SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
freedom of information act
'This Is What the US Military Was Doing in Iraq': Photos of 2005 Haditha Massacre Finally Published
"I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny," said one survivor who was just 8 years old during the attack by U.S. Marines.
Aug 28, 2024
After years of working with Iraqis whose relatives were killed by U.S. Marines in the 2005 Haditha massacre, American journalists finally obtained and released photos showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage—whose perpetrators never spent a day behind bars.
On Tuesday, The New Yorker published 10 of the massacre photos—part of a collaboration with the "In the Dark" podcast that joined the magazine last year.
The podcast's reporting team had filed its public records request four years ago, then sued the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Central Command over their failure to hand over the images. "In the Dark" host Madeleine Baran also traveled with a colleague to Iraq's remote Anbar Province to meet relatives of some of the 24 Iraqi civilians—who ranged in age from 1 to 76—slaughtered by U.S. troops.
"The impact of an alleged war crime is often directly related to the horror of the images that end up in the hands of the public."
Baran explained that she sought the relatives' help partly because "we anticipated that the government would claim that the release of the photos would harm the surviving family members of the dead," as "military prosecutors had already made this argument after the trial of the final accused Marine."
Khalid Salman Raseef, an attorney who lost 15 members of his family in the massacre, told Baran that "I believe this is our duty to tell the truth."
The graphic photos show dead Iraqi men, women, and children, many of them shot in the head at close range. One 5-year-old girl, Zainab Younis Salim, is shown with the number 11 written on her back in red marker by a U.S. Marine who wanted to differentiate the victims in photos.
On November 19, 2005, a convoy of Humvees carrying Marines of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, First Marine Division was traveling through Haditha when a roadside bomb believed to have been placed by Iraqis resisting the U.S. invasion killed Miguel Terrazas, a popular lance corporal, and wounded two other Marines.
In retaliation, Marines forced a nearby taxicab to stop and ordered the driver and his four student passengers out of the vehicle. Sgt. Frank Wuterich then executed the five men in cold blood. Another Marine then desecrated their bodies, including by urinating on them.
Wuterich then ordered his men to "shoot first and ask questions later," and they went house to house killing everyone they saw. They killed seven people in the Walid family home, including a toddler and an elderly couple.
"I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny," Iman Walid, a survivor who was 8 years old when her family was slain, toldTime in 2006.
Next, the Marines killed eight people in the Salim family home, six of them children. Finally, the troops executed four brothers in a closet in the Ahmad family home.
The Marines subsequently conspired to cover up what a military probe would deem a case of "collateral damage." The military initially claimed that 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the same explosion that took Terrazas' life. However, a local doctor who examined the victims' bodies said they "were shot in the chest and head from close range."
Eight Marines were eventually charged in connection with the massacre. Six defendants were found not guilty and one had their case dismissed. Initially charged with murder, Wuterich pleaded guilty and was convicted of dereliction of duty. He was punished with a reduction in rank and was later honorably discharged from service.
Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis—who earned his "Mad Dog" moniker during one of the atrocity-laden battles for the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004—intervened on behalf of the Haditha defendants and personally dismissed charges against one of them.
Later, while serving as former President Donald Trump's defense secretary, Mattis oversaw an escalation in what he called the U.S. war of "annihilation" against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The general warned that "civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation," and thousands of men, women, and children were subsequently slaughtered as cities including Mosul and Raqqa were leveled.
The Haditha massacre was part of countless U.S. war crimes and atrocities committed during the ongoing so-called War on Terror, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives in at least half a dozen countries since 2001. One of the reasons why the Haditha massacre is relatively unknown compared with the torture and killings at the U.S. military prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq is that photos of the former crime have been kept hidden for decades.
"The impact of an alleged war crime is often directly related to the horror of the images that end up in the hands of the public," Baran wrote in the New Yorker article. She noted that Gen. Michael Hagee, who commanded the Marines at the time of the Haditha massacre, later boasted how "proud" he was about keeping photos of the killings secret.
"This," journalist Murtaza Hussain
reminded the world on Tuesday, "is what the U.S. military was doing in Iraq."
Keep ReadingShow Less
In Undercover Video, Project 2025 Architect Says Trump Is 'Very Supportive of What We Do'
A watchdog group secretly recorded Russell Vought, a former Trump administration official, explaining his plan to get confidential Project 2025 plans into the Republican nominee's hands if he wins in November.
Aug 15, 2024
A key architect of Project 2025 believed he was speaking to relatives of a wealthy right-wing donor when he described his plan to share a flurry of secret executive orders, proposed regulations, and other documents directly with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his transition team if he wins another White House term in November.
In fact, Russell Vought—who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump's first term—unwittingly divulged his strategy to an undercover journalist and a paid actor working undercover for the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR), an investigative organization based in the United Kingdom.
During the nearly two-hour conversation, which was secretly recorded by CCR's undercover team, Vought boasted of his close proximity to Trump and voiced confidence that he will be able to get Project 2025's confidential 180-day plan into the Republican nominee's hands following the November election, despite the former president's false claim that he knows "nothing about" the project.
"There are people like me that have his trust that will be able to get it to him in whatever position we're at," said Vought, who is expected to receive a high-ranking post in a potential second Trump administration. "The relationships will be there. The trust level will be there."
Vought, founder of the Center for Renewing America (CRA), went on to describe Project 2025's secret plan as a "very, very close hold," which CCR noted is a phrase used by the U.S. government for documents that aren't for public consumption.
Watch CCR's video of its conversation with Vought, who expressed his desire to "rehabilitate Christian nationalism," pursue "the largest deportation in history," and "block funding for Planned Parenthood":
NEW
We went undercover in Project 2025.
Our investigation uncovered details of the secretive second phase of Project 2025 being led by a Trump insider, with plans to feed hundreds of highly-confidential battle plans directly into the Trump transition team.
Watch here. pic.twitter.com/je9qHpjAns
— Centre for Climate Reporting (@ClimateReport_) August 15, 2024
Much of the media attention on Project 2025—a sweeping far-right agenda crafted by more than 100 conservative groups and many former Trump administration officials—has centered on the initiative's 922-page "Mandate for Leadership," a document that outlines plans to abolish the Education Department, further privatize Medicare, roll back climate regulations and abortion protections, and centralize power in the executive branch.
Such plans are deeply unpopular with the U.S. public, according to recent polling.
But in recent weeks, Democratic lawmakers and watchdogs have attempted to shine light on what Project 2025 has called the "Fourth Pillar" of its agenda, which is briefly described on the project's website as a "180-day transition playbook" that contains "a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency."
Micah Meadowcroft, who worked in the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump's first term, told CCR's undercover reporter that Vought has "supervised" the handling of Project 2025's secretive "second phase," which aims to "break down actual policy packets and executive orders and agenda items and things like that."
"He's the team lead behind the scenes, just putting all that together," said Meadowcroft, who helped set up the meeting between Vought and CCR's undercover team. "I have colleagues who officially work for CRA, but like 35 out of their 40-hour work week is Project 2025 stuff."
Meadowcroft went on to describe Project 2025's secret plan as "a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period, but not as part of the transition."
"Because obviously, you want as little of it to be FOIA-able... as possible," he added, referring to the ability of members of the press and the public to request documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
Vought told CCR that he is "overseeing a large team that is developing 350 different transition documents, consisting of draft executive orders, secretarial memos, and regulations," the outlet noted in its detailed story on the investigation.
"His priority, he said, is to provide detailed plans for enacting policies he already knows Trump wants to carry out, based on the former president's campaign speeches," CCR continued. "He is confident that these plans won't end up in a White House shredder, despite the Trump campaign's insistence that they have nothing to do with Project 2025. He suggested that Trump's disavowal of Project 2025 is a pre-election political ploy rather than anything substantive."
As Vought himself put it: "He's running against the brand. He is not running against any people; he is not running against any institutions."
"He's very supportive of what we do," Vought said of Trump's stance on the Center for Renewing America, which CCR noted is "responsible for promulgating some of the most radical Project 2025 policy ideas."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Secret Doc Exposes Flaws in Pentagon Claim That No Civilians Were Killed in al-Baghdadi Raid
"Over the past 20 years, the U.S. military has struggled with escalation of force and many civilians were killed when they were falsely viewed as a threat. This incident appears to be one of many such cases," said one expert.
Jul 21, 2023
A formerly classified document published Friday by NPRrevealed how the Pentagon dismissed highly credible evidence of civilian deaths caused by the October 2019 U.S. assassination of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria.
In a raid hailed by then-U.S. President Donald Trump as "impeccable," U.S. special forces stormed al-Baghdadi's hideout just outside Barisha in Idlib province on October 26-27, 2019. Realizing he was cornered during the raid, al-Baghdadi detonated an explosive device, killing himself and two children he was carrying with him, according to U.S. officials.
For years, the Pentagon dismissed a December 2019 NPRreport of a U.S. military helicopter attacking Syrian civilians in Barisha during the raid, killing two cousins traveling in a van and blowing the hand off a third man, claiming the victims were enemy combatants who ignored repeated warning shots.
NPR subsequently filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Pentagon and obtained a redacted copy of the military's erstwhile secret assessment of the raid.
The document revealed that:
- U.S. troops fired warning shots just seconds before helicopters opened fire on the victims' van, belying claims that the men demonstrated hostile intent by failing to stop or move;
- The Pentagon offered no solid evidence that the victims were enemy combatants;
- The military did not compile a recommended intelligence dossier to back its claim that the victims were "unlawful enemy belligerents";
- The Pentagon questioned the veracity of a survivor's account of the attack given to NPR—but did not interview the man; and
- The military dismissed credible evidence—including photos, reporting by NPR and other media, and assessments by NGOs including Airwars—that civilians were harmed in the raid.
"Over the past 20 years, the U.S. military has struggled with escalation of force and many civilians were killed when they were falsely viewed as a threat," Larry Lewis of the Center for Naval Analyses told
NPR. "This incident appears to be one of many such cases."
The raid's sole survivor, a 39-year-old laborer named Barakat Ahmad Barakat, told
NPR that the two men who were killed were his friends and that they were heading home after working at a local olive press. Barakat—who insisted he did not know that al-Baghdadi was hiding out in the area—said the U.S. airstrike took the men by surprise. They fled the van but came under renewed aerial attack.
"Suddenly I felt something hit us," he said. His friends, 27-year-old Khaled Mustafa Qurmo and 30-year-old Khaled Abdel Majid Qurmo, were killed. Barakat's right hand was blown off; his arm was later amputated. His left hand was also badly injured.
The U.S. military initially claimed that the army helicopters came under fire from the van. However, a formerly classified U.S. Central Command document previously published by NPR shows that the Pentagon acknowledged the claim was untrue.
The newly exposed document states that the military also "assessed secondary explosions emitted from the vehicle, indicating weapons and explosive devices were on board the panel van."
This was untrue, as was a similar claim made by the Pentagon following an August 2021 drone strike that killed 43-year-old Afghan aid worker Zamarai Ahmadi and nine of his relatives, including seven children, in Kabul during the chaotic days of U.S. withdrawal from a 20-year invasion.
The Pentagon often attempts to conceal or minimize civilian casualties caused by U.S. bombs and bullets, which have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of civilians in more than half a dozen nations since the ongoing so-called War on Terror began after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
NPR's latest report on the al-Baghdadi raid comes as the Pentagon implements its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP), a series of policy steps aimed at preventing and responding to the death and injury of noncombatants.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular