The Haditha Killings, 19 November 2005

Haditha is the case that shows how an account survives. Not by being convincing, but by being the only one filed, and by nobody with the power to check having a reason to.

What happened

On the morning of 19 November 2005, a roadside bomb struck a US Marine convoy in Haditha, in Anbar province, killing one Marine and wounding others.

In the hours that followed, Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians. The pattern of a first casualty followed by deaths among nearby civilians recurs throughout this index. Five men were shot beside a taxi that had stopped near the scene. The others were killed inside three nearby houses, entered room by room.

Who died

The dead included women, children and an elderly man in a wheelchair. The killings happened in Anbar province during the same period covered by the Iraq war timeline. Several of the children were very young. Survivors from the houses described the killings as taking place at close range, indoors, without fire being returned from the buildings.

The account that was filed

The initial report said that fifteen civilians had been killed by the roadside bomb itself, and that a number of insurgents had been killed in a subsequent firefight. That version was issued publicly and stood for months.

It did not survive contact with the physical evidence. People killed by a bomb in the road do not have gunshot wounds at close range inside their homes.

How it came apart

• A local journalism student filmed the aftermath, including the bodies and the houses.
• An Iraqi human rights group passed the material on.
• Time magazine investigated and put the discrepancies to the military in early 2006.
• Only then was a serious investigation opened, some months after the killings.

The sequence is the one in every entry here: first account wrong, correction from outside, long delay.

The prosecutions

Twenty-four dead civilians, eight prosecutions, and the total punishment was a demotion.

Twenty-four dead civilians, eight prosecutions, and the total punishment was a demotion.The Haditha outcome, stated plainly

Which category this belongs in

Contested, and the contest is the substance of the case. The defence argued that the Marines were operating under rules permitting them to clear houses from which they believed they were taking fire, in a town where that was a constant threat, minutes after losing a comrade.

Against that: the dead were in their homes, several were small children, and no fire was established as coming from the buildings entered. Killing people you have not identified, in rooms you have entered, is not incidental harm from an attack on a military objective. The distinction is set out here.

This index places Haditha with the deliberate killings, while recording that a US military justice process reached no such finding against seven of the eight men charged.

The charges nobody talks about

Four of the eight Marines charged were officers, and the allegations against them concerned the reporting rather than the shooting: failing to investigate, and passing up an account that did not match what had happened.

Those charges matter more than they are usually given credit for. A false first account is not a clerical problem. It is what determines whether anything is examined at all, and at Haditha it held for months while the physical evidence sat in three houses.

All of the officer charges were dropped or ended in acquittal. The practical effect is that filing an account that turns out to be wrong carries no consequence, which is a poor incentive to get the first one right. The same dynamic sits behind how the 2007 Baghdad inquiry closed in weeks.

What Haditha shows about prosecuting a war crime

That the difficulty is not proving people died. Nobody disputed the 24 dead. The difficulty is proving a state of mind, in combat, minutes after a friend was killed, using evidence held by the defendant's own institution, against a standard deliberately set high to protect soldiers acting in good faith.

That is the same wall described on the accountability page, and Haditha is its most thoroughly tested example: the system did convene courts-martial, did hear evidence, and still produced a demotion. Compare it with Nisour Square, where convictions were obtained and then undone by a different mechanism entirely.