I have dialed way back on blogging about abuses committed by U.S. soldiers on Iraqi civilians after beating that drum pretty hard as details of the Mahmudiya and Haditha massacres leaked out last summer.
For one thing, these crimes are being committed by a small handful of otherwise honorable troopers. For another, I don’t want my home blog, 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, it’s time to break my own rules of engagement rules because of a gruesome Washington Post story on the opening act of the Haditha massacre, a horrid incident on November 19, 2005 that left 24 unarmed Iraqis dead, many of them women and children.
According to a lengthy Marine Corps investigative report obtained by the Post that included eyewitness accounts, Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the squad’s leader, shot five Iraqi men one by one after Marines ordered them out of a taxi (see photo) in the moments following a roadside bombing that killed one Marine and injured two others. Another Marine fired rounds into their bodies as they lay on the ground.
Says the Post:
“One of the witnesses, Sgt. Asad Amer Mashoot, a 26-year-old Iraqi soldier who was in the Marine convoy, told investigators he watched in horror as the four students and the taxi driver fell. ‘They didn’t even try to run away,’ he said. ‘We were afraid from Marines and we saw them behaving like crazy. They were yelling and screaming.’
“. . . The report, which relied on hundreds of interviews with Marines, Iraqi soldiers and civilian survivors conducted months after the incident, presents a fragmented and sometimes conflicting chronicle of the violence that day. But taken together, the accounts provide evidence that as the Marines came under attack, they responded in ways that are difficult to reconcile with their rules of engagement.”
Wuterich and three other Marines have been charged with murder. Each faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted. Through their lawyers, three have argued 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.
Four officers, including a lieutenant colonel, are charged with failing to investigate and fully report the slayings. No higher ups have been charged, but the investigation continues.
There are lessons to be learned from what happened in Haditha. None of them forgive what happened. But they do help explain why it did happen.
Please click here to read more.