Omerta and Haditha

In yesterday's post on the Haditha killings, I asserted, without much evidence, that "the amazing, truly amazing thing, is how rarely [military discipline] beaks down in a big way." In a comment to that post, Billy Bob, my only correspondent with anything close to real-world experience in this area, agreed:

We have people in harm's way all the time, and their actions are governed by strict rules of engagement and escalation of force procedures (ROE and EOF). I obviously can't elaborate on specifics, but I will say that every time I hear of an engagement, the reports say that our soldiers followed the ROE and EOF precisely. This is no small feat. These are soldiers on strange roads in a strange country in a strange war. That there aren't more incidents at this level says a lot to me about the character of these soldiers.

There will always be flukes, but the little things being done right every day say more about the soldiers. These are good people doing difficult things very well. That's why I do what I do.

I have no doubt that Billy Bob is right that there are many, many "little things being done right every day" by our armed forces and that soldiers are overwhelmingly "good people doing difficult things very well." But I am less certain today than I was yesterday that this means the apparent rarity of events like Haditha and My Lai is a true picture of what is actually going on.

What I didn't know yesterday is that, according to a report in Saturday's LA Times, the marines had an investigation team on-site taking pictures very shortly after the "incident," that the pictures indicated "execution-style" killings of the victims, but that, according to Time reports, no formal investigation was commenced until Time confronted the Marines with a videotape two months later. What I also didn't know was that the conclusion of this initial investigation was that "Marines, not a bomb, killed the civilians but that the deaths were the result of 'collateral damage.' " When combined with the LA Times article, the following account of the history of the investigation (from the Time article linked above) is troubling:

The military's initial report stated that Terrazas and 15 civilians were killed in a roadside blast and that shortly afterward, the Marines came under attack and returned fire, killing eight insurgents. . . .

The day after the killings, an Iraqi journalism student videotaped the scene at a local morgue and the homes where the shootings had occurred. "You could tell they were enraged," the student, Taher Thabet, said last week. "They not only killed people, they smashed furniture, tore down wall hangings, and when they took prisoners, they treated them very roughly. This was not a precise military operation." A delegation of angry village elders complained to senior Marines in Haditha about the killings but were rebuffed with the excuse that the raid had been a mistake. TIME learned about the Haditha action in January, when it obtained a copy of Thabet's videotape from an Iraqi human-rights group. But a Marine spokesman brushed off any inquiries. "To be honest," Marine Captain Jeff Pool e-mailed McGirk, "I cannot believe you're buying any of this. This falls into the same category of AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq) propaganda." In late January, TIME gave a copy of the videotape to Colonel Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. After reviewing it, he recommended a formal investigation. The ensuing probe, conducted by a colonel, concluded that Marines, not a bomb, killed the civilians but that the deaths were the result of "collateral damage," not deliberate homicide. Nevertheless, after reviewing the initial probe, senior military officials launched a criminal investigation.

What I also did not know is that, as the LA Times reports today, both of the ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee (Republican John Warner and Democrat John Murtha) say they have "direct evidence of top officers trying to suppress information."

In short, but for the media, we might never even have heard of Haditha. This inevitably makes one wonder how many more incidents there are like this that never come to light simply becuase the media itself never hears about them. Is it true, as General Pace assured us over the weekened, that such events are rare? Or are they are just rarely discovered by the media? Are the military's after-action reports saying "that our soldiers followed the ROE and EOF precisely" accurate or are they more frequently than anyone realizes just self-serving BS?

I take some comfort in this thought: in a world of ubiquitous cameras, sooner or later everything comes to light. Thus, the relative rarity of reports on events such as this may still be a reflection of their actual frequency. But I must admit to some doubt on this score. At a minimum, these types of reports call into question the military's willingness to police itself. And, if the military is only willing to come to grips with such incidents when forced to by media reports, the credibility of assurances such as General Pace's is significantly undermined.

It would be sad to learn (as we did in Viet Nam) that what we hear about is actually just the tip of the ice berg.


Update(5/31) : A New York Times article today, sheds a somewhat more favorable light on the investigation. See my mea culpa above.