Haditha defendent a "fall guy"

NCT:

Calling his client "a convenient fall guy for the government," a defense attorney told a military jury Thursday that 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson had no motive to cover up evidence of the killings of 24 civilians in the town of Haditha, Iraq.

Grayson is accused of ordering a junior Marine to delete from his personal computer more than three dozen photographs depicting the dead, women and very young children among them.

The junior Marine, Staff Sgt. Justin Laughner, told the jury Thursday that Grayson told him to get rid of the pictures three months after the Nov. 19, 2005, deaths ---- and said that Grayson's order came during the early stages of media-sparked military investigations of the killings.

Laughner had photographed the bodies on the day of the deaths to determine if any of the victims were insurgents. He later uploaded them to his computer.

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During his opening statement Thursday morning, Grayson's military attorney, Maj. William A. Santmyer, told the jury that Grayson was not present on the day of the killings or when Haditha city leaders asked military officers to investigate the slayings.

Santmyer said the intelligence officer's only connection to the incident was as a senior Marine to Laughner.

"Grayson is nothing more than a fall guy for a series of investigations conducted under intense media pressure," Santmyer told the seven jury members.

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The San Diego Union-Tribune gives more details of the testimony in the case.

Seeing the corpses of 24 Iraqi men, women and children – all killed in a short span Nov. 19, 2005, in the city of Haditha – made a powerful impression on Marine Sgt. Justin Laughner.

A squad of fellow Marines had done the killing. Laughner, an intelligence analyst, took pictures of the bodies and stored them on his personal laptop computer.

Then one day in February 2006, he said, an intelligence officer told him to get rid of the images. In a Camp Pendleton courtroom yesterday, Laughner identified that officer at 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson.

“He told me I needed to delete them,” said Laughner, now a staff sergeant. “I knew I had done something wrong with those photographs.”

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Laughner said Grayson then asked him to dictate an account of his actions on Nov. 19 and told him to delete the photos. He said he didn't fully trust Grayson afterward.

Under cross-examination, Laughner acknowledged lying to multiple investigators about the disposition of the pictures. He said he came clean after learning that his computer would be seized.

Laughner appears to be compromised as a witness. If he thought he was getting an unlawful order he was obligated not to follow it. The story does not indicate whether the photos were recovered from Laughner computer.