Iraq
From American Gulag
This page relates to 2007 reporting from Haditha. For Britt Kovachevich's 2008 piece, see Haditha.
Contents |
[edit] 2007 Reporting
This section focuses specifically on an event that took place on Nov. 19, 2005 in which a unit of U.S. Marines murdered 24 civilians in a small village in Northern Iraq called Haditha.
[edit] RECENT DEVELOPMENTS, WHAT HAPPENED IN HADITHA AND HOW ONE JOURNALIST BROKE THE STORY
U.S. military action following the recent massacre of 19 civilians in Afghanistan yields insight into the post-Haditha military mindset
On March 4, 2007, an elite platoon of Marines shot and killed 19 innocent local civilians and wounded 50 others on a bustling roadway in eastern Afghanistan after a suicide bomber drove a small van laden with explosives into their convoy.
The incident marked the first time a military convoy traveling through a public area openly shot at civilians, according to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.
At the time of the shootings, the Marines operated under a command led by the U.S. Army. As a result, Army officials took over the investigation.
After the incident, the Army quickly opened an investigation and redeployed the Marines involved to the Persian Gulf. Officials transferred the Marine company commander and senior noncommissioned officer to North Carolina. Both leaders were relieved of their command.
Army officials also quickly made $2,000 payments to the families of the 19 civilians killed. Under military law, the so-called solatia payments do not signify an admission of guilt. In fact, they explicitly deny wrongdoing. Upon disbursement, the military officially asserts that its killing of civilians amounted to an accident of war, not a war crime.
These legal distinctions didn’t stop U.S. Army Col. John Nicholson from holding a press conference two months later to apologize for the Marines’ actions. Nicholson, a unit commander in Afghanistan, appeared live via teleconference.
“The [Afghan] people are our center of gravity here,” said Nicholson. “So first and foremost in all that we do, we seek to do no harm to the people. So events such as that do set us back with the population and they have to be addressed very directly and forthrightly with the Afghan people.”
Nicholson then reread a statement presented earlier to the Afghan families affected by the shootings.
“So I stand before you today, deeply, deeply ashamed and terribly sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people,” read Nicholson. “We are filled with grief and sadness at the death of any Afghan, but the death and wounding of innocent Afghans at the hand of Americans is a stain on our honor and on the memory of the many Americans who have died defending Afghanistan and the Afghan people. This was a terrible, terrible mistake, and my nation grieves with you for your loss and suffering. We humbly and respectfully ask for your forgiveness.”
In the past four years, 757,000 civilians died in Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of the war, while 1.4 million have been injured. The U.S. military’s role in those deaths remains unclear.
During a news briefing held nine days later, the Marine Corps’ top official criticized Nicholson’s apology.
“Well, I think he [Nicholson] was premature to apologize, in that there is an investigation ongoing to determine what happened,” said Gen. James Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps. “If the investigation should determine that there are charges that should be levied, then there will be a hearing, perhaps a court-martial, those types of things.”
Conway’s cautionary reaction to the Marines’ role in the Afghanistan incident follows similar assertions made by the U.S. military following the Nov. 19, 2005 killing of 24 Iraqi civilians by Marines in Haditha.
In contrast, the Army’s push to quickly investigate and apologize after the Afghan incident reflects a growing awareness among military leaders and policymakers that securing support among the Iraqi and Afghan civilian population has become vital in salvaging the U.S. war effort.
“Commanders and political leaders in the U.S. and Iraq have made this point clearly,” says Josh White, military correspondent for The Washington Post who covered both the Haditha massacre and the recent incident in Afghanistan. “The support of the Iraqi people and the Afghani people are key to our success.”
Haditha
On March 19, 2006, Time magazine exposed the murder of 24 civilians by a company of Marines in the eastern Iraqi town of Haditha. The magazine broke the story about the event, which took place four months earlier.
On Nov. 19, 2005, Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, “went on a rampage” killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children after a roadside bomb detonated hours earlier killed one Marine and severely wounded another. The Marines also killed four passersby whose automobile arrived at the road site shortly after the bomb exploded.
Human-rights activists interviewed by Time foreign correspondent Tim McGirk claimed that, “the incident ranks as the worst case of deliberate killings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. service members since the war began.”
McGirk began chasing the story three months earlier after an announcement by Pres. George Bush in Dec. 2005 regarding civilian casualties peaked his interest.
McGirk first contacted an Iraqi human rights monitoring group which supplied him with a videotape shot by a local Iraqi human rights worker. The video showed bodies in a Haditha morgue and interior shots of a house with bloody walls.
“So, they [the human rights group] came one day and they brought this horrendous video, and they didn’t know that much about it, they just knew that it came from Haditha, and there were two segments of it,” said McGirk. “The first showed relatives claiming the bodies in a morgue in Haditha, and the second showed interiors of a house where something awful had happened. Then they said, ‘the Marines did this,’ and I found it very hard to believe, you know?”
When McGirk first approached Marines officials for comment in January, they denied knowledge of a massacre. But after supplying them with a copy of the videotape on Feb. 10, they launched a preliminary investigation into the incident.
“To be honest. I cannot believe you’re buying any of this,” emailed Jeff Pool, a Marine captain and McGirk’s first contact. “This falls into the same category of AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq) propaganda.”
When Time’s story broke in March, it garnered little attention from other news organizations or the general public. Mainstream media eventually picked up the story, but only after Sen. John Murtha (D.-Pa.), a former Marine, publicly denounced the massacre as part of his anti-war political rhetoric.
Several popular bloggers and conservative pundits criticized McGirk for not personally reporting the incident from Haditha. During the 10 weeks he spent reporting the story, McGirk attempted several trips to Haditha, but security barriers proved insurmountable. Instead he relied heavily on the firsthand accounts of an 8-year old girl present on the day of the massacre.
“She wasn’t being coached to talk about things she hadn’t seen or witnessed directly,” said McGirk. “She only talked about what she saw, and she saw two Marines in the doorway of the living room, who opened fire first on her 78 year-old grandfather - shot him twice, once in the chest, once in the head. They shot the grandmother, then opened fire at the group [of Iraqis] who were huddled at the far end of the room, and she was one of them, along with her younger brother, who also survived.”
Critics not only questioned McGirk’s credibility, but his motives. The Time story exemplified their claim that mainstream media coverage overemphasizes America’s failures in Iraq and how that negatively impacts troop security and the United States’ image abroad, argued pundits.
Other reporters often face similar criticism from both liberal and conservative camps when covering military involvement in civilian deaths.
“I’m not out there looking for a bad thing,” says White of The Washington Post. “I do not go out to find Hadithas. But when we find them we try to give them proper context and frame the debate so people can have the debate.”
Subsequent reporting by Time and other mainstream media outlets substantiated McGirk’s story, ultimately revealing a broader effort by the Marines to cover-up the incident.
After months of legal wrangling and deal making, the U.S. military began its first hearings into the Haditha massacres last month at Camp Pendleton in Southern California.
Seven Marines currently face courts-martial charges. Four officers face criminal charges for failing to investigate the incident properly while three enlisted men await trial for murder.
The North County Times senior reporter Mark Taylor covered the Haditha hearings for the local daily newspaper.
“It may be a national or international story for the AP, but for us it’s a local story,” says Taylor.
The North County Times devoted significant coverage to the first hearing held on May 17 in which Capt. Randall Stone, a Marine lawyer, faced charges for failing to properly investigate the Haditha incident.
While military coverage matters to a large segment of Taylor’s readership, which includes active duty Marines and retirees, the newspaper won’t devote as much energy to covering subsequent Haditha hearings.
Once it finally gained traction, the initial Haditha story was covered by every major new agency in the world. With few exceptions, the same attention has not been paid to the Afghanistan incident.
“The general readership has moved on,” says Walker. “There is a general weariness among the public at large. We saw this in Vietnam. They become inured at some point. They are weary that we are still there and that people are dying. They see that civilians have been killed and we are investigating our troops and they are just sick of it.”
SOURCES:
1. Nader Nadery, member of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission as quoted in, “Excessive Force by Marines Alleged,” Washington Post, April 14, 2007, by Ann Scott Tyson and Josh White.
2. Jon Tracy, “Sometimes in War, You Can Put a Price on Life,” New York Times. May 16, 2007. Tracy, an op-ed contributor for the NYT, is a former Army captain. He was a judge advocate in Iraq in 2003-2004.
3. “DoD News Briefing with Col. Nicholson from Afghanistan,” U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs). May 8, 2007. http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3959
4. www.unkownnews.net, an admittedly ant-war organization that draws on several reputable sources.
5. Collateral Damage or Civilians Massacre in Haditha? Time magazine, Tim McGirk. March 19, 2006.
6. Columbia Journalism Review online interview between Paul McLeary and Tim McGirk on June 16, 2006. http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/tim_mcgirk_on_haditha.php
7. “The Shame of Kilo Company,” Time magazine. Michael Duffy. May 28, 2006.
- This paper was written as a final paper for a Human Rights Journalism class conducted at Stanford University in Spring 2007 solely for educational purposes. It is a hybrid of material pulled from existing sources and original reporting.
[edit] ARTICLES:
ARTICLE THAT BROKE THE STORY
1. "One Morning in Haditha - Collateral Damage...
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1174682,00.html
FOLLOW-UP ARTICLES
1. "The Shame of Kilo Company"
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1198892,00.html
2. "Ghosts of Haditha"
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1200763,00.html
BEAUTIFULLY-WRITTEN OVERVIEW ARTICLE
1. "Rules of Engagement"
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/11/haditha200611?printable=true¤tPage=all
SERIES OF ARTICLES THAT EXAMINES THE COVERAGE BY JOURNALISTS
1. Lori Robertson, "A Matter of Time," AJR, June/July 2006.
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4158
2. Sherry Ricchiardi, "Out of Reach," AJR, April/May 2006.
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?i
RELATED INTERESTING ARTICLES
1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6627055.stm
[edit] DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
Regarding human rights violations
• How do you define a massacre? Was this a massacre if "only" 24 people were killed?
• Can you empathize with the actions of the soldiers? Can you understand why they would have reacted in this way especially given the "circumstances" of the war?
• Can you see comparisons between the U.S. government's response to Haditha and the governmental response to the Mozote massacres? How does this make you feel about the American government and your role (if you choose to pursue one) in challenging the "party line"
Regarding the journalist's role in covering Haditha
• What do you think of Time magazine reporter Tim McGirk's decision to trust that the videotape provided to him by an Iraqi journalism student was not propaganda?
• Should media organizations hire human rights investigators to cover stories in countries like Iraq where their reporters cannot move freely among the populace?
• Why do you think it took a public denouncement of the Haditha massacre by Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) before the mainstream media began to really cover the story? How does this make you feel about the "D.C. press corp?"
[edit] FILMS DEALING WITH THE SUBJECT OF U.S. MILITARY WAR CRIMES AGAINST CIVILIANS:
