US Lawmakers: Haditha Probe Must Go to Top

US Lawmakers: Haditha Probe Must Go to Top

Agence France-Presse

Monday 05 June 2006

A US probe of an alleged massacre of civilians in Haditha, Iraq must go beyond accused Marines and up the military command to rule out any possibility of a cover-up, US lawmakers said.

"The test will be whether the leadership in the Department of Defense and in the administration does not try to ... say it was just a few Marines or a few soldiers, but looks to see if this is part of a larger systemic problem," Senator Jack Reed told "Fox News Sunday."

Meanwhile, Senator Carl Levin told CNN's "Late Edition" program: "There is a real possibility of a cover-up."

Levin pointed out that the massacre of some 24 men, women and children in November only came to light only months after the fact, in a March 2006 Time Magazine article.

Marines said in a press release the day after the incident that the Iraqis had been killed by a roadside bomb, but videotape footage showed children and elderly people had died of gunshot wounds.

"The press release that came out the following day was false," said Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Service Committee.

Another lawmaker said the incident is further proof of poor Pentagon leadership, and renewed his call for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"He should be gone," said Senator Joe Biden, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has denounced the killings in Haditha as an "odious crime" and called for talks "to redefine the obligations of coalition forces."

Reed, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said al-Maliki "is suggesting that this might be more comprehensive than just this one incident."

Senator Lindsey Graham told "Fox News Sunday" that he was "very confident" that the investigation would go as far up the chain of command as necessary.

"We're going to find out if ... the fac?s initially reported were wrong and why were they wrong, did people know better and tell a lie, should people have known better and investigated harder rather than letting it sit, did people actually pull a trigger and kill a child who was innocent of any wrongdoing.

"All those things are going to be looked at, and it will go where it goes," the South Carolina Republican said.

"I'm very confident that the military legal system and Marine Corps will handle this appropriately," Graham said, and compared it to investigation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

"As to Abu Ghraib, dozens of officers have had their careers ruined, most, I think, appropriately so. And we will see if Abu Ghraib is a done deal after the prosecution of the dog handlers or there are more people involved."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who made the rounds of Sunday talk shows, said the Haditha case was being handled "at the highest levels" and promised a "serious and thorough investigation."

"That's what democracies do when there are allegations of misconduct," she told CNN." And when those investigations are finished, I'm sure that there will be appropriate punishment if people are indeed found guilty."

The US officials' remarks to the Sunday morning talk shows came after a military inquiry in Fort Meade, Maryland last week cleared US forces of wrongdoing during a raid on the village of Ishaqi north of Baghdad, on March 15, in which four people died.



Go to Original

A Hard Look at Haditha
The New York Times | Editorial

Sunday 04 June 2006

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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