No Time for the Truth: The Haditha Incident and the Search for Justice
392
No Time for the Truth: The Haditha Incident and the Search for Justice
392Hardcover
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Overview
In the waning days of 2005, twelve Marines were ambushed by Sunni Muslim insurgents on Route Chestnut, an ancient Mesopotamian road at the south edge of Haditha, Iraq, when an IED detonated under one of four Humvees they occupied, killing or wounding a quarter of their number. The surviving Marines quickly counterattacked. Their merciless response killed twenty-four Iraqi citizens, including an old man and ten women and children. This horrific encounter was quickly dubbed the Haditha Massacre and compared to My Lai, and its echoes still resonate today. Prompted by international condemnation, the Pentagon and Marine Corps initiated court-martial proceedings against the Marines involved.
No Time for the Truth is the first book to show how the subsequent seven-year investigation and trial—which resulted in only a single minor conviction—was no more than theater meant to appease an outraged public and salvage US-Iraq relations. Authors Nathaniel Helms and Haytham Faraj, who served as defense counsel, reveal how the Pentagon pressured prosecutors to protect the integrity of the Marine Corps by hiding the fully gruesome nature of killings perpetrated by “battle-rattled” soldiers, with the intention of laying blame at the feet of a single staff sergeant. This is a stunning account of one of the darkest moments in the war in Iraq, a critical examination of whether justice was even sought after, and a powerful statement that in war, “truth is the first casualty.”
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history—books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628726855 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2016 |
| Pages: | 392 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.00(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Haytham Faraj is a nineteen-year veteran of the Marine Corps and has served as an infantryman, officer, and defense attorney. He is the recipient of the Wheeler Award for Infantry Excellence; Meritorious Service Medal; Combat Action Ribbon; Navy Marine Corps Commendation Medal; two Navy-Marine Corps Achievement Medals; and the Humanitarian Service Medal. He lives in Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE HADITHA MASSACRE — SETTING THE STAGE
Camp Pendleton, California. The longest criminal inquiry in Marine Corps history ended on Tuesday, January 24, 2012, with a solitary smack of the military judge's gavel. The so-called Haditha Massacre inquiry had not settled a thing except to ensure that the six-year-long prosecution of US Marine Corps staff sergeant Frank D. Wuterich was finally over. The thirty-one-year-old career infantryman was the last Marine among eight charged with massacre and cover-up to walk away a free man.
His ordeal had begun six years earlier — at 0730, Saturday, November 19, 2005 — in the city of Haditha, Iraq, when the twelve-man rifle squad Wuterich led lost a Marine to ambush before killing eight suspected insurgents and fifteen civilians. The skirmish was provoked by enemy soldiers on a road the Marines called Route Chestnut, a modern, paved boulevard into the ancient city. The Marines belonged to "K" for Kilo Company, Third Battalion, First Marines, a First Marine Division light infantry battalion of about 650 men on its third deployment to the Iraq War.
Included among the dead were ten women and four children. They died pathetically, huddled together in the bedrooms of two separate houses. Marines under Wuterich's command killed them with grenades and pistol and rifle fire. By Sunday the civilian deaths were known to most of the top Marine commanders in Iraq. The gruesome deaths elicited absolutely no interest among the harried brass. The Second Marine Division commanding general in charge of 3/1 while the First Marine Division asset worked through its third deployment was briefed two days later.
"I sat there and took the brief and no bells and whistles went off," Major General Richard A. Huck later ruminated.
All the senior officers required to care about such things categorized the civilians as collateral damage and moved on. Their only response was a bland press release. The Army generals in faraway Baghdad said they never got a heads-up about the grisly nature of the innocents' deaths until a magazine reporter told them.
It was feasible — even likely — the civilian deaths could have slipped by unnoticed. The events at Haditha were relatively insignificant among the dozens of horrible incidents reported every week during the second year of the three-way Iraq war. The week before, November 12, the Associated Press reported that a car bomb placed by Sunni insurgents exploded outside a public market in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of New Baghdad, killing eight people and wounding twenty-one more. Iraqi police lieutenant colonel Hassan Chaloub said among them was a woman and her eight-year-old daughter.
The same morning Wuterich's squad was ambushed, five American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division died in two car bombing attacks near Mosul. The next morning, a British patrol was attacked by a roadside bomber in the southern city of Basra. One soldier was killed and four others were wounded, a British Defense Ministry official said.
The next day, Dr. Ahmed Fouad of the Baqouba city morgue claimed that five people, including three children, were killed and two others wounded by American soldiers manning a checkpoint. The following Monday, a US spokesman said, "US forces mistakenly fired on a civilian vehicle outside of an American military base north of Baghdad, killing at least three people, including one child."
Two days later, insurgents set off a car bomb outside a hospital in Mahmoudiya, killing thirty and wounding thirty-five, a doctor there said. Among the dead were three women and two children. American forces played no part in the incident. The Pentagon reported that eighty-eight Americans died in Iraq during November. No one was sure about the number of Iraqis killed. In the United States, nobody noticed. President George W. Bush was in Mongolia thanking folks there for supporting the war. He needed friends anywhere he could find them. His poll numbers were slipping after his contentious reelection; unemployment and gas prices were rising, the economy was tanking. Without weapons of mass destruction, the voracious press circling the Pentagon demanded reasons why the United States invaded Iraq. Meanwhile, the rabid war fever that raged in the country after 9/11 was waning. The Pentagon responded with more parades, more heroes, and more hoopla at football games.
In Iraq, Lieutenant General John R. Vines, the Army general to whom top Marines in Iraq reported, apparently never received — or never shared — the information about Haditha with his superiors in Baghdad. At the time, Vines was the commanding general of the coalition forces in Iraq, then officially designated Multi-National Corps–Iraq (MNC–I). Nobody involved in the Haditha investigation is certain about what he knew and when because high-level protocol prevented Vines from ever officially being questioned. Ultimately, the buck stopped with the Marines. Haditha was their baby and the Army generals and Washington politicians running the war came down hard on the Marine Corps three months later, when a story about the obscure town hit the big time, the cover of TIME magazine.
Thirteen months after that, Wuterich was indicted for murdering eighteen civilians. Seven other Marines from his battalion were also indicted for murder, assault, cover-up, and lying about the same incident. The defendants were accused of slaughtering tweny-four innocent civilians during an out-of-control rampage and then conspiring to cover it up. Somebody dubbed it the "Haditha Massacre" and the name stuck.
Inside the Corps, everybody's eyes were on the first Marine Corps general ever appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Peter Pace had been in command only six weeks when the events at Haditha erupted. Everyone was looking to him to take the lead. Pace is a moral man who tried to lead with the principles he learned at the US Naval Academy and practiced as a platoon leader in Vietnam. He said nothing publicly for six months.
Pace broke his silence in Singapore on June 4, 2006, when telling Marines stationed there that "the ongoing investigations of events in Haditha, Iraq, presented an opportunity for all service members to revisit ourselves and see where we are on our moral compass."
Asked his thoughts about news coverage of the alleged Haditha incident, Pace told the group he supported the new ethics training requirement for deployed troops and believed it supported "what 99 percent of Marines are doing right." Pace acknowledged that as the investigations unfolded, there would likely be "a bumpy road" ahead.
He probably didn't realize just how bumpy the road would be. The scandal that evolved overshadowed his tenure as the country's highest-ranking military officer almost as soon as it was revealed. He would last two years. On June 8, 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that he would advise President George W. Bush not to nominate Pace for a second term. The only Marine ever so honored stepped down as chairman on October 1, 2007, replaced by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Mullen. Pace was the first Marine to fall.
At a Pentagon briefing the next day, Marine Corps Commandant General Michael W. Hagee reiterated his boss's concern without adding anything relevant to the budding imbroglio. Instead of offering excuses, he said he couldn't comment on specifics regarding ongoing investigations of alleged Marine misconduct at Haditha on November 19, 2005, or another alleged murder that followed on April 26 in Hamdaniya, a village west of Baghdad.
"As commandant, I am gravely concerned about the serious allegations concerning actions of some Marines at Haditha and Hamdaniya," Hagee told reporters. "I can assure you that the Marine Corps takes them seriously. We want to ensure the investigations are complete with respect to what actually happened on the ground and actions taken or not taken by the chain of command."
THE CIVILIAN DEATHS at Haditha were not secret. The day after the November 19 skirmish, a routine Marine Corps press release from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi reported that one Marine and fifteen Iraqi civilians were killed there when a convoy was hit by an IED blast. The Marine Corps's colorless account noted that "gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire." When the shooting ended, the announcement said, eight insurgents were dead and a wounded insurgent was captured. It sounded like a tiny victory. Good news in the perverse order of things.
The report was written by Second Marine Division public affairs officer Captain Jeffrey Pool, a career Marine responsible for briefing the vociferous press in Al Anbar Province. In November 2005, Al Anbar was the hot ticket in Iraq for determined reporters, the place where they could make a name for themselves, dancing briefly with the terrible danger the Marines faced every day. Pool was there to accommodate them.
Regrettably, Pool's account was erroneous. He knew it at the time. Pool later claimed he released the inaccurate report because he believed the civilian deaths were attributable to the roadside bombing because "it led the Marines to counter-attack the hidden insurgents" who had set it off.
The communiqué was not Pool's personal opinion; a colonel named Richard A. Sokoloski told him what to say. Colonel Sokoloski was chief of staff of the Second Marine Division, a lawyer, and Pool's boss.
The Marine who died was twenty-year-old Lance Corporal Miguel "T. J." Terrazas, the son of a retired Army staff sergeant from El Paso, Texas. At the time, the senior officers knew only that a faceless Marine was dead and eleven others had been wounded in a sharp contest that lasted an entire day. The attack that started on Route Chestnut ended when Marine jets and attack helicopters destroyed a suspected enemy safe house down the road after a handful of insurgents sought refuge there. A scene from video of the event recorded by a ScanEagle unmanned aerial vehicle shows an enemy soldier diving over a wall while a five-hundred-pound bomb is descending on his position. A few days later, some Marines found half a stinking corpse not far away wearing the same kind of chest rig the jumper did.
Three months after the IED killed Terrazas, TIME detonated its own bomb from the internationally known magazine's Baghdad bureau. TIME claimed the twenty-four Iraqi citizens who died at Haditha were massacred, the victims of Marine vengeance. The reporter telling the tale was Tim McGirk, a particularly resourceful journalist who claimed the Iraqis were gunned down by merciless Marines gone berserk. Regrettably, like Pool, McGirk also got it wrong, remarkably wrong, but for different reasons. He was never there. His editors decided it was too dangerous for him to find out for himself. Before the Marine Corps could make McGirk's specious account right, it was too late. To steal a time-worn phrase, the Marines had landed, but the situation was entirely out of hand. It is also where this story begins.
Wuterich's court-martial ended abruptly on a gorgeous January Monday morning after a secret plea deal was reached the preceding weekend. He had been well investigated. He was investigated by an Army major general and his staff, an Army colonel and his smaller staff, sixty-five NCIS special agents, and a committee of top-notch Pentagon lawyers reporting to then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. After that, he faced a five-year prosecution effort by dozens of Marine Corps lawyers reinforced by reservists called to active duty to put him and seven other disgraced defaulters away. In the end, Wuterich pled guilty to speaking ineptly during his personally led counterattack. Nobody else was convicted of anything.
His admission of guilt was a small victory for the Marine Corps — almost infinitesimal, in fact. But it was a victory nonetheless. In return for a guilty plea to one count of negligent dereliction of duty, the government dismissed thirteen far more virulent charges, including nine counts of voluntary manslaughter, two counts of aggravated assault, and three charges of willful dereliction of duty. Wuterich was charged initially on December 21, 2006, with eighteen murders, aggravated assault, and lying to cover up his offenses at Haditha. He faced a possible death sentence. The charge he admitted to was on the same level as failing to put on his cover, or cap, when he went outside. It was the only conviction the Marine Corps managed to obtain during the most extensive criminal investigation in its history.
"Not bad," civilian defense lawyer James Culp drily observed shortly afterward. The former Army paratrooper from Round Rock, Texas, represented one of the enlisted shooters indicted alongside Wuterich.
On December 12, 2006, the US Marine Corps Forces Central Command "detailing authority" Lieutenant Colonel Phillip Simmons assigned Lieutenant Colonel Colby C. Vokey to represent Wuterich. Until his appointment, Vokey had been the regional defense counsel for West Coast Marines. Without him there weren't enough defense attorneys to go around.
Two weeks after Wuterich was indicted, Simmons assigned Major Haytham Faraj to represent him as well. Before this assignment, Faraj had worked for Vokey. He was already up to his neck in the court-martial of another grunt charged with murder at Hamdaniya, Iraq, five months after Wuterich had led his squad into Haditha.
"We already knew it was going to be big," Faraj said. "It was going to be as big as My Lai. But I put it on the back burner. Puckett and Mark Zaid (civilian cocounsel at the time) were putting it in the media. I avoided getting involved. You don't put criminal cases in the media. I told them I would be happy staying in the background writing motions."
At first, it seemed the government was holding all the cards. Then the case against Wuterich began falling apart. Disintegration started slowly when the government announced that one of the defendants had decided to testify against his former squad leader. On April 17, 2007, the Marine Corps dropped all charges against accused murderer Corporal Sanick P. Dela Cruz in exchange for his testimony. Soon after he was promoted to sergeant, Dela Cruz led the subsequent parade of eyewitnesses and participants who would walk away from prosecution in return for their testimony. His claim to fame was urinating into the skull of one of the dead men.
On August 9, 2007, Lieutenant General James N. Mattis, the convening authority and final arbiter in the Haditha affair, dropped all charges against Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt and Captain Randy Stone. Sharratt was a trigger puller, and Stone was the battalion lawyer. He was charged with failing to thoroughly investigate what Wuterich's squad allegedly did.
On September 18, 2007, LtGen Mattis dropped all charges against Captain Lucas McConnell in exchange for immunity and his cooperation with the investigation. The Annapolis graduate was the commanding officer of K Company when the events on Route Chestnut exploded onto the world stage. He had been relieved for cause the preceding April along with his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, and India Company commander Captain James Kimber, who had nothing to do with the events at Haditha. McConnell's career was later rehabilitated and he was promoted to major.
On March 28, 2008, all charges against Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum were dropped. He was with Wuterich during the entire event and had admitted shooting at least five civilians. He was the last shooter to be exonerated. Charges of involuntary manslaughter against Tatum were dismissed "in order to continue to pursue the truth-seeking process into the Haditha incident," the Marines said in a written statement.
On June 5, 2008, First Lieutenant Andrew Grayson was acquitted by a general court-martial of all charges stemming from his participation in the Haditha incident. He was the only officer to stand court-martial. Grayson was an intelligence officer attached to Wuterich's battalion. He was charged with deleting photos of the deceased Iraqis in order to obstruct the investigation. He was later charged with failing to notify the Marine Corps administrative chain of command of his murky legal status when his term of service expired before he was "accidentally" discharged from the Marine Corps. It was a circus.
On June 17, 2008, all charges against Chessani were dismissed by a military judge citing unlawful command influence. He was accused of failing to follow orders by not following up on the civilian deaths with an investigation and failing to adequately detail timely battlefield reports. The Marine Corps appealed that ruling a month later. On March 17, 2009, a military appeals court upheld the dismissal of the charges against Chessani. An administrative board of inquiry was then convened for one final shot at the highest-ranking officer charged with crimes in the incident. The board found no evidence of misconduct and recommended that Chessani be allowed to retire without loss of rank or benefits. He did so a few days later.
Wuterich was the last Marine standing.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "No Time for the Truth"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Nathaniel R. Helms.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xxiv
Abbreviations xxix
Chapter 1 The Haditha Massacre-Setting the Stage 1
Chapter 2 Major Haytham Faraj, USMC (Ret.) 26
Chapter 3 Sharratt's War 50
Chapter 4 The Kill Sack 65
Chapter 5 Damage Control 89
Chapter 6 Getting in Trouble 99
Chapter 7 What the Marines Said When Nobody Was Listening 115
Chapter 8 House #4 146
Chapter 9 Trouble Brewing 153
Chapter 10 Another Incident at Owl Creek 164
Chapter 11 Hector Salinas-Trump Card 186
Chapter 12 The Leaky Boat-The "Bargewell Report" 206
Chapter 13 What Do We Do Now? 236
Chapter 14 Thank You for Your Service 253
Chapter 15 Wuterich/CBS/Court-Martial 266
Chapter 16 Truth on Trial 283
Notes 332