This story is a supplement to Season 3 of our investigative podcast, “In the Dark.”
On the morning of November 19, 2005, a squad of Marines traveling in four Humvees hit an IED along a road in the Iraqi town of Haditha. The explosion killed one Marine, Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and wounded two others. The ensuing events sparked the largest war crimes investigation in U.S. history.
Over the next few hours, the Marines killed 24 Iraqi men, women, and children. Near the site of the explosion, the Marines shot and killed five men who were driving to a university in Baghdad. They entered three nearby homes, killing nearly everyone inside. The youngest victim was a three-year-old girl. The oldest was a 76-year-old man. The Marines later claimed they had been fighting insurgents that day, but all of those killed were civilians.
After the killing was over, two other Marines set off to document the incident: Corporal Ryan Briones with an Olympus digital camera; Corporal Andrew Wright with a red Sharpie marker.
Briones and Wright went from scene to scene, numbering and photographing the bodies. Other Marines, including intelligence officers, also took photos at the scene. By the time they were done, they had assembled the most powerful collection of photographs to present to their fellow Marines.
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The killings became known as the Haditha Massacre. Four Marines were charged with murder, but the charges were later dropped. General James Mattis, who later became Secretary of Defense, wrote an impassioned letter to one of the Marines, dropping the charges and declaring his innocence. By the time the final trial ended in a plea deal with no prison sentence in 2012, the Iraq War was over, and stories about the legacy of the U.S. occupation had barely made it into the news.
The impact of alleged war crimes is often directly related to the horrific images that reach the public. The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison became an international scandal when graphic photographs were made public. The killings at Haditha had no similar events. Some of the images taken by the Marines have entered the public domain, but the majority remain hidden.
In a 2014 Marine oral history interview, Gen. Michael Hagee, who was commandant of the Marine Corps at the time of Haditha's murder, bragged about keeping Haditha's photographs secret.
“Unlike Abu Ghraib, the media never got around to catching them,” Hagee said.
The interviewer, Marine Corps historian Fred Allison, interjected, “Photographs. They got the photographs. That's what was so terrible about Abu Ghraib.”
“Yes,” Hagee replied. “And I learned from it,” he said. “No one has seen the photo I took today yet, so I'm very proud of that.”
In 2020, the In the Dark podcast team filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Navy, seeking records, including photographs. We thought the photographs would help us reconstruct what happened that day and why the military dropped the murder charges against the Marines involved. The Navy released nothing in response. So we filed a lawsuit against the Navy, Marine Corps, and U.S. Central Command to compel them to turn over photographs and other records related to the killings in Haditha. We expected the government to argue that releasing the photographs would harm the families of the dead. Military prosecutors had already made this argument after the trial of the last defendant, a Marine.
While we were fighting with the military for the photos, my colleagues and I went to Iraq to meet with the families of the murder victims. They told us what happened on November 19, 2005, and how all efforts to seek justice had failed. “We believe it is our duty to tell the truth,” Khalid Salman Ratheef, a lawyer who lost 15 family members that day, told me. Another man, Khalid Jamal, was 14 when his father and uncle were killed. He told me that for years he had wondered what had happened in his family's final moments. “Did they die bravely? Or were they scared?” he said. “I want to know the details.”
We asked the pair if they would be willing to help us get hold of photos of their lost family members, and so we formed an unusual partnership: an American journalist and two Iraqi men whose families had been killed, working together to uncover military secrets.
I worked with the lawyer representing us in our lawsuit against the military to prepare signed paperwork from surviving family members stating they wanted the photos to be given to us, and Ratheef and Jamal offered to deliver it to the other family members.
They went from house to house in Haditha, explaining our coverage and what we were trying to do.
At one home, Jamal told the father of a man who had been killed trying to reach Baghdad, “Of course I am one of you.” Jamal told him, “What happened in the massacre will be exposed,” and asked him to sign a document. His father, Hamid Hurley Hassan, responded, “A drowning man will clutch at a straw. I will sign it. I will sign it. I will sign it, not once, but twice.”
Ratheef and Jamal collected 17 signatures. Our lawyers submitted the document to the court as part of their lawsuit. In March, more than four years after we first filed a Freedom of Information request, the military relented and provided us with the photos.
The New Yorker has decided to publish some of these photographs, with permission from the families of those depicted, to highlight the horror of the murders the military chose not to punish.
