In Haditha, truth coming into view

WASHINGTON — At 5 p.m. Nov. 19, near the end of one of the most violent days the Marine Corps had experienced in Iraq's Upper Euphrates Valley, a call went out for trucks to collect the bodies of 24 civilians.

The unit that arrived in the farming town of Haditha found Iraqi babies, women and children, shot in the head and chest. An old man in a wheelchair had been shot nine times. A group of girls, ages 1 to 14, lay dead. Everyone had been killed by gunfire, according to death certificates issued later.

The next day, Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman in Iraq, released a terse statement: Fifteen Iraqis "were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately after the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another."

Despite what Marine witnesses saw when they arrived, that official version has been allowed to stand for six months. Who lied about the killings, who knew the truth and what, if anything, they did about it is at the core of one of the potentially most embarrassing and damaging events of the Iraq war, one that some say may surpass the detainee abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison.

The Marine Corps is saying only that it would be inappropriate to comment while investigations are under way. But since that Saturday afternoon in November, evidence has been accumulating steadily that the official version was wrong and misleading, and several top officials suspect what happened in Haditha went beyond the usual daily violence in Iraq.

The trigger?

On Nov. 29, the Marine unit in question — Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment — had a memorial service at a Marine base for Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, a well-liked 20-year-old from El Paso, Texas. He was killed in a roadside bomb explosion that appears to have been the trigger for what looks to investigators like revenge shootings of Iraqi civilians. Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones said that Terrazas had been "like a brother to me." Staff Sgt. Travis Fields, Terrazas's platoon sergeant, called him "a man of heart."

Not long after the bodies were discovered, Maj. Dana Hyatt, a Marine reservist whose job in part was to work with the civilian population when damage was inflicted by the U.S. military, paid out $38,000 in compensation to the families of the 15 dead. The Iraqis received the maximum the United States offers — $2,500 per death, plus a small additional amount for other damage.