The Legacy, Part Two

Andrea Bruce for The New York Times
Transcripts of military interviews from the investigation into the Haditha massacre were found at this trailer in a junkyard in Baghdad, which specializes in selling trailers and office supplies left over from American military base closings.

Secret Military Documents, Straight From an Iraqi Junkyard

One by one, the Marines sat down, swore to tell the truth and began to give secret interviews discussing one of the most horrific episodes of America’s time in Iraq: the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.

“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, told investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq. At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”

The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.

The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.

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It seems the US military was too stupid to destroy the evidence, and left it behind.

And then the NYT gives the "classified" evidence back to the military instead of publishing it.  And the US military cares so little about the war crimes it has committed, it cannot dispose of the evidence properly.

And NO ONE WAS HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THIS CRIME IN HADITHA.  THIS IS MASSIVELY EVIL.

A partial picture of the aftermath:

 On Nov. 19, 2005, a group of Marines went on a shooting spree in which 24 Iraqi civilians were killed.

From Washington Post website.  A photo contained in a Naval Criminal Investigative Service report obtained by The Washington Post shows a Marine inspecting a roadside scene near Haditha, Iraq, where five unarmed civilians were killed Nov. 19, 2005.