THE SHAMEFUL SCUM OF THE SCANDAL OF HADITHA

A lie can get half way around the world before the truth can lace up its combat boots. This is especially true when the lie is propagated by a major news magazine and a senior member of Congress.

On March 19, 2006, Time Magazine published an article written by Time reporter Tim McGirk which in effect accused a squad of Marines of having murdered civilians in Haditha, Iraq, and their superiors of covering it up.

"It's much worse than reported in Time Magazine," said Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa, at a press conference May 17, 2006.  "There was no fire fight.  There was no IED that killed these innocent people.  Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

Rep. Murtha, a former Marine, later told the Philadelphia Inquirer he got his information from the Commandant of the Marine Corps.  But the briefing Gen. Michael Hagee gave Rep. Murtha took place on May 24, a week after Mr. Murtha had accused the Marines of murder.

On December 21, 2006, four enlisted Marines were charged with multiple counts of murder.  Later, four officers in their chain of command were charged with having covered up the murders.  The news coverage of the indictments was enormous.

This Tuesday (6/17), a military judge dismissed charges against LtCol. Jeffrey Chessani. He was the seventh of the eight Marines either to have the charges against him dismissed, or be found not guilty.  

The only Marine still facing court martial is Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, and the charges against him have been downgraded from murder to manslaughter.  News coverage of the acquittals has been sparse, relegated to the "news briefs" section in most newspapers.

The Time Magazine story was based chiefly on the testimony of three Iraqis, all of whom had ties to the insurgency.  Time reporter Tim McGirk may himself have sympathized with the insurgents.  He spent the first Thanksgiving after 9/11 with members of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  This is what he wrote about it in Time:

"Our missing colleagues finally arrive, and I leave thinking this evening wasn't very different from the first Thanksgiving; people from two warring cultures sharing a meal together and realizing, briefly, that we're not so different after all."

Testimony at the various courts martial indicated at least eight of the 24 alleged victims were armed terrorists, and the physical evidence at the scene contradicted the accounts of Mr. McGirk's witnesses.  

Writing in StrategyPage a year ago May, Harold Hutchison compared Haditha to claims made by the Palestinian Authority that Israeli soldiers had massacred civilians in the village of Jenin in Gaza in April, 2002.  The accusations received much more attention from the news media than the subsequent reports of UN investigators that the accusations were false.

"If the testimony about Haditha bears out, then it will just be the latest example of media misreporting," Mr. Hutchison wrote.  "At that point, though, the real cover up will begin. Very little, if any effort will be made to correct the record.  Politicians like John Murtha, who repeated the most inflammatory charges, will get a pass."

What Mr. Hutchison predicted has come to pass. Time Magazine and Rep. Murtha owe these Marines an apology, but it is unlikely to be forthcoming.  Only people with integrity apologize when they've done harm to innocents.

But Time and Jack Murtha aren't the only miscreants in this sorry saga.  The Marines were charged despite a report, issued the month before Mr. Murtha accused them of murder, which concluded "there is no evidence that the Marines intentionally set out to target, engage and kill non-combatants."

When they were first arrested, the enlisted Marines were treated far worse than terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.  The Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) ignored exculpatory evidence.  One prosecution witness changed his story five times.  Another failed a polygraph test.  

That witness, a native of Venezuela, may have been threatened with deportation if he didn't testify against his comrades. The charges against LtCol. Chessani were dismissed because of unlawful command influence.

When I was a Marine, I was comforted by the thought that I'd never be left behind, even if I were dead.  But it appears that some senior people in the Corps and NCIS tried to railroad the Haditha Eight to appease Rep. Murtha's false, politically motivated charges.  

It is they — not the Haditha Marines — who should be hanging their heads in shame.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.