Incident at Haditha

Michelle Malkin has a long post with several links about the Marines at Haditha. This story from Time suggest the investigation has been thorough and professional.

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Those memories would have come in handy for sleuths of the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS, who have spent time in Haditha in recent weeks, to uncover the facts of the massacre. Belated as the investigation was, the residents of Hay al-Sinnani say they were gratified by its thoroughness. That there have been three separate enquiries suggests the U.S. military “want to get at the truth,” says Walid Abdel Khaliq, the doctor of the Haditha morgue where the victims' bodies were taken.

They were especially impressed by the NCIS investigators. “They must have visited the houses 15 times,” says Khalid Raseef, a spokesman for the victims' kin and uncle of Emaan and Abdel Rahman Waleed, the children who lost almost their entire immediate family in the massacre. The investigators “asked detailed questions, examined each bullet hole and burn mark, and took all sorts of measurements. In the end, they brought all the survivors to the homes and did a mock-up of the Marines' movements. It was a very professional investigation.”

The families say they cooperated fully with the NCIS, but drew the line at exhumation; investigators' requests for the bodies to be dug up for forensic examination were flatly turned down by the families. Islam doesn't permit bodies to be disturbed after burial.

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They will probably have to rely on the photos taken by the Marines after the action was over.

It should be noted that the enemy in Iraq in violation of the Geneva Convention camoflages himself as a civilian, which puts all civilians at risk. That may indeed be a part of the defense if these Marines are charged. However, the allegations in this case go beyond the accidental shooting of a noncombatant, and we will have to wait for the Marines' explanation of the events.