Officer Called Haditha Routine

A separate review of decisions by Marine officers, including Chessani and his superiors, was conducted by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell. The findings of his investigation, which concluded many weeks ago, has not been released, but people familiar with its contents have said that he found multiple failures by Marine leaders in the training they mandated, in the tone they set and in how information was reported up the chain of command.

Chessani's statement, which was given at a base in Iraq starting at midnight on March 20, is the first formal evidence to emerge in the case. Until now, media reports contain accounts provided by Iraqis and Marines rather than those from official documents produced by the investigatory process.

The statement provides the first public look at comments from a key commander who oversaw the action there and bolsters the defense argument that troops involved in the Haditha incident saw the events as part of the normal course of combat.

Chessani has not made any public comments about the case. He waived his rights when he provided the statement and did not ask for an attorney, though he had the right to do so. He was told at the outset of the questioning that he was suspected of dereliction of his duty.

Chessani was relieved of command about three weeks after he gave his statement, in early April, soon after his battalion returned to its home base at Camp Pendleton, Calif. It is not clear whether he has retained defense counsel. He could not be reached for comment by telephone Friday and did not respond to e-mails.

Chessani said in his statement that when he was first informed by a military investigator that Marines under his command may have intentionally killed civilians, "the allegations seemed baseless." But the investigator then told him, he said, that "we had killed civilians and did not have positive identification in this instance. . . . He described it that we had made entries into rooms and shot women and children. He believed, if I recall right, that some of the rooms, some of the houses that we entered, the Marines weren't being fired at at the time."

After the killings, the Marine Corps issued a statement that Iraqis had been killed in Haditha by a roadside bomb. Chessani said that he did not see the statement then, and that the first time he read it was when an investigator showed it to him about three months later.

"I knew this was inaccurate when I saw it," he stated. The Marine Corps has not issued a retraction, saying the entire matter is under investigation.

At one point, Col. John Ewers, the Marine lawyer who took the statement, seemed almost exasperated with Chessani's passive approach to the incident. Using a profanity, he told Chessani his own reaction was "15 civilians dead, 23 or 24 total dead, with no real indication of how it was that we arrived at the enemy KIA number."

Ewers asked: "Did it occur to you that you needed to do an investigation simply so you could go to the locals and say, 'This was righteous'? . . . And be confident that you were speaking with certainty?"

Chessani responded: "Sir, I did not think about it like that. . . . Enemy has picked the place, he had picked the time, and the location for a reason. . . . [H]e wanted to make us look bad."