Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich is the last Marine to go to trial in connection with the 2005 murder of 24 Iraqis including an old man in a wheel chair and small children living in the Euphrates River town of {Haditha}. Jury selection began Friday from among a panel of combat veterans. To date none of the eight Marines charged in connection with the killings has been convicted of a crime. That fact was the deal breaker for Iraqi officials faced with American demands for legal immunity before the Pentagon would leave troops behind to bolster the fragile Iraqi government. Wuterich was the squad leader of marines which shot five unarmed Iraqi men then cleared houses with automatic gunfire and grenades after a IED killed a fellow marine in the convoy. Since the court martial process began--stalled for years by legal arguments over the admissibility of his CBS News "60 Minutes" interview--Wuterich has been manning a desk at the 1st Marine HQ, Camp Pendleton, awaiting trial.
What was recently found in an Iraqi dump has shed more light on American forces' treatment of Iraqi civilians during the nine year occupation of Iraq. A resourceful New York Times reporter shifting through the debris left by departing American troops found four hundred pages of interrogation of American military personnel in a junkyard outside Baghdad. The attendant was using the supposedly classified secret documents as fuel to cook his dinner. The papers appear to be official investigation into the Haditha atrocity, but the US military refused to confirm that fact, claiming the papers were still classified despite being found discarded in a junkyard. What the Q and As show is Iraqi civilians were being killed regularly during the war. In the transcripts, a US major general described the killings as "the cost of doing business". Soldiers and marines, unsurprisingly, became either paralyzed or dehumanized as the violence escalated. Bodies piled up as troops began to fire on civilians indiscriminately while some of their comrades took pictures. Clearly, the Americans did not understand or appreciate the foreign culture they had invaded. Consequently, the Haditha killings were considered by the Americans to be unremarkable. Then Anbar Province commander, General Johnson, did not examine the Haditha deaths because "it [civilian casualties] happened all the time...throughout the country". Anbar Province, where Haditha is located, was the epicenter of the Sunni insurgency; 1335 Americans were killed in Anbar alone.
Anbar is also the location of Fallujah, the site of the most violent engagements of the war. After Blackwater mercenaries where dragged through the streets and their bodies burned and hanged from a Euphrates River bridge, the American military loosed havoc on Fallujah in 2004. Residents still have not forgotten or forgiven Americans for the brutal destruction of their town. In two major battles American marines struggled to control the city. The urban warfare left it pulverized and hundreds of Iraqi civilians dead. The majority of destroyed homes have been rebuilt, but many factories are still shuttered. Apartment buildings lie in heaps of rubble. The US trained Iraqi army still controls the Sunni bastion, fueling local resentment. Given the lack of accountability of the US military in Iraq, it is no wonder Iraqi politicians found it politically impossible to grant legal immunity to American military personnel.