The Military Tried To Hide Evidence of a Massacre. A Lawsuit Just Exposed It.
The Haditha massacre was one of the worst U.S. actions during the Iraq War. After a roadside bomb killed a Marine in the town of Haditha in November 2005, the rest of his squad shot dead 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women, and children, many of them inside their own homes. The Marine Corps then lied about it, claiming that the victims were all killed by the bomb or by running gun battles with insurgents.
Only dogged reporting by Time Magazine forced the military to open an investigation. No one was ever jailed for the killings or the coverup. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the commander of the squad, pleaded guilty to one count of dereliction of duty and was demoted.
The military avoided a public relations disaster, Gen. Michael Hagee would later brag, because graphic photos of the massacre were never published. Until now.
In the Dark, a true crime podcast published by The New Yorker, dedicated its latest season to re-investigating the Haditha massacre. The producers filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the U.S. military’s files on the incident, then sued when the military refused to hand them over.
Officials claimed they were withholding photos of the massacre out of respect for the victims’ families. Two survivors, Khalid Salman Raseef and Khalid Jamal, then went around Haditha collecting signatures for a petition to release the photos. They won the support of 17 relatives of the victims.
The military gave in. On Tuesday, with permission from the survivors, The New Yorker published several unredacted crime scene photos taken by investigators and by Lance Cpl. Ryan Briones and Lance Cpl. Andrew Wright, two Marines who arrived shortly after the massacre.
The FOIA files also included a recording of a 2014 interview between Hagee and a Marine Corps historian, meant for internal use. The massacre “could have been horrific for the Marine Corps if we did not handle that correctly. Another My Lai. Or another Abu Ghraib,” Hagee claims, referring to the My Lai massacre, which helped turn American opinion against the Vietnam War, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where U.S. soldiers and CIA officers were photographed torturing and sexually assaulting inmates.
Hagee “learned from” the Abu Ghraib scandal not to let Briones and Wright’s photographs of the Haditha killings be published. “Those pictures today have still not been seen, and so I’m quite proud of that,” he says.
Indeed, the photos are pretty shocking; the victims range from a three-year-old girl to a 76-year-old man. “I’ll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and h
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