It’s looking good!
SOURCE: Stars and Stripes-January 9,2012
When Wuterich and other Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, had arrived in Haditha in the fall of 2005, they were warned by intelligence officers that Haditha would be “another Fallujah,” the site of the bloodiest urban fighting involving Marines since Vietnam.
The battalion that the Three-One had replaced had had two dozen Marines killed in combat. Insurgents had beheaded locals who had been friendly to the Marines.
The Marines were warned that fighters from Syria were flooding into Haditha to mount “complex attacks” with snipers and buried roadside bombs and that the fighters would hide behind non-combatants.
And so when a roadside bomb exploded beneath a Marine convoy, Marines were convinced that a complex attack was under way, Faraj said. Attacks were under way in other parts of Haditha as well.
The defense will question the competency of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and suggest that Marine brass panicked and began looking for scapegoats when Time magazine splashed the story of the Haditha killings as a “massacre.”
A military investigator had concluded that Wuterich and his Marines had done nothing wrong, that the deaths of noncombatants were tragic but not proof of an illegal act.
When there are multiple reports of being under fire from a location, it is unreasonable to expect each Marine to stop to decide whether each individual in that location presents a “hostile act,” the investigator concluded.
In the weeks after the incident, Wuterich was recommended for promotion and a commendation for having been cool under fire that morning. But within months, after the magazine story ignited a political firestorm in the U.S. and Iraq, Wuterich and seven other Marines were charged.