The Current - Why was no one held accountable for the Haditha Massacre?

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

U.S. marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children in 2005, in what became known as the Haditha Massacre. Investigative journalist Madeleine Baran, host of the podcast In the Dark, looks at what happened that day — and why no one was ever held accountable. 

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. This is my Aunt Khamisa. Khamisa. This is my Uncle Hamid. This is Uncle Hamid. This is Jaheed.

This is Jaheed. This is Rashid. This is Rashid. That's an Iraqi man named Khaled Salman Rasif listing the members of his family killed by U.S. Marines on November the 19th, 2005 in Haditha, Iraq. This is Noor. This is Mohammed. This is Saba. This is Aisha. This is Z, his son. Saba. This is Saba, his daughter. Aisha. This is Aisha.

Zainab. This is Zainab. Marines killed 24 Iraqi men, women, and children that day, including Khalid's family. The killings, which became known as the Haditha Massacre, led to one of the largest war crime investigations in U.S. history. Season 3 of the podcast In the Dark looks at what happened that day and why no one was ever held accountable. Madeline Barron is an investigative journalist and host of In the Dark from The New Yorker. Madeline, hello. Good morning. This podcast begins with you traveling to Iraq, to northern Iraq in particular,

to talk to Khalid. Who is he? So he's a man who's from the town of Haditha, Iraq, and he lost 15 members of his family on November 19th, 2005. They were all killed by U.S. Marines. And he's a lawyer, and he's ever since that day devoted his life to trying to find justice for his family. And so he had traveled to meet with us in Erbil, Iraq, to tell us what happened and to tell us all his efforts over so many years to try to get this investigated and get the people who killed his family held accountable. What specifically was he asking you to do? This has in some ways become his life's work, but he manages to connect with you.

What did he want you to do? You know, he wanted this story to be told truthfully, and he wanted people to care about what happened to his family. He wanted the world to know that his family were good people, not insurgents. And he wants some measure of justice. And, you know, what that could mean at this point, you know, is not terribly clear, but he wanted accountability. He wants accountability. And he has sought it for so many years. You know, he sought it through the military justice system. He sought it through telling his story, but he's never really been able to get it. What did he tell you? I gave in that introduction kind of the very briefest of sketches of what

happened. What did he tell you about what happened that day, the 19th of November, 2005? So from his perspective, you know, that day started like any other. The Marines at that point were in the town of Haditha and had been for some time. And they were used to seeing the Marines driving through the town. through the town. And that morning, early that morning, Khalid hears an explosion, a sound that turns out to be an IED that exploded and hit a vehicle in a convoy of Marines that was traveling through the town and had killed one of the Marines, a man named Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and injured two other Marines. And then Khalid, the rest of that day, continues to hear sounds, but it's not really safe to go outside. He can see like from his door and window, you know, Marines moving about.

And he hears gunshots. He hears other sounds and he starts to get very worried. He's hearing these sounds and they're coming now. They're closer. They're in his neighborhood. His neighborhood is full of people, not just that he knows, but people in his family, his sister, other relatives. his family, his sister, other relatives. And it's really not until the next day that the full horror of what has transpired becomes clear to him when he goes the next morning to go to his sister's

house to see what has happened and see what is going on at her house. And no one is there. There's blood everywhere. And a neighbor is running by and says, they've taken the bodies to the morgue. And he runs off to the morgue at the hospital and he sees, and that's where he enters a room and he sees and identifies one by one, the members of his family and discovers that there are 15 of them that have been killed. And it wasn't just, I mean, as horrifying as that sounds, it wasn't just members of his family that were killed as well, right? Right. There are also, so in total that day by,

in terms of killing by this one squad of Marines, that one squad was involved in the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha that day. And these are people, I mean, the range of people who were killed is extraordinary. It goes from a three-year-old girl all the way up. Right. The youngest was a three-year-old, as you say, and the oldest was a grandfather in his 70s. Why did you say yes to his request to try to find out more about this? Well, we had actually been interested in this story before we reached out to him.

And so for me, what I was interested in exploring about what happened in Haditha is I've long been interested in war crimes. And, you know, war crimes are the type of crime that we hear a lot about. Obviously, whenever there's a conflict, we hear allegations of war crimes, investigations, prosecutions. But none of us, I don't think, have a very clear understanding of how these crimes are actually handled. You know, we don't really understand the system or systems that prosecute war crimes. So that's always been something that's interested me. I mean, as an investigative reporter, I'm drawn to these murky areas where a tremendous amount of power exists, but it's not quite clear who's wielding it and how they're wielding it. And the military justice system was a classic example of this. So I had been interested

for some time in a story that could explore what's going on in the military justice system when it handles war crimes cases. And, you know, when we were looking for at different war crimes, you know, Haditha, of course, stood out because Haditha was the one at the time when it did come to light months later. This was the one that everyone said, you know, we are going to take this one seriously. George W. Bush gave public statements about Haditha. The military, the Marine Corps gave statements. This was a case that was going to be fully investigated, and anybody responsible was going to be held accountable. And so it seemed like an excellent case to really ask the question, well, why did no one get held accountable for the killings? We ended up suing the U.S. military to

gather the documents of what happened, the investigative and prosecution files, and it became what turned out to be a four-year investigation by the time all was said and done. I mean, in many ways at the heart of this, as you've said, are families who are looking for answers as to what happened to their loved ones. And you speak with this incredible range of people, including one of the survivors, Khalid Jamal. He was 14 when his father and his uncles were killed that day. And he told you to that point, he's always wanted to know what happened in their final moments. Take a listen. I want that.

Why? I want to know what's happened in Rome. Because you don't know. Yes. I saw the bodies only. I want to know how he did these killings of my father, my uncles, and ask just a question and just answer from him. What did the survivors and the eyewitnesses that you spoke with tell you about how these killings have impacted them and the rest of their lives?

up to his mother and to his aunt, and they described this really beautiful family life before all this happened. You know, the two families, they lived right next door to each other. So, and Khalid was, you know, surrounded by his uncles and his father, and everybody was very close. And then within, you know, a matter of minutes that morning, you know, his father is dead. All of his father's younger brothers are killed, his uncles, and the family is left trying to figure out, you know, what just happened. And for Khalid, in particular, you know, people respond to trauma, of course, in all different kinds of ways. For Khalid, he really has this curiosity, Khalid Jamal. He wanted and wants to

know what actually happened in his father's final moments, as you hear in the clip that you played. And so he spent a lot of time himself gathering, you know, looking online, using Google Translate, translating news stories in the U.S. media from English to Arabic, trying to figure out, going on Facebook, trying to look up the Marines who shot at his family, trying to understand what happened that day. You know, his questions are also very intimate questions like, you know, I want to know, was my father shot first and didn't realize what was happening? Or did my father have to watch as one by one his brothers were killed and then realize that he was about to

be killed. And these are the sort of things that he's dreamt about it. I mean, it's become something that is maybe obsession is too strong a word, but something that has definitely consumed a lot of his life. And so in the course of our reporting, we were able to give him answers to some of those questions. There were certain things that we were able to tell him that, you know, were hard also, because not knowing is hard and knowing is hard. The path to getting those answers, I mean, you mentioned earlier,

this took four years of reporting. You are on three continents in 21 states, and a big part of that reporting is getting your hands on these military records. What did you have to do to get those records made public? Well, it started simply enough, as things often do with a FOIA request, so Freedom of Information Act request, to the U.S. military seeking their records on the Haditha cases. And that ended up not working. So we started working with a law firm, and we ended up suing the U.S. military

several times to force them to comply with FOIA and turnover documents, which they started to do. And so that is how we ended up getting even the most basic documents in some cases, like the trial transcript for the one Marine who did go to trial. We had to sue to even get what was said in open court, let alone, you know, some of the more difficult things to get. By far, the trickiest thing to get that we were able to get in the end were the photos of what happened that day. You also managed to track down, and I mean, there's extraordinary examples of going and finding people, some of the Marines that were involved in this,

tracking them down and where they live, knocking on their door. Often people didn't want to talk to you. Sometimes, remarkably, people did want to talk to you. When they did, what did they tell you about what happened that day? So the Marines were really all over the place with how they felt about it. I mean, you know, when this happened, they were in their early 20s. These are not the Marines who were themselves involved in the shootings, but the Marines who were involved in later things that happened that day, like helped remove the bodies from the homes, saw things, saw the aftermath. Some of them were deeply troubled by what they saw that day. Others were not. You know, one Marine joked with another reporter on our team about playing with some human

remains later that day. You know, other Marines talked about how they can no longer eat certain kinds of meat because it reminds them of the bodies, you know, that they're just very traumatized by what they saw. And a lot of Marines were still trying to rationalize how this could have happened.

Like, there must be some explanation. We heard this so many times. There had to be some reason why the Marines, you know, these other Marines did this. Like, they couldn't have just done this. You know, they had to have thought they were insurgents. Maybe an insurgent was using children as a human shield or something. You know, and some of the Marines we talked to were doing really well in life at this point, and others were really struggling, you know, in some cases with trauma related to their time in the service. But it was important to us to try to track down as many Marines who were there as we could. And

that ended up taking many, many months. But when they did talk, you know, we ended up talking to many of these men for hours upon hours. So these were not quick conversations. And a number of them said, thank you for talking to me. You know, I don't actually talk about this very often. I don't have people that I sit down. I mean, of course not, right, that you sit down and talk about the day that you carried the bodies of children out of a house. I mean, you presumably do not talk about that very often. So, yeah, the conversations were very enlightening, too, in terms of just trying to piece together what that day looked like. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere

in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. One of the explanations that people would often put back to you is that you can't understand what that was like, that there was what's known as the fog of war, that it's hard for those of us who haven't been in combat to understand the decisions that are made in a split second in a war zone, and that this happened almost 20 years ago. It's in the past. Why are you focusing on this now? You say

in the podcast that, and you hinted at this before, that you wanted to tackle this story in the way that you would if you were assigned to cover a shooting that happened a few blocks from your apartment. Can you walk me through that, like that kind of thinking? Yeah, I think that, you know, it's easy when something happens like this in another country in the middle of a war to sort of think of it as something that we can't possibly understand, we can't possibly relate to. But really what happened was something that we can relate to, we can relate to. Unfortunately, many people can relate to the idea of violent crime happening in their neighborhood, someone being killed in their neighborhood.

And so the choices that we made when we put the story together were all about trying to connect listeners to what happened there and see the victims of the killings as though they would look at their neighbors, see the family the killings as though they would look at their neighbors, see the family members who survived as though they would imagine the family members of a shooting in the United States, you know, grieving and trying to get justice, instead of telling it as like a quote-unquote war story. This is also the story of, as you described it, the peculiar and secretive parallel justice system that investigates war crimes in the United States. This was, as you mentioned, George W. Bush, the president spoke about this. The belief was there would be this open and transparent investigation. What is that

peculiar and secretive parallel justice system? So the way that war crimes are by and large prosecuted in the United States is by the U.S. military. So the military prosecutes its own members for alleged war crimes. And although that system does involve things such as regular, you know, courtrooms that you could, in theory, get credentials to walk onto a military base and sit down in a courtroom just like you could in a civilian world, in so many other ways, what goes on inside the military justice system is secretive, hard to decipher, hard to get access to. You know, once the trial had concluded in the case of the squad leader, getting our hands on that trial transcript, even though it happened in open court, required lengthy

litigation. And even then, when we received the transcript, the names of the people testifying, by and large, were redacted. So, you know, this is not like your typical, you know, reporting assignment where you can just like walk into the courthouse, talk to the clerk, pay maybe an annoyingly high amount of money, get the transcript and go home. This is something that took years to just get even that one set of documents. The way that the system is set up, we're trusting the U.S. military to handle its own prosecutions of war crimes. But the other thing that we learned is not just in Haditha,

but overall, the public doesn't have a good sense at all of what kind of job the U.S. military does of prosecuting alleged war criminals. So another big part of our reporting was to look not just at the Haditha case, but all of the alleged serious war crimes that we could find that American service members had been accused of post 9-11 in Iraq and Afghanistan, and do our own analysis of that. And that found that in so many cases, in the overwhelming majority of time, allegations of serious war crimes do not result in any kind of serious punishment. I mean, even in cases where we found where people were convicted, we found in the records we looked at, one in five had received any kind of sentence of confinement of the total cases that we looked at. So, you know, that was also an

important finding to us because these are among the most serious crimes that a nation can deal with. You know, the allegations that our own service members killed people, murdered civilians in the context of a war that we sent them to fight. And so it seemed important to us to really understand what the U.S. military is doing with those cases and to get as precise as possible as we could. It was just a very challenging system to try to understand, but one that we felt was incredibly important to understand. I mean, and it seemed like if ever there was a criminal justice system that needed further scrutiny, it was this. You know, if we're giving them the responsibility to handle these very serious crimes, at minimum, the public should know how often they're successfully prosecuting them.

You see that right at the very beginning of this process. I mean, there's an initial non-criminal investigation into what happened in Haditha, and it's led by retired Colonel Gregory Watt. You tracked him down. Take a listen to what he told you about the survivors of that massacre. I think they've moved on. Why do you think that? I think it's human nature. Even if your whole family was killed? I believe so, especially in that region of the world.

What do you mean? They have different values than we do, okay? They're more concerned about the living than those that have passed. What were you thinking when he told you that? That this was a very revealing conversation, I think, was my main thought. What were you thinking when. I think that I was trying to, as you hear in that clip, just understand what he was saying. So my questions were pretty minimal, but it was quite clear what he was saying, which was that, you know, they're just fundamentally different than us. And they are so different from us, in fact, that the death of their own family members is not something that registers for them in the same way that it would for you or I. He said that he also gave the Marines the benefit of the doubt in every opportunity that he could, as the guy who is investigating this, in determining whether this would move ahead to more formal charges.

What came out of his investigation? So Colonel Watt did recommend, although he did give them a benefit of the doubt, as he said, he did recommend a criminal investigation. And there was a criminal investigation. And that led to murder charges against four of the Marines involved in the shooting. But none of those Marines ever faced any actual punishment. so three of the cases were dismissed and the fourth case did go to trial but in the middle of the trial it was pled out to a minor charge a charge called negligent dereliction of duty like a very very low level charge you could get that charge for falling asleep while you're on watch duty and no prison

time associated with it. And that was the end of any chance of accountability within the U.S. military justice system, at least for the killings that day. When you take a look at, and you've hinted at this when it comes to that database that was put together looking at possible American war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, do you believe that the U.S. military is interested in truly investigating what may or may not have happened? reached the point of a criminal investigation by NCIS. You know, NCIS did investigate. They traveled to Iraq. They went to the houses. They pried bullet holes out of the walls. They interviewed the survivors. They interviewed the shooters. You know, they were quite extensive in their investigation. It went on for many, many months. And yet their work was undermined in

the prosecution phase. Well, we did talk to one of the investigators, a woman who worked on the Haditha investigation, who was quite frustrated by what ended up coming of the case. But, you know, it's not the role of investigators to prosecute. They investigate, they pass it along to the prosecution team, and the prosecutors go from there. But yeah, I mean, and in many other cases, too, we did see investigations. You know, we also found, you know, many cases that were not investigated very much. Even what's interesting about Haditha is even when there was a really substantive investigation, there well know that you looked at the case of Curtis Flowers, black man from Mississippi, faced execution after being tried six times for the same crime. He, of course, is now free. His case was dismissed. And that is, in large part, overwhelmingly because of your investigation into his case. When you take a look at this work here on Haditha, what do you hope that people take from this investigation and the work that you did as an investigative journalist? No, all I can ever expect or hope for for a story, I think, is that people listen to it, that they care about it, and then they decide for themselves,

you know, what to think and what to do in response to that story. I never go in thinking I'm trying to have a certain outcome or something like that. I mean, in the case of Curtis Flowers that you mentioned, I didn't go into that reporting thinking I would like to exonerate someone or something like that. But I try to pose these larger questions about accountability and the use or misuse of power and then lay them out for the public and then the public can engage with them and take whatever action or non-action that they would like in response to it. With this story, what I was really hoping for was to take a story that might seem distant but really make it real to people in a way that it hadn't been before this moment.

So that is my hope, that people care about the story, care about the lives of the people who were killed that day, and also think critically about this military justice system that oversaw the prosecutions. What did you hear finally at the end of your work from Khalid Salman Rasif that we heard from at the very beginning of our conversation? Well, Khalid has told me repeatedly how grateful he is to have the story out there. I mean, it's what he wanted. He wants the world to know what happened to his family. What he wanted was to have this story investigated and told. And so he's grateful for that. Of course, that is such a small thing when you put that up against the tremendous loss of life in his own family. It's remarkable work, and I hope that people listen to it from beginning to end. I look forward to whatever you turn your spotlight to next. In the meantime, Madeline, thank you very much. Thank you.

Madeline Barron is an investigative journalist and host of the fantastic New Yorker podcast, In the Dark. The third season is out now, and you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.