoing. It would be premature for me to judge the outcome."
Asked how such a thing could have happened, he replied, "Fortunately, it does not happen very frequently, so there's no way to say historically why something like this might have happened. We'll find out."
Pace's predecessor, retired Gen. Richard Myers, told ABC's "Good Morning America" that he had "no idea" what happened but that there "has been and there is an ongoing, thorough investigation."
Murtha repeated his view that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily and needs political solutions, which he said were damaged by such incidents involving the U.S.
"This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," he said. "And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib."
The U.S. effort to win over Iraqis and others in the Arab world by fostering a democratic government was severely damaged when it was revealed that U.S. military personnel had abused and humiliated people held at Abu Ghraib, a prison outside of Baghdad.
The incident at Haditha has sparked two investigations — one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up.
The second, noncriminal investigation is examining whether Marines sought to cover up what actually occurred that day and, in doing so, lied about having killed civilians without justification. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.
A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Associated Press on Friday that evidence gathered so far strongly indicated that the Haditha killings were unjustified.
Early this year, a videotape of the aftermath of the incident, showing the bodies of women and children, was obtained by Time magazine and Arab television stations. The military then undertook another investigation.
Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would hold hearings on the killings but cautioned against reaching conclusions until the military concluded its investigation.
"There is this serious question, however, of what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it," Warner said.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into the shootings is not expected to be completed earlier than in June. Whether violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including murder, would be pursued would be determined by a senior Marine commander in Iraq.
The NCIS also is conducting a criminal investigation into another incident, the death of an Iraqi civilian on April 26, involving Marines in Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback
Snuffy, this reminds me of the thread you started on May 4 "Message of a Vet of My Lai Time, Tony Swindell":
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...T&f=104&t=55123
Wonder what "Marine" is saying now. As to "Flydangler", when all the investigation and paperwork is done it will be years before "the truth" shakes out, if indeed we ever get the truth. If our troops are so stressed that Marines are losing it, then it's time to come home for sure. If they are at the point of hating the very people they were sent to protect, then it is surely done. For me this just adds to my contention that most of the military guys are there for EACH OTHER, and that is why they would lose it when a friend was killed.
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...T&f=104&t=55123
Wonder what "Marine" is saying now. As to "Flydangler", when all the investigation and paperwork is done it will be years before "the truth" shakes out, if indeed we ever get the truth. If our troops are so stressed that Marines are losing it, then it's time to come home for sure. If they are at the point of hating the very people they were sent to protect, then it is surely done. For me this just adds to my contention that most of the military guys are there for EACH OTHER, and that is why they would lose it when a friend was killed.
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1808360.php
Murtha: Marines killed Haditha civilians in cold blood
By Christian Lowe
Times staff writer
Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., discusses the war in Iraq during a Capitol Hill news conference on Wednesday. — Dennis Cook / AP Photo
Rep. John Murtha, an influential Pennsylvania lawmaker and outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, said today Marines had “killed innocent civilians in cold blood” after allegedly responding to a roadside bomb ambush that killed a Marine during a patrol in Haditha, Iraq, Nov. 19.
The incident is still under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and Multi-National Forces Iraq.
The Marine Corps originally claimed that a convoy from the Camp Pendleton, Calif.-based Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, hit a roadside bomb that killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, and the ensuing firefight killed 15 Iraqi civilians — casualties the Corps at first claimed were killed in the bomb blast — including seven women and three children.
A March 27 Time magazine report published claims by an Iraqi civil rights group that the Marines barged into houses near the bomb strike, throwing grenades and shooting civilians as they cowered in fear. The report prompted calls for a Pentagon probe.
“It’s much worse than was reported in Time magazine,” Murtha, a Democrat, former Marine colonel and Vietnam war veteran, told reporters on Capitol Hill.
“There was no firefight. There was no [bomb] that killed those innocent people,” Murtha explained, adding there were “about twice as many” Iraqis killed than Time had reported.
No official investigation report has been released by the Pentagon and a spokesman for Murtha was unable to add to the congressman’s remarks.
“I do not know where Rep. Murtha is obtaining is information,” said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a spokesman for Marine Corps Forces Central Command in Tampa, Fla. “Thoroughness will drive the investigation.”
Three Marine officers from the battalion that is under investigation, including battalion commander Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, were relieved April 7 for “lack of confidence in their leadership abilities stemming from their performance during a recent deployment to Iraq.” Officials would not tie those firings to the Haditha investigation, however. The two other Marines who were relieved, Capts. Luke McConnell and James Kimber, were company commanders within the battalion.
Murtha said combat stress prompted the Marines’ alleged rampage.
“It’s a very serious incident, unfortunately. It shows the tremendous pressure that these guys are under every day when they’re out in combat,” he said. “One man was killed with an [improvised explosive device] and after that they actually went into the houses and killed women and children.”
Time magazine spent 10 weeks interviewing local residents affected by the incident and, in January, shared these accounts with military officials in Baghdad. The accounts directly conflicted with the Corps’ initial stance that the civilian casualties were the result of the insurgent attack.
Officials with Multi-National Corps-Iraq launched an investigation Feb. 14 after Time brought the allegations to their attention. Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of MNC-I, directed further review March 9 after he was presented with initial findings of the investigation.
Chiarelli then handed the findings to Marine Maj. Gen. Richard Zilmer, the new military commander for western Iraq.
Lt. Col. Bryan Salas, in a March 23 e-mail response to questions, said Zilmer directed the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to look into the allegations.
The Nov. 19 incident came one year after another high-profile incident that enflamed tensions between U.S. forces and Iraqis.
On Nov. 13, 2004, a corporal with 3/1 was videotaped shooting what appeared to be a wounded insurgent inside a mosque in Fallujah, Iraq, during the major U.S. operation to retake the city from insurgents.
Like the Haditha incident, the Fallujah shooting sparked outcries from human-rights groups regarding actions by U.S. forces against Iraqis.
Staff writer Gidget Fuentes contributed to this report.
Murtha: Marines killed Haditha civilians in cold blood
By Christian Lowe
Times staff writer
Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., discusses the war in Iraq during a Capitol Hill news conference on Wednesday. — Dennis Cook / AP Photo
Rep. John Murtha, an influential Pennsylvania lawmaker and outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, said today Marines had “killed innocent civilians in cold blood” after allegedly responding to a roadside bomb ambush that killed a Marine during a patrol in Haditha, Iraq, Nov. 19.
The incident is still under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and Multi-National Forces Iraq.
The Marine Corps originally claimed that a convoy from the Camp Pendleton, Calif.-based Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, hit a roadside bomb that killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, and the ensuing firefight killed 15 Iraqi civilians — casualties the Corps at first claimed were killed in the bomb blast — including seven women and three children.
A March 27 Time magazine report published claims by an Iraqi civil rights group that the Marines barged into houses near the bomb strike, throwing grenades and shooting civilians as they cowered in fear. The report prompted calls for a Pentagon probe.
“It’s much worse than was reported in Time magazine,” Murtha, a Democrat, former Marine colonel and Vietnam war veteran, told reporters on Capitol Hill.
“There was no firefight. There was no [bomb] that killed those innocent people,” Murtha explained, adding there were “about twice as many” Iraqis killed than Time had reported.
No official investigation report has been released by the Pentagon and a spokesman for Murtha was unable to add to the congressman’s remarks.
“I do not know where Rep. Murtha is obtaining is information,” said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a spokesman for Marine Corps Forces Central Command in Tampa, Fla. “Thoroughness will drive the investigation.”
Three Marine officers from the battalion that is under investigation, including battalion commander Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, were relieved April 7 for “lack of confidence in their leadership abilities stemming from their performance during a recent deployment to Iraq.” Officials would not tie those firings to the Haditha investigation, however. The two other Marines who were relieved, Capts. Luke McConnell and James Kimber, were company commanders within the battalion.
Murtha said combat stress prompted the Marines’ alleged rampage.
“It’s a very serious incident, unfortunately. It shows the tremendous pressure that these guys are under every day when they’re out in combat,” he said. “One man was killed with an [improvised explosive device] and after that they actually went into the houses and killed women and children.”
Time magazine spent 10 weeks interviewing local residents affected by the incident and, in January, shared these accounts with military officials in Baghdad. The accounts directly conflicted with the Corps’ initial stance that the civilian casualties were the result of the insurgent attack.
Officials with Multi-National Corps-Iraq launched an investigation Feb. 14 after Time brought the allegations to their attention. Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of MNC-I, directed further review March 9 after he was presented with initial findings of the investigation.
Chiarelli then handed the findings to Marine Maj. Gen. Richard Zilmer, the new military commander for western Iraq.
Lt. Col. Bryan Salas, in a March 23 e-mail response to questions, said Zilmer directed the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to look into the allegations.
The Nov. 19 incident came one year after another high-profile incident that enflamed tensions between U.S. forces and Iraqis.
On Nov. 13, 2004, a corporal with 3/1 was videotaped shooting what appeared to be a wounded insurgent inside a mosque in Fallujah, Iraq, during the major U.S. operation to retake the city from insurgents.
Like the Haditha incident, the Fallujah shooting sparked outcries from human-rights groups regarding actions by U.S. forces against Iraqis.
Staff writer Gidget Fuentes contributed to this report.
QUOTE(Teacher in SC @ May 29 2006, 09:31 PM)
Snuffy, this reminds me of the thread you started on May 4 "Message of a Vet of My Lai Time, Tony Swindell":
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...T&f=104&t=55123
Wonder what "Marine" is saying now. As to "Flydangler", when all the investigation and paperwork is done it will be years before "the truth" shakes out, if indeed we ever get the truth. If our troops are so stressed that Marines are losing it, then it's time to come home for sure. If they are at the point of hating the very people they were sent to protect, then it is surely done. For me this just adds to my contention that most of the military guys are there for EACH OTHER, and that is why they would lose it when a friend was killed.
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...T&f=104&t=55123
Wonder what "Marine" is saying now. As to "Flydangler", when all the investigation and paperwork is done it will be years before "the truth" shakes out, if indeed we ever get the truth. If our troops are so stressed that Marines are losing it, then it's time to come home for sure. If they are at the point of hating the very people they were sent to protect, then it is surely done. For me this just adds to my contention that most of the military guys are there for EACH OTHER, and that is why they would lose it when a friend was killed.
I don't believe this warrants the death penalty. But then, I don't believe in the death penalty. I also believe that if these soldiers are prosecuted, then the entire chain of command deserves prosecution, and that includes the Commander in Chief.
Scott Peck wrote a very interesting analysis of My Lai in his book The People of the Lie. What a travesty that entire proceeding was.
This weekend has been one of the bloodiest in Iraq. Its time for this to end.
http://news.google.com/news?ned=tus&rec=0&...D10384094&hl=en
There are at least 1,160 stories on this today world wide.
Carnage has been a regular feature of this war, Afterdowning stree.org has what they call..
Iraq War Images Uncensored
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/uncensored
Nasty stuff, but this is what we are doing in this completely pointless war. The "posed war trophies" are particularly hideous.
Iraq War Images Uncensored
QUOTE
This collection of photos is the most complete we are aware of. Many of them are being made public here for the first time. Many of them are extremely gruesome. These must not be censored, because this is what a war really looks like, and that is something citizens need to see in order to cast informed ballots and lobby our representatives for or against war.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/uncensored
Nasty stuff, but this is what we are doing in this completely pointless war. The "posed war trophies" are particularly hideous.
QUOTE(Snuffysmith @ May 29 2006, 04:57 PM)
I don't believe this warrants the death penalty. But then, I don't believe in the death penalty. I also believe that if these soldiers are prosecuted, then the entire chain of command deserves prosecution, and that includes the Commander in Chief.
Scott Peck wrote a very interesting analysis of My Lai in his book The People of the Lie. What a travesty that entire proceeding was.
This weekend has been one of the bloodiest in Iraq. Its time for this to end.
http://news.google.com/news?ned=tus&rec=0&...D10384094&hl=en
There are at least 1,160 stories on this today world wide.
Scott Peck wrote a very interesting analysis of My Lai in his book The People of the Lie. What a travesty that entire proceeding was.
This weekend has been one of the bloodiest in Iraq. Its time for this to end.
http://news.google.com/news?ned=tus&rec=0&...D10384094&hl=en
There are at least 1,160 stories on this today world wide.
I thought of that same Scott Peck passage today as I listened to the stories, including the Marine's mother interviewed, sobbing, as she told about how her boy had been one of the second group in, the ones taking pictures. This madness needs to end. We are still a civilized nation and it is time for us to take our leader to task. He started this war, and he needs to end it. Now.
Here's a link to the NBC piece on the young soldiers who photographed the bodies:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13038563/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13038563/
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_844.shtml
My Lai . . . Haditha . . . and America’s whitewashers
By Ben Tanosborn
Online Journal Guest Writer
May 29, 2006, 01:06
It was 38 years ago that a platoon from Charlie Company (11th Brigade, Americal Division) commanded by a young Army lieutenant murdered hundreds of old men, women, and children in a small Vietnam village, presumably with the tacit approval of military higher-ups. A memorial later erected there by the Vietnamese lists 504 names as victims of the massacre, ranging in ages from 1 to 82.
My Lai had its victims, a gruesome display on par with the worst incidents that have come to light in the last century. It also had its gang of perpetrators; soldiers under the command of Lt. William Calley. And it even had four heroes; three from a helicopter crew (Thompson, Colburn and Andreotta) who saved the lives of a few villagers; and a man in Calley’s platoon whose conscience would not permit him to take part in the massacre (Bernhardt). But beyond heroes and villains, for the next few years My Lai would also have a never-ending series of whitewashers, who in good conscience must also be considered villains . . . by choice or by default.
The whitewashers came in all ranks of importance, from the anticipated ever-present military brass, that initiated and maintained the cover-up, to a host of politicians and people in leadership, all the way to the commander-in-chief, President Nixon in this case. The incredible bottom line to this massacre was, however, that the only person found guilty for this carnage was Lt. Calley, who ended up serving three and a half years of “house arrest” in his quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia. The entire sordid affair became not just a national disgrace for which the country could do penance, but a monumental whitewash that to date Americans prefer not to talk about.
In a way, the enablers to the entire whitewash were the American public. Not only were the villains and whitewashers de facto exonerated, but the four heroes in the plot became traitors . . . to their military comrades, and also to much of the population.
My Lai, photos and all, was just too big a war crime to allow an effective cover-up, or it might have remained a secret to this date. Accounts provided by soldiers who lived through similar criminal accounts, if on a much smaller scale, were kept hush-hush we are led to believe “not to affect the morale of the troops.” It was all done, as it always seems to be in these cases, for the “greater good.” Yes, the end justifies the means!
Now the hamlets of Pinkville have given way to the streets of Haditha, and the probable murder of two dozen Iraqis, including women and children, by a large, yes large, group of marines. If it turns out to be as horrific as noted in some of the leaked details, and there wasn’t a single marine with enough humanity in the group to put a stop to this. God have pity on us as a nation . . . and as human beings.
It has been six months since the incident occurred, far too long to conduct an adequate investigation had the military chosen to do so. But the delay probably had as much or more to do with the timing in the formation of the Iraqi government than with the preparation of Americans at home for this “new truth.”
Vietnam is far away in time and memory. But now Americans have to cope with new unpleasant realities: a government that lied to them, so as to enlist their support for an illegitimate war; then Abu Ghraib, and the realization that the military is far from squeaky-clean when it comes to torture, human rights and compliance with international law. Now, it is the pride of the military, the marines, who are being put to the test. And this may turn out to be a test like no other in the history of the Corps.
Revenge for the killing of a fellow marine is no reason to kill innocent, defenseless Iraqi women and children; nor is frustration, even when insurgents are at times fed and sheltered by civilians in the area, or when complicity is suspected. Criminal reprisal as an answer to physical and/or mental strain is just unacceptable behavior in human beings, much less in soldiers. When soldiers get to a point where they are apt to crack, they should be kept in their barracks or sent home. Just what role does the military leadership play in all this? Commanders, doctors and chaplains . . . aren’t they all gravely derelict?
How many more Hadithas are there . . . will we ever know what happened in Fallujah, and so many other places where the US military has no reason or right to be?
One must wonder. One, two . . . three decades from now some of these people who are committing crimes in Iraq, or those whitewashing their behavior, are likely to be in positions of political power in these United States. One could even become senator, president, or secretary of state. The whitewash, it appears, never ends.
© 2006 Ben Tanosborn
My Lai . . . Haditha . . . and America’s whitewashers
By Ben Tanosborn
Online Journal Guest Writer
May 29, 2006, 01:06
It was 38 years ago that a platoon from Charlie Company (11th Brigade, Americal Division) commanded by a young Army lieutenant murdered hundreds of old men, women, and children in a small Vietnam village, presumably with the tacit approval of military higher-ups. A memorial later erected there by the Vietnamese lists 504 names as victims of the massacre, ranging in ages from 1 to 82.
My Lai had its victims, a gruesome display on par with the worst incidents that have come to light in the last century. It also had its gang of perpetrators; soldiers under the command of Lt. William Calley. And it even had four heroes; three from a helicopter crew (Thompson, Colburn and Andreotta) who saved the lives of a few villagers; and a man in Calley’s platoon whose conscience would not permit him to take part in the massacre (Bernhardt). But beyond heroes and villains, for the next few years My Lai would also have a never-ending series of whitewashers, who in good conscience must also be considered villains . . . by choice or by default.
The whitewashers came in all ranks of importance, from the anticipated ever-present military brass, that initiated and maintained the cover-up, to a host of politicians and people in leadership, all the way to the commander-in-chief, President Nixon in this case. The incredible bottom line to this massacre was, however, that the only person found guilty for this carnage was Lt. Calley, who ended up serving three and a half years of “house arrest” in his quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia. The entire sordid affair became not just a national disgrace for which the country could do penance, but a monumental whitewash that to date Americans prefer not to talk about.
In a way, the enablers to the entire whitewash were the American public. Not only were the villains and whitewashers de facto exonerated, but the four heroes in the plot became traitors . . . to their military comrades, and also to much of the population.
My Lai, photos and all, was just too big a war crime to allow an effective cover-up, or it might have remained a secret to this date. Accounts provided by soldiers who lived through similar criminal accounts, if on a much smaller scale, were kept hush-hush we are led to believe “not to affect the morale of the troops.” It was all done, as it always seems to be in these cases, for the “greater good.” Yes, the end justifies the means!
Now the hamlets of Pinkville have given way to the streets of Haditha, and the probable murder of two dozen Iraqis, including women and children, by a large, yes large, group of marines. If it turns out to be as horrific as noted in some of the leaked details, and there wasn’t a single marine with enough humanity in the group to put a stop to this. God have pity on us as a nation . . . and as human beings.
It has been six months since the incident occurred, far too long to conduct an adequate investigation had the military chosen to do so. But the delay probably had as much or more to do with the timing in the formation of the Iraqi government than with the preparation of Americans at home for this “new truth.”
Vietnam is far away in time and memory. But now Americans have to cope with new unpleasant realities: a government that lied to them, so as to enlist their support for an illegitimate war; then Abu Ghraib, and the realization that the military is far from squeaky-clean when it comes to torture, human rights and compliance with international law. Now, it is the pride of the military, the marines, who are being put to the test. And this may turn out to be a test like no other in the history of the Corps.
Revenge for the killing of a fellow marine is no reason to kill innocent, defenseless Iraqi women and children; nor is frustration, even when insurgents are at times fed and sheltered by civilians in the area, or when complicity is suspected. Criminal reprisal as an answer to physical and/or mental strain is just unacceptable behavior in human beings, much less in soldiers. When soldiers get to a point where they are apt to crack, they should be kept in their barracks or sent home. Just what role does the military leadership play in all this? Commanders, doctors and chaplains . . . aren’t they all gravely derelict?
How many more Hadithas are there . . . will we ever know what happened in Fallujah, and so many other places where the US military has no reason or right to be?
One must wonder. One, two . . . three decades from now some of these people who are committing crimes in Iraq, or those whitewashing their behavior, are likely to be in positions of political power in these United States. One could even become senator, president, or secretary of state. The whitewash, it appears, never ends.
© 2006 Ben Tanosborn
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=9063
May 30, 2006
Massacre Story Mars
Memorial Day
by Jim Lobe
Monday's observance of Memorial Day, the annual commemoration of U.S. soldiers who died in the service of their country, has taken place at a particularly difficult moment for both the U.S. armed forces and the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush.
While the traditions of small-town parades, barbecues, and family visits to the cemetery to plant flags along the grave markers of veterans were duly honored, the news from Iraq and Afghanistan – where a total of some 150,000 U.S. troops are currently deployed – was anything but upbeat.
While Monday's fatal crash of a runaway military truck in Kabul sparked the worst outbreak of anti-U.S. demonstrations in the Afghan capital since the ouster of the Taliban in late 2001, dozens of people, including two British members of a CBS News television crew, were reported killed in the latest surge of gunfire and bomb attacks throughout Iraq.
The incident in Afghanistan, in which at least half a dozen people were reported killed – some allegedly by U.S. troops – in the rioting that followed the crash, underlined the degree to which foreign forces are increasingly resented. It also temporarily diverted attention to the unprecedented resurgence of Taliban forces in the country's Pashtun belt, where a series of violent clashes have left several hundred dead over the past two weeks.
"Afghanistan is the sleeper crisis of this summer," the head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), John Hamre, told the Sunday New York Times in an analysis that described "some officials" here as worried that Washington "might become tied down in a prolonged battle as control slips away from the central government."
Those concerns could well result in the reversal of an earlier decision to reduce by several thousand the roughly 20,000 U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan and replace them with soldiers from other NATO countries, according to officials here.
In Iraq, where the new government headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is still struggling to gain consensus on who should head the all-important defense and interior ministries, the ongoing violence and intensified ethnic cleansing, particularly in Baghdad, are forcing a similar reassessment.
Plans to bring home at least 30,000 out of the 133,000 U.S. troops currently deployed there by the mid-term Congressional elections in November appear to have been put on hold, much to the chagrin of nervous Republican candidates who know that the unpopularity of both the war and of President Bush poses a serious threat to their electoral ambitions.
While the situations in both countries underline the doubtfulness of Bush's pledges of "complete victory" – most recently voiced Saturday at graduation at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point – in his "war on terror," what makes this year's Memorial Day particularly downbeat is the impending release of an official report on what almost certainly was a massacre of as many as two dozen unarmed Iraqis, including one five-month-old baby girl, carried out by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, last November.
First reported in March by Time magazine, the three- to five-hour killing spree, which is being widely compared to the bloodier 1968 My Lai massacre that helped turn public opinion decisively against the Vietnam War after it became public in late 1969, has reportedly been detailed to some lawmakers behind closed doors by senior military officers and Pentagon officials last week.
But major U.S. newspapers, including the Times and the Washington Post, have since provided accounts based on eyewitness testimony by residents of Haditha, an insurgent stronghold in al-Anbar province, as well as secondhand reports by lawmakers, notably ex-Marine veteran and Iraq War critic, Democratic Rep. John Murtha, about what they have been told.
The massacre was reportedly triggered by the bombing of a military convoy that resulted in the death of one Marine. A squad of Marines subsequently conducted a sweep of the neighborhood, first killing five men in a taxi, then invading two homes where they killed unarmed men, women and children, most at close range.
One congressional official described the killings to the Times as "methodical in nature," and despite initial reports of the incident to the contrary, no indication that the Marines faced armed resistance or attack at any time during their sweep has emerged.
"This was not an immediate response to an attack," another ex-Marine, Republican Rep. John Kline, also told the Times. "This would be an atrocity."
Worse, as in My Lai, there appears to have been an attempt at covering up the incident, including planting evidence to indicate the presence of armed resistance and lying to military investigators. The initial descriptions of the killings as resulting from the original bombing and then a running battle between the Marines and insurgents also proved false.
The fact, however, that no serious investigation of the killings appears to have taken place until after the appearance of Time's report more than four months after the incident – coupled with the military's offer of $2,500 per victim to the surviving family members in compensation, a decision normally handled at senior levels – has added to the impression that the Marines or the Pentagon or both had tried to prevent the massacre from coming to light.
These factors were cited by Murtha, whose ties to the uniformed military are considered particularly close and who first disclosed the preliminary results of the military's investigation two weeks ago, as evidence of a cover-up.
"There has to have been a cover-up of this thing," he said on a television interview Sunday. "No question about it," he added, suggesting that it could go high up the chain of command. "How far up it went, I don't know."
Murtha also noted another pending case against a separate group of Marines who are accused of summarily executing an Iraqi man just last month near Fallujah and then trying to cover it up.
The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, announced Sunday that he would hold hearings on the incident, including the reaction of "senior officers in the Marine Corps."
In the Haditha case, one battalion commander and two company commanders have reportedly been relieved of their posts, while several Marines who allegedly carried out the killings are being held in the brig at their home base at Fort Pendleton, Calif., pending the completion of the investigations. A dozen other Marines have also been implicated, according to published reports.
To Murtha, who has called for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq for the last six months, however, the incident and its aftermath are yet one more indication that the administration failed to anticipate an unconventional war in Iraq and train and equip U.S. troops adequately to cope with it.
(Inter Press Service)
May 30, 2006
Massacre Story Mars
Memorial Day
by Jim Lobe
Monday's observance of Memorial Day, the annual commemoration of U.S. soldiers who died in the service of their country, has taken place at a particularly difficult moment for both the U.S. armed forces and the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush.
While the traditions of small-town parades, barbecues, and family visits to the cemetery to plant flags along the grave markers of veterans were duly honored, the news from Iraq and Afghanistan – where a total of some 150,000 U.S. troops are currently deployed – was anything but upbeat.
While Monday's fatal crash of a runaway military truck in Kabul sparked the worst outbreak of anti-U.S. demonstrations in the Afghan capital since the ouster of the Taliban in late 2001, dozens of people, including two British members of a CBS News television crew, were reported killed in the latest surge of gunfire and bomb attacks throughout Iraq.
The incident in Afghanistan, in which at least half a dozen people were reported killed – some allegedly by U.S. troops – in the rioting that followed the crash, underlined the degree to which foreign forces are increasingly resented. It also temporarily diverted attention to the unprecedented resurgence of Taliban forces in the country's Pashtun belt, where a series of violent clashes have left several hundred dead over the past two weeks.
"Afghanistan is the sleeper crisis of this summer," the head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), John Hamre, told the Sunday New York Times in an analysis that described "some officials" here as worried that Washington "might become tied down in a prolonged battle as control slips away from the central government."
Those concerns could well result in the reversal of an earlier decision to reduce by several thousand the roughly 20,000 U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan and replace them with soldiers from other NATO countries, according to officials here.
In Iraq, where the new government headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is still struggling to gain consensus on who should head the all-important defense and interior ministries, the ongoing violence and intensified ethnic cleansing, particularly in Baghdad, are forcing a similar reassessment.
Plans to bring home at least 30,000 out of the 133,000 U.S. troops currently deployed there by the mid-term Congressional elections in November appear to have been put on hold, much to the chagrin of nervous Republican candidates who know that the unpopularity of both the war and of President Bush poses a serious threat to their electoral ambitions.
While the situations in both countries underline the doubtfulness of Bush's pledges of "complete victory" – most recently voiced Saturday at graduation at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point – in his "war on terror," what makes this year's Memorial Day particularly downbeat is the impending release of an official report on what almost certainly was a massacre of as many as two dozen unarmed Iraqis, including one five-month-old baby girl, carried out by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, last November.
First reported in March by Time magazine, the three- to five-hour killing spree, which is being widely compared to the bloodier 1968 My Lai massacre that helped turn public opinion decisively against the Vietnam War after it became public in late 1969, has reportedly been detailed to some lawmakers behind closed doors by senior military officers and Pentagon officials last week.
But major U.S. newspapers, including the Times and the Washington Post, have since provided accounts based on eyewitness testimony by residents of Haditha, an insurgent stronghold in al-Anbar province, as well as secondhand reports by lawmakers, notably ex-Marine veteran and Iraq War critic, Democratic Rep. John Murtha, about what they have been told.
The massacre was reportedly triggered by the bombing of a military convoy that resulted in the death of one Marine. A squad of Marines subsequently conducted a sweep of the neighborhood, first killing five men in a taxi, then invading two homes where they killed unarmed men, women and children, most at close range.
One congressional official described the killings to the Times as "methodical in nature," and despite initial reports of the incident to the contrary, no indication that the Marines faced armed resistance or attack at any time during their sweep has emerged.
"This was not an immediate response to an attack," another ex-Marine, Republican Rep. John Kline, also told the Times. "This would be an atrocity."
Worse, as in My Lai, there appears to have been an attempt at covering up the incident, including planting evidence to indicate the presence of armed resistance and lying to military investigators. The initial descriptions of the killings as resulting from the original bombing and then a running battle between the Marines and insurgents also proved false.
The fact, however, that no serious investigation of the killings appears to have taken place until after the appearance of Time's report more than four months after the incident – coupled with the military's offer of $2,500 per victim to the surviving family members in compensation, a decision normally handled at senior levels – has added to the impression that the Marines or the Pentagon or both had tried to prevent the massacre from coming to light.
These factors were cited by Murtha, whose ties to the uniformed military are considered particularly close and who first disclosed the preliminary results of the military's investigation two weeks ago, as evidence of a cover-up.
"There has to have been a cover-up of this thing," he said on a television interview Sunday. "No question about it," he added, suggesting that it could go high up the chain of command. "How far up it went, I don't know."
Murtha also noted another pending case against a separate group of Marines who are accused of summarily executing an Iraqi man just last month near Fallujah and then trying to cover it up.
The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, announced Sunday that he would hold hearings on the incident, including the reaction of "senior officers in the Marine Corps."
In the Haditha case, one battalion commander and two company commanders have reportedly been relieved of their posts, while several Marines who allegedly carried out the killings are being held in the brig at their home base at Fort Pendleton, Calif., pending the completion of the investigations. A dozen other Marines have also been implicated, according to published reports.
To Murtha, who has called for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq for the last six months, however, the incident and its aftermath are yet one more indication that the administration failed to anticipate an unconventional war in Iraq and train and equip U.S. troops adequately to cope with it.
(Inter Press Service)
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/sf/nyt5_30_06.htm
New York Times
May 30, 2006
On a Marine Base, Disbelief Over Charges
By CAROLYN MARSHALL
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., May 29 — In this "company town" where everything and everyone caters to the well-being of the Marine Corps, there is no shortage of people, both military and civilian, who are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the troops accused of unjustified killings last November in Haditha, Iraq.
Denial and utter disbelief are the overwhelming reaction to reports of the killings involving marines based here. If there is any truth to the accusations, some say, then the troops must have been acting on direct orders, responding as they were trained to do.
Lawrence Harper, 36, now retired, served in the Marine Corps for more than 15 years, and was in the Persian Gulf war.
"Many times you see a situation the next day and wonder, how did my brain think this was dangerous?" Mr. Harper said, while shopping for gear at G.I. Joe's, a military supply shop in Oceanside.
Mr. Harper expressed doubt that the marines knowingly committed crimes in Haditha, saying that they undoubtedly acted on instinct, as trained, in the heat of battle.
"When a bullet comes at you and you turn around and half your buddy's head is blown off, it changes the way you think forever," he said.
Jerry Alexander, the owner of G.I. Joe's and a Navy man who served with the Marines for a dozen years, had much the same perspective, saying, "If I saw my buddy laying there dead, there is no such thing as too much retaliation."
While Mr. Alexander said "unacceptable kills" should not be covered up, he worried about the unfairness of judging those who were in Haditha.
"In the heat of combat, you cannot hesitate; he who hesitates is lost," he said. "I would not prosecute these young men because they were just doing their jobs."
On this Memorial Day, in this military community, people will concede that any marine who committed illegal acts must be punished and that the Pentagon must take responsibility.
But conversation quickly returns to emotional and earnest explanations of the need for understanding for what one former marine described as "these 19-year-old kids who get paid 900 bucks a month to put their lives on the line."
The marines and several senior officers assigned to the Third Battalion of the First Marine Division are the focus of criminal investigations looking into the deaths of 24 people who lived in the Subhani district of Haditha, an insurgent stronghold in Iraq.
A preliminary inquiry indicated that the civilians were killed during a four- to five-hour sweep, led by a handful of marines angry over the death of Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Tex., who was killed as his patrol drove through the area.
Appearing Monday on the CNN program "American Morning," Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "We want to find out what happened and we'll make it public."
He added, "If the allegations, as they are being portrayed in the newspaper, turn out to be valid, then of course there will be charges. But we don't know yet what the outcome will be."
The family of Corporal Terrazas was interviewed Monday morning on "Morning Edition" on National Public Radio. His uncle, Andy Terrazas, a former marine who is now a border patrol agent, said, "I hope this is over soon so they can just let him rest in peace. I hope these marines come out clean, but I guess it's not looking too good, right?"
None of the active and former marines interviewed for this story knew Corporal Terrazas or the members of the unit at the center of the probe. But most of them had seen combat, recently or in the Gulf war.
"In Iraq, everything you do has to be cleared with a commanding officer," said Cpl. Michael Miller, 25, who has served two tours of duty and fought in Falluja and Ramadi. "You just can't go clearing houses without the permission of higher-ups."
Corporal Miller said he believed that the marines would be vindicated in the inquiry. "I just think the marines did what they had to do," he said. "I don't know why innocent people are dead, but someone must have seen a gun." Several retired senior officers agreed. Col. Ben Mittman of the Air Force, interviewed as he got his regular military buzz cut at the Beachcomber Barber Shop in Oceanside, worried that the young servicemen were being made scapegoats.
"If this thing really happened, they had to radio communication and get the go-ahead," he said. "The frontline grunts these days do not do anything without the commanders knowing, especially something like that."
The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that photographs taken by a Marine intelligence team sent into Haditha showed execution-style killings, including gunshots to the head. As more details about the Haditha deaths incident surface, it has conjured disturbing memories of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam for many former marines and in other circles of war veterans. "I would draw the same parallel," Mr. Alexander said. "The young guys took the heat for the higher-ups there too."
Most of those "young guys," the active-duty marines who are the peers of those under scrutiny in the Haditha deaths, were off base this weekend on a five-day holiday leave.
It is those marines and their leaders who were the focus of other remarks by General Pace in his interview on "Morning Edition."
"We should, in fact, as leaders take on the responsibility to get out and talk to our troops and make sure that they understand that what 99.9 percent of them are doing, which is fighting with honor and courage, is exactly what we expect of them," he said, adding, "Because regardless of where this investigations goes, we want to ensure that our troops understand what's expected of them."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
New York Times
May 30, 2006
On a Marine Base, Disbelief Over Charges
By CAROLYN MARSHALL
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., May 29 — In this "company town" where everything and everyone caters to the well-being of the Marine Corps, there is no shortage of people, both military and civilian, who are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the troops accused of unjustified killings last November in Haditha, Iraq.
Denial and utter disbelief are the overwhelming reaction to reports of the killings involving marines based here. If there is any truth to the accusations, some say, then the troops must have been acting on direct orders, responding as they were trained to do.
Lawrence Harper, 36, now retired, served in the Marine Corps for more than 15 years, and was in the Persian Gulf war.
"Many times you see a situation the next day and wonder, how did my brain think this was dangerous?" Mr. Harper said, while shopping for gear at G.I. Joe's, a military supply shop in Oceanside.
Mr. Harper expressed doubt that the marines knowingly committed crimes in Haditha, saying that they undoubtedly acted on instinct, as trained, in the heat of battle.
"When a bullet comes at you and you turn around and half your buddy's head is blown off, it changes the way you think forever," he said.
Jerry Alexander, the owner of G.I. Joe's and a Navy man who served with the Marines for a dozen years, had much the same perspective, saying, "If I saw my buddy laying there dead, there is no such thing as too much retaliation."
While Mr. Alexander said "unacceptable kills" should not be covered up, he worried about the unfairness of judging those who were in Haditha.
"In the heat of combat, you cannot hesitate; he who hesitates is lost," he said. "I would not prosecute these young men because they were just doing their jobs."
On this Memorial Day, in this military community, people will concede that any marine who committed illegal acts must be punished and that the Pentagon must take responsibility.
But conversation quickly returns to emotional and earnest explanations of the need for understanding for what one former marine described as "these 19-year-old kids who get paid 900 bucks a month to put their lives on the line."
The marines and several senior officers assigned to the Third Battalion of the First Marine Division are the focus of criminal investigations looking into the deaths of 24 people who lived in the Subhani district of Haditha, an insurgent stronghold in Iraq.
A preliminary inquiry indicated that the civilians were killed during a four- to five-hour sweep, led by a handful of marines angry over the death of Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Tex., who was killed as his patrol drove through the area.
Appearing Monday on the CNN program "American Morning," Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "We want to find out what happened and we'll make it public."
He added, "If the allegations, as they are being portrayed in the newspaper, turn out to be valid, then of course there will be charges. But we don't know yet what the outcome will be."
The family of Corporal Terrazas was interviewed Monday morning on "Morning Edition" on National Public Radio. His uncle, Andy Terrazas, a former marine who is now a border patrol agent, said, "I hope this is over soon so they can just let him rest in peace. I hope these marines come out clean, but I guess it's not looking too good, right?"
None of the active and former marines interviewed for this story knew Corporal Terrazas or the members of the unit at the center of the probe. But most of them had seen combat, recently or in the Gulf war.
"In Iraq, everything you do has to be cleared with a commanding officer," said Cpl. Michael Miller, 25, who has served two tours of duty and fought in Falluja and Ramadi. "You just can't go clearing houses without the permission of higher-ups."
Corporal Miller said he believed that the marines would be vindicated in the inquiry. "I just think the marines did what they had to do," he said. "I don't know why innocent people are dead, but someone must have seen a gun." Several retired senior officers agreed. Col. Ben Mittman of the Air Force, interviewed as he got his regular military buzz cut at the Beachcomber Barber Shop in Oceanside, worried that the young servicemen were being made scapegoats.
"If this thing really happened, they had to radio communication and get the go-ahead," he said. "The frontline grunts these days do not do anything without the commanders knowing, especially something like that."
The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that photographs taken by a Marine intelligence team sent into Haditha showed execution-style killings, including gunshots to the head. As more details about the Haditha deaths incident surface, it has conjured disturbing memories of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam for many former marines and in other circles of war veterans. "I would draw the same parallel," Mr. Alexander said. "The young guys took the heat for the higher-ups there too."
Most of those "young guys," the active-duty marines who are the peers of those under scrutiny in the Haditha deaths, were off base this weekend on a five-day holiday leave.
It is those marines and their leaders who were the focus of other remarks by General Pace in his interview on "Morning Edition."
"We should, in fact, as leaders take on the responsibility to get out and talk to our troops and make sure that they understand that what 99.9 percent of them are doing, which is fighting with honor and courage, is exactly what we expect of them," he said, adding, "Because regardless of where this investigations goes, we want to ensure that our troops understand what's expected of them."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/ne...t_id=1002576997
Haditha Massacre: KR Reporter, Last August, Noted Worries There That U.S. Marines Might 'Crack'
Tom Lasseter
By Greg Mitchell
Published: May 28, 2006 12:50 PM ET
NEW YORK New revelations suggest that U.S. marines committed atrociities in Haditha, Iraq, last November, killing at least two dozen civilians after an American was slain by a roadside bomb. Three months before that, Tom Lasseter, longtime Baghdad correspondent for Knight Ridder, filed a report from that area noting concerns that the marines there might "crack under the pressure."
Today, on Memorial Day, the Los Angeles Time published a story based on an interview with one of the marines in Haditha that day. Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones claims that he did not participate in the rampage but was involved in the cleanup. He said his worst moment, and one that still haunts him, was picking up the body of a young girl who was shot in the head. "I held her out like this," he said, "but her head was bobbing up and down and the insides fell on my legs."
Here is Lasseter's Aug. 28, 2005, story, as it appeared then. Lasseter recently won a top Overseas Press Club award for his reporting from Iraq.
*
HIT, Iraq -- The inability of U.S. forces to hold ground in Anbar province in western Iraq, and the cat and mouse chase that ensues, has put the Marines and soldiers there under intense physical and psychological pressure.
The sun raises temperatures to 115 degrees most days, insurgents stage ambushes daily then melt into the civilian population and American troops in Anbar find themselves in a house of mirrors in which they don't speak the language and can't tell friend from foe.
Most Marines and soldiers in Anbar live behind massive concrete barriers, bales of concertina wire and perimeters guarded by sniper towers and tanks.
Despite their overwhelming military might, they must watch every alleyway for snipers and each patch of road for mines or bombs, which can send balls of flame through their vehicles. That happened earlier this month south of Haditha, when an explosion killed 14 Marines in an amphibious assault vehicle.
Officers worry about the enemy while trying to make sure their men don't crack under the pressure.
"I tell the guys not to lose their humanity over here, because it's easy to do," said Marine Capt. James Haunty, 27, of Columbus, Ohio. "I tell them not to turn into Col. Kurtz."
Haunty was referring to a character in Joseph Conrad's novella, "Heart of Darkness." It became the basis for the Vietnam War movie "Apocalypse Now," in which Kurtz has a mental breakdown and murders suspected Vietnamese double agents.
Asked for an example of the kind of pressure that could cause Marines to crack, Haunty talked about the results of a car bomb: "I've picked up pieces of a friend, a Marine. I don't ever want to see that s--- again."
Sitting with his men at a morning meeting in the town of Hit, Marine Maj. Nicholas Visconti said he was up late the night before, unable to sleep in the heat, when a call came from a patrol requesting permission to shoot an Iraqi man. The man, the patrol leader said, was out past curfew and appeared to be talking on a cell phone. Visconti intervened and told the patrol leader not to shoot.
Looking at his young lieutenants and sergeants, Visconti said, "If he's a bad guy, if he's running the (car bomb) factory, I'll put the gun in his mouth and kill him myself ... but first let's get a f------ security check."
With a worried look, Visconti, 35, of Brookfield, Conn., continued: "There's killing bad guys and there's murdering civilians. Let's do the first and not the second. Murderers we're not, OK?"
Chief Warrant Officer Mike Niezgoda nodded in agreement. The next day, a roadside bomb knocked Niezgoda unconscious and broke his arm.
"It's a lot like it was in Vietnam, when the VC's (Viet Cong) would come out and pretend to be your friends," said Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Vidler, 23, of Syracuse, N.Y. "You're fighting an enemy on his home ground and you don't know who's who."
After a recent meeting with local tribal sheiks in Fallujah, Marine Lt. Col. Jim Haldeman walked to the back of the room and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
The gathering was supposed to be an exercise in civic empowerment but quickly degenerated into the Iraqis demanding that they get identification cards designating them as sheiks, which would bar local security forces from arresting them on the streets.
"All of these guys are f------ muj," Haldeman said, using the Arabic term for "holy warriors," mujahedeen, which American troops frequently use to describe the insurgents.
Haldeman took a deep drag from his cigarette.
"I've never been so nervous around a group of men," he said. Haldeman, 50, of West Kingston, R.I., later added that he was sure that a lot of the men in the crowd would have slit his throat if they'd had the opportunity.
Walking down an alley in Hit a few days earlier, stepping over pools of sewage, Lance Cpl. Greg Allen had watched the Marines around him. They were picking through garbage, tugging on wires and kicking boxes, looking for bombs and mines and hoping that if they found one it wouldn't go off.
"They (insurgents) are doing a hell of a job fighting this war. They know they can't take us head on but they can do a lot of damage with bombs," said Allen, 19, of Syracuse, N.Y. "There's no one out here to fight."
The men in Allen's squad stopped at a grocery to buy water and sodas. As they walked away, several of them wondered if they'd just given money to an insurgent sympathizer.
On a recent patrol through southern Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, Sgt. 1st Class Tom Coffey, 37, of Burlington, Vt., looked through the thick bulletproof windows of his Humvee. Children were peeking at him from behind a half-closed garage door.
"I'd love to play soccer with them but we'd have to stage gun trucks and then we'd still end up being a large soft target," he said.
After he went back to the base to pick up some supplies, a call came: A roadsi
Haditha Massacre: KR Reporter, Last August, Noted Worries There That U.S. Marines Might 'Crack'
Tom Lasseter
By Greg Mitchell
Published: May 28, 2006 12:50 PM ET
NEW YORK New revelations suggest that U.S. marines committed atrociities in Haditha, Iraq, last November, killing at least two dozen civilians after an American was slain by a roadside bomb. Three months before that, Tom Lasseter, longtime Baghdad correspondent for Knight Ridder, filed a report from that area noting concerns that the marines there might "crack under the pressure."
Today, on Memorial Day, the Los Angeles Time published a story based on an interview with one of the marines in Haditha that day. Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones claims that he did not participate in the rampage but was involved in the cleanup. He said his worst moment, and one that still haunts him, was picking up the body of a young girl who was shot in the head. "I held her out like this," he said, "but her head was bobbing up and down and the insides fell on my legs."
Here is Lasseter's Aug. 28, 2005, story, as it appeared then. Lasseter recently won a top Overseas Press Club award for his reporting from Iraq.
*
HIT, Iraq -- The inability of U.S. forces to hold ground in Anbar province in western Iraq, and the cat and mouse chase that ensues, has put the Marines and soldiers there under intense physical and psychological pressure.
The sun raises temperatures to 115 degrees most days, insurgents stage ambushes daily then melt into the civilian population and American troops in Anbar find themselves in a house of mirrors in which they don't speak the language and can't tell friend from foe.
Most Marines and soldiers in Anbar live behind massive concrete barriers, bales of concertina wire and perimeters guarded by sniper towers and tanks.
Despite their overwhelming military might, they must watch every alleyway for snipers and each patch of road for mines or bombs, which can send balls of flame through their vehicles. That happened earlier this month south of Haditha, when an explosion killed 14 Marines in an amphibious assault vehicle.
Officers worry about the enemy while trying to make sure their men don't crack under the pressure.
"I tell the guys not to lose their humanity over here, because it's easy to do," said Marine Capt. James Haunty, 27, of Columbus, Ohio. "I tell them not to turn into Col. Kurtz."
Haunty was referring to a character in Joseph Conrad's novella, "Heart of Darkness." It became the basis for the Vietnam War movie "Apocalypse Now," in which Kurtz has a mental breakdown and murders suspected Vietnamese double agents.
Asked for an example of the kind of pressure that could cause Marines to crack, Haunty talked about the results of a car bomb: "I've picked up pieces of a friend, a Marine. I don't ever want to see that s--- again."
Sitting with his men at a morning meeting in the town of Hit, Marine Maj. Nicholas Visconti said he was up late the night before, unable to sleep in the heat, when a call came from a patrol requesting permission to shoot an Iraqi man. The man, the patrol leader said, was out past curfew and appeared to be talking on a cell phone. Visconti intervened and told the patrol leader not to shoot.
Looking at his young lieutenants and sergeants, Visconti said, "If he's a bad guy, if he's running the (car bomb) factory, I'll put the gun in his mouth and kill him myself ... but first let's get a f------ security check."
With a worried look, Visconti, 35, of Brookfield, Conn., continued: "There's killing bad guys and there's murdering civilians. Let's do the first and not the second. Murderers we're not, OK?"
Chief Warrant Officer Mike Niezgoda nodded in agreement. The next day, a roadside bomb knocked Niezgoda unconscious and broke his arm.
"It's a lot like it was in Vietnam, when the VC's (Viet Cong) would come out and pretend to be your friends," said Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Vidler, 23, of Syracuse, N.Y. "You're fighting an enemy on his home ground and you don't know who's who."
After a recent meeting with local tribal sheiks in Fallujah, Marine Lt. Col. Jim Haldeman walked to the back of the room and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
The gathering was supposed to be an exercise in civic empowerment but quickly degenerated into the Iraqis demanding that they get identification cards designating them as sheiks, which would bar local security forces from arresting them on the streets.
"All of these guys are f------ muj," Haldeman said, using the Arabic term for "holy warriors," mujahedeen, which American troops frequently use to describe the insurgents.
Haldeman took a deep drag from his cigarette.
"I've never been so nervous around a group of men," he said. Haldeman, 50, of West Kingston, R.I., later added that he was sure that a lot of the men in the crowd would have slit his throat if they'd had the opportunity.
Walking down an alley in Hit a few days earlier, stepping over pools of sewage, Lance Cpl. Greg Allen had watched the Marines around him. They were picking through garbage, tugging on wires and kicking boxes, looking for bombs and mines and hoping that if they found one it wouldn't go off.
"They (insurgents) are doing a hell of a job fighting this war. They know they can't take us head on but they can do a lot of damage with bombs," said Allen, 19, of Syracuse, N.Y. "There's no one out here to fight."
The men in Allen's squad stopped at a grocery to buy water and sodas. As they walked away, several of them wondered if they'd just given money to an insurgent sympathizer.
On a recent patrol through southern Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, Sgt. 1st Class Tom Coffey, 37, of Burlington, Vt., looked through the thick bulletproof windows of his Humvee. Children were peeking at him from behind a half-closed garage door.
"I'd love to play soccer with them but we'd have to stage gun trucks and then we'd still end up being a large soft target," he said.
After he went back to the base to pick up some supplies, a call came: A roadsi