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WP Leaks Photos From Haditha Report

The wire services are gleefully running photographs that the Washington Post claims to have gotten from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s report of the incident.

The details of the photos (such as the date and time) are left to our imagination. But the clear implication is that they were taken on or about the day of the incident.

The Washington Post clearly thought the first photograph was the most damning, as they ran it with their front page story today:

Death in Haditha

Eyewitness Accounts in Report Indicate Marines Gunned Down Unarmed Iraqis in the Aftermath of a Roadside Bombing in 2005

By Josh White

Saturday, January 6, 2007; Page A01

U.S. Marines gunned down five unarmed Iraqis who stumbled onto the scene of a 2005 roadside bombing in Haditha, Iraq, according to eyewitness accounts that are part of a lengthy investigative report obtained by The Washington Post.

Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the squad’s leader, shot the men one by one after Marines ordered them out of a white taxi in the moments following the explosion, which killed one Marine and injured two others, witnesses told investigators. Another Marine fired rounds into their bodies as they lay on the ground.

Twenty-four civilians died in attacks by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, on Nov. 19, 2005, after a bomb killed one of the troops in a convoy. Four Marines have been charged with murder in the incidents, which began with the killing of five civilians outside a taxi and continued with the killing of Iraqis in nearby homes. These diagrams are drawn from accounts in investigative reports.
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The taxi’s five occupants exited the vehicle and according to U.S. and Iraqi witnesses, were shot by Wuterich as they stood, unarmed, next to the vehicle approximately ten feet in front of him," said a report by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service on the incident that runs thousands of pages…

If the photographs reflect the positions of the bodies at the time of their deaths, it certainly does seem to contradict the contention that the passengers attempted to flee.

But again it is not clear that these pictures are from the day of the incident. And the captions give no indication that they are — or aren’t.

Are they the photographs that the (now disgruntled) Marine claims he took the next day?

The Washington Post also has provided an elaborate graphic to illustrate their theory (portrayed as fact) about what happened that day in Haditha.

All of which seems calculated to convict these Marines in the public’s mind before they go to trial.

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This article was posted by Steve Gilbert on Saturday, January 6th, 2007 at 5:57 pm. You can leave a response.

13 Responses to “WP Leaks Photos From Haditha Report”

  1. newshound
    January 6th, 2007 at 8:08 pm

    The major question is did the Marines perceive the occupants of the vehicle as a threat. It is easy to now say that they were unarmed and there was no evidence of association with the IED attack.

    The occupants could have had a charging device or the vehicle could have been a car bomb. Plus we’re getting only one side, the prosecution’s being selectively leaked.

    What I find more interesting is the number of leaks that have come from military officials in this case. Seems like someone really wants to pressure these Marines into a plea.

    This case does not seem nearly as strong as others, but the interest to turn this into the Iraq massacre the media so wants is intense.

  2. Phil Byler
    January 6th, 2007 at 9:28 pm

    What is needed here is for the Marines to win the case at trial, and then for those of us who care about the military guys, to use that victory as a wedge to go after the creeps playing the unethical leaking prosecutor game and to go after the press for being anti-military jerks seeking to convict the Marines in the public’s eye.

  3. SG
    January 6th, 2007 at 10:17 pm

    You’re probably right, PB.

    At the very least these kind of stories put enormous pressure on the judges in the courts martial.

    Which is the opposite of what courts martial are supposed to be about.

  4. icanplainlysee
    January 6th, 2007 at 10:53 pm

    I’ve been awaiting the details of this incident.

    I’m dissapointed that a formal statement of facts wasn’t presented, instead only enough information to flare up the imagination and prejudice in the eye of the beholder to construct truth.

    After the faux photos and AP’s fake, but accurate reporting I was looking for much less propaganda, or at least not presenting news as a fill in the blank exercise.

  5. SG
    January 6th, 2007 at 10:54 pm

    That’s an excellent point, ICPS.

    Since it’s clear the Washington Post had their mits on the NCIS report, why didn’t they just go ahead and publish the entire thing?

    Instead they cherry-picked it. And (one strongly suspects) not to the Marines’ favor.

  6. Warmonger Infidel
    January 6th, 2007 at 11:56 pm

    The JAG’s in this case are playing the age old game of trying to scare one of the defendants enough to get him to roll on the others. This can happen when you threaten very young warriors with sentences of death or life without parole, even if the threatened one, or his mates are not guilty. The fog of war as to what was perceived by Sgt. Wuterich makes this case very weak at best. Did the Marines kill these people? Yes, I believe they probably did. Were they justified? Yes, based on what I believe they saw in the “fog” and what threat they perceived at the time, I believe they were justified. Leaking this kind of pre-trial info to the WaPo is prosecutorial misconduct of the worst kind. I hope someone in the senior JAG goes after and fries whoever did this.

  7. newshound
    January 7th, 2007 at 7:04 am

    This morning’s New York Times has a much fairer account of the report and one officer concludes it’s impossible to detemine what happened from the report since much of the evidence is contradictory.

    From last spring, when this case broke, there has been a leaker or several in the Pentagon who are leaking information detrimental to the Marines and their right to a fair trial. I wonder who this leaker is.In many cases, he was wrong, especially with dates he predicted, but he’s been consistent. Clearly he leaked the entire CD disk to the Washington Post.

    I would think this is prejudicial in the extreme and I would also think that he would be easy to find since the number of “officials” who have access to this documentation should be limited.

  8. endzonekiller
    January 7th, 2007 at 7:40 am

    I don’t know how many of you remember Mei lai? Vietnam?
    It is “by the play-book” example of normal media, activists and disgruntled politicians collusion. newshound is absolutely right; don’t fight the hands of the hydra; find it’s neck. Bite off the heads. There is a leaker (s) in the prosecution and it is connected to the media.
    As long as that connection exists, there is no chance for a fair trialand no justice for either for the soldiers or the dead. It is naught but, like Mai lai, a political hoax that could cause hundreds of innocents to die.
    Don’t ever forget that Ameica’s premature pull-out from S.E. Asia lead to the death of millions of little brown folk like me! We were none too happy about that. Don’t abandon Iraqi people because of filthy liberal-politic tactics.
    Japanese Joe

  9. newshound
    January 7th, 2007 at 8:00 am

    My major concern is that perhaps the Pentagon wants this information leaked. They may desperately want a plea; their case is murky at best and possibly quite weak. The brass seems to acknowledge this by its treatment of the accused in this case when compared to the others. The 8 accused are free, able to visit their family at Christmas and under no restriction. This differs considerably from the other 2 cases that I’ve followed. This one is much weaker, there was actual combat; there was a fog of war.

    However, the media wanted this to be their massacre story, their My Lai, even though it is totally different in scope and circumstance. The media is not permitted to use “massacre” directly, I guess their editors have some standards, but they strain to work the word into their stories.

    So there is a collaboration and coordiantion among members of the media and some members of the entrenched bureucracy at the Pentagon to try these Marines in the media. I just have not figured out why.

  10. doingwhatican
    January 7th, 2007 at 8:37 am

    I’m so weary of how the media is always trying to undermine our military. War is hell. People die. Sometimes innocent people get caught in the middle. These soldiers were engaged with an enemy that looks, acts and, for that matter, is the local population. Anyone could be the insurgent.

    This is no clear case by any means. Things look different in the heat of battle than they do in hindsight by the light of day. Given the choice of whom to believe, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to our soldiers who were there rather than to some armchair lawyer or reporter who has never known what it feels like to react to a IED that was set off by someone in the immediate vicinity.

    These guys may have been overwhelmed by combat which may give them the appearance of acting inhumanely and even unprofessional but it would be wrong to call them criminals. Pull them out of combat positions if you have doubts, but don’t prosecute them. If there are any criminals to be had in this case, I would look to the MSM that commits treason every chance they get.

  11. SG
    January 7th, 2007 at 12:06 pm

    Just as the Washington Post had hoped, these photos are being presented as conclusive evidence of the Marines’ guilt.

    Behold this headline from the Australian outlet The Age:

    Global evidence hunt uncovers horrific images

    http://tinyurl.com/ycxavu

    They show the first photo of the taxi cab with this caption:

    Hard evidence: A photo of a marine standing at the site where five unarmed civilians were killed on November 19, 2005, contained in an investigative report.

    And in the story itself:

    Much like the photographs that emerged in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse cases, the Haditha images have provided investigators with powerful and visceral evidence of what happened…

  12. SG
    January 7th, 2007 at 12:12 pm

    By the way, has anyone ever offered an explanation as to why these young men were in a taxi cab before dawn?

  13. 1sttofight
    January 7th, 2007 at 12:21 pm

    Where is the evidence it was a taxi cab?


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