Massacre by US Forces of Civilians at Haditha, Iraq…… ”Mission Accomplished,” said George W Bush

Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.”
The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s own internal investigation, and co  nfirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.

The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

That sense of American impunity ultimately poisoned any chance for American forces to remain in Iraq, because the Iraqis would not let them stay without being subject to Iraqi laws and courts, a condition the White House could not accept.

The military said it did not know from which investigation the documents had come, but the papers appear to be from an inquiry by Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell into the events in Haditha. The documents ultimately led to a report that concluded that the Marine Corps’s chain of command engaged in “willful negligence” in failing to investigate the episode and that Marine commanders were far too willing to tolerate civilian casualties.

Many of those testifying at bases in Iraq or back in the United States were clearly in the hot seat for not investigating an atrocity and may have tried to shape their statements to dispel any notion that they had sought to cover up the events.

One enlisted Marine testified: “I had Marines shoot children in cars…” The documents uncovered by The Times — which include handwritten notes from soldiers, waivers by Marines of their right against self-incrimination, diagrams of where dead women and children were found.