Haditha Prosecutors Didn’t Leak This

For many months, those close to the prosecution of the Haditha Marines have engaged in selective leaks to the media that have reflected negatively on those there and above, and in the U.S. and around the world as evidence that our mission in Iraq is a bloodthirsty evil endeavor.

At Saturday’s Article 32 (grand jury-type hearing to consider charges) at Camp Pendleton of a legal officer charged with negligence for not investigating the incident further, a previously unrevealed bit of exculpatory evidence emerged.

Throughout the week, officers all up the chain of command testified that the deaths at Haditha were considered collateral damage to action against insurgents. This was played by the media as indicating blasé attitudes toward civilian deaths, although it may also excuse the lower ranking Captain whose Article 32 hearing is underway.

Saturday, the following testimony was heard:

Eight of the 24 people whom Marines are accused of killing in Haditha, Iraq, were described yesterday as insurgents by a defense attorney and a Marine liaison officer during a pretrial hearing.

Randy Stone Defense attorney Charles Gittins said the eight were identified by human and electronic intelligence. They were not mentioned by name.

The eight were among five men ordered from a car and shot to death and four men killed in a home cleared by Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, said Gittins, who is representing Capt. Randy Stone at a pretrial hearing at Camp Pendleton. Stone is charged with failing to investigate and properly report the killings.
Last week, Capt. Jeffrey Dinsmore, the intelligence officer for the battalion, testified that “it's fairly well established through the (unmanned aerial vehicle) coverage that there were insurgents in those homes,” referring to the homes where civilians were killed.
Gittins' comments outside court were supported by Maj. Dana Hyatt, a Marine liaison officer in Haditha, who testified yesterday under a grant of immunity that four men that Marines killed inside one of three houses that the Marines cleared were insurgents. If proved, the developments could complicate the prosecution of three Marines charged with murder in the November 2005 incident.

“Obviously this will make a difference,” said Tom Umberg, a former military defense counsel, prosecutor and judge. “It's a fact favorable to the defense. I think it adds a new dynamic to what the Marines did. It may affect whether their actions were reasonable.”

John Hutson, former judge advocate general for the Navy and now president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H., agreed that this could help the defense.

“If it is true and one-third are insurgents, it would certainly be complicated to explain how these guys should have been able to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys,” Hutson said.
“It gives the defense the argument they were looking for.”

Another newspaper near Camp Pendleton reported:

Word throughout the chain of command was that even though the dead included two women and five children slain inside their homes, the "NKIAs" as the Marines call noncombatants killed in action, were victims of crossfire and nothing more….

According to intelligence reports that the Marine Corps has never released, several of the people inside were insurgents, as were some of the men from the car, Stone's attorney Charles Gittins said outside of court Saturday.

A Marine Corps spokesman, Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, later said he could not comment on any classified material that may give a full accounting of the number of dead determined to be insurgents….

Relatives of four men killed in a third house got no payment because those men were believed to be insurgents, Marine Maj. Dana Hyatt testified Saturday.

Hyatt also said no payments were made to relatives of the five men killed as they were held at gunpoint when they emerged from a car minutes after the bombing. No money went to their survivors because of a never-verified report that the car contained weapons indicating those men were insurgents.

We’re waiting for the NYT’s and others on the Haditha prosecution leak list to pick up on this.