Laurence Vance
LRC Blog
March 20, 2012

Remember the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha? I didn’t think so. I had completely forgotten about it also. A few months ago, a reporter for the New York Times found 400 pages of interrogations along with reams of other classified documents in a junkyard outside Baghdad. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the United States military in Iraq, said that many of the documents remained classified and should have been destroyed. Here is one reason why.

Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.” According to other testimony: “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.”

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