Iraq II: Update on the Haditha Massacre

I have dialed way back on blogging about abuses committed by U.S. soldiers on Iraqis after beating that drum pretty hard as details of the Mahmudiya and Haditha massacres leaked out.

For one thing, these crimes are being committed by a small handful of otherwise honorable troopers. For another, I don't want Kiko's House to be portrayed as an angry left-wing blog. You know, the image thing. For yet another, the Iraq war has spiraled so far out of control that there is a numbing sameness about blogging on individual events, so I've tried to stay above the fray and focus on the big picture.

All that said, because of recent developments it's time to break my own rules of engagement and revisit the Haditha massacre, a horrid incident on November 19, 2005 that left 24 unarmed Iraqis dead, many of them women and children, at the hands of Marines who apparently went bonkers after a beloved colleague was killed and two others wounded in a roadside bombing.

A Marine Corps investigative report on the incident included eyewitness accounts that said Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the squad's leader, shot five Iraqi men one by one after they were ordered them out of a taxi (see photo) in the moments following the bombing.

Wuterich and three other Marines were charged with murder, although they argued through their lawyers that they behaved appropriately while taking fire on a chaotic battlefield, and that the civilian deaths were a regrettable but unavoidable part of warfare in an especially dangerous area.

Now Lieutenant Colonel Paul Ware, a Marine Corps investigator, has recommended that all murder charges be dropped because the evidence is not strong enough. Ware did recommend that Wuterich be charged with negligent homicide in the deaths of two women and five children. These charges carry a maximum sentence of three years in prison.

Prosecuting the case was difficult because there was the all but inevitable initial cover-up and by the time the killings had come to light because of a Time magazine article, there were no bodies to examine and no Iraqi witnesses to testify.

This explanation is not sufficient for people who believe that the Marines were wrongfully charged in the first place, as well as a smaller but vocal group who believe the deaths were precipitated by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a propaganda ploy.

They include Nathaniel R. Helms, who in a report at Defend Our Marines says that he has the smoking gun to back up that contention -- a Marine Corps intelligence report that states the insurgents set up and paid for the incident.

If true, that information certainly is perintent to getting out the whole story of what happened at Haditha.

But it does not change what the Marines did, the cover up over what they did, and ultimately their culpability. Helms, of course, does not address that.

More here.