Advance Screening: PBS’ Frontline Haditha Earns a “B-”

This coming Tuesday, February 19, PBS’s respected Frontline will air its examination of “what really happened in Haditha,” the show’s introduction saying that’s what we should expect of the program.

The show doesn’t meet that goal, and can be criticized for what it does and doesn’t include, meriting a grade of “B-.” That means, the show is definitely worth watching, and deserves a passing grade.

Necessary to a full understanding of Haditha, none but a very few have read or remember the hundreds of pages of Haditha Article 32 hearings, the hundreds of serious newspaper articles and blog posts examining the unfolding of the known facts, or have personal training and experience in combat. Frontline’s “Rules of Engagement” about the Haditha events may be as close as most will come.

The writer/producer/director of the show, Arun Rath, doesn’t have that background for understanding Haditha. Nonetheless, he has made a serious effort, and admits that his view matured from a reflexive liberal view of a massacre:

"I am a journalist and tend to follow world news fairly closely, but before starting work on this project all I knew about the Haditha incident was basically the headlines," Rath told me.

"When I first heard about it I thought it was interesting and counterintuitive. I knew that Marines had more intense training than our other forces, so the idea that so many would suddenly snap under pressure seemed a little strange. But I also knew that horrible things happen in wars, and figured something bad must have happened.

"Once we started to look into the story more deeply, we realized how far off the popular notion of what happened in Haditha was. For instance, the idea that there were no firefights when we know that November 19, 2005 was a day of very intense attacks across the town. We spend some time in our film spelling this out, using an interview with Major (then Captain) Jeffrey Dinsmore, the battalion's intelligence officer, to help bring that day to life. We were also able to obtain the ScanEagle video from that day. That will be eye-opening for much of our audience."

Thanks to Frontline, I received an advance copy of the show and its transcript, to share a preview of it with readers.

An “A” would have likely been unattainable, given an hour and the few still open questions to be decided at upcoming court martials. Or, an “A” might only be given by a rigid partisan of one side or another, if the show marched to a one-sided tune. A “C” would be appropriate if there were disabling errors in the show, resulting in a serious overall misimpression. A “D” or “F” would be reserved for a slanted diatribe or ranting screed, better reserved for Bill Moyers or Keith Olbermann respectively.

There are several serious misimpressions created by the show, but they are not disabling of the show’s overall veracity, as the core facts of the Marines acting within the rules of engagement does come through, and only reduce what would otherwise be a “B” to a “B-.”

Washington Post reporter Josh White provides his views and speculations throughout the show, but White has not been one of the primary reporters following the Article 32 hearings and other emerging details. White has been a prime conduit for those close to the prosecution. Perhaps White was used in the show because the prosecution is not permitted to comment publicly. However, an explanation of White’s presence in the show as the only newsman (except for scandal starter Time Magazine’s Tim McGirk) would have been more enlightening to the viewer. The slant in White’s views can be gleaned, for example, in this incident of taking a quote about Haditha misleadingly out of context. The authority quoted replied: “The way the story ran made it seem like I believed the Marines were guilty before the incident had even been investigated. That saddened me...”

As to Tim McGirk, whose Time story of Haditha at the time and in the show is given much attention, his reporting and views are given more credence than deserved. McGirk misrepresented his source as a “the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch”, which Human Rights Watch denied and Time ran the correction.

In Frontline’s show, the intelligence officer for the Marines at Haditha says “the Hammurabi video is insurgent propaganda because intelligence information received almost immediately after the – the events of November 19th, indicated that the video had been – recorded by an insurgent propagandist.”

That’s immediately followed by McGirk’s interview by Frontline, McGirk saying, and having the final word:

I had worked with the Hammurabi people before on other stories. And I think that it’s wrong to smear them as pro-insurgent. These are people who are carrying out human rights work in Iraq.

McGirk’s convenient memory and facility with the facts, however, ignores the facts about Hammurabi, handily summarized here. Hammurabi is an invention of two Iraqis with axes to grind, whose video at Haditha was staged a day after the event, which they sat on for months until McGirk bit.

Frontline shows early in the program an interview with one of Hammurabi’s principals, neatly attired in suit, but doesn’t question the veracity of his statements nor even raise the question as to whether Hammurabi is a human rights group until the much later exchange above.

Toward the end of the show, two surviving Iraqi children are shown making brief statements about how they saw Marines brutally kill their families. Their statements are not questioned.

However, these children’s stories have actually varied in different tellings. Frontline doesn’t raise that. Nor does it raise that one of the children admitted to prior knowledge of an attack on the Marines.

Frontline introduces Haditha as a rather bucolic spot before the Americans arrived, a “serene oasis.” Frontline has the Marines’ intelligence officer speaking to the number of insurgents passing through and in Haditha. Frontline, however, doesn’t speak about the strategic importance of Haditha, its giant dam feeding crucial electricity and water through much of Anbar province, or earlier attacks on Marines in Haditha, such as,

In Spring 2005, insurgents attacked Haditha General Hospital, the largest in western Al Anbar, with a suicide car bomb, destroying more than half of the building with the explosion and ensuing fire. Insurgents also established fortified firing positions inside the hospital and used patients and staff as human shields as they attacked Marines from the hospital and later retreated from the Marine counterattack.

Nor does Frontline update us about Haditha today, building and commerce thriving under newfound security, and security now turned over to Iraqis.

Lastly, the details of the Article 32 hearings, especially of those whose charges were dismissed or tangential to the killings, are only sketchily narrated and explained, but one can mark that up to the brevity of time the show has and the surrounding issues it covers.

Nonetheless, despite these shortcomings in the Frontline show, what clearly comes through is that, as the show’s press liaison said to me, “was there a rush to judgment?” can be answered in the affirmative. The show, particularly, zeroes in on John Murtha’s inflammatory comments about Haditha and the Marines as propelling Haditha into the news and hurried CYA and investigations. Even using a Fox Report, Frontline says, “Haditha led the news for weeks. And soon became synonymous with other outrages in the Iraq war, like Abu Ghraib.” Former Marine and renowned Iraq analyst Bing West drives the point home:

Haditha in my judgment is a metaphor for how the press unconsciously, being in opposition to the war, will take an incident and simply by reiterating it and reiterating it and reiterating it build it into something that it wasn’t.

The prosecutions arguments that there were either more restrictive rules of engagement than followed, or that they required even greater hesitation than followed, are ably refuted by the defense attorneys and the Article 32 hearings’ results thusfar. The remaining court martials, set to begin in March, of SSgt Wuterich and LCpl Tatum are for reduced charges, and the prosecution’s case appears weak as evidenced by a last minute scurrying to Iraq to reinterview Iraqis in hope of strengthening their case.

The Hammurabi shill for a massacre gets one of the last words, “the punishments don’t come close to the crimes committed in Haditha.” But he is immediately followed by the WP’s Josh White, “what the investigation has revealed since [being “potrayed by Iraqi civilians as a massacre, by Congressman Murtha as killings in cold blood”] is that this was far more complicated than some execution.”

At the show’s end, several current Marines from Kilo/3/1, the unit involved at Haditha, express either their concern that stricter rules of engagement and scrutiny of any killings of Iraqis may lead to Leavenworth or their own death, while hoping that it will contribute toward winning hearts and minds.

That’s a sober finishing note, and one to consider if someone you know or love has to face the clearly split second decisions necessary in combat, especially when the enemy hides among civilians and is aided by them, as at Haditha.

P.S.: A closing quote by Bing West in the show is, I believe, out of context. I’ve yet been unable to reach Bing West to see if this is so, and will add an update if and when I do.

P.P.S., 2/18/08: Jules Crittendon, who was embedded with US forces in Iraq, offers his advance screening able review of the show.