2 Marines Deny Suspecting Haditha War Crime

05/31/2007

By PAUL VON ZIELBAUER
NY Times
Published: May 31, 2007


CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., May 30 — Two Marine junior officers, in testimony made public on Wednesday, said they had no reason to suspect a possible war crime when they inspected the human carnage, including the bodies of 10 women and children, after an infantry attack that killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005.

But one of the officers, First Lt. Alexander Martin, suggested that one of the consequences of the Marine unit’s killing of civilians — which followed a roadside bomb blast that killed one marine and wounded two others — was that Haditha residents became noticeably more helpful, if not quite friendly, to the Americans.

“After 19 November,” Lieutenant Martin said in videotaped testimony, referring to the day the civilians were killed in 2005, “I had people coming up to me to tell me where the I.E.D.’s were.”

I.E.D. stands for improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb.

The other officer testifying, First Lt. Max D. Frank, offered a detailed and gruesome accounting of the human remains — including the bodies of six children and two women on one bed — that the officers saw in three homes that had been attacked by a squad of infantryman searching for insurgents whom they suspected of detonating the roadside bomb.

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