Military court frees last Marine in Haditha massacre

To see graphic photos from the investigation of this crime, where unarmed men, women and children were killed while in their beds, go to tinyurl.com/6wktotx.

In November 2005, a squad of U.S. Marines made a night raid on homes in Haditha, Iraq. They shot and killed at close range 24 unarmed civilians — children, women and even a man in a wheelchair, most in their night clothes. The Marine Corps claimed the civilians had been killed in a gun battle between the troops and “insurgents.” It wasn’t until the next year, after Time magazine uncovered the story, that the Marine Corps started a criminal investigation.

The Associated Press on Aug. 2, 2006, reported that an unnamed Pentagon official said the investigation had uncovered evidence that “supports accusations that U.S. Marines deliberately shot civilians, including unarmed men, women and children.” Eight Marines were charged with crimes.

But as the cases wore on, the charges were dropped against six of them, including a lieutenant colonel. In June 2008, a Marine intelligence officer was tried by a seven-member jury of officers and acquitted of covering up the killings by destroying evidence.

This year, the last Marine still charged in the case, which became known as the Haditha Massacre, was allowed to plead guilty to “dereliction of duty,” although he had originally been charged with murder. Squad leader, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who had told his men to “shoot first and ask questions later,” was sentenced to a loss of rank — with no jail time.

This verdict set off a wave of revulsion and anger throughout Iraq. One Iraqi told CNN: “This soldier should be executed. The verdict is unfair and unjust for the innocent people who were killed in this incident.” Another commented: “They were just civilian people who did not raise weapons against the occupiers and they were killed this way. This is a heinous crime and the soldiers should get the most severe punishment.”

Ali Latif, a commentator on the British Iraqi Forum, said: “Even by Iraq’s post-war bloody standards, the Haditha massacre shocked a nation and the world. The cold-blooded killing of 24 civilians by a U.S. army unit epitomized the callous disregard for life that many Iraqis experienced during the years of occupation. This has obviously not registered with … the U.S. justice system.”

Most of the media coverage of this massacre has focused on the rank-and-file Marines and left out the responsibility of those in command, who were tasked with crushing any Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation of the country. For the first two years of the occupation, Haditha was a center of resistance. Massacres like Haditha were a deliberate tool the occupiers used to establish control in Iraq.

The fact that the decisions in these cases of mass murder were made by U.S. military courts rather than Iraqi courts is just another proof that the imperialists permit Iraq no sovereignty, even when the “government” there was set up by the U.S. occupation.