weeen

During the next several hours, Marines killed twenty-four Iraqi men, women, and children. Near the site of the explosion, they shot five men who had been driving to a college in Baghdad. They entered three nearby homes and killed nearly everyone inside. The youngest victim was a three-year-old girl. The oldest was a seventy-six-year-old man. The Marines would later claim that they were fighting insurgents that day, but the dead were all civilians.

After the killing was over, two other Marines set off to document the aftermath. Lance Corporal Ryan Briones brought his Olympus digital camera. Lance Corporal Andrew Wright had a red Sharpie marker.

Briones and Wright went from site to site, marking bodies with numbers and then photographing them. Other Marines, including one who worked in intelligence, also photographed the scene. By the time they were done, they had made a collection of photographs that would be the most powerful evidence against their fellow-Marines.

In an oral-history interview for the Marine Corps, in 2014, General Michael Hagee, who was the commandant of the Marine Corps at the time of the Haditha killings, bragged about keeping the Haditha photos secret.

“The press never got them, unlike Abu Ghraib,” Hagee said.

The interviewer, Fred Allison, a Marine Corps historian, interjected, “The pictures. They got the pictures. That was what was so bad about Abu Ghraib.”

“Yes,” Hagee replied. “And I learned from that.” He said, “Those pictures today have still not been seen. And so, I’m quite proud of that.”