The Haditha case began after an insurgent bomb killed a Marine in Haditha, 60 miles north of Baghdad, on Nov. 19, 2005. In the hours after his death, a squad of Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including some who local civilians claim were innocents simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Marines initially reported that only 15 Iraqis had died, and that they had been killed by a roadside bomb. Senior Marine officers did not investigate the incident at the time. The death toll went uninvestigated until TIME magazine raised questions last February.
Lt. Gen. Richard Natonski, who will brief the House and Senate armed services committees behind closed doors, has experience investigating alleged Marine wrongdoing in Iraq. Critics claimed a videotape of a Marine shooting a prone Iraqi inside a mosque in 2005 was an example of a war crime, but Natonski disagreed. As the senior officer responsible for deciding how to handle the case, he cleared the Marine, saying the Iraqi used an insurgent's "common tactic" when he concealed his left arm behind his head and "feigned death." Insurgents would often then "rise to continue fighting." In what many sources say what a move related to Haditha but not publicly explained, last spring Natonski removed three officers after the incident because he had "lost confidence" in them. The three have not been charged.
Natonski is expected to summarize the findings of the two separate investigations into Haditha. One was conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service that looked for criminal wrongdoing and focused on the Marines on the ground at Haditha. The second, conducted by Army Major General Eldon Bargewell, looked at how the commanders responded to the event.
Natonski, Marines say, will echo what the commanders overseeing Iraq have told others: That Nov. 19 was a typically frantic day. According to a Pentagon source, the on-scene officers were dealing with "numerous" other significant events, including firefights and bombings. A bombing that killed 15 "would be one of maybe a dozen high-interest items in a single day," says an officer who served in Iraq. But it is clear that Marines misreported the initial incident, did not correct it, and officers did not investigate it. The question Natonski will get — and one that may be answered by a military court-martial — is, should the commanders have known?
Regardless of the pain caused the Pentagon by the Haditha probe, it can take some solace from a new study by Colin Kahl of the University of Minnesota. "Despite some dark spots on its record, the U.S. military has done a better job of respecting noncombatant immunity in Iraq than is commonly believed," Kahl, an assistant professor of political science, says in the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. "I have found not only that U.S. compliance with noncombatant immunity in Iraq is relatively high by historical standards, but also that it has been improving since the beginning of the war."
Kahl contrasts the Iraq war with prior counter-insurgencies in which the U.S. has been involved, and comes away impressed. In Vietnam, for example, he writes that the number of civilians killed per month was nine times higher than in Iraq. "Even if the estimates for Iraq are off by a factor of two or three," Kahl writes, "the conflict's casualty count is far lower than that in previous U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns."
That is little comfort to the leadership of the Marine Corps, which is focused on holding Marines accountable for Haditha and preventing any more.