Denys,

here is another article worth reading and following the facts.
Of course this article was not placed by the military and not paid for by 
them either.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1174649,00.html?cnn=yes

Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?
Last November, U.S. Marines killed 15 Iraqi civilians in their homes. 
Was it self-defense, an accident or cold-blooded revenge? 
A Time exclusive  By TIM MCGIRK / BAGHDAD Posted Sunday, Mar. 19, 2006

The incident seemed like so many others from this war, the kind of tragedy 
that has become numbingly routine amid the daily reports of violence in 
Iraq. On the morning of Nov. 19, 2005, a roadside bomb struck a humvee 
carrying Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, on a road 
near Haditha, a restive town in western Iraq. The bomb killed Lance 
Corporal Miguel (T.J.) Terrazas, 20, from El Paso, Texas. The next day a 
Marine communique from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi reported that Terrazas 
and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the blast and that "gunmen attacked 
the convoy with small-arms fire," prompting the Marines to return fire, 
killing eight insurgents and wounding one other. The Marines from Kilo 
Company held a memorial service for Terrazas at their camp in Haditha. They 
wrote messages like "T.J., you were a great friend. I'm going to miss 
seeing you around" on smooth stones and piled them in a funeral mound. And 
the war moved on. 

But the details of what happened that morning in Haditha are more 
disturbing, disputed and horrific than the military initially reported. 
According to eyewitnesses and local officials interviewed over the past 10 
weeks, the civilians who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a 
roadside bomb but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the 
village after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, 
including seven women and three children. Human-rights activists say that 
if the accusations are true, the incident ranks as the worst case of 
deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. service members since the war 
began. 

In January, after Time presented military officials in Baghdad with the 
Iraqis' accounts of the Marines' actions, the U.S. opened its own 
investigation, interviewing 28 people, including the Marines, the families 
of the victims and local doctors. According to military officials, the 
inquiry acknowledged that, contrary to the military's initial report, the 
15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of the Marines, not the 
insurgents. The military announced last week that the matter has been 
handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (ncis), which will 
conduct a criminal investigation to determine whether the troops broke the 
laws of war by deliberately targeting civilians. Lieut. Colonel Michelle 
Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq, told Time the 
involvement of the ncis does not mean that a crime occurred. And she says 
the fault for the civilian deaths lies squarely with the insurgents, 
who "placed noncombatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to 
defend themselves." 

Because the incident is officially under investigation, members of the 
Marine unit that was in Haditha on Nov. 19 are not allowed to speak with 
reporters. But the military's own reconstruction of events and the accounts 
of town residents interviewed by Time—including six whose family members 
were killed that day—paint a picture of a devastatingly violent response by 
a group of U.S. troops who had lost one of their own to a deadly insurgent 
attack and believed they were under fire. Time obtained a videotape that 
purports to show the aftermath of the Marines' assault and provides graphic 
documentation of its human toll. What happened in Haditha is a reminder of 
the horrors faced by civilians caught in the middle of war—and what war can 
do to the people who fight it. 
Here's what all participants agree on: at around 7:15 a.m. on Nov. 19, a 
U.S. humvee was struck by a powerful improvised explosive device (ied) 
attached to a large propane canister, triggered by remote control. The bomb 
killed Terrazas, who was driving, and injured two other Marines. For U.S. 
troops, Haditha, set among date-palm groves along the Euphrates River, was 
inhospitable territory; every day the Marines found scores of bombs buried 
in the dirt roads near their base. Eman Waleed, 9, lived in a house 150 
yards from the site of the blast, which was strong enough to shatter all 
the windows in her home. "We heard a big noise that woke us all up," she 
recalls two months later. "Then we did what we always do when there's an 
explosion: my father goes into his room with the Koran and prays that the 
family will be spared any harm." Eman says the rest of the family—her 
mother, grandfather, grandmother, two brothers, two aunts and two uncles—
gathered in the living room. According to military officials familiar with 
the investigation, the Marines say they came under fire from the direction 
of the Waleed house immediately after being hit by the ied. A group of 
Marines headed toward the house. Eman says she "heard a lot of shooting, so 
none of us went outside. Besides, it was very early, and we were all 
wearing our nightclothes." When the Marines entered the house, they were 
shouting in English. "First, they went into my father's room, where he was 
reading the Koran," she claims, "and we heard shots." According to Eman, 
the Marines then entered the living room. "I couldn't see their faces very 
well—only their guns sticking into the doorway. I watched them shoot my 
grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my 
granny." She claims the troops started firing toward the corner of the room 
where she and her younger brother Abdul Rahman, 8, were hiding; the other 
adults shielded the children from the bullets but died in the process. Eman 
says her leg was hit by a piece of metal and Abdul Rahman was shot near his 
shoulder. "We were lying there, bleeding, and it hurt so much. Afterward, 
some Iraqi soldiers came. They carried us in their arms. I was crying, 
shouting 'Why did you do this to our family?' And one Iraqi soldier tells 
me, 'We didn't do it. The Americans did.'" Time was unable to speak with 
the only other survivor of the raid, Eman's younger brother, who relatives 
say is traumatized by the experience. U.S. military officials familiar with 
the investigation say that after entering the house, the Marines walked 
into a corridor with closed doors on either side. They thought they heard 
the clack-clack sound of an AK-47 being racked and readied for fire. (Eman 
and relatives who were not in the house insist that no guns were there.) 
Believing they were about to be ambushed, the Marines broke down the two 
doors simultaneously and fired their weapons. The officials say the 
military has confirmed that seven people were killed inside the house--
including two women and a child. The Marines also reported seeing a man and 
a woman run out of the house; they gave chase and shot and killed the man. 
Relatives say the woman, Hiba Abdullah, escaped with her baby. 

According to military officials, the Marines say they then started taking 
fire from the direction of a second house, prompting them to break down the 
door of that house and throw in a grenade, blowing up a propane tank in the 
kitchen. The Marines then began firing, killing eight residents—including 
the owner, his wife, the owner's sister, a 2-year-old son and three young 
daughters. 

The Marines raided a third house, which belongs to a man named Ahmed Ayed. 
One of Ahmed's five sons, Yousif, who lived in a house next door, told Time 
that after hearing a prolonged burst of gunfire from his father's house, he 
rushed over. Iraqi soldiers keeping watch in the garden prevented him from 
going in. "They told me, 'There's nothing you can do. Don't come closer, or 
the Americans will kill you too.' The Americans didn't let anybody into the 
house until 6:30 the next morning." Ayed says that by then the bodies were 
gone; all the dead had been zipped into U.S. body bags and taken by Marines 
to a local hospital morgue. "But we could tell from the blood tracks across 
the floor what happened," Ayed claims. "The Americans gathered my four 
brothers and took them inside my father's bedroom, to a closet. They killed 
them inside the closet." 

The military has a different account of what transpired. According to 
officials familiar with the investigation, the Marines broke into the third 
house and found a group of 10 to 15 women and children. The troops say they 
left one Marine to guard that house and pushed on to the house next door, 
where they found four men, one of whom was wielding an AK-47. A second 
seemed to be reaching into a wardrobe for another weapon, the officials 
say. The Marines shot both men dead; the military's initial report does not 
specify how the other two men died. The Marines deny that any of the men 
were killed in the closet, which they say is too small to fit one adult 
male, much less four. According to the military officials, the series of 
raids took five hours and left at least 23 people dead. In all, two AK-47s 
were discovered. The military has classified the 15 victims in the first 
two houses as noncombatants. It considers the four men killed in the fourth 
house, as well as four youths killed by the Marines near the site of the 
roadside bombing, as enemy fighters. The question facing naval detectives 
is whether the Marines' killing of 15 noncombatants was an act of 
legitimate self-defense or negligent homicide. Military sources say that if 
the ncis finds evidence of wrongdoing, U.S. commanders in Iraq will decide 
whether to pursue legal action against the Marines. 

The available evidence does not provide conclusive proof that the Marines 
deliberately killed innocents in Haditha. But the accounts of human-rights 
groups that investigated the incident and survivors and local officials who 
spoke to Time do raise questions about whether the extent of force used by 
the Marines was justified—and whether the Marines were initially candid 
about what took place. Dr. Wahid, director of the local hospital in 
Haditha, who asked that his family name be withheld because, he says, he 
fears reprisals by U.S. troops, says the Marines brought 24 bodies to his 
hospital around midnight on Nov. 19. Wahid says the Marines claimed the 
victims had been killed by shrapnel from the roadside bomb. "But it was 
obvious to us that there were no organs slashed by shrapnel," Wahid 
says. "The bullet wounds were very apparent. Most of the victims were shot 
in the chest and the head--from close range." 

A day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene 
at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The 
video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates 
with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared 
with Time. The tape makes for grisly viewing. It shows that many of the 
victims, especially the women and children, were still in their 
nightclothes when they died. The scenes from inside the houses show that 
the walls and ceilings are pockmarked with shrapnel and bullet holes as 
well as the telltale spray of blood. But the video does not reveal the 
presence of any bullet holes on the outside of the houses, which may cast 
doubt on the Marines' contention that after the ied exploded, the Marines 
and the insurgents engaged in a fierce gunfight. 

There are also questions about why the military took so long to investigate 
the details of the Haditha incident. Soon after the killings, the mayor of 
Haditha, Emad Jawad Hamza, led an angry delegation of elders up to the 
Marine camp beside a dam on the Euphrates River. Hamza says, "The captain 
admitted that his men had made a mistake. He said that his men thought 
there were terrorists near the houses, and he didn't give any other 
reason." 
But the military stood by its initial contention—that the Iraqis had been 
killed by an insurgent bomb—until January when Time gave a copy of the 
video and witnesses' testimony to Colonel Barry Johnson, a U.S. military 
spokesman in Baghdad. After reviewing the evidence, Johnson passed it on to 
the military command, suggesting that the events of Haditha be given "a 
full and formal investigation." In February an infantry colonel went to 
Haditha for a weeklong probe in which he interviewed Marines, survivors and 
doctors at the morgue, according to military officials close to the 
investigation. The probe concluded that the civilians were in fact killed 
by Marines and not by an insurgent's bomb and that no insurgents appeared 
to be in the first two houses raided by the Marines. The probe found, 
however, that the deaths were the result of "collateral damage" rather than 
malicious intent by the Marines, investigators say. 

The U.S. has paid relatives of the victims $2,500 for each of the 15 dead 
civilians, plus smaller payments for the injured. But nothing can bring 
back all that was taken from 9-year-old Eman Waleed on that fateful day 
last November. She still does not comprehend how, when her father went in 
to pray with the Koran for the family's safety, his prayers were not 
answered, as they had been so many times in the past. "He always prayed 
before, and the Americans left us alone," she says. Leaving, she grabs a 
handful of candy. "It's for my little brother," she says. "I have to take 
care of my brother. Nobody else is left." 

--With reporting by Aparisim Ghosh/Baghdad 

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