From Ali Hamdani in al-Haditha and Ned Parker in Baghdad
05/29/06 "
-- -- 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..
Re: Marine 'Massacre' in al-Haditha: Eye Witness Report - The Times
And if those Marines are guilty they will be punished harshly just like the people responsible for Abu Ghraib. If they massacred those people then it was a disgusting act and the American people and government will not stand for it.
A U.S. military investigation into whether U.S. soldiers tried to cover up the killings of Iraqi civilians in Haditha will conclude that some officers gave false testimony to their superiors, who then failed to scrutinize the information adequately, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Citing an unidentified army official, the Post said that the three-month inquiry was also expected to call for change in how U.S. forces are trained for duty in Iraq.
The probe, led by Army Maj. General Eldon Bargewell, is one of two military inquiries into the Nov. 19 killings of 24 Iraqi civilians, including women and children, in the town of Haditha, 125 miles northwest of Baghdad.
According to the Post, the army official said there were numerous failures by U.S. soldiers but he refused to say whether he would describe it as a “cover-up”, as charged by Rep. John Murtha, an outspoken critic of Iraq War who recently said that the Haditha massacre is worse than the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
The newspaper said a final report on the Haditha massacre will be handed to top military commanders by the end of the week.
The report also stated that the top commander in Iraq, Army Gen. George W. Casey, will order all U.S. forces in Iraq to receive "core values" training including humane treatment of civilians and an understanding of Iraqi culture.
"Not only will leaders discuss how to treat civilians under the rules of engagement, but small units also will be ordered to go through training scenarios to gauge their understanding of those rules," the Post said.
A separate inquiry into the Haditha massacre found evidence that the killings were unprovoked, contradicting the U.S. Marines’ version of events, U.S. officials said on Wednesday, according to Reuters.
That probe, led by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which handle criminal investigations involving Marines, might lead to charges including murder, officials said.
U.S. politicians believe that the Haditha massacre would deal a major blow to Washington, with some Congressmen convinced that there has been a cover-up.
In Iraq, the reports of the killings sparked “a feeling of great shock and sadness”, according to a member of the Iraqi parliament and former foreign minister, Adnan Pachachi.
"There must be a level of discipline imposed on the American troops and change of mentality which seems to think that Iraqi lives are expendable," he told the BBC.
Iraq's new Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki also said on Thursday that the government would soon address Haditha and similar incidents.
"The cabinet will follow up on this matter with the multinational forces and we will issue a statement to denounce the event and reveal others like it that have happened in the past," he said
The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by United States marines at Haditha will be hard to dispose of with another Washington damage control operation. The Iraqi government has made clear that it will not sit still for one, and neither should the American people. This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad men.
This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place. Critics of the war predicted that American troops would become an occupying force, unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and murderous insurgents, propelled down the same path that led the British to disaster in Northern Ireland and American troops to grief in Vietnam. The Bush administration understood the dangers too, but dismissed them out of its deep, unwarranted confidence that friendly Iraqis would quickly be able to take control of their own government and impose order on their own people.
Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field. The inquiry also needs to critically examine the behavior of top commanders responsible for ensuring lawful and professional conduct and of midlevel officers who apparently covered up the Haditha incident for months until journalists' inquiries forced a more honest review.
So far, nothing in President Bush's repeated statements on the issue offers any real assurance that the White House and the Pentagon will not once again try to protect the most senior military and political ranks from proper accountability. This is the pattern that this administration has repeatedly followed in the past — in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, in the beating deaths of prisoners at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in the serial abuses of justice and constitutional principle at Guantánamo Bay.
These damage control operations have done a great job of shielding the reputations of top military commanders and high-ranking Pentagon officials. But it has been at the expense of things that are far more precious: America's international reputation and the honor of the United States military. The overwhelming majority of American troops in Iraq are dedicated military professionals, doing their best to behave correctly under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Their good name requires a serious inquiry, not another deflection of blame to the lowest-ranking troops on the scene.
What we now know about the events last Nov. 19 in Haditha, a town in Anbar Province in western Iraq, the violent epicenter of the Sunni Arab insurgency, essentially boils down to this: A roadside bomb struck a Humvee traveling in the vicinity, killing one of the marines on board, and sometime later 24 Iraqi civilians were gunned down, many in their homes. The victims included women, children and grandparents. We know this not through the original Marine Corps report on the incident, which claimed that all the Iraqi deaths resulted from the bomb and an exchange of gunfire with insurgents. We know it because reporters from Time magazine began challenging inconsistencies between eyewitness Iraqi accounts and the Marine Corps version.
We still do not know how high up the Marine Corps chain of command the original cover-up went, nor do we know how the president, the defense secretary and other top officials responded when they first learned of the false reporting. Americans need to be told what steps are now being taken, besides remedial ethics training, to make sure that such crimes against civilians and such deliberate falsifications of the record do not recur.
It should not surprise anyone that this war — launched on the basis of false intelligence analysis, managed by a Pentagon exempted from normal standards of command responsibility and still far from achieving minimally acceptable results — is increasingly unpopular with the American people. At the very least, the public is now entitled to straight answers on what went wrong at Haditha and who, besides those at the bottom of the chain of command, will be required to take responsibility for it.
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