May 31, 2007
2 Marines Deny Suspecting Haditha War Crime
By PAUL VON ZIELBAUER

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., May 30 — Two Marine junior officers, in testimony made public on Wednesday, said they had no reason to suspect a possible war crime when they inspected the human carnage, including the bodies of 10 women and children, after an infantry attack that killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005.

But one of the officers, First Lt. Alexander Martin, suggested that one of the consequences of the Marine unit’s killing of civilians — which followed a roadside bomb blast that killed one marine and wounded two others — was that Haditha residents became noticeably more helpful, if not quite friendly, to the Americans.

“After 19 November,” Lieutenant Martin said in videotaped testimony, referring to the day the civilians were killed in 2005, “I had people coming up to me to tell me where the I.E.D.’s were.”

I.E.D. stands for improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb.

The other officer testifying, First Lt. Max D. Frank, offered a detailed and gruesome accounting of the human remains — including the bodies of six children and two women on one bed — that the officers saw in three homes that had been attacked by a squad of infantryman searching for insurgents whom they suspected of detonating the roadside bomb.

The testimony introduced on Wednesday, both videotaped in March because the officers were to return to Iraq, came at a hearing for Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, a former commander of the Third Battalion, First Marines, who is one of four officers charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the Haditha killings properly.

In his own videotaped testimony, Lieutenant Frank told a Marine prosecutor that each of the eight bodies he found on the bed had “multiple holes” in it, and that one child’s head was missing. But Lieutenant Frank repeatedly said in his testimony that he had never considered the possibility that a war-crime violation had occurred, the legal threshold under Marine Corps regulations that compels an episode to be reported to a superior officer.

“It was unfortunate what happened, sir,” Lieutenant Frank told the marine prosecutor, Lt. Col. Sean Sullivan, “but I didn’t have any reason to believe that what they had done was on purpose,” he said of the Marine infantrymen who killed the civilians in a house-to-house attack after coming under fire from insurgents. He said he and other officers had agreed to portray the deaths to Haditha town leaders as an unfortunate and unintended result of local residents’ allowing insurgent fighters to use family homes to shoot at passing American patrols.

After returning to the Marine base near Haditha on the evening of Nov. 19, 2005, Lieutenant Frank said, another officer, First Lt. Adam P. Mathes, told him that the Marines should not issue an apology for wrongfully killing civilians but offer a less conciliatory statement.

Lieutenant Frank said Lieutenant Mathes, the company’s executive officer, advised a Marine major assigned to a civil affairs unit that “the best way to explain this to the Iraqi people” would be to tell them, “It’s an unfortunate thing that happens when you let terrorists use your house to attack our troops.”

Lieutenant Frank, who testified after being granted immunity from prosecution in the Haditha case, said he complained to the company commander about the way that marines were forced to photograph and collect the 24 bodies.

The marines had only four or five body bags at the base and used them to collect the largest of the dead civilians, said Lieutenant Frank. The children’s remains were placed in trash bags, he said. When the marines’ four-Humvee convoy carrying the bodies arrived at a local hospital morgue that evening, Iraqi workers reacted in horror and some vomited at the sight, he testified.

Ellie