Worse than Abu Ghraib?

President Bush said in his snoozer of a press conference last week that the biggest mistake made by the U.S. in Iraq was Abu Ghraib, and "we've been paying for that for a long time." Well, we may soon be paying again:

Two influential legislators who have been briefed on the U.S. military's investigation into the deaths of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians said Sunday that they suspected senior officers were involved in covering up evidence of war crimes by the Marine unit involved.

Neither lawmaker — Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine and a leading authority on military issues — said they had direct evidence of top officers trying to suppress information.

But both said the delay in launching a formal investigation into the incident in the western Iraqi town of Haditha led them to suspect that officers up the chain of command were complicit in attempting to keep the incident under wraps. They said they expected that congressional hearings on the killings would focus on the military's reaction to evidence of an atrocity.

The killing of unarmed civilians, including women and children, occurred Nov. 19, but a formal investigation was not launched until reporters from Time magazine handed over video taken by an Iraqi journalist to military authorities in late January. A criminal inquiry was not begun until weeks later.

"It's been six months since this happened," Murtha, who was one of the first congressmen briefed on the incident by Marine officials, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "It's very simple: They went out the next day, they knew there was something wrong. Two or three days later, they decided that these people were murdered….

"It goes right up the chain of command," said Murtha, who has emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the Iraq war. "Who said: 'We're not going to publicize this thing. We're not even going to investigate it'? Until March, there was no serious investigation. There was an investigation right afterward, but then it was stifled."

On the same program, Warner was more cautious in his criticism, but said there were "serious questions" about "what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it."

He added that a separate military investigation underway would look into how senior officers reacted when they learned about the killings.

On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reported that a special unit of Marine intelligence specialists, known as a human intelligence exploitation team, took photographs of the scene shortly after the incident, evidence that was turned over to the military chain of command.

But Time reported Sunday the existence of another set of photos, taken by the Marines allegedly involved. It quoted John Sifton, an investigator with Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group based in New York, as saying a photo a Marine took with his cellphone showed Iraqis kneeling before being shot. Sifton did not return a call seeking comment Sunday.

Other evidence has emerged that paints a troubling picture of members of the Camp Pendleton-based unit's actions after a roadside bomb exploded in Haditha, killing Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas.

Murtha said Sunday that Marine officials had told him of one Iraqi woman "bending over a child, pleading for mercy" when the Marines "shot her in cold blood." He said a man was "asking for mercy" in English before being shot.

Of course, since there are pictures, lawmakers including Warner and Murtha are saying that this situation could be worse for the U.S. than Abu Ghraib, because it recalls something even darker: My Lai.

More on this story from TIME Magazine: The shame of Kilo Company:

The outfit known as Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, wasn't new to Iraq last year when it moved into Haditha, a Euphrates River farming town about 150 miles northwest of Baghdad. Several members of the unit were on their second tour of Iraq; one was on his third. The men in Kilo Company were veterans of ferocious house-to-house fighting in Fallujah. Their combat experience seemed to prepare them for the ordeal of serving in an insurgent stronghold like Haditha, the kind of place where the enemy attacks U.S. troops from the cover of mosques, schools and homes and uses civilians as shields, complicating Marine engagement rules to shoot only when threatened. In Haditha, says a Marine who has been there twice, "you can't tell a bad guy until he shoots you."

But one morning last November, some members of Kilo Company apparently didn't attempt to distinguish between enemies and innocents. Instead, they seem to have gone on the worst rampage by U.S. service members in the Iraq war, killing as many as 24 civilians in cold blood. The details of what happened in Haditha were first disclosed in March by TIME's Tim McGirk and Aparisim Ghosh, and their reporting prompted the military to launch an inquiry into the civilian deaths. The darkest suspicions about the killings were confirmed last week, when members of Congress who were briefed on the two ongoing military investigations disclosed that at least some members of a Marine unit may soon be charged in connection with the deaths of the Iraqis--and that the charges may include murder, which carries the death penalty. "This was a small number of Marines who fired directly on civilians and killed them," said Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican and former Marine who was briefed two weeks ago by Marine Corps officials. "This is going to be an ugly story." ...

...A military source in Iraq told TIME that investigators have obtained two sets of photos from Haditha. The first is after-action photos taken by the military as part of the routine procedure that follows any such event. Submitted in the official report on the fighting, the photos do not show any bodies. Investigators have also discovered a second, more damning set of photos, taken by Marines of the Kilo Company immediately after the shootings. The source says it isn't clear if these photos were held back from the after-action report or were personal snapshots taken by the Marines. The source says a Marine e-mailed at least one photo to a friend in the U.S.

It's those photos that could hang, not only the Marines involved, but the U.S. image, yet again, around the world.

I have to admit to sympathizing with the stress these Marines and the other 130,000 odd troops in Iraq are under. This pointless war is a grinding machine that's chewing up military families with multiple deployments, horrific physical and psychological injury, and in my opinion, pointless, needless death. And yet, the depravity of what reportedly happened at Haditha cannot be excused. And so the military justice system will very likely take these Marines down. I'm just waiting to see if their commanders go with them.

Other links:

Bloody scenes haunt a Marine

Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones says he is tormented by two memories of Nov. 19, 2005, in Haditha, Iraq.

The first is of the body of his best friend and fellow Marine blown apart just after dawn by a roadside bomb. The second is of the lifeless form of a small Iraqi girl, one of two dozen unarmed civilians allegedly killed by members of his Camp Pendleton unit — Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division.

Briones, a wiry, soft-spoken 21-year-old interviewed Sunday at his family home in this Central Valley city, said he was not among the small group of Marines that military investigators have concluded killed the civilians, including children, women and elderly men.

However, Briones, who goes by Ryan, said he took photographs of the victims and helped carry their bodies out of their homes as part of the cleanup crew sent in late in the afternoon on the day of the killings.

"They ranged from little babies to adult males and females. I'll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart," Briones said.

He said he erased the digital photos he took at the scene after first providing them to the Haditha Marine command center. He said Navy investigators later interrogated him about the pictures and confiscated his camera.

And from Talkleft, links to video and pictures, plus more accounts of the alleged Haditha massacre. More pictures are available at World Pictures News.

And let's not forget, of course, that Marines from this unit also died at Haditha. Their deaths are just as tragic and senseless, and were the trigger for the bloody hell that happened next.

Tags: Kilo Company, Iraq, Politics, War, News, Military, TIME Magazine, Haditha