After nearly two decades of obstruction by the U.S. military, The New Yorker has obtained and published 10 photos of the aftermath of the 2005 Haditha massacre, when U.S. marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians in revenge for an IED bombing that killed a service member. The graphic images show dead Iraqi men, women and children, many of them shot in the head at close range. The victims ranged in age from 3 to 76. Release of the photos came only after producers of the investigative podcast In the Dark sued the Navy, the Marine Corps and U.S. Central Command to force them to turn over the photos and other records. “What the photos clearly show is that these were innocent people who do not appear to be doing anything threatening at the time of their deaths,” says Madeleine Baran, host and lead reporter of the podcast. Four marines were charged for the killings, but the charges were dismissed in three cases, and the last ended with a plea deal that did not result in a single day in prison. Baran says the survivors of the massacre, who cooperated with producers to get the photos released, are still waiting for justice. “What they want is the world to know what happened to their family, to know that their family were good people, not insurgents, and they want justice,” she says.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. A warning to our audience: The following story contains graphic images and descriptions of violence.
The New Yorker has published 10 photographs of the U.S. Marines’ 2005 massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha. Their killings in the middle of the night came in retaliation for an attack on U.S. military convoy as it drove through Haditha. The convoy hit a roadside bomb, an IED, placed there by Iraqis resisting the U.S. invasion. It killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas.
The gruesome images published last week show dead Iraqi men, women and children, many of them shot in the head at close range. One of the victims, a 5-year-old girl named Zainab Younis Salim, is seen with a number 11 written on her back with a red marker. The release of the photos comes 19 years after the massacre and only after producers of the investigative podcast series In the Dark sued the Navy, the Marine Corps and U.S. Central Command to force them to turn over the photos and other records. This is a trailer for In the Dark.
MICHAEL FAY: It’s now about 17:30, and we’re finishing up the day here at an observation post. And right now for about the last 10, 15 minutes, we hear in the background the evening singing from the minarets.
CAP. LUCAS McDONNELL: Believe it or not, sooner or later, we will kill some of these folks, who need to be killed. And that’s the beautiful thing about this world, is that there’s always someone who needs to be killed. And we’re the folks to do it.
MADELEINE BARAN: I spent the past four years investigating a crime, a crime that most people have long forgotten.
INTERPRETER FOR KHALID SALMAN RASEEF: He heard the sound of really strong bombing.
KHALID SALMAN RASEEF: I heard M16, zhzhzhzhzhzh.
MADELEINE BARAN: A crime that for almost 20 years has gone unpunished.
KEVIN PARMELEE: They went into the room, and they were just taking shots.
SAFA YOUNIS: [translated] Me and Noor, we were under the bed. He get his rifle and then start shooting at us.
KEVIN PARMELEE: How did they not perceive that these were children?
ARISTOTELES BARBOSA: I remember I opened a Humvee, and I just see bodies stacked up. And I open another one, the same thing. I’m like, “[Bleep].”
MADELEINE BARAN: A four-year investigation, hundreds of interviews, thousands of documents, all in an effort to see what the U.S. military has kept from the public for years.
COL. GREGORY WATT: You know, I don’t know what’s to be gained by this investigative journalism.
FORMER MARINE: I’m not interested in talking about that. That was a long time ago, and I tried to move past all that. So, no, thank you, on all that.
MARINE FAMILY MEMBER: He was saying it was so traumatic, he couldn’t talk about it.
KHALID JAMAL: You and you and you.
INTERPRETER FOR KHALID JAMAL: And you and you. They pointed at each one to go inside the house.
JEFFREY CHESSANI: Can I help you?
PARKER YESKO: Hi there, Mr. Chessani. My name is Parker. I’m a radio reporter, working on —
JEFFREY CHESSANI: Parker what?
BRIAN WITT: What did I think?
MADELEINE BARAN: Yeah.
BRIAN WITT: I assumed it meant that he had [bleep] shot someone.
FORMER MARINE: It’s not a big deal. [bleep] everyday [bleep]. Normal day in Haditha.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re now joined by Madeleine Baran, head reporter and host of The New Yorker‘s In the Dark podcast. She traveled to Haditha, Iraq, to meet with family members, the victims of the Haditha massacre. Her piece for The New Yorker is titled “The Haditha Massacre Photos That the Military Didn’t Want the World to See.”
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Madeleine. This is an astounding, what, nine-part podcast series and piece in The New Yorker with these photographs. You’ve interviewed hundreds of people, you and your team. First, talk about what these photographs mean now, so many years later, the significance of what they show, and what happened with this massacre, who was charged, who was not held accountable.
MADELEINE BARAN: Well, what these photos show, Amy, are direct evidence of what the Marines did that day in Haditha. I should say I didn’t personally travel to Haditha. We traveled to another part of Iraq, and we did send a reporter with more experience in the region to Haditha. But these photos show, as you can see, men, women, children in defenseless positions — in one case, a mother on a bed surrounded by her dead children; in another case, a mother in the corner of their living room with her arm around her 4-year-old boy, both of them killed, and they’re facedown on the ground, huddled, cowering in a corner. And so, what the photos clearly show is that these were innocent people who do not appear to be doing anything threatening at the time of their deaths.
And what happened with the Haditha case is, is that four marines initially were charged with murder, but all of those murder charges eventually went away. In three cases, the charges were dismissed. And in the final case, the one against the squad leader, Sergeant Frank Wuterich, that case did go to trial, but it ended in the middle of the trial with a plea deal for negligent dereliction of duty. It’s a very low-level charge. Wuterich’s own lawyer described it to me as basically akin to a parking ticket. It didn’t carry a single day in prison or jail.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Madeleine, could you talk about your long battle to get these photos and the resistance that you met and why you persevered for so long?
MADELEINE BARAN: Well, so, this all started in 2020, when a reporter on our team, Parker Yesko, filed the first FOIA request by our team, trying to get not just the photos, but all of the investigative records into what happened in Haditha. You know, at the time when this killing happened, this was described as another My Lai. And yet, you know, we still know very little, at least when we started our reporting, knew very little about what even happened that day. So, we filed this FOIA. The military really barely responded. And so, we worked with a law firm who specializes in FOIA work, Loevy & Loevy, an amazing team, led by a lawyer, Matt Topic, and they helped us sue the military. So we filed suit against the military. And then, at that point, you know, we were still not necessarily getting anywhere. I mean, I don’t think we ever thought it was at all a foregone conclusion that we would receive these photos.
So, we knew from reading the records — I had seen in the past that the U.S. military had made a claim that they wanted to keep the photos private because of concern — in part because of concern for the surviving family members of the dead. And so, anticipating this concern, when I was in Iraq, I talked with one of the survivors and, ultimately, talked to two of the survivors and said, you know, “What do you think about us trying to get these photos?” And they both said — one is a man, Khalid Jamal, who was 14 when his father and uncles were killed. Another is Khalid Salman Raseef, who’s a lawyer who lost 15 members of his family that day. And they both said, “Yes, we want you to have these photos. These photos are important.” And so, then they did something remarkable. Working with a reporter we sent there, they went house to house and talked to other surviving family members, explained our reporting to them, explained what we were trying to do, and had, like, a form with them that we had provided, in Arabic and English, that explained that this form would authorize us to try to obtain the photos, with their permission, from the U.S. military. And ultimately, those two men collected 17 signatures, and then we filed those in court. And then, in March of this year, the military relented and sent us the photos.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to play two clips for you from the podcast series. But start off by walking us through that day, November 19th, 2005.
MADELEINE BARAN: So, early that morning, the marines set off, a squad of marines in a four-vehicle convoy, just a routine supply run. And one of those vehicles was hit by an IED, and it killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas and injured two other marines. In the hours that followed, the marines shot five people by a white car next to the — near the site of the explosion, and then went into three houses, and they killed men, women and children inside. The oldest person they killed was a grandfather in his seventies, and the youngest was a 3-year-old girl.
AMY GOODMAN: So, this is retired Colonel Gregory Watt of the Army. He was — first led a noncriminal investigation into what happened in Haditha. And this is him speaking in this podcast, In the Dark.
COL. GREGORY WATT: Yeah, my experience leads me to believe that this occurred 2006, 2007. Now it’s now 2023. I think they’ve moved on.
MADELEINE BARAN: Why do you think that?
COL. GREGORY WATT: I think it’s human nature.
MADELEINE BARAN: Even if your whole family was killed?
COL. GREGORY WATT: I believe so, especially in that region of the world.
MADELEINE BARAN: What do you mean?
COL. GREGORY WATT: They have different values than we do, OK? They are more concerned about the living than those that have passed.
MADELEINE BARAN: I think, to the — I’ve talked to some of the survivors. And for them, it’s really important to know as much as possible about how their family members were killed and then also why no one was ever punished.
COL. GREGORY WATT: Yeah, I’m not — I don’t have the answers to that.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Colonel Gregory Watt from the In the Dark podcast. This is Khalid Jamal, who you just described, one of the survivors of the Haditha massacre, 14 at the time, his dad and three uncles killed by the Marines in 2005, responding.
MADELEINE BARAN: One day while we were talking with Khalid Jamal, we turned off the air conditioner in the hotel room because it was so noisy. But at one point, it got so hot, we had to take a break.
SAMARA FREEMARK: Yeah, OK, let’s turn on the air conditioning, take a little break.
MADELEINE BARAN: Samara called down to the lobby and ordered coffee and pastries.
SAMARA FREEMARK: Hi. Is this room service? Hi. I wanted to order…
MADELEINE BARAN: While we were waiting, Khalid Jamal asked me a question. He asked me whether I had ever talked to Frank Wuterich.
KHALID JAMAL: Did you meet Frank Wuterich?
MADELEINE BARAN: Not yet, no.
And then Khaild Jamal said something surprising.
KHALID JAMAL: I hope to meet him.
MADELEINE BARAN: He wanted to talk to Wuterich.
KHALID JAMAL: I want to ask him —
SAMARA FREEMARK: Hold up. OK.
KHALID JAMAL: I need to ask him one question only. Just one question. How did he kill them? I want to explain how did he that in our house. How?
MADELEINE BARAN: Khalid Jamal told us that he’s always wanted to know what happened in his father and uncles’ final moments.
KHALID JAMAL: I want. I want that.
SAMARA FREEMARK: Why?
KHALID JAMAL: I want to know what’s happened in home.
SAMARA FREEMARK: Because you don’t know.
KHALID JAMAL: Yes. I saw the bodies only. I want to know how he did this killings of my father.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is Khalid Salman Raseef, 15 members of his family killed by the Marines in the Haditha massacre.
INTERPRETER FOR KHALID SALMAN RASEEF: They kind of gave up on anyone talking about this case again. They didn’t forget. They have been heartbroken every day since that day. But they gave up on someone talk about the case or someone reinvestigate the case.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Madeleine Baran, it is now almost 20 years later, and you have the military, the representative, saying, “Why would they care? They can move on.” Explain what you were most shocked by in what you discovered in these investigations, not to mention another man that they killed that day.
MADELEINE BARAN: Well, of course, you know, the crime itself is shocking. You know, what happened that day is shocking. I think that, you know, as we got deeper and deeper into the reporting, it was also very interesting to see what happened in the years that followed, how — you know, I think, really, one of the big undertold parts of this whole story is the role of the surviving family members, who have been quietly and persistently questing for justice for years now and have done almost everything they can think of to try to reveal this story, to try to get justice for their dead family members, and have been repeatedly sort of left out of the process.
You know, as we show in the podcast, at trial of the squad leader, none of the depositions — you know, the jury never heard any of the depositions of the survivors, the eyewitnesses to the killings who were Iraqi. You know, at trial, the prosecutors had asked to replace the names of the victims with numbers. And so, at trial, the dead were referred to by the numbers that the marines scrawled on their bodies hours after the killings. And so, I think there’s also a story here about how we treat the Iraqi civilians and how we treated these particular Iraqi civilians in this case.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Madeleine, could you talk about the role of General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who went on to become secretary of defense in the Trump administration?
MADELEINE BARAN: So, Mattis played a very key role in this case. You know, Mattis was the person who, most memorably in this case, dismissed the charges against one of the marines, a man named Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt. Sharratt is the one who killed three members of 14-year-old Khalid Jamal’s family. And Mattis didn’t just dismiss the charges. He also wrote Sharratt a very glowing, full-of-praise letter, saying that, in his eyes, Sharratt was innocent, and praising Sharratt for how he had performed as a marine. And, you know, this is something that Mattis, I think, to this day appears as very proud of. In his memoir, he even published the letter in his book.
AMY GOODMAN: And at this point, no one went to jail, Madeleine. We have 15 seconds.
MADELEINE BARAN: Correct, no punishment, no jail time for the killings to this day. That’s correct.
AMY GOODMAN: And the response of the Iraqis, the family members who survived?
MADELEINE BARAN: What they want is the world to know what happened to their family, to know their family were good people, not insurgents, and they want justice.
AMY GOODMAN: Madeleine Baran, we want to thank you for an astounding podcast series, In the Dark, head reporter and host of the New Yorker podcast, the new article in The New Yorker is “The Haditha Massacre Photos That the Military Didn’t Want the World to See.” We will link to it all.
That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, with Juan González in Chicago. Thanks for joining us.
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