In Haditha Killings, Details Came Slowly

Chiarelli told subordinates in early February he was amazed by that response, according to an Army officer in Iraq. He directed that an inquiry commence as soon as possible. He wanted to know what had happened in Haditha, and also why no investigation had begun.

Army Col. Gregory Watt was tapped to start an investigation and by March 9, he told Chiarelli that he had reached two conclusions, according to the Army officer.

One was that death certificates showed that the 24 Iraqis who died that day -- the 15 the Marines said had died in the bomb blast and others they said were insurgents -- had been killed by gunshot rather than a bomb, as the official statement had said. The other was that the Marine Corps had not investigated the deaths, as is the U.S. military's typical procedure in Iraq, particularly when so many civilians are involved. Individually, either finding would have been disturbing. Together, they were stunning.

On March 10, the findings were given to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, the first Marine ever to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rumsfeld told aides that the case promised to be a major problem. He called it "really, really bad -- as bad or worse than Abu Ghraib," recalled one Pentagon official. On March 11, President Bush was informed, according to the White House.

At the Marine Corps headquarters, there was "genuine surprise at high levels," said an Army officer who has been working with the Marine Corps on the case. "It caught a lot of people off guard."

That weekend, almost four months after the incident, "we went to general quarters," recalled one Marine general, using the naval expression for the call to arms. The following Monday, March 13, Marine officers began briefing key members of Congress on defense-related committees. Their message was succinct: Something highly disturbing had happened in Haditha, and its repercussions could be serious. The alacrity of the Marine response surprised some of Rumsfeld's aides in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. OSD, as it is called at the Pentagon, told the Marine Corps a few days later not to say anything to anyone about the investigation, recalled the general. Too late, the Marines responded, we've already briefed Capitol Hill.

The Marines began their own investigation almost immediately, following up on Watt's inquiry, but quickly realized that to credibly examine the acts of their top commanders in Iraq, they would need someone outside their service. The Army offered up Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell, a career Special Operations officer who first saw combat as a sergeant in the Vietnam War, to look into the matter. The Marines, who are part of the Navy Department, also turned over the question of criminal acts to agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Notified on March 12, the NCIS immediately sent a team of three Iraq-based investigators to Haditha, one of the most violent areas in Iraq. A few days later, as the scope of the case sank in, it dispatched a team of reinforcements from the United States.

But even then, nothing had been made public about the November event that might have distinguished it from Iraq's daily bloodshed. Then, on March 19, the Time magazine article appeared. "I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head," the magazine quoted Eman Waleed, 9, as saying. Most of the victims were shot at close range, the director of the local hospital told Time.

The first public indication that the military was taking those allegations seriously came on April 7, when Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, a reserved, quietly professional officer from northwestern Colorado, was relieved of command of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines, Kilo Company's parent unit. Also removed were two of his subordinates -- Kilo's commander, Capt. Luke McConnell, and the commander of another company. Even then, the Marine Corps didn't specify why the actions were taken, beyond saying that the officers had lost the confidence of their superiors.

Then, on May 17, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) let the news slip out. In the middle of a rambling statement at the outset of a news conference on Capitol Hill, he said -- almost as an aside -- that what happened in Haditha was "much worse than reported in Time magazine." He asserted that the investigations would reveal that "our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

The reporters present barely focused on what Murtha had said. When the congressman finished his statement, the first reporter asked about Iraqi security forces. The second asked about U.S. troop withdrawals. The third asked about congressional support for Murtha's resolution calling for a U.S. pullout from Iraq. Finally, the fourth asked about Haditha. Murtha responded with a bit more detail: "They actually went into the houses and killed women and children. And there was about twice as many as originally reported by Time." Even then, his comments captured little attention and were not front-page news.

It took a few days for the horror of what Murtha was talking about to sink in. "This is just My Lai all over again," Vaughan Taylor, a former military prosecutor and instructor in criminal law at the Army's school for military lawyers, said last week. "It's going to do us enormous damage."

The facts of the shooting incident seem now to be largely known, with military insiders saying that recent news articles are similar to the internal reports they have received from investigators. But considerable mystery remains about how Marine commanders handled the incident and contributed to what some officials suspect was a coverup. "The real issue is how far up the chain of command it goes," said one senior Marine familiar with the case. "Who knew it, and why didn't they do something about it?"

The Marine Corps still has not corrected its misleading Nov. 20 statement asserting that the Iraqi civilians were killed in a bomb blast. A Marine Corps spokesman didn't return calls on Friday asking why it had not.

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.