Military to Report Marines Killed Iraqi Civilians

[fontman]

By THOM SHANKER, ERIC SCHMITT and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 25 - A military investigation into the deaths of two dozen Iraqis last November is expected to find that a small number of marines in western Iraq carried out extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians, Congressional, military and Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Two lawyers involved in discussions about individual marines' defenses said they thought the investigation could result in charges of murder, a capital offense. That possibility and the emerging details of the killings have raised fears that the incident could be the gravest case involving misconduct by American ground forces in Iraq.

Officials briefed on preliminary results of the inquiry said the civilians killed at Haditha, a lawless, insurgent-plagued city deep in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, did not die from a makeshift bomb, as the military first reported, or in cross-fire between marines and attackers, as was later announced. A separate inquiry has begun to find whether the events were deliberately covered up.

Evidence indicates that the civilians were killed during a sustained sweep by a small group of marines that lasted three to five hours and included shootings of five men standing near a taxi at a checkpoint, and killings inside at least two homes that included women and children, officials said.

That evidence, described by Congressional, Pentagon and military officials briefed on the inquiry, suggested to one Congressional official that the killings were "methodical in nature."

Congressional and military officials say the Naval Criminal Investigative Service inquiry is focusing on the actions of a Marine Corps staff sergeant serving as squad leader at the time, but that Marine officials have told members of Congress that up to a dozen other marines in the unit are also under investigation. Officials briefed on the inquiry said that most of the bullets that killed the civilians were now thought to have been "fired by a couple of rifles," as one of them put it.

The killings were first reported by Time magazine in March, based on accounts from survivors and human rights groups, and members of Congress have spoken publicly about the episode in recent days. But the new accounts from Congressional, military and Pentagon officials added significant new details to the picture. All of those who discussed the case had to be granted anonymity before they would talk about the findings emerging from the investigation.

A second, parallel inquiry was ordered by the second-ranking general in Iraq to examine whether any marines on the ground at Haditha, or any of their superior officers, tried to cover up the killings by filing false reports up the chain of command. That inquiry, conducted by an Army officer assigned to the Multinational Corps headquarters in Iraq, is expected to report its findings in coming days.

In an unusual sign of high-level concern, the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, flew from Washington to Iraq on Thursday to give a series of speeches to his forces re-emphasizing compliance with international laws of armed conflict, the Geneva Conventions and the American military's own rules of engagement.

"Recent serious allegations concerning actions of marines in combat have caused me concern," General Hagee said in a statement issued upon his departure. The statement did not mention any specific incident.

The first official report from the military, issued on Nov. 20, said that "a U.S. marine and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb" and that "immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire."

Military investigators have since uncovered a far different set of facts from what was first reported, partly aided by marines who are cooperating with the inquiry and partly guided by reports filed by a separate unit that arrived to gather intelligence and document the attack; those reports contradicted the original version of the marines, Pentagon officials said.

One senior Defense Department official who has been briefed on the initial findings, when asked how many of the 24 dead Iraqis were killed by the improvised bomb as initially reported, paused and said, "Zero."

While Haditha was rife with violence and gunfire that day, the marines, who were assigned to the Third Battalion, First Marines, and are now back at Camp Pendleton, Calif., "never took what would constitute hostile fire of a seriously threatening nature," one Pentagon official said.

Women and children were among those killed, as well as five men who had been traveling in a taxi near the bomb, which killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas of El Paso.

Although investigators are still piecing together the string of deaths, Congressional and Pentagon officials said the five men in the taxi either were pulled out or got out at a Marine checkpoint and were shot.

The deaths of those in the taxi, and inside two nearby houses, were not the result of a quick and violent firefight, according to officials who had been briefed on the inquiry.

"This was not a burst of fire, but a sustained operation over several hours, maybe five hours," one official said. Forensic evidence gathered from the houses where Iraqi civilians died is also said to contradict reports that the marines had to overcome hostile fire to storm the homes.

Members of the House and Senate briefed on the Haditha shootings by senior Marine officers, including General Hagee and Brig. Gen. John F. Kelly, the Marine legislative liaison, voiced concerns Thursday about the seriousness of the accusations.

Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who is a retired Marine colonel, said that the allegations indicated that "this was not an accident. This was direct fire by marines at civilians." He added, "This was not an immediate response to an attack. This would be an atrocity."

The deaths, and the role of the marines in those deaths, is being viewed with such alarm that senior Marine Corps officers briefed members of Congress last week and again on Wednesday and Thursday.

The briefings were in part an effort to prevent the kind of angry explosion from Capitol Hill that followed news of detainee abuse by American military jailers at Abu Ghraib prison, which had been quietly under investigation for months before the details of the abuse were leaked to the news media. "If the accounts as they have been alleged are true, the Haditha incident is likely the most serious war crime that has been reported in Iraq since the beginning of the war," said John Sifton, of Human Rights Watch. "Here we have two dozen civilians being killed - apparently intentionally. This isn't a gray area. This is a massacre."

Three Marine officers - the battalion commander and two company commanders in Haditha at the time - have been relieved of duty, although official statements have declined to link that action to the investigation.

Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, said he expected senators would review investigators' evidence, including photographs by military photographers that Mr. Warner said were "taken as a matter of routine in Iraq on operations of this nature when there's loss of life."

Lawyers who have been in conversations with the marines under investigation stressed the chaotic situation in Haditha at the time of the killings. And they expect that the defense will stress that insurgents often hide among civilians, that Haditha on the day of the shootings was suffering a wave of fluid insurgent attacks and that the marines responded to high levels of hostile action aimed at them.

Much of the area around Haditha is controlled by Sunni Arab insurgents who have made the city one of the deadliest in Iraq for American troops. On Aug. 1, three months before the massacre, insurgents ambushed and killed six Marine snipers moving through Haditha on foot. Insurgents released a video after the ambush that appeared to show the attack, and the mangled and burned body of a dead serviceman. Then, two days later, 14 marines were killed when their armored vehicle was destroyed by a roadside bomb near the southern edge of the city.

The Marines also disclosed this week that a preliminary inquiry had found "sufficient information" to recommend a criminal probe into the killing of an Iraqi civilian on April 26 near Hamandiyah, a village west of Baghdad.

[thedrifter]

My Lai, Iraq
The Few, the Proud, the Murderers

By PIERRE TRISTAM

Of course the first line of defense, for those craven enough to defend atrocities just because Americans commit them, is to say that Iraqis do worse. And in fact the U.S. military, after lying about the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha last year, then lying about the number of Iraqis killed, then covering up the massacre until a Time magazine article made it impossible to keep lying, attempted that very line of defense: As Time reported in March, "Lieut. Colonel Michelle Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq, told Time the involvement of [military investigators] does not mean that a crime occurred. And she says the fault for the civilian deaths lies squarely with the insurgents, who "placed noncombatants in the line of fire as the M! arines responded to defend themselves.'" All lies, of course. There were no insurgents hiding among civilians. There w as no crossfire. The Marines weren't defending themselves. They were out on a rampage, murdering at point-blank leisure, logding bullets in the heads of women and children, My Lai-style.

There is one buried quarter truth in Michelle Martin's official story (odd, how her name rhymes with the name of that most craven of right-wing bloggers, to whom apologizing for brutality, as long as it's camouflaged in stars and stripes, is a back-seat shtick), though it doesn't justify what happened in Haditha: When you train men not only to kill but to become sub-human drones who dehumanize their enemy in turn, and when you place them in situations where they want to see nothing but sub-human creatures, you can't expect them not to act the part they've been trained to act! .

I keep remembering that Bob Herbert column in the Times last May, relating the story of Aidan Delgado, a U.S. soldier who served in Iraq: "He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states," Herbert wrote, "a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans. "He laughed,' Mr. Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with him.' The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads.' He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: "What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded ju! st comp letely openly. They said: "Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.'' "Haji' is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook' or "Charlie' was used in Vietnam. Mr. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong." The banality of evil doesn't have to rise to the level of genocide to find its stage. To the contrary. Evil at its most routi ne is localized affair, the more debased for being either completely out of sight and accountability, or for being tacitly, happily condoned by its execut ioner's posse. The Haditha massacre stands out only because in its case someone was there to report it. But who doubts that these atrocities aren't routine, or that a soldier's swift kick in the chest of a six year old boy is any less of an atrocity, considering what that soldier would do to an adult if can be such a brute toward children?

What's almost as repulsive, though in this case only ink is being spilled, not blood, is the way the subsequent reporting about the massacre is being laid out. The New York Times this morning, with its usual, but in this case nauseating, restraint in balance's name, pulls a classic example of mitigating atrocity with qualifiers. The lead paragraph refers to a small number of marines carrying out "extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians," establishing right away the rogue-soldier theory that was attempted in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib. The downplaying of U.S. torture as an institutional rather than ! an exce ptional strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan was successful, at least in the public's mind.

The evidence suggests otherw ise. It does so as well when it comes to wanton killings, whether it's the trigger-happy soldiering at Iraqi checkpoints or the killing of civilians in allegedly collateral circumstances. Yet you can see the Haditha massacre's dowplaying game already in full swing. The Times has the story over two columns above the fold, but to the left of a four-column spread about the Enron verdict. Enron is news. It isn't bigger news than the massacre of twenty-four Iraqis at the hands of U.S. marines. Not by any stretch of journalistic calibration. But such are the tastes for news in the United States that business porn will always outplay patriotism's barbarity. Americans don't want to know what their soldiers are doing in their name in Iraq. The cost to Iraqis is immense. It's more devastating, especially in human terms, than anything Enron ever did. But it's safer to focus on old-fashioned homegrown corruption and malfeasance. In that sense Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling are doing the American public a favor, in distractions and entertainment, and the public is grateful. They may be bad guys, but they're our bad guys, and they! 're pro v iding cover for what our supposedly good guys, our supposedly heroic soldiers, under the leadership and don't-mess-with-Texas-encouragement of their apologist-in-chief, are doing in Iraq.

For the record, the Los Angeles Times' lead about the massacre had none of the New York Times' daintiness. It was to the point: "Marines from Camp Pendleton wantonly killed unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover up the slayings in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha, military investigations have found." One more point about the Times story. The very last paragraph raises the prospect of yet another massacre, though it reads like an afterthought: "The Marines also disclosed this week that a preliminary inquiry had found "sufficient information' to recommend a criminal probe into the killing of an Iraqi civilian on April 26 near Hamandiyah, a village west of B! aghdad. " But isn't the uncovering of atrocity always an afterthought, if even that?

Pierre Tristam is a columnist and editorial writer at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and editor of Candide's Notebooks, a Web site. Reach him at ptristam@att.net.

Ellie

[booksbenji]

They kill us, WE KILL 'EM. NO MATH PROB'S. It is the 'Paddies w/o the paddies. Sorry, folks, that's the way it is. Not happy with it but 35 yrs NADA has changed. Weapons has not changed 2 much, but the weapons changed a bit.

[Future-USMC-LT]

"The Few, the Proud, the Murderers"

WTF??!?!?!?!!? Nice job taking one of our trademarks and bastardizing it.

[mrbsox]

I trhought it was spelt "MAI LAI", but I'm no dictionary.

The point is, these things happen.
When you place men into the situation where CIVILLIANS MAY BE THE ENEMY, these things will happen, and it is sad.

If the investigation determines it WAS murder (without the media hype attached), I do hope those accountable stand up, and 'take it'.

The Corps 'takes care of their own', and this should be no different. This is just a balance between "AND TO KEEP OUR HONOR CLEAN" and "NO BETTER FRIEND, NO WORSE ENEMY".

But, those (Iraqi famalies) affected need to also so see, that we ARE a nation of freedoms, as well as laws. And when our OWN exceed the freedoms, they answer to the law.

I also hope this just not start a new round of "baby killer' chants from the liberal lefties.

$.02

Terry

[marinefamily5]

Myself personally I think we should just KILLEM ALL....but that is just me.

[jcavala]

LET'S JUST CONVICT THEM IN THE PRESS !!

Hey, "Pee-Aire". Are you from downtown France, by any chance ? I do hope so, because that would explain a lot about your motivations for writing that piece of unresearched garbage. My Lai, indeed.. How honest was your research if you didn’t even spell the name of that unfortunate vil correctly. As far as I’m concerned, your only motivation in penning that garbage was to embarrass the country that bailed your sorry collective butts out of two World Wars. The only thanks we ever got was a reminder that the Colonies might not have survived the Revolutionary War if the French hadn’t intervened. We do thank you for planting a couple of Men of War off the Atlantic Coast who loosed a few rounds across the bows of the British supply ships and turned them back. For that matter, we can even thank the British for deciding not to go to war with you over the colonies. The British decided to let things cool down and give it another try later. Some thirty six years later, they did try once again to subdue the Colonies, (War of 1812), but they found us to be much better organized and prepared to defend ourselves. Enough History..
We do owe it to ourselves to be honest and look this and similar incidents straight in the eye. Like any story, there are two sides to consider. This calls to mind a saying we had in the ole’ sixties Marine Corps,. I have no idea if it’s still fashionable, but it was, "You have that ten percent who can’t get with the program". You and I both know that there are some people who shouldn’t have the right to wear our uniform. Being tough is one thing that comes with the uniform, but some of those ten percenters will and have used the uniform as an excuse to blow somebody away without having to face the DA on a murder rap.
Whether this is the case or not, I have no way of knowing.
On the other hand, guerrilla warfare has to be classed as one of the most dehumanizing experiences a man can face. You can take the most devout Christian, one who follows a daily ritual of progressing through the "Hail Mary’s", and in a relatively short time in this envirnoment, you’ll have yourself one hard assed trooper. Talk all you want about women and children in the abstract sense, but remember this. It only takes a couple of ounces of pressure to squeeze off a round and it doesn’t take weeks of training at the rifle range at Parris Island or San Diego to learn how to properly use the rifle. In close quarters using an indestructable assualt rifle like the AK-47 and put it in the hands of a woman or child, and it will kill you just as dead as it would in the hands of a trained NVA soldier. If you haven’t been there, you can’t really follow this, so shut up and sit down.
If you’ve never walked in my shoes, how can you have the audicity to tell me my combat boots look comfortable when you can’t see the jungle rot eating away my toes.
The bottom line harshness of this reality can be summed up in a much used phrase from Vietnam.
"F*** it, kill them all and let God sort it out.".
Only time and honest investigation will tell if this is one or the other, or maybe even some of both. But, this you can take to the bank. All you smug Bas*ards who try to drag the United States Marine Corps through the mud over any isolated incident, will surely have earned your place in Hell.

[outlaw3179]

You cant go around killing innocent civillians. You hunt down the bad ones and you take care of them. Wen you start killing families you become exactly what we are over there to stop. You immediately become no better than the thugs, and the murderers who use intimidation and fear to accomplish their goal. I hope that theese Marines are cleared of this , but ......if it does come to light that they actually did commit murder then there must be accountability. As much as I hate saying that , the integrity of the Marine Corps and its Corps values must be maintaned.

[thedrifter]

Thorough Inquiry of Marines Promised
From the Associated Press
May 30, 2006

WASHINGTON — 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 two dozen Iraqi civilians by Marines.

But at the same time, Marine Gen. Peter Pace said he believed it was crucial to make the point that if certain service members were responsible for an atrocity there, they "have not performed their duty the way that 99.9% of their fellow Marines have."

Interviewed on CBS' "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 P. Murtha (D-Pa.), 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.

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.

Asked how such a thing could have happened, Pace 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 Air Force Gen. Richard B. 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."

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service inquiry into the shootings is continuing. 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 agency also is investigating the death of an Iraqi civilian on April 26, involving Marines in Hamandiya, west of Baghdad.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Marines 'left traumatised by killings in Haditha'
By Sam Knight and agencies

Two US Marines ordered to photograph the corpses of more than 20 unarmed Iraqi civilians allegedly massacred by their comrades were left severely traumatised by the sight, according to the soldiers' parents.

Lance Corporal Andrew Wright, 20, and Lance Corporal Roel Ryan Briones, 21, both Marines based at Camp Pendleton, California, were sent to photograph and remove the bodies of up to 24 Iraqi men, women and children who were shot last November in the western Iraqi city of Haditha.

According to their parents, both men have struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder ever since. What they saw that day has become the subject of two US military investigations and is threatening to become, alongside Abu Ghraib, a defining horror of the American-led invasion of Iraq.

Iraqi witnesses and US politicians who have seen evidence from the investigations say that a group of Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, went on the rampage after a popular soldier was killed by a roadside bomb.

US soldiers allegedly shot up a taxi before going from house to house, throwing grenades and killing a family at close range.

Several members of Kilo Company are currently confined to their barracks in Camp Pendleton, between San Diego and Los Angeles, while the investigations, one focusing on the alleged killings, the other on an alleged military cover-up, reach their conclusion.

As Americans spent Memorial Day weekend digesting news reports from Haditha, including a Times investigation into the alleged killings, General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the most senior uniformed US officer, urged the country not to jump to conclusions about what took place.

"We want to find out what happened and we'll make it public," he told CNN. "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 mother of Corporal Briones said her son was ordered to take pictures of the bodies in Haditha on his personal digital camera, which he was then told to hand over to the US Navy. "It was horrific. It was a terrible scene," she told the Associated Press.

Mrs Briones called the incident "a massacre" and said Corporal Briones, who won a Purple Heart after he was injured on his first tour of duty in Iraq, had found himself moving the body of a young girl who had been shot in the head. "He had to carry that little girl’s body," she said, "and her head was blown off and her brain splattered on his boots".

Corporal Wright’s parents, Patty and Frederick Wright of Novato, California, declined to say what might have happened to the pictures their son took, but said he had turned over all of his information to the Navy. "He is the Forrest Gump of the military," Mr Wright said. "He ended up in the spotlight through no fault of his own."

The spark to the violence was the death of Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, a close friend of Corporal Briones, who was killed by a roadside bomb as his patrol passed through the streets of Haditha, a notorious base for insurgents.

Interviewed yesterday on National Public Radio, Corporal Terrazas's uncle, Andy Terrazas, a former Marine, 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?"

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Sent to me by hubby..fontman

Ellie

Mr. Murtha's Rush to Judgment
The Washington Post
Sunday, May 28, 2006; B06

A year ago I was charged with two counts of premeditated murder and
with other war crimes related to my service in Iraq. My wife and mother
sat in a Camp Lejeune courtroom for
five days while prosecutors painted me as a monster; then autopsy
evidence blew their case out of the water, and the Marine Corps dropped all
charges against me ["Marine
Officer Cleared in Killing of Two Iraqis," news story, May 27,
2005].

So I know something about rushing to judgment, which is why I am so
disturbed by the remarks of Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) regarding the
Haditha incident ["Death Toll Rises in
Haditha Attack, GOP Leader Says," news story, May 20]. Mr. Murtha said,
"Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they
killed innocent civilians in cold
blood."

In the United States, we have a civil and military court system that
relies on an investigatory and judicial process to make determinations
based on evidence. The system is not
served by such grand pronouncements of horror and guilt without the
accuser even having read the investigative report.

Mr. Murtha's position is particularly suspect when he is quoted by news
services as saying that the strain of deployment "has caused them [the
Marines] to crack in situations like
this." Not only is he certain of the Marines' guilt but he claims to
know the cause, which he conveniently attributes to a policy he opposes.

Members of the U.S. military serving in Iraq need more than Mr.
Murtha's pseudo-sympathy. They need leaders to stand with them even in the
hardest of times. Let the courts
decide if these Marines are guilty. They haven't even been charged with
a crime yet, so it is premature to presume their guilt -- unless that
presumption is tied to a political motive.

ILARIO PANTANO
Jacksonville, N.C.

-30-

Semper Fidelis,
Mark

[Old Marine]

A quote from Forrest Gump: **** Happens.

[thedrifter]

Lawyer: Officers not target of investigations into Iraqi killings

By: THOMAS WATKINS - Associated Press

CAMP PENDLETON -- Three officers relieved of command from a Marine battalion are not the targets of military investigations examining whether their troops killed up to two dozen Iraqi civilians and then tried to cover it up, the attorney for one of the officers said Tuesday.

Attorney Paul Hackett said his client, Capt. James Kimber, only learned about the deaths after the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment returned from Iraq in March. The killings in the western Iraqi city of Haditha occurred Nov. 19.

Separate investigations are trying to determine whether the killings were criminal acts and whether the Marines involved and their commanding officers tried to hide the truth.

The Pentagon has said little publicly about what happened in Haditha. What is known is that a bomb rocked a military convoy, killing one Marine. 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.

But Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and decorated war veteran who has been briefed by military officials, has said Marines shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot others.

Last week, a senior defense official said the evidence so far strongly indicated the killings were unprovoked murders. The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the investigation.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Tony Snow said President Bush only learned of the killings after a reporter from Time magazine began asking questions. Time published an article in March that said the Pentagon was investigating the incident.

The investigations come at a tenuous time. Iraqi insurgents continue to mount deadly attacks as the new Iraqi government attempts to establish itself and take over more security duties from U.S. and coalition forces. Meantime, the American public's support for the war has been sinking as casualties mount.

Coupled with the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, the Haditha killings "could undermine our entire mission in Iraq," said Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif. and member of the Armed Services Committee.

House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said that because of the seriousness of the allegations and how they could harm the U.S. mission in Iraq, "There has to be accountability."

Murtha said the Haditha incident is a recruiting tool for terrorists.

"We're fighting for the ideals of America," Murtha said "And when something like this happens and then you try to cover it up, it makes it look like America doesn't stand for those ideals."

He called it a "failure of leadership" if officers didn't know about the killings until later or if they knew sooner and tried to cover it up.

The targets of the investigations are about a dozen enlisted Marines, according to Hackett, the Marine reservist and Iraqi war veteran who represents Kimber. Hackett, who last year narrowly lost a special election for a U.S. House seat in Ohio, said the highest ranking among those under investigation is a staff sergeant who led a four-vehicle convoy that was hit by a blast from a roadside bomb.

Kimber, who was nominated for a Bronze Star for valor in Haditha, was relieved of command last month not because of Haditha but because his subordinates in the battalion's Lima Company used profanity, removed sunglasses and criticized the performance of Iraqi security services during an interview with Britain's Sky News TV, according to Hackett.

"My purpose is to separate his name from the alleged war crimes that took place," Hackett told The Associated Press by telephone. "He's not under investigation for anything related to what has played out in the press."

The Pentagon has named two others who were relieved of command: Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, the commander of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and Capt. Lucas McConnell, who commanded Kilo Company, the company implicated in the killings. Hackett does not represent either man but said neither was present for the shootings and he believes neither man is a target of the investigations.

Like all Marines, Chessani and McConnell were taught that commanders accept responsibility for the failure of their subordinates, said Hackett, who served with a Marine Civil Affairs unit in Iraq.

"That's different than being criminally negligible or criminally responsible for the criminal actions of your subordinates," he said.

McConnell refused to speak with an AP reporter who visited his home near Camp Pendleton on Monday night. Attempts to reach Chessani have been unsuccessful.

In his first statement on the case, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Tuesday expressed remorse over the deaths of about two dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians whom the Marines are suspected of killing.

"We emphasize that our forces, that multinational forces will respect human rights, the rights of the Iraqi citizen," al-Maliki said through an interpreter in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. "It is not justifiable that a family is killed because someone is fighting terrorists, we have to be more specific and more careful."

Associated Press writers Seth Hettena in San Diego and Erica Werner in Washington contributed to this report.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

The Truth About Haditha
By Michelle Malkin
May 31, 2006

Democrat Rep. John "Cut and Run" Murtha thinks he knows the truth about Haditha -- and he has been blabbing it to every last cable show host that will host him. The loose-lipped former Marine has accused troops of wantonly killing some two dozen civilians, including children, "in cold blood" in the terrorist stronghold in Iraq last November. There are two ongoing military investigations into the incident itself and the actions of higher-ups in the Haditha aftermath.

Let me repeat that: The investigations are ongoing. Not complete. Official reports aren't expected for several weeks.

I do not know the truth about Haditha. Neither do Murtha and the media outlets calling the alleged massacre a massacre before all the facts are in. It would be helpful if they could handle these grave charges without serving as al Jazeera satellite offices. GOP Sen. John Warner, who like Murtha also served in the Marines, struck the right tone over the weekend -- refusing, unlike Murtha, to render a verdict against the Marines before trial and avoiding Bush Derangement Syndrome, but also taking the allegations very seriously.

I do know this. Children are dead. Other children have been orphaned. There are pictures of bullet holes and bloodied homes. There are evolving stories about what happened last Nov. 19 and serious allegations of a possible cover-up.

I also know this: Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, the Marine who was killed by a roadside IED (improvised explosive device) that day, followed a proud family tradition of military service. He had received a commendation for bravery on his first tour of duty in Iraq in 2004. One of his fellow Marines said Terrazas's body was split in two by the bomb explosion that rocked his Hummer while on patrol that morning.

And there's this: Haditha is crawling with terrorists. The Associated Press points out that "in just three days last August, six Marine snipers were killed in Haditha and 14 Marines died in nearby Parwana in the deadliest roadside bombing of the war." Most-wanted al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is reported to have lived in Haditha. The Washington Post quoted a military lawyer noting that Nov. 19 was the Marine 3rd Battalion's "hottest day" in Iraq.

"In addition to drone surveillance that day," the paper reported, "AV-8 Harriers were dropping bombs, helicopters were evacuating wounded, and a large firefight occurred about one-third of a mile from the site of the civilian shootings, said several people familiar with the investigation." Audio of radio traffic that day reportedly contradicts Rep. Murtha's claim that the Marines did not come under small-arms fire after the roadside explosion, according to one of the Post's military sources.

We know this, too: Naval Criminal Investigative Service officials have not turned their backs. Time magazine, which initially broke the story of survivors' accounts that prompted the military probe, reports that Haditha residents -- who have yet to be visited by any of Iraq's own officials -- "were gratified by [the investigation's] thoroughness" and "were especially impressed by the NCIS investigators" conducting three separate enquiries.

Finally, there is this incontrovertible fact: There are countless numbers of anti-war zealots on the American Left rooting for failure. They believe the worst about the troops. They've blindly embraced frauds who've lied about their military service and lied about wartime atrocities. They've allied themselves with socialist kooks and coddled murderous dictators. They are looking for any excuse to pull out, abandon military operations and reconstruction, and impeach the president.

They insist on giving suspected foreign terrorists more benefit of the doubt than our own men and women in uniform. And that, I know, I am not willing to do.

I will wait. I will pray. And I will remind you that while the murder of civilians is and remains an anomaly in American military history, it is the jihadists' way of life.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Inquiry Opposes Account of Iraq Raid
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID S. CLOUD
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 30 - A military investigator uncovered evidence in
February and March that contradicted repeated claims by marines that Iraqi
civilians killed in Haditha last
November were victims of a roadside bomb, according to a senior
military official in Iraq.

Among the pieces of evidence that conflicted with the marines' story
were death certificates that showed all the Iraqi victims had gunshot
wounds, mostly to the head and chest, the
official said.

The investigation, which was led by Col. Gregory Watt, an Army officer
in Baghdad, also raised questions about whether the marines followed
established rules for identifying
hostile threats when they assaulted houses near the site of a bomb
attack, which killed a fellow marine.

The three-week inquiry was the first official investigation into an
episode that was first uncovered by Time magazine in January and that
American military officials now say
appears to have been an unprovoked attack by the marines that killed 24
Iraqi civilians. The results of Colonel Watt's investigation, which
began on Feb. 14, have not previously
been disclosed.

"There were enough inconsistencies that things didn't add up," said the
senior official, who was briefed on the conclusions of Colonel Watt's
preliminary investigation.

The official agreed to discuss the findings only after being promised
anonymity. The findings have not been made public, and the Pentagon and
the Marines have refused to
discuss the details of inquiries now underway, saying that to do so
could compromise the investigation.

When Colonel Watt described the findings to Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli,
the senior ground commander in Iraq, on March 9, they raised enough
questions about the marines' veracity
that General Chiarelli referred the matter to the senior Marine
commander in Iraq, who ordered a criminal investigation that officials say
could result in murder charges being
brought against members of the unit.

Colonel Watt's findings also prompted General Chiarelli to order a
parallel investigation into whether senior Marine officers and enlisted
personnel had attempted to cover up what
happened.

Colonel Watt's inquiry included interviews with marines believed to
have been involved in the killings, as well as with senior officers in the
unit, the Third Battalion of the First Marine
Regiment.

Among them were Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, whom officials had said was
one of the senior noncommissioned officers on the patrol, and Lt. Col.
Jeffrey R. Chessani, the battalion
commander, the senior official said. Colonel Chessani was relieved of
his command in April, after the unit returned from Iraq.

In their accounts to Colonel Watt, the marines said they took gunfire
from the first of five residences they entered near the bomb site,
according to the senior military official.

The official said the marines had recalled hearing "a weapon being
prepared to be used against them."

Colonel Watt also reviewed payments totaling $38,000 in cash made
within weeks of the shootings to families of victims.

In an interview Tuesday, Maj. Dana Hyatt, the officer who made the
payments, said he was told by superiors to compensate the relatives of 15
victims, but was told that rest of
those killed had been deemed to have committed hostile acts, leaving
their families ineligible for compensation.

After the initial payments were made, however, those families demanded
similar payments, insisting their relatives had not attacked the
marines, Major Hyatt said.

Major Hyatt said he was authorized by Colonel Chessani and more senior
officers at the marines' regimental headquarters to make the payments
to relatives of 15 victims.

Colonel Chessani "was part of the chain of command that gives the
approval," Major Hyatt said.

"Even when he signs off on it," the major added, "it still has to go up
to" the unit's regimental headquarters.

Colonel Chessani declined to comment on Tuesday when visited at his
home at Camp Pendleton, Calif.

The list of 15 victims deemed to be noncombatants was put together by
intelligence personnel attached to the battalion, Major Hyatt said.
Those victims were related to a Haditha
city council member, he said. The American military sometimes pays
compensation to relatives of civilian victims.

The relatives of each victim were paid a total of $2,500, the maximum
allowed under Marine rules, along with $250 payments for two children
who were wounded. Major Hyatt said
he also compensated the families for damage to two houses.

"I didn't say we had made a mistake," Major Hyatt said, describing what
he had told the city council member who was representing the victims.
"I said I'm being told I can make
payments for these 15 because they were deemed not to be involved in
combat."

The military began its examination of the killings only after Time
magazine presented the full findings of its investigation to a military
spokesman in Baghdad in early February.

General Chiarelli, an Army officer who took command of American ground
forces in Iraq in January, learned soon after the spokesman was
notified that the Marines had not
investigated the incident, according to the senior military official.

On Tuesday, the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said President Bush
first became aware of the episode after the Time magazine inquiry, when
he was briefed by Stephen
Hadley, the national security adviser. "When this comes out, all the
details will be made available to the public, so we'll have a picture of
what happened," Mr. Snow said.

-30-

Semper Fidelis,
Mark