The New Yorker Radio Hour - From In the Dark: What Happened That Day in Haditha?

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

This program is drawn from a new season of the award-winning investigative podcast In the Dark. On a November day in 2005, in the city of Haditha, Iraq, something terrible happened. “Depending on whose story you believed, the killings were a war crime, a murder,” the lead reporter Madeleine Baran says. “Or they were a legitimate combat action and the victims were collateral damage. Or the killings were a tragic mistake, unintentional—sad, but not criminal. Basically, the only thing that everyone could agree on was that twenty-four people had died, and it was marines who’d killed them.” Season 3 of In the Dark looks at what happened that day in Haditha, and why no one was held accountable for the killings. Baran and her team travelled to twenty-one states and three continents over the course of four years to report on a story that the world had largely forgotten. Episode 1 airs this week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, and you can listen to the rest of the series wherever you get your podcasts. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last year, the team behind the podcast, In the Dark, joined us at The New Yorker. Now, you might have heard their extraordinary series about Curtis Flowers, a black man in Mississippi who spent years on death row. Flowers was tried six times for the same crime. after In the Dark examined every twist and turn of that prosecution, the Supreme Court overturned Flowers' conviction entirely. The show has won two Peabody Awards as well as a George Polk Award,

one of the top honors in journalism. That was the very first ever given to a podcast. The new season of In the Dark has been four years in the making, and it's the most ambitious work they have ever done. They travel to 21 states, and three continents, to report on a story that the world has largely forgotten. And I'll mention that some of the details are difficult to hear about. You should use discretion if you're listening with children.

Here's Madeline Barron, the lead reporter for In the Dark. Two years ago, I went to Iraq to talk to a man about what sounded like a murder. It had happened almost 17 years earlier. The killing of the man's sister, his nephew, so many others. 24 people in all. It was a killing that had gone unpunished, where not a single person had ever gone to prison. A killing committed by U.S. Marines.

The man whose family was killed is named Khalid Salman-Rasif. He met me in the lobby of a hotel in the city of Erbil, Iraq. We headed up to a room with our producer Samara Freemark and our interpreter, a woman named Ayamuthana. We all sat down. Mr. Khalid, why don't you sit here? Okay. Can I get you a water or a coffee or anything like that?

Some water. Some water? Okay. I'd wanted to meet Khalid in his hometown. It's called Haditha. But traveling to Haditha is dangerous for Western journalists. Remnants of ISIS are still active in the region. So Khalid agreed to meet us in a safer place, in Erbil, in the north.

He's thanking you for coming here. He says that you had the longest. He's welcoming you guys to Iraq. Palad's in his 50s. He's a lawyer, and he looks like one. He has short hair and a neat mustache, and despite the fact that he traveled eight hours to meet us, his dark suit and tie were immaculate.

He pulled out his phone and started showing us pictures of his first grandchild. I am grandfather. She'd been born just six months earlier. What's her name? Naba. Naba. Yes. We're happy.

College used to speak English all the time, back when you needed to speak it, so we could talk to the American Marines who were occupying his town. But those days are long past. I'm sorry. You know, I am... Because I don't go to any school to learn English. It's very difficult. Therefore, I am sorry.

It's not a while, but no, it's good. It's good. Yeah. Perfect? Almost perfect. Well, it's nice to meet you in person after just talking on the phone. He's also so happy to see you in person. I mean, I'm pretty, you know, the things that were in the heart.

They kind of gave up on anyone's talking about this case again. They didn't forget they've been heartbroken every day since that day, but they gave up on someone talk about the case or someone pre-investigate the case. So, I mean, it was barque of Amel. So he said that he was so thrilled and happy that media is interested in coming all the way for the truth. I'm out of it.

I think that this is our job of the truth. And I also thank him. He says that this is his duty. for the truth to be told. The story Khalid wanted to tell me happened in Khalid's hometown, Haditha. Haditha is a pretty small city. It's in western Iraq, in the desert,

but it's right on the banks of the Euphrates River. And so depending on where in Haditha you are, the place is either dry and dusty or lush with palm trees. Before the U.S. invaded, life there was quiet, sleepy even. Some people had small farms. They would grow cucumbers and melons.

Other people worked in the oil industry. On the weekends, they'd go drink tea and coffee and cafes along the river. It's the kind of place where it seemed like everyone knew everyone. But by the time college story begins, in 2005, all that had changed. The Iraq war had started two years earlier. The United States military had invaded, overthrown Saddam Hussein and captured Baghdad. But now the U.S. military was trying to establish control over the rest of the country, and that was proving more difficult.

In western Iraq, where Haditha is, an insurgent's movement was growing. Foreign fighters from groups like Al-Qaeda were starting to arrive. So terrorists, Qaeda, started to make their appearance in Haditha city. Now when Khalid went to the marketplace, he'd see people he didn't recognize. People who weren't from Haditha, people who spoke with foreign accents, from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria. He'd see people with their faces covered so that no one could. could see who they were. And he tried to just keep his head down and stay out of their way. In 2005, a new battalion of U.S. Marines arrived in Heditha to try to drive the insurgents out.

And so, there were two groups of outsiders in Hiditha, both of them terrifying to the people in town. The insurgents would plant IEDs under Heditha's streets and occasionally pop up to fire rounds at the Marines. The Marines spent their time patrolling, carrying their big guns, driving their big humvies, looking for insurgents and caches of weapons and explosives, detaining people they deemed suspicious. They spent a lot of time searching houses. They could burst into your home without warning. It could be late at night or early in the morning. They'd bust down your door with assault rifles drawn, and there was always the worry that if you made one wrong move, if you misunderstood a command, barked out in English, they might just shoot you, or zip tie your hands and fly you off to Buka prison.

Khaled told me that the people of Haditha developed a kind of protocol for when the Marines showed up at their houses. They take all the old people and the women and children and put them in a back room. And then the men would go out and talk to the Marines, in English if possible, carefully, appeasingly. Welcome, you can enter and you can't do anything. Please don't break anything.

There is my mother here, my father here. Please. my wife is very sick, my children is very sick. When I taught them, sometimes they go. But sometimes they said, shut up and sit down. Don't talking with me anything. The Marines demanded total cooperation from the people of Hiditha. They expected the people of Hiditha to give them intel about the insurgents,

to tell the Marines where IEDs had been placed, where the weapons caches were hidden to help them out in this fight against the bad guys. But even if you had that information, helping the Americans not putting your own life in danger. Because if you did help the Americans in any way, the insurgents could consider you a collaborator.

If they saw any person from the local community talks to any American Marine. And by the time, he'd have to be the armala and he'd be a second day, They would take them to Haditha's bridge. And they would cut their head. And they would cut their head. And put it on their back.

Put it on their back? Yes. And then just leave the body on the bridge? That sounds terrifying. Hale, a man, a very scary. He's saying that it was horrifying. And this is not only his experience, like he's saying that this was like a public situation

for all of the people of Haditha. Al-Qaeda, they're working with us, and we're between these, be it. They wouldn't trust the Al-Qaeda and they wouldn't trust the American military. So they lived in this hard situation, terrifying moments, scared from both Al-Qaeda

and the U.S. military. And he said that it was basically like hell. Yes, yes. Like the hell. It's like the hell. It's very hard. Khalid said they had a saying back then. When there's a matter of saying,

when the lastor-wehury-of-hid is the arshb of-hazhore. When two elephants fight, the only loser is the green grass. We're we're a-hub-haw-hore. And that green-gris, grass. In this story, it was Khalid's family. So maybe we could now talk a bit about the day of the incident. What do you remember about how that day started? I'm in the bottom of the wadi, biate al-gebel.

It was the morning of November 19, 2005. College was 31 at the time. He lived in Heditha with 3rd. his wife, his two daughters, and his parents. They lived in a middle class, or maybe even upper middle class neighborhood, filled with two-story stone houses set close together. Khalid's sister Asma lived with her family nearby. His cousins were also close by, as were his aunts and uncles.

Khalid was basically surrounded by his family. That morning, Khalid was asleep in his house. By 7.4, I fizzed on a sound of infirar, 7.15 a.m. the day of the incident, he heard the sound of really strong bombing. The sound of an explosion woke Khaled up, and he jolted out of bed. Heard shrapnel raining down outside. Some of it even hit a tree in his garden. An IED had exploded on the road near his house. Khaled didn't know it then, but he would later learn that the

A. D. had hit a convoy of Marines traveling down the road. It had destroyed one of the Marines' humvies. One of the Marines was now lying dead in the road, his body torn apart. And the remaining Marines in the convoy were mounting a response. The distinctive sound of American M16 assault rifles coming from the road nearby. And the sound of Marines shouting. He heard the military just shouting hysterically. Like they were shouting in a really strange behavior.

And then all of a sudden, Khaled heard what sounded like a grenade going off inside a house, right there in his neighborhood. And that was followed by the sound of more gunfire. Khalid looked out. There were Marines everywhere. They were on the streets. on the rooftops.

Hours passed. Collet and his family decided to flee to a safer part of town. They set off on foot, carrying white flags so the Marines wouldn't shoot them. They got to a relative's house and hunkered down.

As the day wore on, more family arrived, and word began to trickle in that something horrible had happened at Collid's sister, Asma's house, and another house close by. The next morning, Khalid woke up early.

He headed to Asma's house to see what had happened. When Khalid got to the house, it was quiet. No one seemed to be home. As he walked inside, the first thing he saw was blood. There was so much blood, even the air smelled of it. There was blood on the walls, and the floors, and the furniture, even on the ceilings. And there were bloody drag marks leading out the door.

But where was Khalid's family? Where are they? What has happened? Where did they go? And then someone came by, told Khalid, that the Marines had taken all the bodies to the hospital. The bodies? Collad took off running for the hospital. At some point, one of his cousins drove up.

He said, jump in. And together, they drove the rest of the way. When Khalid got to the hospital, he found a crowd had gathered. People were walking in and out of a small air-conditioned room that the hospital was using as a morgue. Like a freezer.

For bodies. Yes. Yes. There was a nurse there, holding a list of names. And they said, your relatives are all inside. You can go and

identify them. Yes. The floor of the room was covered in bodies and body parts. Some of the bodies were in body bags. Others were in trash bags. They started opening one bag. Then another and another. This is my aunt Kamisa.

This is my uncle Hamid. This is Jihad. This is Rashid. This is Huda. They kept opening bags. This is Eunice. And his wife, Ayeda. And their children.

Nor. Bintel Kuh. Mohamed. This is Mohamed. Saba. Aya. Aisha. Haia.

Zayna. Zay. Zay. And then, this is my sister, Asma. And this is Asma's husband, Waleed. And Asma and Waleed's husband, Waleed. four-year-old son, Abdullah.

And Abdullah. There were other bodies there, too, people who weren't from Khalid's family, but who he knew. Four brothers, Marwan, Kattan, Khajahe, and Jamal. And five other men. Ahmed, Akhm, Akram, Khalid,

Wajdi, and Muhammad. 24 bodies in all. 14 men, four women, and six children. The oldest was a 76-year-old grandfather, and the youngest was a three-year-old girl. The killings were gruesome. Whole families had been nearly wiped out,

and how they were killed also stood out. What he noticed was gunshots. He said that most of them are a gunshot in the head or in the chest. Shot, yes. They died this way. Adults shot in the head. Children shot in the head. Collid stood in the cold room, surrounded by the bodies of his family.

He would go on to spend years wondering why. Why did this happen? He's actually devoted his life to answering that question. And now, I was wondering too. I've spent the past four years, along with the rest of the In the Dark team, investigating the killings of Collid's family and the others that day. A mass killing, carried out by U.S. Marines over just a few hours in Hiddiq. This story would take us to 21 states and three continents.

We would talk to hundreds of people, Iraqi civilians, Marines, eyewitnesses, experts. We would obtain thousands of pages of government documents. We would look at photos, videos, drone footage, reports, intelligence assessments, handwritten notes, records from the peculiar and secretive parallel justice system that handles crimes committed by American service members. We would even sue the U.S.

military, all to find out what really happened that day in Hiditha, and why was no one punished for the killings. From the New Yorker, this is season three of In the Dark. Episode 1, The Green Grass. In the days after the killings, Cullid walked around Heditha in a daze. He just lost his sister, his sister's husband, his nephew, so many other family members. Caled told me what those days were like. The word he used to his sister, he used to be a little bit of the most was shocked. Seeing his family dying like his whole family, he was shocked.

Shocked when he saw the bodies of his family in the hospital. Shocked in the days it followed. But after a week of this, Khaled said, I woke up. I said that God, God, I'm going to have to have to move, He said that God gives some people, like a hidden power, to just act when something happened in these kind of situations.

Khalid wanted to know why the Marines had killed his family. He wanted to know what had happened inside those houses, how the killings had happened. And he wanted the people responsible to be punished. An investigation, a prosecution, a punishment, the kinds of things that a person expects when their family is killed. What he wanted was justice. But Khalid said the Marines hadn't even come to his family to apologize.

They actually hadn't said anything to him at all about the killings. It was like it hadn't happened. And so Khalid and some other town leaders in Haditha gathered at the town's central library. Local leaders were there in the city council. Collid was actually a member. They came up with a list of demands. They wrote them down in the form of a letter. Someone in the group translated the letter into English.

Now they needed to get that letter to the Marines. But going to the American base was extremely dangerous. Insurgents monitored the road to the base to see it was coming and going. And if they spotted an Iraqi civilian traveling there, sometimes that person would later end up decapitated on the bridge. Anybody who goes to the American base, it was basically like a suicide. But Khalid was desperate. And so, eight days after the killings, he and the other men headed down that suicidal road to the American base to meet with the Marines.

Reporter Madeline Barron, she'll explain what happened when the men arrived at the base when we continue. This is episode one of In the Dark's new season and you're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The investigative journalist Madeline Barron and her team, have spent the last four years reporting the new season of the award-winning podcast, In the Dark. Today, we're presenting the first episode of the new season. In 2005, 14 men, four women, and six children, the youngest being three years old, were all killed by U.S. Marines in Iraq in the small city of Haditha.

In the Dark is asking why one of the most high-profile war crimes prosecutions in American history failed to deliver any justice. A number of the victims were relatives of a man named Khalid Salman Rasif, and he identified them at the local hospital in a makeshift morgue. Eight days after the killings, Rasif and other men who had lost family members tried to get some answers from the Americans themselves. We'll continue the story now. Hello.

I want to introduce you to an American who was at the base when Khalid and the other Iraqi men arrived. His name is Dana Hyatt. Our producer Natalie Jablonsky went to his house in Connecticut to talk to him. Nice to meet you. I'm Natalie. Dana Hyatt's now retired from the military. He'd served 28 years. I see some Marines'

logos here on some photos. A little mini museum there. Oh, yeah. And then I taught school. Hyatt had kept a scrapbook of photos of his type in Iraq, and he showed it to Natalie. We can go through some of this stuff if you want.

Let's take a look. flipping through its pages, it's like a highlight reel of all the stereotypes the American military applied to Iraq during the war. You have the smiling Iraqi kids. Give up bubble gum, candy. The palm trees. This woman coming from the river area, palm fronds. The Marines hobnobbing with tribal leaders.

Shakes, shakes, sheiks over there. The livestock in the streets. This guy's hurting his sheep out here. Like biblical times. The houses, the way they look. And then there are the photos of zip-tied detainees. lying in the desert. Yep.

So, stuff happened. In Haditha, Hyatt was what's called a civil affairs officer. His job was to build relationships with the civilians in town, win them over to the Marines side, what the military calls, hearts and minds. The hearts and minds, helping to make Haditha better, helping to, I don't know, improve their lives. When the Marines did something that harmed civilians,

Hyatt's job was basically to paper it over, like he'd hand out money to repair homes the Marines had damaged. Here you go. Here's $20, here's $50, here's $10, whatever. Hyatt wasn't involved in the killings of Khaled's family, but he had seen some of their bodies. Hyatt had gone with other Marines to the hospital that night, when the bodies were unloaded from Humvees and put in the makeshift morgue where Khalid would later find them.

What were you thinking at that point, or what did you make of that? It just, I don't know. I was purposely not trying to think too much about it. I didn't want some of those visuals constantly being there later. Instead, Hyatt's focus was on managing the fallout. That's why I was at the hospital that night. I talked with the hospital personnel. I gave them my information, you know,

because we figured there were going to be questions. They were going to be complaints. They were going to be all kinds of, you know, like what the hell happened type things. Hyatt was right. There were questions. And now Hyatt found himself in a meeting with a group of Iraqis, including Khalid, talking about precisely these, as he put it, what the hell happened type things. So then this is the city council meeting. This was because of the incident. Hyatt's scrapbook has some photos in the meeting. Yeah, there's quite a few people in the room. I think you're probably looking at 20, 25 people in there. Oh, wow.

In the photos, you can see a group of Iraqi men crammed into a pretty small. room, sitting scrunched up next to each other on couches. This is the mayor. This was another interpreter. You can see collids sitting on one of those couches, wearing a dark suit. Hyatt calls him the lawyer. There's the lawyer. On a little red stool were paper cups of tea that the Marines had set out.

We were trying to be hospitable. Sitting in the corner and looking stern was the top Marine in the room, the head of the Marines in Haditha. His name was Jeffrey Chassani. Chisani was a lieutenant colonel. He was 41 years old. He was ambitious. He'd spent nearly half his life

climbing the ranks of the Marine Corps and thought he might soon be promoted to Colonel. Khalid remembers Chasani being fairly quiet in this meeting. He remembers Dana Hyatt doing most of the talking. But another Iraqi man we spoke with, the director of the hospital in Heditha, Dr. Walid El-Obeidi, recalls Chasani kicking the whole thing off.

The leader, Colonel Chazani, we know that he knows everything. Chisani clearly knew that people had died that day, a lot of people. And according to Dr. El-Obedi, he started with standard official speak, the kinds of things you say to try to smooth things over. We all come here and we want to help you. We're here to help. This shouldn't affect the good relationship between us.

And then Dr. El-Abedee said, Chasani offered an explanation for what happened that day, how all those people ended up dead. And this explanation, as soon as Khaled and Dr. Elabedi heard it. They knew it wasn't true. Dr. Elabati said, Chasani told them that the civilians had died

because of an IED explosion and an ensuing firefight. In other words, it was the insurgents' fault. He made it sound like Collet's family just got caught in the middle of something. But Chassani had known since that very first night that civilians had been killed by his own Marines. Chisani would later admit

that he'd heard from one of his captains that Marines had gone into people's houses and killed women and children inside. But rather than immediately report all these details up the chain of command or call for an investigation of a possible war crime, Jasani, according to two officers, had approved a report for his higher-ups that said that, yes, civilians had died, but that they had died in an IED explosion and in crossfire with enemy fighters. The report said that Marines had returned fire, and that eight insurgents had been killed.

The way this report described it, and it didn't seem like the Marines had done anything wrong. Of course, Khalid had no way of knowing any of this. But sitting there in that meeting, one thing he did know for sure was that the story Chasani was telling him in the other town leaders was definitely not true. He knew that firsthand. He'd seen the bodies of his family members with his own eyes. He'd seen the bullet wounds in their heads. He'd gone into his sister Asma's house.

He'd seen the blood on the walls. He tried explaining all this to the Marines. to Chasani and to Dana Hyatt, the man whose job it was to build relationships with the locals. Some of his family members were killed that day. And he's like crying to me about it. And I'm like, all right, but we lost a Marine that day too. I'm sorry that, you know, Major, it was my, you know,

and I'm like, I know. And I'm sorry. You know, I'm sorry that that happened, but we also lost the Marine that day. There was something else that Hyatt told Khalid, at this meeting and in the weeks it followed, that Khalid's family, the people who died, weren't wholly innocent. And I said, your family lived in a neighborhood that allowed this to happen.

Like, it's not just us. You guys allowed somebody to do this. Hyatt assumed, without any evidence, that Khalid's family probably saw the IED being planted in the road and didn't tell the Marines about it. And therefore, he felt like, yeah, I'm sorry you're upset they were all killed, but whatever happened inside those houses is kind of their fault. I felt bad that it was his family that got killed, you know.

But I also strongly felt that somehow they bore some responsibility for it. And I told them that. Collet had come to this meeting looking for answers and some kind of justice. Instead, he was having to sit there and listen as his family members were being partly blamed for their own deaths. It would have been understandable if Khaled had just walked out of the meeting at that point. But he stayed. He still wanted to try to reason with the Americans. Collet and the other people from town presented the Marines with the letter of demands they'd prepared. Dr. Elabady read it to me.

In the morning of 19th November, 2005, a painful distress has happened when an American soldier's had executed three families with a number of universities. The letter called the events of November 19th, a quote, painful disaster and a crime of war a war crime which could be never forgotten the letter demanded that the military investigate what happened

and punish the people responsible the main point we want from him is to investigate about these accidents and we told him that he must call and tell the his leaders about this

The Marine Corps has clear rules for what to do if you're a commander and you receive an allegation of a war crime. Once you get it, you can't ignore it. You have to report it up to your superiors and to military police and try to secure evidence. This isn't optional. It's required. The meeting ended. Chasani never launched an investigation. Chasani was later charged for failing to accurately report and thoroughly investigate the incident as a possible war crime. But the case against him was dismissed.

We tried to talk to Tassani. A reporter Parker Yesko went to his house in California. Can I help you? Oh, hey there, Mr. Chasani. My name's Parker. I'm a radio reporter working at... Parker what? Parker Yesco. I'm a radio reporter.

I'm working on a project about the Iraq War. Chassani is no longer in the Marines. He works at a Christian college and lives down the street from it. Any comment on the Haditha incident? Any regrets about how you handled it? No, I don't have any comment. You think it... I just said I'm on the car.

Yeah, sure. I understand. You have a nice evening, all right? You too. Thanks. Thanks. Have a good night. Jasani's lawyer later sent us an email. He wrote,

I trust you have never been in combat, and thus have no sense of the incredible stress associated with combat, or the fog of war that proceeds from that, or the courage required to lead under such circumstances. As for what happened that day, Chasani's lawyer wrote, The fact that civilians were killed during the course of an ambush initiated by the enemy

from a location where civilians were located, a residential neighborhood, does not evidence a war crime, except perhaps on the part of the terrorists who initiated the attack. It's false to suggest otherwise. This whole thing, he said, was a quote, non-story. In Aditha, the weeks passed. The military paid the families of the victims some money, $2,500 for each person who,

died. The military calls these kinds of payments, condolence payments. The way Dana Hyatt saw it, giving the families this money was a big deal. He'd even put some photos of himself giving money to Khaled in his scrapbook. It's a strange scene. Hyatt in his uniform, Khalid in his suit, a stack of crisp $50 bills for Khaled to distribute to his family on a small table in front of them. Hyatt told us it was a lot of money for an Iraqi. Collet didn't see it that way. And Besides, money wasn't what he really wanted. He wanted an investigation, accountability, answers. But none of the Marines in Haditha would give him those things.

And that might have been where this story ended. Were it not for one more thing that Khaled did? Our story continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The United States withdrew most of its troops from Iraq in 2011 after eight years of fighting. The danger in our country is that the memory of that war, and the crimes like what we saw in Haditha, will be forgotten.

But for Iraqis who live through it, the war is a vivid presence to this day. After the killing of 24 civilians in Haditha by U.S. Marines, surviving family members demanded that the military investigate what had happened. Instead, the military gave families what they call condolence payments. $500 cash for each person killed. But Khalid Salman Rasif, who lost his sister and other family members, well, he wanted something more than money. He wanted justice, and he became a central figure in the reporting done by In the Dark

over the past four years. Here's reporter Madeline Barron. In the weeks after the killings, Khalid Salman Raseef asked a man he knew to make a video. The video was of the inside of his sister's house. house and the house of his other relatives nearby. The purpose of making it was to document the evidence that remained. To film everything that was inside the houses, the blood stains and pieces of the bodies. So he wanted that to be on tape to show the truth of what happened.

Making this video was risky. The Marines could easily consider a video like this. to be insurgent propaganda. And that wasn't the sort of thing that the military dealt with nicely. It was a sort of thing that could lead to a person being arrested, chipped off to prison. Collard gave the video to a neighbor

who said he'd help get the story out, and the video ended up getting cut together with some other videos that people had filmed. The final video is about 22 minutes long. It opens with a half-second shot of some palm trees. And then it cuts abruptly to a scene in the hospital with the bodies of Khalid's family

were taken. There's a close-up of a bloodied head on the floor. The camera zooms out and you can see more bodies and men crowding around them. It's chaotic. The men are here to retrieve the bodies of their family members, to load the bodies into cars and trucks, to take them to be prepared for burial. One man is crying and has blood on his face. He helps carry a body wrapped in a black bag out to a white truck. The camera goes in closer to the back of the truck. It shows several bodies, partly covered by black tarps or body bags. An older man moves one of the tarps to reveal a very young girl, maybe three years old, lying face up, dead.

She has dark hair, she's wearing a shirt with blue sleeves, her eyes are closed, her face is covered in blood, and her arm is draped across another body. In one point, a man says, in Arabic. Are those kids the terrorists? Back inside the hospital room, A man stands over two of the bodies, holding his head in his hands, weeping. Another man walks over to one of the bodies and appears to pick up an arm and hold it very briefly to his cheek. Then the video moves to the houses.

A friend of Khaled addresses the camera, pointing out the evidence. He says, come with me, come look at this. The camera pans, and you can see blood on the walls and the ceilings. Inside a bedroom of one of the houses, you can see blood on the walls. the bed and the bed frame and shell casings on the ground. People in Haditha smuggled the video out to a human rights activist in Baghdad. That activist gave the video to an American journalist at Time magazine named Tim McGirk, who wrote a story about it, alleging that 24 civilians had been killed by U.S. Marines.

And the story blew up. Some are comparing the Haditha killings to the Vietnam massacre at Meal. They actually went into the houses and killed women and children. And they killed innocent... Members of Congress vowed to look into what had happened. We will hold hearings and hold reviews. And there will be thorough oversight. Even President George W. Bush weighed in.

The Haditha incident is under investigation. Obviously, the allegations are very troubling for me and equally troubling for our military, especially the Marine Corps. The U.S. military ordered its own investigation into what happened in Haditha. And that first investigation would lead to more investigations, three of them in all. It would become one of the largest war crimes investigations in U.S. history. Seemingly every day, the case file would grow. There would be statements taken, forensic evidence gathered, cases built against the Marines responsible.

Eventually, four Marines were charged with murder. They faced the possibility of life in prison. And Khaled Suman received thought he might finally get the justice. he fought so long and so hard for. But that's not at all what happened. I first got interested in the Haditha case a few years ago when I was doing some research on war crimes committed by the U.S. military. As a reporter, I spent a lot of time in civilian courtrooms.

I've watched hearings, read files, talk to lawyers and defendants. But war crimes are prosecuted in a different kind of system in the United States, the military justice system, this bizarre, opaque, acronym-laden world that exists mostly outside of public view. In other words, exactly the kind of world that interests me as an investigative reporter. And the Haditha case in particular stood out to me because of a mystery at the center of it.

Despite the fact that four Marines had been charged with murder, and in such a high-profile case, truly one of the biggest stories out of the entire Iraq war, not a single one of those Marines ended up serving a day in prison. Over the years, every single one of the cases

against the Marines collapsed. There was not a single criminal conviction for the killings. How did that happen? As I kept reading about Haditha, I got even more interested, because I realized that what actually happened that day was also a mystery. The most basic facts of the day,

who killed who and why and how, were unclear. Depending on whose story you believed, the killings were a war crime, a murder. Or they were legitimate combat action and the victims were collateral damage. Or the killings were a tragic mistake, unintentional, sad, but not criminal. Basically the only thing that everyone could agree on

was that 24 people had died, and it was Marines who'd killed them. The Iraq war has been over for almost 13 years. Some people might say that what happened over there is old news. It's time to move on. But how can you move on from something that you never understood to begin with?

Khaled Salman-Rsif in particular was asking me not to move on, pleading with me really. And so, on this season of In the Dark, we are not moving on. We're going back to 2005 to figure out what really happened to college family that day, to investigate the Marines and what they did, and to find out why the military justice system never punished a single one of them for the killings. In The Dark is a podcast from The New Yorker.

To listen to the rest of the story, which I highly recommend, follow in the dark wherever you go for podcasts. I'm David Remnick, and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.