Maybe she should have asked this guy, Thaer Thabet, al-Hadithi, the budding journalist. He lives right in the neighborhood, has a great video camera with sound. I'm sure he would have loved to help Ms. Nayda Mannle.
Posted on 06/12/2007 4:12:45 PM PDT by radar101
CAMP PENDLETON ---- A lance corporal charged with murder in the death of three Iraqi brothers in 2005 passed a polygraph examination when asked whether he was being truthful when he said the first man he shot inside a home was holding an AK-47 assault rifle, according to testimony heard this morning.
The test administered last spring showed there was no apparent deception in the account provided by Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, said Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Nayda Mannle.
Sharratt is charged with three counts of unpremeditated murder for his role in the deaths of two dozen Iraqi civilians following a roadside bombing on the morning of Nov. 19, 2005. The 22-year-old rifleman from the base's 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment could face life in prison if ordered to trial and convicted.
Mannle's testimony came on the second day of Sharratt's hearing. She eventually became the lead agent for the Haditha investigation, which resulted in Sharratt and two other enlisted men from the battalion facing homicide charges and three of its officers being charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the incident.
While acknowledging that the polygraph did not indicate that Sharratt's account to investigators was deceptive, Mannle also testified that the account the Marines gave of what happened when four homes were stormed by the Marines did not match what some family members of the slain Iraqis said occurred.
Sharratt is accused of killing the three brothers inside the last of four homes that were assaulted by Marines after a roadside bombing that killed a lance corporal and injured two others.
His attorneys are trying to show inconsistencies in the investigation, focusing many of their questions on why government agents did not pursue full background reports on the men who died inside the fourth home, particularly one man who worked on the Jordanian border and may have had several Jordanian passports in his possession.
Mannle said that probably should have been done and agreed that agents can still try to piece that information together. But she also said that none of the 24 victims who died in Haditha had any known ties to the insurgency.
"We ran them through the database and all came up as negative for insurgents," she said during telephonic testimony from an office in the Pentagon.
The defense also is trying to show that forensic evidence taken from a bedroom where men died inside the fourth house is inconsistent with an account given by those men's surviving family members, who told investigators the men were herded into that room and executed in rapid succession.
For a full report on Tuesday's court proceedings, see Wednesday's North County Times.
tact staff writer Mark Walker at (760) 740-3529 or mlwalker@nctimes.com.
NPR played it because it makes Bush look bad by showing that those servicemen the left thoroughly endorses are being persecuted by the evil Bush administration.
Sadly, that is why we had to seek attention from the left, the RIGHT side of the media wont touch this.
I sat down with some FOX news persons...all I hear is crickets.
BUMP
bump for later
Hi Darryl! It’s Sherri. I hope you and Theresa take me up on my offer. I may not be a perfect cook - but, it’s gotta be better than fast food. Gosh, I HOPE it’s better than fast food.... lol If not, I feel sorry for my kids!
Please educate us. I know for a fact they measure nervousness not "truth."
Good question, pink. Of course, NavySec Winter took the word of NCIS agents over Marines.
Even after three Marines signed affadavits that their testimony had been falsified in the Lt Phan, Winter refused to investigate NCIS conduct. Winter said he knew NCIS agents were honest.
And what does that make the Marines?
Hope these Marines can sue the DNC and PravdABDNC for falsely destroying their lives.
Pray for W and Our Marines
The actual polygraph result aren't important in that scenario - it's the suspect's reaction to the threat of one. There have been cases where cops hooked people up to "lie detectors" that were merely a colander wired to a photocopier that said "He's lying." (That interrogation technique worked.)
Funny how that works ;-)
~Prayers on their way~
They need to drop the entire episode, re-instate the men to combat, give them a big, fat bonus, and formally apologize to them, their families and the nation.
All excellent points, Girlene.
At the very least.
GREAT point girlene!
By: North County Times Opinion staff -
Our view: Military investigators risking their own cases by failing to use yesterday's technology
Seven years into the 21st century, it's long past time for NCIS to catch up to 20th-century technology. The investigators of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the federal agency responsible for investigating sailors and Marines accused of criminal acts, must immediately start recording their interviews and interrogations of witnesses and suspects with something better than a ballpoint pen. The perils of not doing so are apparent to anyone following the Article 32 hearing of Marine 2nd Lt. Nathan Phan, who stands accused of assaulting three Iraqis in March and April, and making a false official statement regarding one of the incidents. Defense witnesses testified last month that NCIS agents added false material to the statements the agents were collecting from those witnesses while researching the charges against Phan. We may be stuck with a "he said, she said" dispute over what happened in those interviews, and it shouldn't have to be that way.
The disputed testimony in Phan's case has cast a harsh light on the outdated methods NCIS agents use to record those statements. Essentially, NCIS agents write down the statements of the witnesses they are questioning, and then have witnesses initial their own statements. But that leaves far too much room for error or interpretation. At least one witness now says he signed off on an inaccurate statement because he was busy with guard duty in Iraq.
The glaring truth is it didn't have to be this messy. Video cameras have been around for decades, tape recorders even longer, and newer digital devices make recording even easier. There is simply no excuse for military investigators to rely on notebooks and their memories when conducting custodial interviews.
A 2004 study of police experience with recording custodial interrogations by Thomas P. Sullivan of the Northwestern University School of Law convincingly makes the case: The precise words a suspect utters are captured in permanent record. The visual cues of gesture and reaction (often indispensable in evaluating a face-to-face conversation) are available to subsequent juries and judges. Accusations of police misconduct ---- for failing to properly provide Miranda warnings or ignoring requests for a lawyer, for instance ---- can be supported or dismissed almost instantly.
Sure, machines break down and human error can render them useless, but both can be minimized through training and policies that take such inevitable, presumably infrequent mishaps into account. The value of having such a neutral record of an interview or interrogation is priceless.
An NCIS spokesman told North County Times reporter Mark Walker in September that the agency was reviewing its policy of not video- or audiotaping statements it takes from witnesses or suspects.
That answer came in the early days of the prosecution of the so-called "Pendleton 8," seven Camp Pendleton-based Marines and a Navy corpsman who were charged in connection to the slaying of a 52-year-old Iraqi civilian in the village of Hamdania, Iraq. The case against Phan, who wasn't present during that fatal April 26 incident and hasn't been linked to it in any way, nonetheless sprung from the Hamdania investigations. Phan was the commanding officer of the eight platoon members charged in the Hamdania killing, five of whom have pleaded guilty to various charges. Statements written down by NCIS agents pursuing the Hamdania case formed the crux of the assault cases against Phan.
Phan's is the second straight high-profile case against locally based Marines to send up a flare illuminating the unjustifiably antiquated interviewing methods employed by the NCIS. It's long past time for the agency to start properly recording the statements it takes from witnesses and suspects.
After all, if the police departments of Oceanside, Carlsbad and Escondido have all used recording and audiovisual equipment for years, why are the feds so slow to catch up to last century's technology?
One thing is for certain. The cat is out of the bag. The prosecution along with NCIS cannot pretend they where being the slightest bit honest or honorable.
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