Two years ago, I went to a rock to talk to a man about what sounded like a murder. It happened almost 17 years earlier. The killing of the man's sister, his nephew, so many others, 24 people in all. It was a killing that had gone unpunished. We're not a single person had ever gone to prison. A killing committed by U.S. Marines. The man whose family was killed is named Khaled Salman Received. Get me in the lobby of a hotel in the city of Herbil, Iraq. We headed up to a room with our producer Samara Freemark and our interpreter, a woman named Ion Muthana. We all sat down. "Mr. Khaled, why don't you sit here, can I get you a water or a coffee or anything like that?" "Some water?" "Some water." I'd wanted to meet Khaled in his hometown, it's called Haditha. But traveling to Haditha is dangerous for western journalists. Remnants of ISIS are still active in the region. So Khaled agreed to meet us in a safer place, in Herbil, in the north. "He's thanking you for coming here, he says that you had the longest weight, he's welcoming you guys through Iraq." Khaled's in his 50s, he's a lawyer, and he looks like one. He has short hair and a neat mustache, and despite the fact that he traveled eight hours to meet us. His dark, suit and tie were immaculate. He pulled out his phone and started showing us pictures of his first grandchild. "I'm grandfather." She'd been born just six months earlier. "What's her name?" "Never." "Never." "Yes. There you go." "We're happy." Khaled used to speak English all the time, back when he needed to speak it, so he could talk to the American Marines, who were occupying his town. But those days are long past. "I'm sorry, you know, I don't go to any school to learn the English, it's very difficult, therefore I'm sorry." "No, it's good." "It's good." "Yeah." "Perfect." "Oh, almost perfect." "It's nice to meet you in person after just talking on the phone." "He's also so happy to see you in person." "They kind of gave up on anyone talking about this case again. They didn't forget, they've been heartbroken every day since that day, but they gave up on someone to talk about the case or someone to re-investigate the case." "So he said that he was so thrilled and happy that a media is interested in coming all the way for the truth." "He says that this is his duty, for the truth to be told." The story Colled wanted to tell me, happened in Colled's hometown, Haditha. Haditha is a pretty small city, it's in western Iraq in the desert, but it's right on the banks of the Euphrates River, and so depending on where in Haditha you are, the place is either dry and dusty or lush with palm trees. Before the US invaded, life there was quiet, sleepy even. Some people had small farms, they would grow cucumbers and melons. Some people worked in the oil industry. On the weekends they'd go drink tea and coffee and cafes along the river. It's a kind of place where it seemed like everyone knew everyone. But by the time Colled's story begins, in 2005, all that had changed. The Iraq war had started two years earlier. The United States military had invaded, overthrown Saddam Hussein and captured Baghdad. But now the US military was trying to establish control over the rest of the country, and that was proving more difficult. In western Iraq, where Haditha is, an insurgency movement was growing. Foreign fighters from groups like Al-Qaeda were starting to arrive. Soldiers started to make their appearance and Haditha city. Now in Colled went to the marketplace, he'd see people he didn't recognize. People who weren't from Haditha. People who spoke with foreign accents. In Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria. He'd see people with their faces covered, so that no one could see who they were. And he tried to just keep his head down and stay out of their way. In 2005, a new battalion of US Marines arrived in Haditha to try to drive the insurgents out. And so, there were two groups of outsiders in Haditha, both of them terrifying to the people in town. The insurgents would plant AEDs under Haditha's streets and occasionally pop up to fire rounds at the Marines. The Marines spent their time patrolling, carrying their big guns, driving their big humvees, looking for insurgents and caches of weapons and explosives, detaining people they deemed suspicious. They spent a lot of time searching houses. They could burst into your home without warning. It could be late at night or early in the morning. They'd bust down your door with assault rifles drawn, and there was always the worry that if you made one wrong move, if you misunderstood a command, barked out in English, they might just shoot you, or zip tie your hands, and fly you off to Buka prison. Khaled told me that the people of Haditha developed a kind of protocol for when the Marines showed up at their houses. They take all the old people and the women and children, and put them in a back room. And then the men would go out and talk to the Marines, in English if possible, carefully, appeasingly. "Welcome, you can enter and you can do anything, please don't break anything, there is my mother here, my father here, please, my wife is very sick, my children is very sick, when I taught them, sometime they got, but sometime they said, shut up and sit down, don't talking with me, I need you." The Marines demanded total cooperation from the people of Haditha. They expected the people of Haditha to give them intel about the insurgents, to tell the Marines where IEDs had been placed, where the weapons caches were hidden, to help them out in this fight against the bad guys. But even if you had that information, helping the Americans meant putting your own life in danger, because if you did help the Americans in any way, the insurgents could consider you a collaborator. If they saw any person from the local community, talk to any American Marine, they would take them to Haditha's bridge, and they would cut their head and put it on their back. And then just leave the body on the bridge. That sounds terrifying. He's saying that it was horrifying, and this is not only his experience, like he's saying that this was a bike up up like situation for all of the people of Haditha. They wouldn't trust the al-Qaeda and they wouldn't trust the American military. So they lived in this hard situation, terrifying moments, as cared from both al-Qaeda and the US military. And he said that it was basically like hell. Yes, yes, like the hell, it's very hard. Khalid said they had a saying back then. When two elephants fight, the only loser is the green grass. And that green grass, in this story, it was Khalid's family. And maybe we could now talk a bit about the day of the incident. What do you remember about how that day started? It was the morning of November 19, 2005. Khalid was 31 at the time. He lived in Haditha with his wife, his two daughters, and his parents. lived in a middle class or maybe even upper middle class neighborhood filled with two stories stone houses
ستقلوص تجده. قلد ستر أسما لترى معها في مرحبا. قلد سترى معها في مرحبا. كذلك سترى معها في مرحبا. سنة 15 أم the day of the incident, he heard the sound of really strong bombing. the sound of an explosion woke Khaled up and he jolted out of bed. يعني مقفى من هولة في جار و ضخامة للنفجار. يرد شرافنوه رياني down outside. some of it even hit a tree in his garden. عندي حديقة صغيرة. an ID had exploded on the road near his house. Khaled didn't know it then, but he would later learn that the ID had hit a convoy of Marines traveling down the road. it had destroyed one of the Marines' Humvees. one of the Marines was now lying dead in the road. his body torn apart. and the remaining Marines in the convoy were mounting a response. the distinctive sound of American M16 Assault rifles coming from the road nearby. and the sound of Marines shouting. he heard the military shouting hysterically like they were shouting in a really strange behavior. and then all of a sudden Khaled heard what sounded like a grenade. going off inside a house right there in his neighborhood. and that was followed by the sound of more gunfire. Khaled looked out. there were Marines everywhere. they were on the streets on the rooftops. ours passed. Khaled and his family decided to flee to a safer part of town. they set off on foot carrying white flags so the Marines wouldn't shoot them. they got to a relative's house and hunkered down. as the day wore on, more family arrived. and word began to trickle in, but something horrible had happened at Khaled's sister Asma's house. and another house close by. the next morning Khaled woke up early. he headed to Asma's house to see what had happened. when Khaled got to the house, it was quiet. no one seemed to be home. as he walked inside, the first thing he saw was blood. there was so much blood, even the air smelled of it. there was blood on the walls and the floors and the furniture, even on the ceilings. and there were bloody drag marks leading out the door. but where was Khaled's family? where are they? what has happened? where did they go? and then someone came by, told Khaled, the Marines had taken all the bodies to the hospital. the bodies? Khaled took off running for the hospital. at some point, one of his cousins drove up, he said, jump in. and together, they drove the rest of the way. when Khaled got to the hospital, he found a crowd had gathered. people were walking in and out of a small air conditioned room that the hospital was using as a morgue. there was a nurse there holding a list of names. and they said, your relatives are all inside, you can go and identify them. the floor of the room was covered in bodies and body parts. some of the bodies were in body bags, others were in trash bags. they started opening one bag, then another, and another. this is my aunt Camisa, this is my uncle Hamid, this is Jheed, this is Rashid, this is Huda, they kept opening bags. this is Eunice, and his wife Aydah, and their children, Nur, Muhammad, Ibn, Aisha, Zaynab, and then, this is my sister, Asma, and this is Asma's husband, Walid, and Asma and Walid's four-year-old son, Abdelah. there were other bodies there too, people who weren't from Khalid's family, but who he knew, four brothers, Marwan, Qatan, Qafan, Jassib, Jassib, and Jamal. and five other men, Akmid, Akram, Khalid, Wajdi, and Muhammad. 24 bodies and all, 14 men, four women, and six children. The oldest was a 76-year-old grandfather, and the youngest was a three-year-old girl. The killings were gruesome, whole families had been nearly wiped out, and how they were killed also stood out. What do you notice was gunshots? He said that most of them are gunshots in the head or in the chest. Shots. Yes. They don't this way. Adults shot in the head. Children shot in the head. Khalid stood in the cold room, surrounded by the bodies of his family. He would go on to spend years wondering why. Why did this happen? He's actually devoted his life to answering that question. And now, I was wondering too. I've spent the past four years, along with the rest of the in-the-dark team, investigating the killings of Khalid's family and the others that day. A mass killing carried out by U.S. Marines over just a few hours in Haditha. This story would take us to 21 states and 3 continents. We would talk to hundreds of people, Iraqi civilians, Marines, eyewitnesses, experts. We would obtain thousands of pages of government documents. We would look at photos, videos, drone footage, reports, intelligence assessments, handwritten notes, records from the peculiar and secretive parallel justice system that handles crimes committed by American service members. We would even sue the U.S. military, all to find out what really happened that day in Haditha and why was no one punished for the killings. From the New Yorker, this is season three of In-the-Dark. Episode one, The Green Grass. In the days after the killings, Khalid walked around Haditha in a days. He just lost his sister, his sister's husband, his nephew, so many other family members. Khalid told me what those days were like. The word he used the most was shocked. Seeing his family dying like his whole family, he was shocked. Shocked when he saw the bodies of his family in the hospital. Shocked in the days that followed. But after a week of this, Khalid said, I woke up. He said that God gives some people like a hidden power to just act when something happened in these kind of situations. Khalid wanted to know why the Marines had killed his family. He wanted to know what had happened inside those houses. How the killings had happened. And he wanted the people responsible to be punished. An investigation, a prosecution, a punishment. The kinds of things that a person expects when their family is killed. What he wanted was justice. But Khalid said the Marines hadn't even come to his family to apologize. They actually hadn't said anything to him at all about the killings. It was like it hadn't happened. And so Khalid and some other town leaders in Haditha gathered at the town's central library. Local leaders were there in the city council. Khalid was actually a member. They came up with a list of demands. They wrote them down in the form of a letter. Someone in the group translated the letter into English. Now they needed to get that letter to the Marines. But going to the American base was extremely dangerous. And surgeons monitored the road to the base to see who was coming and going. And if they spotted an Iraqi civilian traveling there, sometimes a person would later end up to capitated on the bridge. Anybody who goes to the American base, it was basically like a suicide. But Khalid was desperate.
And so, eight days after the killings, he and the other men headed down that suicidal road to the American base to meet with the Marines. That's after the break. Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power and forces shaping our world. And Kenny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feet. Is Doge finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, internet fandom, investigations and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures and power plays driving today's biggest decisions. Un Kenny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. From Vanity Fair, I'm Mark Adouchi and I want to tell you about our new show Fair Game. On every episode of Fair Game, I'll sit down with a leading character in our culture, from the worlds of Hollywood, politics, style, Silicon Valley and beyond. Fair Game is a deep dive into some of the personalities that shape our world and the stories that you need to hear. Think everyone and everything that you'd read about in the pages of Vanity Fair. So join me, Mark Adouchi, on YouTube, VanityFair.com and wherever you listen to podcasts. It's all Fair Game. Hello. I want to introduce you to an American who is at the base when Khaled and the other Iraqi men arrived. His name is Dana Hyatt. Our producer Natalie Jablanski went to his house in Connecticut to talk to him. Nice to meet you, I'm Natalie. Dana Hyatt. Hyatt's now retired from the military. He'd served 28 years. I see some Marines logos here on some photos. There's a little mini museum there. Oh yeah. And then I thought school. Hyatt had kept a scrapbook, a photos of his type in Iraq. And he showed it to Natalie. I can go through some stuff if you want. Let's take a look. Looking through its pages, it's like a highlight reel. All the stereotypes the American military applied to Iraq during the war. You have the smiling Iraqi kids. You give up bubble gum, candy. The palm trees. This woman coming from the river area, palm fronds, the Marines, hobnobbing with tribal leaders. Shakes, shakes, shakes over there. The livestock in the streets. This guy is hurting his sheep out here, like biblical times, the houses, the way they look. And then there are the photos of zip tied detainees lying in the desert. Yeah. So stuff happened. In Haditha, Hyatt was what's called a civil affairs officer. His job was to build relationships with the civilians in town, win them over to the Marines side. What the military calls, hearts and minds. The hearts and minds, helping to make Haditha better, helping to improve their lives. When the Marines did something that harmed civilians, Hyatt's job was basically to paper it over. Like he'd hand out money to repair homes the Marines had damaged. Here you go. Here's 20 bucks. Here's $50. Here's $10. Whatever. It wasn't involved in the killings of college family, but he had seen some of their bodies. Hyatt had gone with other Marines to the hospital that night when the bodies were unloaded from Humvees and put in the makeshift morgue where college would later find them. What were you thinking of that point or what did you make of that? It just, I don't know, I mean, I was purposely not trying to think too much about it. I didn't want some of those visuals constantly being there later. Instead, Hyatt's focus was on managing the fallout. That's why he was at the hospital that night. I talked with the hospital personnel. I gave them my information, you know, because we figured there were going to be questions. They were going to be complaints. They were going to be all kinds of, you know, like what the hell happened, type things. Hyatt was right. There were questions. And now Hyatt found himself in a meeting with a group of Iraqis, including college, talking about precisely these as he put it, what the hell happened, type things. And then this is the city council meeting. This was because of the incident. Hyatt's scrapbook has some photos in the meeting. Yeah, there's quite a few people in the room. Yeah, I think you're probably looking at 20, 25 people in the room. Oh, wow. In the photos, you can see a group of Iraqi men crammed into a pretty small room, sitting scrunched up next to each other on couches. The mayor, this was another interpreter. You can see college sitting on one of those couches wearing a dark suit. Hyatt calls him the lawyer. There's the lawyer. On a little red stool were paper cups of tea that the Marines had set out. We were trying to be hospitable. Sitting in the corner and looking stern was a top Marine in the room, the head of the Marines in Haditha. His name was Jeffrey Chassani. Chassani was a lieutenant colonel. He was 41 years old. He was ambitious. He'd spent nearly half his life climbing the ranks of the Marine Corps and thought he might soon be promoted to Colonel. College remembers Chassani being fairly quiet in this meeting. He remembers Dana Hyatt doing most of the talking. But another Iraqi man we spoke with, the director of the hospital in Chassani, Dr. Alid El Obadi, recalls Chassani kicking the whole thing off. Velida, colonel Chassani. We know that he know everything. Chassani clearly knew that people had died that day, a lot of people. And according to Dr. El Obadi, he started with standard official speak, the kinds of things you say to try to smooth things over. "We are come here and we want to help you." We're here to help. This shouldn't affect the good relationship between us. And then Dr. El Obadi said, Chassani offered an explanation for what happened that day. How all those people ended up dead. In this explanation, as soon as Khaled and Dr. El Obadi heard it, they knew it wasn't true. Dr. El Obadi said, Chassani told them that the civilians had died because of an IED explosion and an ensuing firefight. In other words, it was the insurgents fault. He made it sound like Khaled's family just got caught in the middle of something. But Chassani had known since that very first night that civilians had been killed by his own Marines. Chassani would later admit that he'd heard from one of his captains that Marines had gone into people's houses and killed women and children inside. But rather than immediately report all these details up the chain of command or call for an investigation of a possible war crime, Chassani, according to two officers, had approved a report for his higher-ups that said that yes, civilians had died but that they had died in an IED explosion and in crossfire with enemy fighters. The report said that Marines had returned fire and that eight insurgents had been killed. The way this report described it, it didn't seem like the Marines had done anything wrong. Of course, Khaled had no way of knowing any of this. But sitting there in that meeting, one thing he did know for sure was that the story Chassani was telling him and the other town leaders was definitely not true. He knew that firsthand. He'd seen the bodies of his family members with his own eyes. He'd seen the bullet wounds in their heads. He'd gone into his sister Asuna's house. He'd seen the blood on the walls. He tried explaining all this to the Marines, to Chassani, and to Dana Hyatt. The man whose job it was to build relationships with the locals. Some of his family members were killed that day. And he's crying to me about it. I'm like, all right, but we lost the Marine that day, too. I'm sorry that Major was my, you know, and I'm sorry. Sorry that that happened, but we also lost the Marine that day. There was something else that Hyatt told Khaled at this meeting and in the weeks it followed. That Khaled's family, the people who died, weren't wholly innocent. And I said, you're family lived in a neighborhood that allowed this to happen. Like it's not just us, you guys, you guys allowed somebody to do this. Hyatt assumed, without any evidence, that Khaled's family probably saw the IED being planted in the road and didn't tell the Marines about it. And therefore, he felt like, yeah, I'm sorry, you're upset they were all killed, but whatever happened inside those houses, it's kind of their fault. I felt bad that it was his family that got killed, you know. But I also strongly felt that somehow they bore some responsibility for it. And I told them that. Khaled had come to this meeting looking for answers and some kind of justice. Instead, he was having to sit there and listen as his family members were being partly blamed for their own deaths. It would have been understandable if Khaled had just walked out of the meeting at that point. But he stayed. He still wanted to try to reason with the Americans. Khaled and the other people from town presented the Marines with the letter of demands they'd prepared. Dr. Elabati read it to me. In the morning of 19 November 2005, a painful distress has happened when an American soldier's heart executed three families with a number of universities. The letter called the events of November 19, a quote.
painful disaster, and a crime of war, a war crime, which could be never forgotten. The letter demanded that the military investigate what happened and punish the people responsible. The main point we want from him is to investigate about this accident and we told him that he must call and tell the his leaders about this. The Marine Corps has clear rules for what to do if you're a commander and you receive an allegation of a war crime. Once you get it, you can't ignore it. You have to report it up to your superiors and to military police and try to secure evidence. This isn't optional. It's required. The meeting ended. Chassani never launched an investigation. Chassani was later charged for failing to accurately report and thoroughly investigate the incident as a possible war crime. But the case against him was dismissed. We tried to talk to Chassani, a reporter Parker Jesko went to his house in California. Can I help you? Hey, there, Mr. Chassani. My name's Parker. I'm a radio reporter. I'm working at a project about the Iraq War. Chassani is no longer in the Marines. He works at a Christian college and lives down the street from it. Any comment on the Hadith incident and your regrets about how you handled it? No, I don't have a comment. Think it. I just don't have a comment. Yeah, sure. I understand. Hey. You have a nice evening, all right? You too. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. Have a good night. Chassani's lawyer later sent us an email. He wrote, "I trust you have never been in combat and thus have no sense of the incredible stress associated with combat or the fog of war that proceeds from that." Or the courage required to lead under such circumstances. As for what happened that day, Chassani's lawyer wrote, "The fact that civilians were killed during the course of an ambush initiated by the enemy from a location where civilians were located, a residential neighborhood, does not evidence a war crime, except perhaps on the part of the terrorists who initiated the attack. It's false to suggest otherwise." This whole thing, he said, was a quote, "non-story." [music] In Adita, the week's passed. The military paid the families of the victims some money, $2,500 for each person who died. The military calls these kinds of payments, condolence payments. The way Dana Hyatt saw it, giving the families this money was a big deal. He'd even put some photos of himself giving money to Khalid in his scrapbook. It's a strange scene. Hyatt in his uniform, Khalid in his suit. A stack of Chris $50 bills for Khalid to distribute to his family on a small table in front of them. Hyatt told us it was a lot of money for an Iraqi. Khalid didn't see it that way. And besides, money wasn't what he really wanted. He wanted an investigation, accountability, answers. But none of the Marines in Adita would give him those things. And that might have been where the story ended. Were it not for one more thing that Khalid did? [Music] From Vanity Fair, I'm Mark Aduchis. And I want to tell you about their new show Fair Game. On every episode of Fair Game, I'll sit down with a leading character in our culture. From the worlds of Hollywood, politics, style, Silicon Valley, and beyond. So join me, Mark Aduchis, on YouTube, VanityFair.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. It's all Fair Game. [Music] Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power, and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Will AI actually democratize American health care? Each week, wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, internet fandom, investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle going straight inside the priorities, pressures, and power plays driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. [Music] In the weeks after the killings, Khaled Salman received as a man he knew to make a video. The video was of the inside of his sister's house and the house of his other relatives nearby. The purpose of making it was to document the evidence that remained. [Music] To film everything that was inside the houses, the blood stains, and pieces of the bodies. So he wanted that to be on tape to show the truth of what happened. Making this video was risky. The Marines could easily consider a video like this to be insurgent propaganda. And that wasn't the sort of thing that the military dealt with nicely. It was a sort of thing that could lead to a person being arrested, chipped off to prison. Khaled gave the video to a neighbor who said he'd help get the story out. And the video ended up getting cut together with some other videos that people had found. The final video is about 22 minutes long. It opens with a half-second shot of some palm trees. And then it cuts abruptly to a scene in the hospital where the bodies of Khaled's family were taken. There's a close-up of a bloodied head on the floor. The camera zooms out and you can see more bodies and men crowding around them. It's chaotic. The men are here to retrieve the bodies of the family members, to load the bodies into cars and trucks, to take them to be prepared for burial. One man is crying and has blood on his face. Helps carry a body wrapped in a black bag out to a white truck. The camera goes in closer to the back of the truck. It shows several bodies, partly covered by black tarps or body beds. An older man moves one of the tarps to reveal a very young girl, maybe three years old, lying face up dead. She has dark hair, she's wearing a shirt with blue sleeves, her eyes are closed, her face is covered in blood, and her arm is draped across another body. At one point, a man says in Arabic. Are those kids the terrorists? Back inside the hospital room, a man stands over two of the bodies, holding his head in his hands, creeping. Another man walks over to one of the bodies, and appears to pick up an arm and hold it very briefly to his cheek. Then the video moves to the houses. A friend of college addresses the camera, pointing out the evidence. He says, "Come with me, come look at this." The camera pans, and you can see blood on the walls and the ceilings. Inside a bedroom of one of the houses, you can see blood on the bed and the bed frame, and shell casings on the ground. People in Haditha smuggled the video out to a human rights activist in Baghdad. That activist gave the video to an American journalist, a time magazine named Tim McGurk, who wrote a story about it, alleging that 24 civilians had been killed by US Marines. And the story blew up. Some are comparing the Haditha killings to the Vietnam massacre at me live. They actually went into the houses and killed women and children. Members of Congress vowed to look into what had happened. We will hold hearings and hold reviews, and there will be thorough oversight. Even President George W. Bush weighed in. The Haditha incident is under investigation. Obviously the allegations are very troubling for me, and equally troubling for our military, especially the Marine Corps. The US military ordered its own investigation into what happened in Haditha. And that first investigation would lead to more investigations, three of them and all. It would become one of the largest war crimes investigations in US history. Seemingly every day the case file would grow. There would be statements taken, forensic evidence gathered, cases built against the Marines responsible. Eventually, four Marines were charged with murder. They faced the possibility of life in prison. And Khaled Salman received thought he might finally get the justice he fought so long and so hard for. But that's not at all what happened. I first got interested in the Haditha case a few years ago when I was doing some research on war crimes committed by the US military. As a reporter, I spent a lot of time in civilian courtrooms. I've watched here.
red files, talked to lawyers and defendants, but war crimes are prosecuted in a different kind of system in the United States, the military justice system, this bizarre opaque acronym-laden world that exists mostly outside of public view. In other words, exactly the kind of world that interests me as an investigative reporter. And the Hadithic case in particular stood out to me because of a mystery at the center of it. Despite the fact that foreign Marines had been charged with murder, and in such a high profile case, truly one of the biggest stories out of the entire Iraq war, not a single one of those Marines ended up serving a day in prison. Over the years, every single one of the cases against the Marines collapsed. There was not a single criminal conviction for the killings. How did that happen? As I kept reading about Haditha, I got even more interested because I realized that what actually happened that day was also a mystery. The most basic facts of the day, who killed who and why and how were unclear. Depending on whose story you believed, the killings were a war crime, a murder, or they were legitimate combat action and the victims were collateral damage, or the killings were a tragic mistake, unintentional, sad, but not criminal. Basically the only thing that everyone could agree on was that 24 people had died and it was Marines who'd killed them. The Iraq war has been over for almost 13 years. Some people might say that what happened over there is old news. It's time to move on. But how can you move on from something that you never understood to begin with? College Salman received in particular was asking me not to move on, pleading with me really. And so, on this season of In the Dark, we are not moving on. We're going back to 2005 to figure out what really happened to College's family that day to investigate the Marines and what they did. And to find out why the military justice system never punished a single one of them for the killings. Coming up on this season of In the Dark. I remember I opened a home bee and I just see bodies stacked up, you know, and I opened another one same thing. I'm like, "Shit, you do, do you?" You and you, and you, they found it at each one to go inside the house. To me, they were really making vets. Were they 100% in making vets? I don't know. No, no, no. I'm not very surprised. She said it's insane. This is not what happened. I'm not interested in talking about that. I tried to move past all that, so no, thank you all for all that. Okay, guys, I have never had bigger news for you. I am for wreaking out this morning at 9.19 a.m. Central time. So, I said, holy shit, this is amazing. Could you zoom in, especially to the position of them? No trespassing violators will be shot, survivors will be shot again. You feel comfortable going in? Yeah. The sleeping cells, the militias and the ISIS, the IEDs, the mortars or rockets. So, can you keep us safe of all this? Of course. Did I think? I assumed it meant that he had fucking shot someone. So, he saw the Americans and then he just disappeared. We don't know what happened to him. You know, I don't know what's to be gained by this investigative journalism. Episode two of In The Dark is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or you can listen ad free at New Yorker.com. In The Dark is reported and produced by me, Madeline Baron, managing producer Samara Fremark, producers Natalie Gibonsky and Raymond Tunga Car and reporter Parker Jesko. In The Dark is edited by Catherine Winter and Willing Davidson, interpreting in Iraq by I Am Uthana, additional interpreting in translation by Ayah Al-Shakarchi. This episode was fact-checked by Lucy Croning and Lenea Feldman Emerson, original music by Alison Layton Brown, sound design and mix by John DeLore. Our theme is by Gary Meister. Our art is by Emiliano Ponzi, art direction by Nicholas Conrad and Aviva Michaelov, FOIA legal representation from the FOIA team at Lovie and Lovie, legal review by Fabio Bertone. In The Dark was created by American public media and is produced by the New Yorker. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild. The head of global audio for Conday Nast is Chris Bannon. The editor of The New Yorker is David Rundick. If you have comments or story tips, you can send them to us at
[email protected] and make sure to follow in The Dark wherever you get your podcasts. It's all Fair Game.
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