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A Look Inside the Haditha Tragedy Philip V. Brennan If you haven't noticed, the tragic farce of a government prosecution of its case against the Haditha Marines being played out at the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton is beginning to look like a chapter out of "Alice in Wonderland." All that's needed to complete the picture is a Mad Hatter. But before it's all over, we can expect him to show up as a government witness. As the Article 32 hearings (the equivalents of a grand jury proceeding) progress, the government's case gets, in Alice's words, "curiouser and curiouser." The whole thing begins with the government's equivalent of Wonderland's Queen of Hearts, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) which mimics her demented majesty by running hither and yon and shouting "off with their heads" in this case the heads of some of the nation's bravest warriors — the defendants in the Haditha case. Like the Queen, the NCIS doesn't appear to be interested in the truth. What they want is convictions, which seem to be what they were ordered to get no matter what it takes. It has been alleged that the administration, in an attempt to mollify the Maliki government in Baghdad, is determined to offer up seven innocent and courageous Marines as sacrificial offerings just as they did in the case of Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean imprisoned for doing their jobs, to make the Mexican government happy.
Testifying at the Article 32 hearing of Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, NCIS agent Mark Platt let the cat out of the bag when he admitted that he was not looking for evidence that might exonerate the accused Marines when he went to Haditha to investigate the killings but was following "a script" given him by his superiors. He also said that he did what his superiors "told [him] to do" which apparently was to make a case that three of the Marines were murderers no matter what the facts showed.
He then revealed his incredible bias against the defendants when asked why he did not ask Iraqi women who claim to have witnessed the events of Nov. 19, 2005 relevant questions. His shocking reply that laid bare his prejudice? "I didn't think it would be right to grill these women right after their relatives were murdered."
Not victims caught in a cross fire which the facts show they were, but murdered!
Guilty as charged.
Story Continues Below
I told you that the Mad Hatter would make his appearance before this was over. After listening to several days of that kind of NCIS garbage, the investigative officer Lt. Col. Paul Ware, who presided over the hearing, recommended that all charges against Lance Cpl. Sharratt be dropped. Much has been made of the fact that no insurgent weapons, such as AK47s, were found by NCIS investigators or produced by the Marines when the investigation began in March 2006 — months after the incident.
NewsMax can now reveal the reason why. Keep in mind that on Nov. 19, there was a vicious day-long battle going on in the streets of Haditha. Those who were there were in the midst of a fire fight that wounded 11 Marines and saw airstrikes on houses where insurgents were holed up. Nobody gave a second thought to preserving evidence because they saw no need for it. They were in the middle of a red hot firefight. They had no way of knowing that a deceptive Time magazine story months later based entirely on the testimony of two known insurgent propagandists and anti-American Iraqis would create a need to preserve evidence such as AK47s used by the insurgents that day.
In a blockbuster interview with investigative journalist Nat Helms published by the Defend Our Marines Web site, an eyewitness to the events of that day told NCIS agents that he saw Kalashnikov assault rifles propped against a white taxicab next to the bodies of five Iraqi men killed when the fighting started. His report, Helms notes, contradicts prosecution contentions that the Iraqis were innocent civilians. Wrote Helms, "Joshua Cash Karlen, 23 from Westminster Colorado, said Monday that he is positive he saw the weapons while he was being evacuated from the battlefield. The following spring Karlen says he reported his observations to NCIS investigators while being interrogated by two special agents. "'They grilled me over why I was there, why I was driving through the cordon, and what I saw' Karlen said. 'I was in there for about four hours.'
"Karlen says he repeatedly told the two agents what he witnessed at the ambush site."
The area, he said, was cordoned off: "'I was hit by a grenade and had a severe concussion so I had to be evacuated out. I was on the south side of Chestnut [code name for the road running on the south side of the ambush site] being driven through the cordon. We were going real slow so I could see a white car, a pile of bodies, and weapons piled against the car. There were three or four AKs stacked leaning against a white car and some Marines were standing around.'"
The NCIS suppressed this shocking testimony. Helms wrote, "Despite a lengthy interview, Karlen's statement was never included in the evidence obtained by the defense according to defense attorney Brian Rooney." Their failure to find any AK47s when they investigated months later proved there were none the NCIS alleged. NewsMax can now reveal why there were none. Sometime after the killing of the passengers in the white car, an explosives ordinance disposal team checked the car for explosives. It is not known if other Marines examined the car before the EOD team arrived. If any AK47s were found in the car, as Karlen recalled, those weapons would have routinely picked up by Marines and taken to their base at the Dam. Said one Marine familiar with the case, "This attempt to show guilt by our lack of meticulous accounting for weapons would be comical if it weren't so frustrating and indicative of the cluelessness of those critiquing this from the states. "We had numerous, likely hundreds of incidents in which weapons and equipment were recovered. In all cases, it went in the back of a truck [uncounted and undocumented] and went up to the Battalion [at the dam] to supposedly be documented and sent up to higher headquarters. Frankly there was too much stuff and too many other things to do ... "In any case, near the end of the deployment we had a mound of weapons piled out in the motor pool. The S-4 alerted us to its presencewe asked HQ if they wanted it, they said no so we blew it up. No counting documenting or anything approaching that ever conducted as a matter of course." Said our source the "EOD did an inspection of the vehicle for explosives. This would have been separate from the Marines picking up weapons and throwing them in the back of the truck." During the Tatum hearing, Cpl. Robert Stafford testified that two AK47s were removed from two of the houses where the shootings took place. He then shocked prosecutors when he said he believed an AK47 was taken from the white car. Stunned, they quickly cut him off claiming that the white car was not involved in the Tatum hearing. The white car will be part of the Article 32 hearing of Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich next month and Stafford's testimony will be relevant. Also expected at that hearing will be testimony that Wuterich and his men had been alerted beforehand by intelligence sources that there would be an insurgent action of some kind on that day and to be on the lookout for a white car that was expected to play a part. The NCIS, of course, ignored such inconvenient facts. They've been to busy shouting "off with their heads." Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist and World War II Marine who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com
Editor's note:
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