Girl, do you remember where this business about the four men in the closet was reported? I meant to go back and look for it but couldn’t get the time today (too busy being appreciative!).
The original claim came from the first article by McGirk in Times Magazine http://www.time.com/time/world/printout/0,8816,1174649,00.html
...”The Marines raided a third house, which belongs to a man named Ahmed Ayed. One of Ahmed’s five sons, Yousif, who lived in a house next door, told Time that after hearing a prolonged burst of gunfire from his father’s house, he rushed over. Iraqi soldiers keeping watch in the garden prevented him from going in. “They told me, ‘There’s nothing you can do. Don’t come closer, or the Americans will kill you too.’ The Americans didn’t let anybody into the house until 6:30 the next morning.” Ayed says that by then the bodies were gone; all the dead had been zipped into U.S. body bags and taken by Marines to a local hospital morgue. “But we could tell from the blood tracks across the floor what happened,” Ayed claims. “The Americans gathered my four brothers and took them inside my father’s bedroom, to a closet. They killed them inside the closet.” “...
I’m not sure when the first disclaimer came out. I didn’t realize until reading this again that Yousif Ayed (the guy you quote in your schematic) was the BROTHER of the four killed in that last house. He had plenty of reasons to lie about their status: 1. Prevent the Americans from tieing him in with insurgents, 2. Try to get compensation for 4 Brothers.