NYT : Marines Punish 3 Officers in Haditha Case

Marines Punish 3 Officers in Haditha Case

By PAUL von ZIELBAUER | September 6, 2007

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., Sept. 5 — The Marine Corps said Wednesday that it had formally reprimanded a two-star general and two colonels for their failure to thoroughly investigate why a group of enlisted men killed 24 Iraqis, including several women and children, in Haditha nearly two years ago.

Navy Secretary Donald C. Winter issued letters of censure to Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, the commander of the Second Marine Division at the time; Col. R. Gary Sokoloski, who was the division’s lawyer and the legal adviser to General Huck; and Col. Stephen W. Davis, the commander of a regimental combat team that was in charge of the infantry battalion involved in the Haditha episode, on Nov. 19, 2005.

The announcement of the punishment against the three officers came on the third day of a hearing here for Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the last enlisted man to face murder charges in connection with the Haditha killings. Sergeant Wuterich, 27, is charged with killing 17 people, including a group of seven women and children hiding in a house, in the hours after a roadside bomb had killed one marine and wounded two others.

The letters of censure — administrative punishments that effectively rule out promotions to higher ranks — were issued after senior generals determined that the three officers had not intended to cover up evidence or acted in a manner that warranted criminal charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Marine Corps said.

Letters of censure are issued almost always confidentially. The Marine Corps’s decision to announce these censures reflects the enormous interest military leaders have in shaping the public perception that wrongdoing in Iraq, even by senior commanders, will be punished.

General Huck, who learned of the civilian deaths in Haditha the morning they occurred, was punished for not ensuring that his field commanders found out how and why infantrymen killed so many noncombatants, a development to which marine commanders were told to be especially sensitive. Colonel Sokoloski appeared to have been censured because he waited two weeks to tell General Huck, in early 2006, that a Time magazine reporter was asking questions about accusations that there had been a massacre in Haditha. Colonel Davis, a highly regarded combat commander in Iraq, was also censured for knowing about the civilian deaths but not seeking a detailed explanation from his battalion commander, who was charged last December with failing to investigate the killings.

Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, the commander of the Marine Corps Forces Central Command, determined that the three officers’ “actions, or inactions, demonstrated lack of due diligence on the part of senior commanders and staff.”

General Huck, now an assistant deputy commandant for plans, policies and operations at the Pentagon, is believed to be the highest ranking officer on active duty to be formally and publicly punished by the military since the beginning of the Iraq war. The Marine Corps delayed processing his retirement request after eight marines were charged with crimes stemming from the killings in Haditha.

Four infantrymen, including Sergeant Wuterich, were initially charged with murder in the case. Marine prosecutors dropped the charges against one of them. The cases against the two others were recommended for dismissal, and General Mattis — the convening authority in the Haditha matter — later dismissed charges against one of them.

Four officers at the battalion and company levels, including the commander of the First Marines, Third Battalion, who reported to Colonel Davis, were also charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the episode thoroughly.

Another marine investigator who weighed evidence against the Third Battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, recommended that dereliction of duty charges against him proceed to court martial. Charges against another of the officers, a battalion lawyer, were dismissed. Charges against the other two officers, a company commander and an intelligence officer, will be heard in upcoming evidentiary hearings.

Meanwhile, in Sergeant Wuterich’s hearing here, lawyers and the presiding officer have been grappling with perhaps the most basic issue in his case: did the Marine Corps require him and his comrades to discern noncombatants concealed in a home that they were attacking, and to avoid harming them?

In a sworn statement he gave in Haditha in February 2006 to an Army colonel investigating the Haditha episode, Sergeant Wuterich said he told three marines under his command to “shoot first, ask questions later” as they prepared to attack a house that they thought was the source of enemy fire.

Testifying for the prosecution, Capt. Alphonso Capers, who supervised Sergeant Wuterich’s training of junior marines in tactical combat operations and the rules of engagement, said such a statement appeared to violate Marine Corps training and values.

But on cross-examination by Sergeant Wuterich’s lawyers, Captain Capers suggested that, in combat, many tactical and moral gray areas exist to which the Marine Corps is unable to give absolute answers during training; the training, he said, most often involved only “recommendations.”