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Here's how Rumsfield's response/interaction with this case was reported in Washington Post back in June, 2006. In Haditha Killings, Details Came Slowly

...."Chiarelli told subordinates in early February he was amazed by that response (that there had been no investigation), according to an Army officer in Iraq. He directed that an inquiry commence as soon as possible. He wanted to know what had happened in Haditha, and also why no investigation had begun.

Army Col. Gregory Watt was tapped to start an investigation and by March 9, he told Chiarelli that he had reached two conclusions, according to the Army officer.

One was that death certificates showed that the 24 Iraqis who died that day -- the 15 the Marines said had died in the bomb blast and others they said were insurgents -- had been killed by gunshot rather than a bomb, as the official statement had said. The other was that the Marine Corps had not investigated the deaths, as is the U.S. military's typical procedure in Iraq, particularly when so many civilians are involved. Individually, either finding would have been disturbing. Together, they were stunning.

On March 10, the findings were given to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, the first Marine ever to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rumsfeld told aides that the case promised to be a major problem. He called it "really, really bad -- as bad or worse than Abu Ghraib," recalled one Pentagon official. On March 11, President Bush was informed, according to the White House.

At the Marine Corps headquarters, there was "genuine surprise at high levels," said an Army officer who has been working with the Marine Corps on the case. "It caught a lot of people off guard."

That weekend, almost four months after the incident, "we went to general quarters," recalled one Marine general, using the naval expression for the call to arms. The following Monday, March 13, Marine officers began briefing key members of Congress on defense-related committees. Their message was succinct: Something highly disturbing had happened in Haditha, and its repercussions could be serious. The alacrity of the Marine response surprised some of Rumsfeld's aides in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. OSD, as it is called at the Pentagon, told the Marine Corps a few days later not to say anything to anyone about the investigation, recalled the general. Too late, the Marines responded, we've already briefed Capitol Hill."......

There's a lot of good information and reminders of when everything was happening. Bargewell (Special Ops) was dispatched to make his investigation. NCIS was sent on March 12 to do their investigation. Then McGirk's article came out on March 19. But the cr*p really hit the fan after Murtha came out with his allegations on May 17. It appears from this article that Murtha may have received his first briefing from Marine officers on March 13. First time I'd seen that.

The story is spreading fast...

In NewsMax, Haditha Bombshell: Pentagon Had Secret Committee

A shadow legal body was set up by the Defense Department to manipulate the prosecutions of U.S. Marines accused of massacring Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005.

That’s the bombshell disclosure from the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm that is representing one of the accused Marines, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani.

And it could prove to be the most damning piece of evidence showing the political motivations behind the ongoing prosecutions of the Haditha Marines.

Also in American Thinker, Shadow body monitoring the Haditha prosecution?

Good snooping there, Girlene. It sounds like it was Marine Corps commanders themselves who were first to roll over and presume the worst about the troops in the field. That’s an abominable disgrace but you can only hope that a lesson about dealing with insurgent propaganda schemes has been learned and will be taught to the next generation of commanders.

Meanwhile there are STILL four Marines twisting in the wind, left there by a whole chain of command of mostly cowardly political hacks who can’t seem to clean up their own mess by finding a way to end this sick charade..

I've actually always been a Rumsfeld fan but...

I've been in big corporations my whole working life. I could see that, to a guy like Rumsfeld, the Haditha Marines were no more than bugs to be squashed if they got in the way of the counterinsurgency effort.

And even though Haditha story was all enemy propaganda, it'd better to squash the Haditha Marines than to try to battle the propaganda--especially with the worldwide media against the Bush Administration.

All of this is obviously just speculation on my part. But it should be obvious that the SecDef would care more about the success of the war effort than a squad of Marines.