Two reports from Haditha at politburo diktat 2.0

Two reports from Haditha

An American photographer and an Iraqi lawyer tell what they saw in Haditha. Excerpts of articles follow:

Photographer confronted Marines with Haditha dead images

Just days after the suspected massacre of two dozen civilians in Haditha, an American photographer confronted U.S. Marines with the images of the dead, including Iraqi children.

Freelance photographer Lucian Read, 31, had spent months capturing shots of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment. But when Iraqis invited him to photograph their dead two days after the Haditha killings in November 2005, he felt compelled to show the images to the platoon.

“I … showed those pictures to as many of the Marines as possible. When children are killed, I don’t care what the situation is, that’s bad, and I wanted those guys to see that so they would keep it in their mind next time something like that happened — hey, we don’t want to be killing any more kids.”

An officer and enlisted men reacted to the images with “regretful frowns,” he said.

“It was basically, ‘man, that’s not good,’” he said. “A few, a number of the guys had been there on scene, taken the bodies to the hospitals, to the morgue. Some of those guys already knew what was in the house.”

“But there were portions of the company — a fairly sizable portion of the company that wasn’t even there that day — that had no first-hand knowledge of the fact that there were that many dead people or that there had been children killed.”

“Those people were a little more taken aback,” Read said.

Iraq Investigator Tells AP Haditha Killings Spread Over 3 Hours, Work of Small Group of Marines

Thaer al-Hadithi, a member and spokesman for the Hammurabi human rights association, a Sunni Muslim group, recounted with the help of a satellite map when and where Iraqi civilians cowered and sometimes died. Al-Hadithi, 42, said he had been visiting his family in Haditha in western Iraq for a Muslim holiday when he was awakened on the morning of Nov. 19 by an explosion that he later learned to be a roadside bomb that hit a U.S. convoy of four Humvees, killing one Marine.

A native of the town, al-Hadithi said the roadside bombing took place on a road about 100-150 yards from his family home.

“There was an eerie silence after the explosion,” he said in Hammurabi’s Baghdad offices.

“Then, we started to hear noises, soldiers shouting, that grew louder and louder,” said al-Hadithi.

The first gunshots were heard at around 7:30 a.m., he said, when the Marines moved into the family home of Abdul-Hamid Hassan Ali, a blind and elderly man in failing health. The house is just south of the spot where the roadside bomb went off, al-Hadithi said.

Later, the Marines moved next door to the house of Younis Salem Rsayef and his family.

“There was intense gunfire and I could see a fire at the Rsayef home,” said al-Hadithi, who watched from a window at his family home.

There’s more in both interviews. While eyewitness reports can be unreliable, neither of these struck me as exaggerated or incredible.