An investigation into the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines resulted in no prison time.
Nearly two decades after U.S. Marines killed twenty-five civilians, including women and children, in Haditha, Iraq, U.S. lawmakers are demanding answers. In a request sent this morning to the Department of Defense’s inspector general, which cites recent Pulitzer Center-supported reporting in The New Yorker, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen write that the department “repeatedly misled the public” about Haditha, and that inaccurate reporting by the Marine Corps and delayed investigation of the incident thwarted efforts to hold the shooters accountable. The senators ask the inspector general to find out if the department is complying with its own rules and recommendations for addressing alleged war crimes committed by American service members.
This summer, The New Yorker podcast In the Dark published a years-long investigation into the November, 2005, incident and the prosecutions that followed. Four Marines were charged with murder in military court, but those charges were later dropped. Although President George W. Bush vowed that the public would see the full results of the Haditha investigation, he never made good on that promise. Years later, General Michael Hagee, who was the commandant of the Marine Corps at the time of the shootings, bragged to an oral historian that the press still hadn’t got hold of graphic photos of the killings’ aftermath. That changed after In the Dark sued the military and, with the permission of Iraqi survivors, published a selection of images that revealed the horrors of the day.
Warren and Van Hollen’s letter, co-signed by Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs, whose district in San Diego includes a Marine Corps base, also points to an analysis by In the Dark of seven hundred and eighty-one possible war crimes committed by American service members. That reporting revealed that most of those cases had been dismissed by investigators, that recordkeeping was scant, and that perpetrators rarely faced meaningful accountability.
“For years, the Department of Defense has glossed over alleged war crimes committed by the U.S. military and failed to maintain records of these atrocities—it’s horrific and erodes the trust of the American people,” Warren said in a statement to the In the Dark team. “We have a moral and strategic duty to protect civilians, and there must be real accountability when we fail.” Listen to the In the Dark podcast »
