The military’s initial press release claimed that Terrazas and 15 civilians were killed by the bomb

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http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid56041.aspx

Iraq’s My Lai?
Looking at Haditha
By MIKE MILIARD
February 12, 2008 12:19:46 PM


The morning after watching the Frontline documentary Rules of Engagement (WGBH, February 19 at 9 pm) — which investigates the 2005 massacre of two dozen men, women, and children in Haditha, Iraq — I read in a BBC report that “an Iraqi couple and their son have been killed when US soldiers stormed a tiny one-room house north of Baghdad. . . . at least one of the couple’s daughters was also wounded in the raid.”

Whatever overdue and probably tentative reduction of violence may have been accomplished so far by the Bush “surge,” this much is true: five years after the first bombs fell on Baghdad, the fog of war still roils thick in Iraq.

The footage in this documentary is some rough stuff. Blood-spattered walls. The dead splayed awkwardly on the floor or wrapped in rugs as their relatives keen and cry. Iraqi children with vacant eyes recounting in affectless monotone what it’s like to see a grenade explode and kill one’s family in their home. But for all the horror made explicit here, the truth about what happened on November 19, 2005, is anything but clear. Frontline does its best to untangle the series of events, starting with the death that morning of Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas by a roadside IED and the response of his unit, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. Beyond that, there are few hard facts we can glean from that day.



The military’s initial press release claimed that Terrazas and 15 civilians were killed by the bomb, and that eight insurgents were cut down after the Marines returned fire. But Time reporter Tim McGirk heard different. Four months to the day after to the blast, he wrote that “the civilians who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside bomb but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children.”