The squad leader, Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, was among four Marines charged with murder. The other four soldiers charged were not believed to be present during the killings but were accused of failures in investigating and reporting the deaths.
"In these [U.S. military] courts, there is no voice for the victims," said Dr. Salam Ishmael. The Baghdad-based head of Doctors for Iraq was in Haditha last November when American soldiers allegedly went house-to-house killing two dozen civilians, including a 66-year-old woman and a 4-year-old boy.
"Not one of the victims' families is represented," he added. "No lawyer from the victims' families is represented. So you can see the basic idea of justice and fairness is actually not available."
Dr. Salam Ismael says many Iraqis would like to see the American soldiers brought to trial in Iraqi courts--a position shared by the country's elected prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has demanded an end to the immunity U.S. soldiers currently enjoy under Iraqi law.
"Why are you afraid of being ruled by the law of the country that you're supposedly trying to liberate?" he asked rhetorically. "That's the question--it's a simple question I would like to ask the American people."
International human rights groups have a different concern. They note that since the September 11th attacks five years ago, no officer above the rank of major has been charged in connection with torture or the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody.
In the Haditha case, the highest-ranking officer charged is a lieutenant colonel, who faces the relatively minor charge of dereliction of duty.
"Why isn't he being charged as a principal in the murder that the enlisted personnel are being charged for?" asked Human Rights Watch's John Sifton.
"The issue here is preventing future abuse from occurring and the best way to do that isn't to go after low-level enlisted personnel," Sifton said. "It's by sending a message to the officer corps that they need to prevent [abuses] and that's not going to happen if you just give officers a slap on the wrist."
Dr. Salam Ismael says the military needs to investigate more than the specific events that occurred in Haditha. He points to the current situation in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, where locals have asked the U.S. military to move their posts outside the city limits.
"There are three check points and nobody can go around them. It makes lots of people more miserable," he said. "Fighting is continuous. For about two weeks there were attacks near the hospital in the city itself and many of our doctors said they could not get their patients--many of them women and children--out of the city."
The Pentagon did commission a separate investigation into how the military command structure allowed the Haditha massacre to occur and go unpunished until it was revealed by a Time Magazine article months later.
The details of that investigation, headed by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell, remain secret. But Bargewell told reporters earlier this year that while there appeared to be no cover up, senior Marine commanders failed to investigate when confronted with conflicting information.
According to journalist and foreign policy analyst Rahul Mahajan, "the entire ambiance in al-Anbar province was and still is such that this kind of atrocity was quite likely to happen--and when it did happen it could easily be ignored."
"Those kinds of things can't happen at low levels of the military," he said. "You're talking about large numbers of troops and so you're talking about command level staff."
by Aaron Glantz, OneWorld US
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Comments: 2
The US Pentagon is behaving like a defensive adult-child addict, which it is.
It's also a kind of "rogue adolescent male" energy with no "Mother" (Dept. of Peace) or "Father" (Dept. of Community) to parent it.
What are we USAers doing letting a teen violence addict run the show? And doesn't the Pentagon commandeer 50% or more of annual income tax revenue?
USAmerica - what are we thinking? (NOT)
Haditha Evidence
Marines' Photos Provide Graphic Evidence in Haditha Probe
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 7, 2007; A14
Capturing images of war on their digital cameras, as many troops in Iraq have done, Marines took dozens of gruesome photographs of the 24 civilians who were killed in Haditha, Iraq, in November 2005.
The images -- which investigators tracked down on several laptop computers and digital media drives, some in the United States -- provide visual evidence of a series of shootings outside a taxi and inside three homes that military criminal investigators have alleged were murders.
Much like the photographs that emerged in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse cases, the Haditha images have provided investigators powerful and visceral evidence of what happened. But unlike the detainee photographs, which were turned over to officials who then investigated the case, the Haditha images were discovered months after the shootings as more than 60 Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents scoured the globe for them.
Investigators found photographs on laptop computers that were shipped back to the United States and recovered images that had supposedly been deleted from a Sony PlayStation Portable memory drive, according to investigative documents.
Marines were found to have downloaded the images from each other's devices, traded them and loaded them onto personal Web sites; one Marine told investigators he saw some of the photographs set to music on another Marine's computer. Some were e-mailed from Iraq to a civilian in the United States, but none surfaced publicly until now.
Among the images, there is a young boy with a picture of a helicopter on his pajamas, slumped over, his face and head covered in blood. There is a mother lying on a bed, arms splayed, the bodies of three young children huddled against her right side. There are men with gaping head wounds, and a woman and a child hunkered down on their knees, their hands frozen around their faces as if permanently bracing for an attack.
Several Marines took photographs on Nov. 19, 2005, some of them as part of an intelligence-gathering operation and some in order to record what had happened to a Humvee that was destroyed by a massive roadside bomb, killing Lance Cpl. Miguel "T.J." Terrazas. The photographs of the bomb crater and the shredded vehicle show the power of the explosion that set the Haditha incident in motion.
The images are contained in thousands of pages of NCIS investigative documents obtained by The Washington Post. Post editors decided that most of the images are too graphic to publish.
Ed Buice, an NCIS spokesman, said he could not comment on an open investigation: "NCIS strives to ensure the integrity of every investigation and finds the idea that someone might leak any of its investigative products to be deeply troubling."
One Marine who decided to hold onto the photographs made it certain that officials would have a clearer view of what happened that day. Lance Cpl. Andrew A. Wright, who arrived on the scene after the violence to care for the bodies, took photographs of the dead and kept a full set.
"I decided that it was in my best interest to obtain the photos I had taken that night," Wright told investigators. "Even though there was no investigation at the time, I felt that the photographs would be evidence if anything came up in the future. In my opinion, the people that I photographed had been murdered."
Because the killings in Haditha were not investigated until four months afterward -- initially, Marine officers decided the shootings did not appear out of the norm -- the photographs are in some cases the only hard evidence. Officials are hoping to use them to reconstruct the events because they have not been able to exhume the Iraqi victims' bodies.
NCIS officials are comparing the images with the Marines' statements about what happened.
Investigators have found 44 photographs that a civil affairs officer took in the days after the incident as part of an effort to make condolence payments to the families of the dead. The pictures show pockmarked walls and bloodstained floors.
Investigators also found video from an unmanned aircraft that was aloft in the region that day, but it began recording after the first reports of a roadside bomb and the initial shootings, according to the documents. The video shows Marines conducting door-to-door searches, according to an intelligence officer's statement.
Defense lawyers for four Marines who have been charged with murder in the killings said they believe it will be hard to prove anything based on the photographs alone, other than that the Marines killed the people while hunting for insurgents. The Marines have told investigators that they were following their rules of engagement.
Marine Corps officials believe that many of the photographs -- which show the results of grenade explosions inside civilian homes and close-range rifle shots -- are inflammatory by their nature, no matter whether a crime was committed. Investigators have gone to great lengths to keep them private. It is possible that even the most grim images will surface publicly in military court proceedings.
If these photos are as shocking as the earlier ones, it may impact on Bush and Israel's plans of conquest on Iran as few will sympathize with their crimes which are committed under the pretext of preventive war.