Posted on 06/14/2007 11:05:59 AM PDT by RedRover
When it comes to the November 2005 Haditha incident, which the media has characterized as a wanton massacre of 24 innocent civilians, it seems it is the truth that has been massacred — by the news media.
As Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, long heralded as one of the bravest and most skillful Marine officers in the Corps, faces charges that could send him to prison for failing to adequately investigate the incident, defense attorneys for both the colonel and the other Marines have been unable to cite in open court the evidence that clearly exonerates him and all of the other accused Marines.
As a result, the media has emphasized all of the erroneous charges leveled by the prosecution, most of which rely on suspect testimony from anti-American Iraqis — some of them insurgents.
As NewsMax.com has previously revealed, the bulk of that exculpatory evidence is contained in the eight hours of videotaped testimony offered by the battalion intelligence officer (designated S2), all of which up until now has been highly classified and therefore unusable in open court and kept from the notice of the American people.
The Truth Revealed
That roadblock has been cleared. The full eight hours is declassified, and because it will be available to the public, NewsMax can now break through the paper curtain erected by the media to report what we have long known but have been unable to reveal.
The evidence clearly shows that a great miscarriage of justice has been imposed on a group of some of the bravest and finest of Americans — the men of the Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment.
It told the full story, was supported by photographic evidence, logs of all the day's radio transmissions, and included an almost minute-by-minute narrative of the day's events.
The eight hours of testimony and cross examination offered by Capt. Jeffrey Dinsmore, the S2 officer, gave full details of the intelligence passed on to the officers and men of the 3rd Battalion 1St Marine Regiment including the Marines of Kilo Company. It buttressed previous briefings which alerted the Marines of insurgent tactics such as the killing of seven reconnaissance Marines who were ambushed by insurgents in hospital beds with AK-47s hidden under the bedcovers.
Planned Ambush
According to Dinsmore, a 20-year up-from-the ranks captain reputed to be one of the best intelligence officers in the Marine Corps, as well as the unit's only officer awarded a Bronze Star for his service in Haditha, the officers and men of 3rd Battalion 1St Marine Regiment were specifically alerted to the possibility of a white car being involved in the planned ambush.
That there existed prior intelligence on the planned ambush was hinted at in a May 30, 2006 interview Lance Cpl. James Crossan gave to KING-TV in Seattle.
Crossan was riding in the Humvee that was struck by the IED in Haditha on Nov. 19. He suffered a broken back, shattered bones, and perforated eardrums. The explosion killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas.
According to Crossan the Marines had information on the day of the incident that about 20 insurgents were planning a major attack on the command outpost (COP), which he describes as something like a vehicular check post.
Crossan said that he saw a child signal the passing of the Humvee, and that he saw two guys standing not five feet away from where the IED exploded. He said there was no way that they didn't know about the IED. When the IED exploded, he said, the Marines were already ready for something like it that day, thanks to the intelligence provided them the night before.
Sgt. Wuterich was among those alerted to be on the lookout for a white car, and when a white Opal taxi cab screeched to a halt on the Marine's exposed left flank and five men jumped out and began to flee. Wuterich and Sgt. Sanick P. Dela Cruz ordered them to stop. When they didn't, the Marines shot and killed them. Officers later on the scene said that then position of the bodies clearly showed them to have been fleeing when they were shot.
According to Capt. Dinsmore's telephone testimony, given from his post in Iraq for the Article 32 hearing for Capt. Stone, intelligence showed that four of the men in the cab were among the eight identified insurgents killed that day.
The Time Magazine Debacle
It is interesting to note just how erroneous the media's reporting on that incident was as exemplified by Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer who six months later took the word of a so-called "Iraqi witness" from Haditha and reported that the men in the cab "happened upon the scene inadvertently" while riding in the cab.
Nat Helms is author of a new book, "My Men Are My Heroes" which provides an account of the incredible bravery of Sgt. Brad Kasal in the second battle of Fallujah.
He stated that Knickmeyer wrote about a witness who said that the taxi driver turned onto the street and saw the wrecked Humvee and the Marines, and then the cab driver tried to back away at full speed. The Marines opened fire from about 30 yards away, killing all the men inside the taxi. Dela Cruz reportedly pumped his 30-round M-16 magazine into the car when they tried to run.
Even worse, later media reports said the cab carrying four known insurgents was occupied by four "college students," along with the cab driver, who were on their way to school.
These false reports however, pale in the face of the role played by Time magazine Tim McGirk and Time itself. According to McGirk's first story, a "budding journalism student" had given him a video he had taken after the killing of the civilians in the houses near the site of the IED explosion.
Almost immediately, Time had to correct the story, revealing that the "budding journalism student" was actually 43-year-old Taher Thabet al-Hadithi who just happened to be on hand to videotape the aftermath of the killing in the houses.
Time also identified al-Hadithi as head of something called the Hammurabi Organization for Human Rights and Democracy Monitoring. Time reported that the Hammurabi Human Rights group was affiliated with Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch vehemently denied they had any connection or any ties or association with the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, and Time wrote a retraction.
It was then revealed that the Hammurabi Human Rights group was a group of two: Hadithi and Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani, a Reuters News Service reporter who was previously arrested by U.S. Marines in his home town of Ramadi and underwent weeks of interrogation at the infamous Abu Ghraib Prison. His American warders told Reuters that he was released in a general amnesty in late 2005 along with about 500 other Iraqi prisoners. Reuters also reported that he spent five months in U.S. custody before being released without charges.
Three months later al-Mashhadani was the darling of Time magazine, Nat Helms wrote sarcastically.
NewsMax can now reveal that the battalion S2 knew that the insurgents were following their usual practice of videotaping an ambush. And it was a series of cell phone communications between Hadithi and Mashhadani, both known insurgents, that alerted the Marines to the impending ambush.
False Charges Under False Pretenses
The Marine Corps, however, had discovered al-Hadithi more than a year before Nov. 19, among other anti-government, anti-American Sunni insurgent sympathizers inhabiting Haditha. He was still under their microscope in late February when he gave his video to McGirk after shopping it around for weeks. Helms described it as "ugly and inflammatory, full of dead children and women and blood-covered walls."
Al-Hadithi claimed the deaths were the handiwork of out-of-control Marines who wantonly charged through the innocent victims' homes slaughtering women and children in revenge for Terrazas' gruesome death.
In late March, McGirk released al-Hadithi's "evidence" to the world. Marines who specialized in signal interception told Helms they were shocked when they heard al-Hadithi and Mashhadani were mixed up in it.
In his testimony Capt. Dinsmore revealed that both men were operating freely throughout the province before purportedly announcing the creation of their human rights organization in early 2006. Marine intelligence officers were aware of their intelligence activities because their frequent cellular telephone conversations were monitored, they said.
McGirk's sources were known insurgent propagandists and it was McGirk's Time reports that created the Haditha massacre hoax.
Marine sources told NewsMax that when McGirk first contacted the 3rd Battalion and asked to interview the men of Kilo Company, he was invited to come to Haditha and the men were told by Chessani to answer all his questions fully and truthfully.
On the day before he was due to arrive in Haditha from the safety of Baghdad's Green Zone, NBC reporter Bob Woodward and his cameramen were badly wounded. McGirk promptly canceled his trip, saying it was too dangerous. This, incidentally is the same McGirk who partied with the murderous Taliban after 9/11 and proclaimed them to be a fine upstanding bunch of just plain folks.
The courageous McGirk has now refused to testify at Chessani's Article 32 hearing where defense attorneys insist he would have been torn to pieces in cross examination.
We all know the media is our enemy but it’s not the media who pressed charges against the Marines. The people prosecuting this case are as rotten as the media.
I tend to agree with your understanding of the process. Unfortunately, our domestic enemy knows full well that in such fights, the meme rules all and regardless of fact or finding, the damage is done.
We face a domestic enemy that is fully involved in a full press propaganda offensive.
I agree...The enemy within can be more devastating over time than the enemy on the battlefield. The cowards within trade our security for political gain, they are traitors of the first order.
Also, I think Mattis was not the one in charge of this situation until more recently. He inherited it when he changed responsibilities, I believe. Anyone know?
Marine Mom
Yes, he inherited it. I can’t find the date he actually took command but it was announced that he would be the commander of the 1st Expeditionary Force about a year ago.
You’re wise beyond your years, Girl.
Yes, that is highly probable. The taxi driver could have screwed up and arrived just a little too late at the ambush point when the IED went off.
The Pentagon announced on May 31, 2006 that LtGen Mattis had been chosen to take command of the I Marine Expeditionary Force based out of Camp Pendleton, California. from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Mattis
The media started writing about Haditha in mid-March, 2006, charges were preferred on Dec. 21 or 22, 2006. Now does anyone know if Lt Gen Mattis has to okay the charges when they are preferred. My understanding was that he would have had to have approved them. But I’m not absolutely sure of this process. Anyone know?
Tag for reference
August: Lt. Gen. James Mattis, the incoming commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton, Calif., is briefed on the Haditha investigative report by officials from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Mattis will convene with his lawyers to determine whether charges should be filed.
Link, scroll way down.
I agree with you, to an extent.
The reason this entire fiasco got started in the first place is because the cowardly Bush decided to leave the running of the war in the hands of the scumbag ACLU lawyers of JAG. Now the Marines are more concerned with “battlefield ethics”, “rules of engagement”, and sensitivity classes which stress the need to rat out your brothers-in-arms if, heaven forfend, there are incidental civilian casualties following a fatal ambush.
Had the “Haditha massacre” hoax been vociferously exposed right away there would have been no need to drag a bunch of good Marines through the mud for 18 months, at considerable expense to those Marines and their families. Instead, what we see is a bunch of masturbating JAG lawyers and lying NCIS punks knocking each other over to see who can get their name in lights.
This malicious prosecution is a sickening disgrace, and every day that passes makes it worse. I simply find it difficult to believe that the Marine Corps could let itself get handcuffed like this and that Mattis would let it drag on without sticking his boot up somebody’s behind.
Well, it could be that Lt. Gen. Mattis was snookered by NCIS. They seem to tend to cull statements and info that fits their idea of what happened. They may have “neglected” to fill in the full story of al-Hadithi, and al-Mashhadani’s role in prior knowledge. They may have slanted the whole investigation to appear it was something it wasn’t. Hopefully these hearings will expose the truth. Justin Sharratt’s defense team is doing a heck of a job exposing NCIS tactics and discrepancies. Thank goodness for Capt. Dinsmore and the fact that this info. is now becoming declassified.
You are correct about what a tragedy it is for the families who have to endure the financial and emotional hardship of these allegations and for so long. Let’s first see these Marines exhonerated, then hopefully something can be done to clean up NCIS. Who knows, maybe there’s a way for the families to recoup some of their financial losses?
Thank you for your kind reply. I agree with your theory and in fact said the same thing last week.
NCIS is corrupt to the core. Lt. Gen. Mattis and the Marine Corps may be able to redeem themselves by pressing charges against those who enabled this malicious prosecution through dishonest tactics, selective dissemination of evidence, and unacceptable zeal to prosecute in order to advance their own sorry, selfish agendas. Also, there have been leaks that need to be investigated and addressed. Some of these scumbags on the prosecution team, including the NCIS investigators, need to go to jail - - REAL jail.
Once these Marines have been exonerated we will see if Lt. Gen. Mattis still has any guts.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe Lt. Gen. Mattis can bring any charges against NCIS. I think it’s the Dept. of Justice. This may be one reason they have gone untouched for so long. If they make false statements in a hearing, the Investigating Officer can’t do much but request that an investigation be initiated. The Marines have no jurisdication as far as I know over NCIS, I believe it’s the DOJ. The system is a mess, IMO.
I have to agree with you and when I used the term fainess in my original post to you there is certainly nothing fair about what’s happened to these Haditha Marines.
From McGirk and murtha, the enemedia and then NCIS and their corrupt and inept investigation this was something in the very beginning that snowballed out of control.
Maybe if the Commandant or even CJC Gen. Pace had stepped in in the very beginning it could have been stopped but I tend to doubt that too because it went out of control fast.
These Marines should be exonerated but it has still ruined their careers. The best we can hope for is to make people like McGirk and murtha pay a price for their corruptness and hope the NCIS will be looked into thoroughly and people prosecuted for their criminal acts.
Ahhh. If that's the case, then forget about it. Bush's Justice Department is utterly corrupt.
Wrong answer. Finish the trials, and clear their names properly, by having them found innocent by their peers. THAT is the RIGHT answer. Then, I wouldn’t have any argument against them suing those who falsely maligned them. Slander AND libel, I believe.
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