In The Dark - Bonus: Your Season 3 Questions, Answered

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

Was it scary to knock on all those Marines’ doors? What was it like to report in Iraq? Is it still possible for any Marines to face consequences for what happened in Haditha? The In the Dark team sits down to answer your questions. To view the online-only features of Season 3—the photographs, war-crimes database, and interactive documentary—visit newyorker.com/season3. Have a story idea for the In the Dark team? E-mail us at [e-mail].  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hey, it's Madeline. Since Season 3 came out, we've gotten a lot of questions from listeners about the season. So we wanted to come to you today to answer some of these questions. I'm here with Samara Freemark, Managing Producer for In the Dark. Hey, Madeline. I am excited to be here. And thanks to everyone who wrote in. We read all of your questions, and we're going to

try to answer as many of them as we can today. We're also going to be bringing in some other members of the In the Dark team to help us out on some of these. So let's dive in. Madeline, I wanted to start with a question about what it was like to report this season. This question comes from a listener named Stacy, and she writes, as a former journalist, I was astounded by your willingness to plunge into reporting on the military, as the barriers and insular culture seem impenetrable to me. How did you find reporting on the military different from the previous long-form projects you've completed? Yeah, it is such a good question. This was very different. You know, every time we go into some new in-depth story,

we are in a way entering a different world. The world of the military is complicated. And so we've got to do a lot of work to have it make some sense to us. You know, this could be everything from there's a ton of acronyms in the military that we don't understand as outsiders. So even just reading a simple document is a little bit challenging. Then there's cultural things you need to understand. Then there are structural things you have to understand as well. And, you know, all of this when you start out is relatively unfamiliar to you. And so that can be daunting at first. But as a reporter, you know, this is one of the main skills, I think, of being a reporter is the ability to quickly immerse yourself and

try to understand a world that you don't belong to. I mean, that is the fundamental task of reporting. And that's also, you know, when something's more complicated like this, like the military, that's why it took four years. Or one of the reasons, I guess, why it took four years is to just feel confident that we really could understand as best we could as outsiders this culture that we are definitely not a part of. Yeah, we did get a lot of people, a lot of other journalists actually saying things to us when we started this reporting, like, no one's going to talk to you. Like, this is a brotherhood. This is like a very insular culture, and you are not going to have any luck actually getting people

to talk to you. And that was not actually our experience. We ended up actually talking to literally dozens of Marines. And I think a lot of that success had to do with the particular way we did the reporting for this season. Yeah, I mean, what we do, and this is not a new thing that we do, this is how we conduct our work. we do a lot of going to people's houses and just knocking on their doors. And this is something that has worked really well for us. We show up, we introduce ourselves, we see if people want to talk or not. And I mean, this is a very old school approach to journalism. It's just one that is increasingly, I think, uncommon. It's far more common now, perhaps, to get a text from a journalist or something like that. So we did get a ton of questions about this. We're going to bring in a couple members of our team who did a lot of the

door knocking for this season all over the country to help answer your questions about door knocking. We have our producer, Natalie Jablonski. She's in the studio right now with Samara. Hi, Natalie. Hello, Samara. Hi, Madeline. And our reporter, Parker Yesko, who is calling in now. Hey, Parker. Hey, guys. Parker and Natalie, you two have done a ton of door knocking. You have knocked on so many doors. We've knocked on doors. We've traversed the nation's back roads. You have. I think you've knocked on doors in like dozens of states, so many cities and unincorporated areas. You have a ton of experience with it. And so I thought you guys would be great people to talk about this.

And I want to start with a question we have from a listener, a pretty simple question, but a common one. Was it scary? Was it scary going to some of these veterans' homes? We had this, like, Marines placard that said, if you come on this property, I have been trained to kill you. Consider this your warning in negotiation. No trespassing violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again again you feel comfortable going in yeah um yeah i get this i mean i get this question uh pretty often from my friends and family um

and was it scary i mean a little um more like more just like uncomfortable or like strange. You know, you're walking up to someone's door. You don't know what to expect. They're not expecting you. Like, it's just it's like a strange interaction to have. What do you think, Parker? Yeah, I wouldn't describe it as super scary. We've been doing this type of reporting for a long time now, and we sort of know how to do it safely or as safely as you can.

We like go in pairs. We don't knock too close to sundown or after dark. We always use location sharing on our phones so people can see where we are and if we're like moving anywhere. And we try and just be as friendly and unintimidating as possible when we show up at people's doors unannounced. You know, so there's some risk involved, obviously, in like showing up. But the benefits are pretty tremendous. I mean, it's like, it's just very effective. It's way more effective to show up at someone's door and say, you know, I'm here and I'm interested

in whatever it is that you have to tell than sitting in your home or your studio and trying to call them. We've just like found over the years that it's hard to find working numbers. People never, ever answer their phone. And if you show up and you tell them you want to talk and hear whatever it is they have to say, people are shockingly willing to just have you hang around for a couple hours and hear their stories. Right. It is pretty amazing, like, once you get over that, like, initial just strangeness of, like, yeah, just being a stranger and arriving at someone's door and explaining who you are. It's really gratifying how many people are actually like welcoming and like game to talk to you. They want to talk to you. I mean, I think there's just something really more compelling about like meeting, just like meeting face to face, like putting your face

in front of someone and just being like, I'm a person, I'm trying to talk with you. That human interaction is pretty compelling. It's also way more interesting in a personal level. I'd much rather like drive around to places in America that I haven't seen before than sit in my office and call people all day. For sure. Right. We've gone on a lot of field reporting adventures, all of us, where we're just, you know, in a small town that we've just never been in before. And, like, you might not have a reason to go there except that you're trying to talk to this, like, really important person. where we're just circling for days trying to wait for someone to be home. This field reporting is like moments of great interest surrounded by a lot of just wrong address. We've got three hours to kill here. Natalie and I spent a lot of time wandering around Goodwills,

just killing time. Hanging out in McDonald's. Yeah, we love McDonald's hang. Walmart parking lots. We have had some like travails, like Parker and I once got a flat tire in the middle of the desert. Almost got struck by lightning,

didn't you guys? I think we did. Maybe two phenomena. I think we did. Yeah, that's the jury's out on the, it was close. I mean, a tree fell on our car that was struck by lightning. That is a thing that happened to me and Parker forever changing my relationship with the sky.

But yeah, I mean, I think the reason that we do all of this stuff is that, you know, it works. And, you know, I think that this kind of reporting, it's strange sometimes. It's awkward for maybe everybody involved at first, but it tends to then not be awkward. I mean, the other thing is like it's awkward maybe a little bit, but then you're in it with people and it's like you've been there for days. And you get to that surprisingly quickly. I mean, the amount of times we go from like, wait, who are you? To, you know, five minutes later, we're just like deep in it and we're sitting in someone's living room. It happens more often than not. There are some moments in the podcast where we have to ask some really pointed questions at people's doors. And I'm thinking specifically about the interview that Natalie and Parker, you guys did with Stephen Tatum.

This is the Marine who, according to NCIS, admitted to knowingly shooting women and children. And that was one of the doors that you guys knocked on, and you did talk to Tatum. Hey, my name's Parker. This is Natalie. We're radio reporters. We had one listener who did write in expressing a bit of discomfort with this moment, where you are asking him these really intense questions as you are standing there in front of him. Okay, there's just one thing we need to make sure we ask you while we're here.

I've already told you everything you're going to get. Which is that we've read your statements to investigators where you said that you saw women and children in those rooms and you shot them anyway. Can you guys talk a bit more about this moment? Yeah, I mean, we had prepared a lot for this interview um we had a lot of questions we wanted to ask him and we were hoping to sit down and talk with him for many hours but we also were prepared for a situation where like he didn't want to talk you know he'd obviously been like very involved in these shootings. And so we knew that he might not want to talk. So we were kind of prepared for both scenarios. Yeah. And I think, you know, according to NCIS records, Tatum had told investigators all sorts of damning things

that we needed to ask him about and that we intended to publish. And so I think that like going in, we prepared for a bunch of ways this could have gone, but like no matter what happened, we knew that we needed to give him a chance to address these really serious things we were going to publish. It became clear very quickly that he wasn't going to invite us in and talk to us for several hours. And so we just had to get the question in that we needed to ask. Yeah. And it's important to ask these questions and give people an opportunity to respond. I mean, we want to know what he's going to say in response to these questions. I mean, these questions get at the core of what took place that day. Hi, this is David Remnick, and I'm pleased to share the news that I'm Not a Robot,

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We had several people write in with questions about how we go about conducting these interviews about really intense, traumatic things. And especially we got some questions about how we handle some of these interviews where we have some former Marines who may have PTSD or other mental health issues and how we think about all of that. Yeah, we did try to take care with that because, you know, we're obviously trying to talk to people about what's often an extremely intense time of their lives. And I think a lot of it comes down to like looking for or just like paying attention to and respecting if someone is in distress or telling us that they don't want to talk about something, telling us that it's too traumatic. We're on the lookout for that, and we want to respect that.

Yeah, we don't want to cause anybody any harm, for sure, in the course of our work. And at the same time, we do have questions that are fair to ask, and so we're just kind of always walking this balance. Yeah, and I mean, I think it's maybe also worth pointing out that like PTSD or something or this, you know, this time being too traumatic was a reason that a lot of people gave for not talking to us. And that, you know, that's of course, like, we have to respect that. Like, I don't want to talk about it. It's too traumatic. That's fine. Like, we're hearing that. Yeah, I think in my experience of people, I feel like Marines that I did interview, I think every interview I left where I actually

talked to someone like sat down and we talked, I did not get the sense that talking about these events or even that time in their life, like made anything worse. And many of them said it actually felt good to talk about. Of course, you know, when we're talking about these questions of reporting on trauma, where all of these questions became much more intense came to when we went to Iraq and interviewed people who saw nearly their entire families killed that day. And, you know, we thought a lot in doing all of this reporting, especially reporting in Iraq, about how to best conduct this reporting. We consulted best practices for reporting on trauma. There's a great group that's called the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma

that specializes in these issues. We looked at their best practices, their guidelines. At one point, Samara and I were even dealing with a particularly challenging situation that we found ourselves in involving how to communicate respectfully things to the family of Mamdou Hamad, the family of the man who went missing for years. And so we consulted with the head of DART Center, a man named Bruce Shapiro, and got his advice. You know, with all of this, we're taking such great care because we, yes, we want to do our work, but no, we do not want to cause any kind of undue harm or pain to anybody that we're talking to. A lot of this is just, you know, when we're dealing with talking to someone who's vulnerable in some way, a lot of the way that I think about it is just making sure that they always feel like they

are making decisions for themselves, that they're in charge of what they're choosing to do. And so we're really clear about this is what an interview is. This is how I'm thinking it can go. But you can stop the interview at any time. You know, you can take a break at any time. On the other hand, you know, you don't want to deny agency to people. You don't want to say, well, this is going to be too hard for you, so therefore I'm not even going to talk to you. The reality of this story was that it was very difficult for the survivors to talk to us. And yet the survivors really wanted to talk to us. And they knew it was going to be hard. They talked about that with us. But it was really important to them to tell their stories. Yeah. And I think we wanted to show some of that difficulty. Like we did not want to

hide the fact that these were difficult interviews. And there's one moment in particular that really stands out in my mind for this. This is a moment that happens in Episode 7. And we've gotten a lot of questions about this moment. It's stood out to a lot of listeners. And this is when, Madeline, you and I were talking to Najla and Ehab. These were the widows of two of the brothers who were killed that day. And this moment comes when we're telling them what the investigating officer, whose name was Paul Ware, had said about their testimony. Basically, that their testimony wasn't credible.

And in that particular moment, like hearing this, Najla gets extremely emotional. And actually, not just Najla, but our interpreter, whose name is Aya Muthana. It's this moment right here. I will probably listen to that later on and translate it for you they are a heart we are all heartbroken right now a lot of listeners have written to us about this moment in particular out of everything that they heard in the series both this choice that we made to let Najla's what she was saying her tape play as long as it did uninterrupted untranslated and the choice to show our interpreter Aya's reaction to what Najla was saying yeah this was a moment that our whole team talked about and thought about a lot.

Like, we went back and forth on this many times. Because the question was, like, how long can you expect a listener who doesn't speak Arabic to listen to tape they don't understand without it feeling, like, confusing or almost, like, unmooring. Like, where's this going? What is happening here? So you don't want to alienate the listener. But I felt really strongly that I wanted to let this scene play noticeably long, like way longer than is normal. Like I wanted it to almost be possibly a little uncomfortable for the listener. And part of that is because I think for me and I think for most people, there's a huge amount of information just in how Najla is speaking. Like, there's so much emotional content in her voice. You can, even if you can't understand her words, like, you know so much from just listening to her voice there, even without any translation.

And then there was also kind of this almost editorial point that I think that decision made. And it was related to the fact that the survivors of these killings have felt for years like their voices were in some ways taken away from them, like they were never able to fully tell their stories. Even their names didn't appear at trial. their stories. Even their names didn't appear at trial. Their testimony was discounted. And this decision to let Najla's tape play to the listener uninterrupted and to almost force the listener to listen to this woman's voice, to me felt like a statement of like, we are literally allowing this woman to have a voice to the public that maybe she felt like she didn't have before. And then what about this decision to play our interpreter's reaction to this?

I mean, Aya breaks down crying in this moment. Yeah, this is also something that's really stood out to listeners. Yeah, this is also something that's really stood out to listeners. Because, again, I think it's something you often don't hear when you're listening to audio or video stuff that involves translation. We tend to want to think of the interpreter as almost a disembodied role. And I think for us, for starters, it's because it's what really happened, right? Like, that was what happened in that moment. I mean, that's why you don't hear. I mean, of course, later we find out what Najla said and we tell you that in the podcast.

But in that moment, we are in the same position as the listener. We don't know because Aya could not translate it psychologically, emotionally. She couldn't do it in that moment. Right. And we wanted to show the listener what that moment was like. We didn't want to clean it up and sterilize it and turn it into just a literal representation of what she was saying. So that was definitely part of it. Another part of it is that Aya herself, and we didn't get into this in the podcast, but Aya has her own story of war.

And I think her reaction clearly is informed by that. Like, Aya was a child when the Americans invaded Iraq. She's from Baghdad. She lived through the invasion. She talked to us a lot. Again, this is not in the podcast, but, you know, she talked to us a lot about hiding from bombings, you know, cowering with her mother with the windows taped up. So she has been herself traumatized by war. And I think that helps explain part of her reaction. But I think also, to me, it felt like showing her reaction was cracking's also about what it means to live through war. And I think a lot of Iraqis have very similar stories. And I think letting

Aya have that moment and showing that moment was a way to get at that larger experience. So we have another question here. This one is from a listener named Jen, and it's about the photos. So these are the photos that were taken by Marines after the killings, the ones that the commandant of the Marine Corps bragged about keeping from the public. Jen wrote in to us, to me, one of the main accomplishments of the podcast is humanizing the Iraqis as a counter to the way the U.S. military at so many levels dehumanized them. What went into your decision to so graphically discuss and then actually publicly post the photos? They were incredibly powerful and humanizing, and I'm sure this decision was weighed heavily by your team. Yeah, this was a really challenging decision for us to make and one that we took really seriously.

We had a lot of discussions on the team amongst ourselves and with our editors as well at The New Yorker. And, you know, what we wanted to do, the reason why we wanted to publish some of these photos was because we felt that they were journalistically important. And honestly, they were also historically important. They told the viewer something. What we didn't want to do, though, is to just publish graphic photos for graphic photos' sake. And, you know, another thing that was important to us was to involve the survivors in making this decision. You know, this is a unique situation where we had, as you hear in the podcast, the survivors helping us get the photos by signing a form that we submitted as part of our lawsuit

saying that they wanted us to have the photos of their dead loved ones. And also given the fact that in this situation over the years, time and time again, the survivors described to us feeling, you know, pushed to the side by the U.S. government, feeling left out, not knowing what was going on. So the last thing we wanted to do was to just do that again. left out, not knowing what was going on. So the last thing we wanted to do was to just do that again. So where we landed was that we only wanted to publish photos where we had the permission of the surviving family members of the people depicted in those photos. And we wanted to publish the photos that we thought were journalistically important, that had information that the public had a right and should know. I mean, one of the important pieces of this story

were what those photos showed, not just at a visceral, emotional level, but what they showed forensically about what happened that day. I mean, these photos were evidence in a criminal case. And one of the people on our team who did a lot of that work was our producer, Raymond Tungakar.

So I thought we could call in Raymond and talk to him a little bit about this forensic aspect of the work. Raymond, are you there? I am. Hi, Madeline. Hi, great to see you. Raymond, can you talk about, I know you played a big role in this, all the work that went into understanding the forensic evidence and give us a sense of, you know, what kind of questions we were trying to answer? Yeah, sure. I mean, so we wanted a detailed accounting of the events leading up to the killings. And this was important for a number of reasons. I mean, we knew that it was important to the survivors,

but also it was important to assessing the claims of the Marines, you know, especially this defense from some of them that they had thought that they were engaging insurgents. Right, that the people they were killing were the enemy in some way. Right. And so, you know, we started by reading through the Marine statements, trying to make sense of what had happened that day. But, you know, we quickly ran into problems with that because, as you know, I mean, there were so many conflicting accounts with these

statements. Yeah, the shooters were interviewed, many of them multiple times. Their statements change pretty much almost every time from statement to statement and then between each other's statements. Right. It was really difficult to get a real sense of what had happened that day. And so we turned to the forensic evidence in the hopes of getting some clarity out of that. And, you know, we spent hours and hours with Kevin Parmelee, the independent forensic expert,

talking through what happened at the various sites, going through the photos, going through the other evidence and what it revealed. This is an up-close-and-personal shot where you're putting a bullet into a little boy. He was executed from the back right to the front left temple while his face was down in a kneeling position. in a kneeling position. Ramin, can you talk a little bit about how we decided which details and honestly how much detail to include in all of this? Yeah, that was like a really tricky part of working on this series, right? I mean, we put a lot of thought into, you know, how much to tell the listener and what to tell the listener.

Because on the one hand, we didn't want to be gratuitous or overwhelm the listener. But on the other hand, we wanted to present the specifics of what had happened that day. Right. That's the reality of what happened that day in Haditha. And what our listeners have said to us over and over again in response to this series is that, yes, those parts were very difficult to listen to, but it's important that I listen to it. And that if this is something that our government, our military did, the least I can do is to listen to a description of it so that I know what happened that day. Thank you. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 And they are Incident, Seat 31, Zoe Zephyr, and Eternal Father. And they all immerse you in the finest cinematic journalism,

exploring themes of justice, identity, and the bonds that shape us. These extraordinary films, which were created by established filmmakers, as well as emerging artists, will inform, challenge, and move you. I encourage you to watch them along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films at newyorker.com slash video. So shifting gears, we got a lot of questions about this other thread of reporting that we did that was really a key part of the season, which has to do with not just the Haditha case, rarely convicts or punishes people accused of war crimes, people want to know, is there a chance of a change to this system? Are there reforms that are likely that are coming down the road? Are there different ways of handling these kinds of cases?

So I wanted to bring back in Parker here. Parker, what would you say to these kinds of questions? What has your reporting shown? Yeah, it's hard to say. Since the season aired, I have reached out to a lot of Congress members who work in these issues, the people on the Armed Services Committees, also the ones that have been part of efforts to reform the military justice system in the past, and I haven't gotten any comment from them. There were some reforms to the military justice system in the past, and I haven't gotten any comment from them. There were some reforms to the military justice system a few years back, and they were hard. They took a long time to get through, and they were pretty limited.

They applied to a sort of short set of crimes, mostly sex crimes and also murder. And the big thing that they did was they limited the power of commanders in those prosecutions to charge and dispose of cases. But those reforms would not apply to the majority of the war crimes and alleged war crimes that we have in our database and that we came across. You know, things like assaults or shootings or cruelty and maltreatment towards detainees. And those aren't on the list of crimes that would be tried or handled differently based on the recent reforms. I've tried to get a sense for like if there's any ongoing efforts, sort of active efforts to broaden those reforms. And I don't hear of any. And I think one of the problems may be that like there's no constituency pushing for more vigorous prosecution of American war criminals.

I mean, the victims of these crimes are not Americans. The ones that we were looking at post 9-11, you know, they're Iraqis or Afghans, and they're not voters in America, and they're not calling our congresspeople and saying, hey, like, you know, reform the system and hold these people accountable. And so— They're not creating like a lobbying group and raising millions of dollars and testifying on the Hill and all of this. Right. Their story is sort of like become known

in these rare instances now where a team of reporters takes them on and publishes it in the U.S. So we'll see, right? I think it's still an open question. Yeah. And one thing that's different now is that now the data is out there. I mean, you've compiled the data, we've analyzed it. And prior to this reporting, people really didn't have a clear answer to the question of how the military justice system is handling these cases. So, I mean, the hope, I guess, is like now people know at least, and that can maybe be the beginning of some kind of conversation or debate about what to do next with this information. Yeah, and I think it was always important to us throughout the reporting of this to understand how the Haditha case fit into the bigger picture.

You know, was Haditha and the prosecutions, were they an aberration or were they a symptom of the system? And it was really hard to get at the answer to that, but now we know it. The system, you know, has a tendency to let these prosecutions sort of end without meaningful consequence for the perpetrators. or do things differently, we will follow up on those if they do happen down the road. And in case you haven't checked it out yet, you can see for yourself this entire database that Parker's talking about of possible war crimes that we compiled. It's on the New Yorker's website. You can just go to newyorker.com slash season three. So the last thing we're going to talk about is the final episode in the series. This is the episode that, Samara, you played the lead role in reporting, the episode we called Patient Number Eight. We got a lot of questions about this one.

And just a reminder, this is the episode about the man who went missing on November 19th, 2005, the same day of the rest of the killings, and whose family had been searching for him ever since. And his name is Mamdouh Hamad, and our reporting found he'd been killed by Marines, and his body had been taken to a morgue in Baghdad and then buried. And we communicated all of this to the family, as you hear in that episode. So we got some questions about how the story of Mamdouh Hamad

came to be part of this season. One of these questions came from a listener named Amanda. She wrote, I'd love to know more about the last episode and the narrative process that went into how and why that got included at the end as a final but standalone episode. Yeah, so like we lay out in the podcast, as far as we could tell, there was no other reporting on Mamdouh Hamad and this whole incident where Wudurash and Sherratt start shooting at these guys and one of them was hit and another runs away and is killed by a different squad this was never part of the narrative of the killings so so for years of this reporting like we had no idea that Mamdouh even existed

but then like you hear in the podcast I stumbled across these mentions of this other shooting. And they really intrigued me because, again, this was something that was not part of the Haditha narrative. And it seemed important, just journalistically. And then when you and me, Madeline, when we were in Iraq, and Khaled Salman mentions this man who had disappeared and whose family had been searching for him all these years. I felt this immediate journalistic obligation and also just like a human obligation to report that out. And what do you mean? Well, Khaled was describing this family who had been living in this really awful limbo for almost 20 years, like this limbo of not knowing. And I had a hunch that I might know or I might be able to find out what had happened

to this family member and that I might be able to provide them some answers. And so that was where the moral obligation came in. Like, it just felt like if I knew this or if I could figure this out, that would be something that was worth doing. And then, of course, there was also the journalistic importance of looking into this shooting because it changed the story of what had happened that day. Because like I was saying, all these years, the Haditha killings have been presented as having 24 victims, but I suspected there might actually be 25. And it felt like the record needed to be corrected. Right. And then what about this question of structure?

Like why, you know, we talked about this endlessly as all writing things are discussed. All of us. Yeah. You know, can you talk a little bit, give people some sense of how we landed on that this should be the final episode of the series? Yeah, this was so hard. We, I mean, our whole team, our editor, other people at The New Yorker really kind of banged our head against the wall on this question because, like, where do we put this episode? And we, I think we considered like three or four different places it could go in the series.

Like, maybe it should go earlier. Like, maybe it should go in the chronology of the day. But something about that didn't feel right to us. I think it's all part of the same story, but it also felt like a different story in some ways. Like it did feel it has a standalone quality, like Amanda says, because again, this was a totally unknown killing. No one was prosecuted for it. And so in many ways, it was different than these other killings. And so to us, it felt like putting it at the end made sense. And also there was this quality that we felt of broadening out the series to make it a larger story about the Iraq War at the end. And again, to make this not just the story of these 24 people and what happened to them, but a larger story of this whole nation of people who have lived through war, chaos, lack of answers, like the sheer quantity of that suffering that goes beyond all the other people we had talked to specifically for the story.

And we really wanted to, we wanted the listener at the end of the series to be thinking about all those people as well. Right. There's a scene in the morgue that happens where Mamdou's brother is looking through photos and he's looking through photo after photo, trying to find photos of his brother. And you just get this sense of scale in that moment of how many dead there were, how many people who have not, whose bodies many people whose bodies are in an unmarked grave somewhere, just the sheer scale of what happened there, really that story shows that quite clearly. Yeah. I got a question here from a listener named Will asking, was patient number eight's family, so this would be Mamdou's family, interested in any type of reparation or legal prosecution? Or were they

squarely focused on confirming what happened to their brother and putting this tragedy behind them? Yeah, it's a good question. I think by far the biggest priority of that family was finding out what had happened to Mamdou. That was, they, I mean, it's a kind of torture they had been living in, right? I mean, there's the pain of losing someone, but I think there's a different kind of pain of not knowing what happened to someone you love. And I hope with that episode, we were able to show what that looks like, to show a bit of that specific kind of terrible pain of not knowing. And I think, I mean, this is something that you see in conflicts all over the world. Like the mothers of Argentina are very famous, but this is every conflict has people who just go missing

and their families are left in this wrenching, wrenching space. are left in this wrenching, wrenching space. And actually, Madeline, I was thinking about how in season one, you know, we get into this with season one, which was about the disappearance of a boy named Jacob Wetterling. And in season one, his family had also been living in this terrible uncertainty for so many years. So the family wanted resolution. They wanted to end that pain. I mean, they knew there was a possibility that he was dead, but they really wanted to end that horrible uncertainty. So that was the biggest priority. But certainly, they also want the Marines prosecuted for Mamdouh's

death. Definitely they do. They told me they would come to the United States, they would testify, they would do anything it took to get justice for Mamdouh. So let's talk about that. As we say in the podcast, no one was ever prosecuted, no one charged, convicted for the killing of Mamdouh. And we got a lot of questions from listeners about whether anyone could still be prosecuted for Mamdouh's killing. Yeah. And we also got similar questions about whether any of the Marines involved in any of the shootings could be prosecuted again, if there was any penalty that they could face at this point. And we wanted to bring Parker back in to answer some of these questions because she's been looking into this. Parker, can you take that question? Yeah. So all the Marines who were in Haditha that day and involved in the shootings

are out of the Marine Corps. They're long gone. And so that means that the military can't prosecute them. They're sort of outside the jurisdiction of the military. It is possible for the federal government, i.e. the civilian courts, to prosecute former service members for crimes committed while they were in the military. It's rare. I know of only two instances where this has happened. And this would be the DOJ prosecuting these cases, the Department of Justice, and they'd have to evaluate them on a case-by-case basis. Charging decisions are complicated. So we just don't know. And we certainly don't have any indication that they're going to do that.

We definitely don't have any indication that they're going to do that. You know, with the upcoming Donald Trump presidency, it seems even less likely that the DOJ would take action on this case. If they did, it would be high profile and Trump in his last presidency intervened in quite a few cases of both charged and convicted war criminals in ways that made it pretty clear that he is not interested in pursuing these cases he actually pardoned he pardoned a former service member who had only been charged. The case hadn't even gone to trial. So I think he would certainly not have much appetite for pursuing a case against Marines from Haditha. Okay, Madeline, last question. For anyone listening who might have an idea of a story that we should cover, how can they reach us? How can they send us tips? So you can send us your tips and story ideas

by emailing us at inthedarkatnewyorker.com. I will say we can't possibly respond to every email we receive, but I promise we do read all of them. And we are right now working on new stories to bring you next. So if you do have a story idea, this is a great time to let us know about it.

Absolutely. We definitely want to hear it. Also, I should say, if you haven't checked out the absolutely incredible stuff we have on our website related to this story, which we mentioned earlier in this episode, I really cannot recommend it highly enough. It's amazing. You can find everything at newyorker.com slash season three. So that's where you can go to find the immersive interactive documentary called Cleared by Fire. It's where you can find the war crimes database, which is like this massive database of alleged war crimes that we compiled that Parker was mentioning. And it's also where you can find the photos that we published from the day of the killings. Again, that's newyorker.com slash season three. Thank you all for listening and caring about this story.

It means so much to all of us. From PRX.