BROOKE GLADSTONE:
War stories can burnish a nation’s self-image - lots of World War II battles come to mind – or tarnish it, as in the My Lai massacre of civilians by American soldiers in Vietnam 40 years ago. The war in Iraq also yields stories. One of the most damaging involves a reported massacre in the town of Haditha in the fall of 2005. In fact, what happened there has been compared often in the media to My Lai.

In Haditha, the story goes, after a Marine lance corporal was killed by a roadside bomb, his comrades went on a rampage. Representative John Murtha, Pennsylvania Democrat and Vietnam vet, publicly condemned the incident as a massacre of two dozen men, women and children in their homes.

In December 2006, the Marine Corps filed charges against eight Marines, one of the most significant criminal cases against U.S. troops during this war. Later, eyewitnesses and video evidence indicated that there was, in fact, significant insurgent activity that day and small arms fire was directed at the Marines from some houses.

On Tuesday, the PBS documentary series Frontline takes a closer look at the deaths of those civilians. Were they killed in revenge or were they, in reality, casualties of the rules of engagement?

Arun Rath wrote, directed and produced the hour, called Rules of Engagement. He says that the first military press release about the incident claimed that many of those civilians were killed by that roadside bomb. And that’s how it was reported, at first.
ARUN RATH:
There was a gentleman in Haditha who videotaped much of the aftermath and decided that he was going to get the real story of this out. He went to Time magazine’s Baghdad correspondent, Tim McGurk, gave him the videotape. McGurk was shocked and horrified. It is horrible. You see bodies of dead women and children that had been killed by grenades and by rifle fire.

You know, he went back then and looked at the original Marine press release which claimed all these people had been killed by a roadside bomb and sort of put two and two together and thought, well, these people are actually, they're in their pajamas. You know, Iraqis don't wander around in their pajamas early in the morning. There’s something here which is not quite right. And the people who had given him the tape told him, no, it was Marines who had done this.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
How did the Marines react to McGurk’s story?
ARUN RATH:
Well, the initial Marine that Tim McGurk talked to essentially kind of blew him off. Said, I can't believe you’re buying this. This is clearly al Qaeda in Iraq propaganda. But, you know, come on out here and we'll give you a presentation about what actually happened that day.

McGurk did not go to Haditha. His editor didn't feel it was safe enough to go. So he went to a commander in Baghdad and took this tape to him and took some of the interviews that he'd done over the phone with Iraqis from Haditha. And they said, yeah, this seems like it’s enough for an investigation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And then McGurk wrote his story?
ARUN RATH:
Yeah. McGurk’s piece came out in March of 2006. And the initial story that McGurk wrote, which contains all these basic facts, the accusations of execution-style killings, etcetera, did not get very much attention from the rest of the media when it first came out.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Until Representative John Murtha picked it up.
ARUN RATH:
He did, and that was in June of 2006 at a press conference where at the end of a long litany of complaints about how the war was going in Iraq he let drop this line about, you know, what had happened in Haditha. And he said it was actually much worse than it was reported in Time magazine - they killed these people in cold blood, that there was no firefight that day and that the investigation will reveal that.

That was when people really started to take notice. Other papers picked up on the story and all these comparisons started to fly around. Murtha himself really picked it up at that point and went on all the various, you know, Sunday morning shows and repeated this charge over and over again.

You know, he was doing this in the context of trying to convince the administration and America that we needed to bring U.S. forces home. You know, this is the sort of pressure that our forces were under where it was driving them to basically comment war crimes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So do you have a problem with the way that the media portrayed the incident? I mean, soldiers were deeply angered by the death of their beloved Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas. They did kick down doors. They did shoot women and children and elderly people. Right?
ARUN RATH:
The complaints that I've heard from the Marines who were very angry about how this has played out in the media have been a couple of things. One is that there wasn't enough vetting of what Murtha was saying at the time. I mean, it’s a difficult thing to do, because Murtha, you know, he’s a former Marine. Obviously he has connections to intelligence, to the military. He’s citing his own sources saying that, so you can understand why that would be a big deal to reporters to have this guy who is a Vietnam veteran, a former Marine himself.

The bigger complaint that I think they have is the subsequent attention that the media devoted to the story since the initial charges started to echo around and the sort of coverage there’s been of the legal proceedings since then.

And, as we've seen, a lot of the charges have been dismissed, have been reduced. In the case of one of the Marines who supposedly executed several Iraqis in cold blood, the charges against him have been completely dismissed. As far as the courts are concerned, he is not guilty.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So you buy the military’s complaint that the media who were so quick to accuse were not willing to hang around for the real investigation.
ARUN RATH:
If you do a Nexus search and look at the coverage of Haditha back when the charges were first announced, even before that, when Murtha was making the rounds on the talk shows, there definitely was a lot more coverage of the case than there was as these details have come out in dribs and drabs over the course of the hearings, which have largely been in the Marines’ favor.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So it seems like what you've got here is your classic first draft of history situation. You have the initial reports in the media. You don't have very many follow-up reports except perhaps this documentary of yours. Is there any chance that we'll ever think of Haditha as anything other than an act of revenge, a massacre?
ARUN RATH:
I think it’s going to be difficult to really erase that notion. And we may get there to a certain extent, I think, in America. There are a lot of people who are very passionate about this cause with the Marines, so there are a lot of military bloggers and people who follow this story. Within those communities they reported a lot of the stuff that we've just talked about. And, you know, hopefully with this film, more people will be aware of that.

I think that the bigger damage is likely to be outside our borders. The Iraqis that we spoke to, I told them about what had happened with these trials and how the charges had gradually been diminished bit by bit. And, not surprisingly, they were very cynical about it. They figured, well, this is the Marines judging the Marines. And especially given all the preexisting P.R. problems that have to do with this war, it’s going to be very hard for people not to associate Haditha with a massacre by Marines in the rest of the world, and especially in the Arab world.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
But is it fundamentally wrong when the rules of engagement that currently govern the behavior of American soldiers in Iraq creates an environment where so many civilians can be killed? Maybe the first draft is not so wrong after all.
ARUN RATH:
Well, I mean, I think we can certainly say wrong in certain crucial aspects of it. But you get to an interesting point. The defense’s argument there is at least a certain amount of confusion over the rules of engagement, which is leading to these situations, not that the Marines themselves exercised poor judgment.

They had sent in this unit who had been in Fallujah. They were considered a blunt-force instrument. This is how they clear houses. You don't distinguish friendlies from foes. When a house is declared hostile, you clear the house. That’s blunt force.

If you put a blunt-force instrument into a situation like that where it’s more complicated, where civilians are blended in with the insurgents, civilians are going to die.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Arun, thank you very much.
ARUN RATH:
My pleasure, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Arun Rath is the director, writer and producer of the Frontline documentary Rules of Engagement that premieres on PBS stations on Tuesday.