Will Murtha apologize? I doubt it, he has no honor. He should be removed from Congress.

Marine Leader Charged Over Haditha Is Innocent, Legal Group Says
By Fred Lucas
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
November 28, 2007

(CNSNews.com) - High-ranking government officials in the United States pre-judged the criminal case against Marines involved in the 2005 Haditha incident in Iraq, said the Thomas More Law Center, which is co-defending the commanding officer charged in the case.

U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani was arraigned Nov. 17 at Camp Pendleton on charges of dereliction of duty and violation of a lawful order for allegedly failing to investigate the conduct of four Marines under his command after a Nov. 19, 2005 house-to-house battle in Haditha.

In that battle, 24 Iraqis were killed, 15 of whom allegedly were noncombatant civilians. (See Haditha Investigation Timeline)

The Thomas More Law Center, a conservative group, is joining Chessani's military legal defense team for his trial, which starts in April 2008. Chessani is the highest ranking official charged in the case.

The law center plans to make motions to dismiss the charges against Chessani on grounds of "unlawful command influence," because high-ranking government officials pressed the case early before all the facts were in, said Brian Rooney, a spokesman for the group.

The center announced its involvement in the case as a leaked government report seemed to indicate weaknesses in the prosecution's case.

Military prosecutors have tried to make the case that the soldiers - supposedly motivated by revenge - intended to kill the civilians after a roadside bomb killed one Marine and injured two others.

However, according to a 37-page military assessment recently obtained by Newsweek , the Haditha case is unraveling. The report, by investigator Lt. Col. Paul Ware, said, "The evidence is contradictory, the forensic analysis is limited, and almost all the witnesses have an obvious bias or prejudice."

While civilians were killed in Haditha, insurgent fighters in Iraq have frequently hidden among civilians and used them as shields, which makes the case for a revenge killing difficult to prove.

Meanwhile, all charges have been dropped against two of the Marines in the case, while a third faces court martial for involuntary manslaughter, a drop from the original murder indictment against him. Ware reportedly suggested a similar reduction in the charges against the fourth shooter.

Chessani was charged for dereliction of duty and violation of a lawful order. Specifically, prosecutors accuse him of failure to report or investigate the killings of Iraqi civilians, which would be a violation of war by Marines under his command. He faces up to 30 months in prison and dishonorable discharge from the Marines, if convicted.

In a sworn statement in August 2006, Chessani said the killing of civilians was unfortunate but he did not consider the shooting incident to be out of the ordinary or beyond routine combat.

It is a military order that commanders report to their superiors any time their subordinates violate the laws of war.

Chessani reported the incident on the day it happened, but prosecutors claim he did not report it to officials high enough in the chain of command, Rooney said. Further, it happened during combat and thus was not a violation of war, said Rooney.

Further, Rooney said, Chessani did a preliminary investigation by going to the scene and interviewing the soldiers about what happened. This should have met the legal requirements, Rooney said, but he again blames the media and politicians for making this a "political prosecution."

The Thomas More Law Center contends that previous reports by Army Gen. Eldon Bargewell and Army Col. Gregory Watt from last year back up the conclusion of the 37-page report leaked to Newsweek.

"A U.S. Army colonel and an Army general conducted two separate investigations and came to the same conclusion: There was no 'massacre' and no 'cover-up,'" said the law center's president, Richard Thompson, in a statement.

"Yet the government still pursued a multi-million dollar investigation in order to appease an anti-war politician and the blame-America-first media. Now we have the absurd situation of Lt. Col. Chessani being charged with failing to report and investigate a crime that never occurred," Thompson added.

The "anti-war politician" referred to by Thompson is Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), a retired Marine colonel who became a vocal critic of the Iraq war in 2005.

In May 2006, Murtha said at a Capitol Hill press conference: "There was no firefight. There was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

As chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and the Subcommittee on Defense, Murtha wields power over defense spending and that power potentially could influence the investigation and case against Ware, according to the law center.

In addition to Murtha, the law center's legal motions name other officials who supposedly biased the case, including Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) who, in 2006, was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and vowed to hold hearings on the matter; Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), who compared Haditha to the My Lai massacre of Vietnam; and U.S. Navy Secretary Donald Winter, who also made comments that potentially could pre-judge the case, said Rooney.

"They all showed a bias that these men were guilty before an investigation was complete," Rooney told Cybercast News Service .

"It's frustrating to me, as a former Marine, that a lot of reporters, media types, and politicians have the worldview from the 1960s that never changed. They wanted to make this the new My Lai because they have tried from the beginning to make this the new Vietnam," he said.

In a speech given on the House floor last June, Rangel repeated Murtha's view that the soldiers might have snapped under pressure, "committing atrocities they would never have otherwise committed."

Rangel also said: "The verdict is already in; and it is not in the U.S.'s favor. While Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assures us that 99.9 percent of our servicemen and women are behaving humanely, the majority of the Iraqis confess no surprise at learning about the war crimes of the U.S. soldiers."

Rangel was also referring to Time magazine, which broke the story of the Haditha incident and referred to it as "massacring innocent civilians."

A spokesman from Murtha's office could not be reached for comment on this story, nor could a spokesman from Warner's office.

It was the Time story that prompted the investigation in mid-2006. By that point, the forensic and ballistic evidence was scant and autopsies weren't obtainable, according to the military report in Newsweek. Prosecutors relied on the word of two other Marines who got an immunity deal, but Ware writes in the report that these men have "low credibility."