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- [00:01]
Madelyn
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds.
- [00:14]
Samara Freemark
Visit progressive.com to see if you could.
- [00:16]
Madelyn
Save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [00:31]
Samara Freemark
Hey, it's Madelyn. Since season three came out, we've gotten a lot of questions from listeners about the season. So we wanted to come to you today to answer some of these questions. I'm here with Samara Freemark, managing producer for in the Dark.
- [00:42]
Madelyn
Hey, Madeline. I am excited to be here and thanks to everyone who wrote in. We read all of your questions and we're gonna try to answer as many of them as we can today. We're also gonna be bringing in some other members of the in the Dark team to help us out on some of these. So let's dive in. Madeline, I wanted to start with a question about what it was like to report this season. This question comes from a listener named Stacy and she writes. As a former journalist, I was astounded by your willingness to plunge into reporting on the military as the barriers and insular culture seem impenetrable to me. How did you find reporting on the military different from the previous long form projects you've completed?
- [01:22]
Samara Freemark
Yeah, it is such a good question. This was very different. You know, every time we go into some new in depth story, we are in a way entering a different world. The world of the military is complicated and so we've gotta do a lot of work to have it make some sense to us. You know, this could be everything from there's a ton of acronyms in the military that we don't understand as outsiders. So even just reading a simple document is a little bit challenging. Then there's cultural things you need to understand, then there are structural things you have to understand as well. And you know, all of this when you start out is relatively unfamiliar to you and so that can be daunting at first. But as a reporter, you know, this is one of the main skills I think of being a reporter is the ability to quickly immerse yourself and try to understand a world that you don't belong to. I mean, that is the fundamental task of reporting. And that's also, you know, when something's more complicated like this, like the military. That's why it took four years, or one of the reasons, I guess, why it took four years is to just feel confident that we really could understand as best we could as outsiders. This this culture that we are definitely not a part of.
- [02:29]
Madelyn
Yeah, we did get a lot of people, a lot of other journalists actually saying things to us when we started this reporting. Like, no one's gonna talk to you. Like, this is a brotherhood. This is like a very insular culture, and you are not gonna have any luck actually getting people to talk to you. And that was not actually our experience. We ended up actually talking to literally dozens. And I think a lot of that success had to do with the particular way we did the reporting for this season.
- [03:00]
Samara Freemark
Yeah, I mean, what we do, and this is not a new thing that we do. This is how we conduct our work. We do a lot of going to people's houses and just knocking on their doors. And this is something that has worked really well for us. We show up, we introduce ourselves, we see if people want to talk or not. And I mean, this is a very old school approach to journalism, Just one that is increasingly, I think, uncommon. It's far more common now perhaps to get a text from a journalist or something like that. So we did get a ton of questions about this. We're gonna bring in a couple members of our team who did a lot of the door knocking for this season all over the country. To help answer your questions about door knocking, we have our producer, Natalie Jablonski. She's in the studio right now with Samara. Hi, Natalie.
- [03:50]
Natalie Jablonski
Hello, Samara. Hi, Madeline.
- [03:52]
Samara Freemark
And our reporter, Parker Yesko, who is calling in now. Hey, Parker.
- [03:57]
Parker Yesko
Hey, guys.
- [03:59]
Madelyn
Parker and Natalie, you two have done a ton of door knocking. You have knocked on so many doors.
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Natalie Jablonski
We've knocked on doors. We've traversed the nation's back roads.
- [04:09]
Madelyn
You have, I think you've knocked on doors in, like, dozens of states, so many cities and unincorporated areas. You have a ton of experience with it. And so I thought you guys would be great people to talk about this. And I want to start with a question we have from a listener. A pretty simple question, but a common one. Was it scary? Was it scary going to some of these veterans homes? He had this, like, Marines placard that said, if you come on this property, I have been trained to kill you. Consider this your warning. In negotiation, no trespassing. Violators will be shot, survivors will be shot again.
- [04:50]
Natalie Jablonski
You feel comfortable going in? Yeah, I get this. I mean, I get this question pretty often from my friends and family. And was it scary? I mean, a little more like. More just like uncomfortable or like strange? You know, you're walking up to someone's door, you don't know what to expect. They're not expecting you. Like, it's just. It's like a strange interaction to have. What do you think, Parker?
- [05:21]
Parker Yesko
Yeah, I wouldn't describe it as super scary. We've been doing this type of reporting for a long time now, and we sort of know how to do it safely or as safely as you can. We, like, go in pairs. We don't knock too close to sundown or after dark. We always use location sharing on our phone so people can see where we are and if we're like, moving anywhere and. And we try and just be as friendly and un intimidating as possible when we show up at people's doors unannounced, you know, so there's some risk involved, obviously, in, like, showing up, but the benefits are pretty tremendous. I mean, it's like, it's just very effective. It's way more effective to show up at someone's door and say, you know, I'm here and I'm interested in whatever it is that you have to tell than sitting in your home or your studio and trying to call them. We've just like, found over the years that, that it's hard to find working numbers. People never, ever answer their phone. And if you show up and you tell them you want to talk and hear whatever it is they have to say, people are shockingly willing to just have you hang around for a couple hours and hear their stories.
- [06:36]
Madelyn
Right.
- [06:37]
Natalie Jablonski
It is pretty amazing once you get over that initial just strangeness of just being a stranger and arriving at someone's door and explaining who you are. It's really gratifying how many people are actually welcoming and game to talk to you. They want to talk to you. I mean, I think there's just something really more compelling about meeting face to face, putting your face in front of someone and just being like, I'm a person. I'm trying to talk with you. That human interaction is pretty compelling.
- [07:12]
Parker Yesko
It's also way more interesting at a personal level. I'd much rather drive around to places in America that I haven't seen before than sit in my office and call people all day.
- [07:23]
Samara Freemark
For sure.
- [07:24]
Natalie Jablonski
Right. We've gone on a lot of. A lot of field reporting adventures, all of us, where we're just, you know, in a small town that we've just never been in before. And, like, you might not have a reason to go there except that you're trying to talk to this, like, really important person or a sprawling suburb of.
- [07:42]
Samara Freemark
A large American city where we're just circling for days, trying to wait for someone to be home, this field reporting is like, moments of great interest, surrounded by a lot of just wrong address. You know, we've got three hours to kill here. Natalie and I spent a lot of time wandering around Goodwill's, just killing time.
- [08:06]
Madelyn
Hanging out in McDonald's, having coffee.
- [08:09]
Samara Freemark
We love McDonald's hang Walmart parking lot.
- [08:13]
Natalie Jablonski
We have had some, like, travails. Like, Parker and I once got a flat tire in the middle of the desert.
- [08:18]
Madelyn
Almost got struck by lightning, didn't you guys? I think we maybe did two phenomena.
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Samara Freemark
I think we did.
- [08:24]
Madelyn
Yeah.
- [08:25]
Samara Freemark
That's. The jury's out on the. It was close. I mean, a tree fell on our car that was struck by lightning. That is a thing that happened to me and Parker, forever changing my relationship with the sky. But, yeah, I mean, I think the reason that we do all of this stuff is that, you know, it works. And, you know, I think that this kind of reporting, it's strange. Sometimes it's awkward for maybe everybody involved at first, but it tends to then not be awkward. I mean, the other thing is, like, it's awkward maybe a little bit, but then you're in it with people, and it's like you've been there for days, and you get to that surprisingly quickly. I mean, the amount of times we go from, like, wait, who are you? To, you know, five minutes later, we're just, like, deep in it, and we're sitting in someone's living room. It happens more often than not.
- [09:14]
Madelyn
There are some moments in the podcast where we have to ask some really pointed questions at people's doors. And I'm thinking specifically about the interview that Natalie and Parker, you guys did with Steven Tatum. This is the Marine who, according to ncis, admitted to knowingly shooting women and children. And that was one of the doors that you guys knocked on, and you did talk to Tatum.
- [09:37]
Natalie Jablonski
Hey, Natalie.
- [09:38]
Samara Freemark
Hello.
- [09:38]
Parker Yesko
My name's Parker. This is Natalie. We're with radio reporters.
- [09:41]
Madelyn
We had one listener who did write in expressing a bit of discomfort with this moment where you are asking him these really intense questions as you were standing there in front of him.
- [09:50]
Parker Yesko
Okay, there's just one thing we need to make sure we ask you while we're here.
- [09:54]
Samara Freemark
I've already told you everything you're gonna.
- [09:55]
Parker Yesko
Get, which is that we've read your statements to investigators where you said you saw women and children in those rooms and you shot them anyway.
- [10:06]
Madelyn
Can you guys talk a bit more about this moment?
- [10:09]
Natalie Jablonski
Yeah, I mean, we had prepared a lot for this interview. We had a lot of questions. We Wanted to ask him, and we were hoping to sit down and talk with him for many hours, but we also were prepared for a situation where, like, he didn't want to talk. You know, he'd obviously been, like, very involved in these shootings, and so we knew that he might not want to talk. So we were kind of prepared for both scenarios.
- [10:34]
Parker Yesko
Yeah. And I think, you know, according to NCIS records, Tatum had told investigators all sorts of damning things that we needed to ask him about and that we intended to publish. And so I think that, like, going in, we prepared for a bunch of ways this could have gone, but, like, no matter what happened, we knew that we needed to give him a chance to address these really serious things we were gonna publish. It became clear very quickly that he wasn't gonna invite us in and talk to us for several hours. And so we just had to get the question in that we needed to ask.
- [11:13]
Samara Freemark
Yeah. And it's important to ask these questions and give people an opportunity to respond. I mean, we want to know what he's going to say in response to these questions. I mean, these questions get at the core of what took place.
- [11:49]
Madelyn
You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with.
- [11:54]
Parker Yesko
People you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or.
- [11:58]
Madelyn
Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather.
- [12:02]
Parker Yesko
Of Artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton, or some.
- [12:05]
Madelyn
Of my extraordinarily well informed colleagues at the New Yorker.
- [12:09]
Parker Yesko
So join us every week on the.
- [12:10]
Madelyn
New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [12:29]
Samara Freemark
We had several people write in with questions about how we go about conducting these interviews about really intense, traumatic things. And especially we got some questions about how we handle some of these interviews where we have some former Marines who may have PTSD or other mental health issues and how we think about all of that.
- [12:51]
Natalie Jablonski
Yeah, we did try to take care with that because, you know, we're obviously trying to talk to people about what's often an extremely intense time of their lives. And I think a lot of it comes down to, like, looking for, just, like, paying attention to and respecting if someone is in distress or telling us that they don't want to talk about something, telling us that it's too traumatic. We're on the lookout for that. And, you know, we. We want to respect that.
- [13:17]
Samara Freemark
Yeah. We don't want to cause anybody any harm. Right, sure. In the course of our work, and at the same time, we do have questions that are fair to ask, and so we're just kind of always walking this balance.
- [13:29]
Natalie Jablonski
Yeah. And I mean, I think it's maybe also worth pointing out that, like, PTSD or something or this, you know, this time being too traumatic was a reason that a lot of people gave for not talking to us and that, you know, that's, of course, like, we have to respect that. Like, I don't wanna talk about it. It's too traumatic. That's fine. Like we're hearing that.
- [13:47]
Parker Yesko
Yeah. I think in my experience of people I feel like Marines that I did interview, I think every interview I left where I actually talked to someone, like sat down and we talked. I did not get the sense that talking about these events or even that time in their life made anything worse. And many of them said it actually felt good to talk about.
- [14:09]
Samara Freemark
Of course, when we're talking about these questions of reporting on trauma, where all of these questions became much more intense. Came to when we went to Iraq and interviewed people who saw nearly their entire families killed that day. And, you know, we thought a lot, in doing all of this reporting and especially reporting in Iraq, about how to best conduct this reporting. We consulted Best practices for reporting on trauma. There's a great group that's called the DART center for Journalism and Trauma that specializes in these issues. We looked at their best practices, their guidelines. At one point, Samara and I were even dealing with a particularly challenging situation that we found ourselves in involving how to communicate respectfully, things to the family of Mamdu Hamid, the man. The family of the man who went missing for years. And so we consulted with the head of DART Center, a man named Bruce Shapiro, and got his advice. You know, with all of this, we're taking such great care because, yes, we want to do our work, but no, we do not want to. To cause any kind of undue harm or pain to anybody that we're talking to. A lot of this is just when we're dealing with talking to someone who's vulnerable in some way. A lot of the way that I think about it is just making sure that they always feel like they are making decisions for themselves, that they're in charge of what they're choosing to do. And so we're really clear about this is what an interview is. This is how I'm thinking it can go. But you can stop the interview at any time. You know, you can take a break at any time. On the other hand, you know, you don't want to deny agency to people. You don't want to say, well, this is going to be too hard for you. So therefore, I'm not even going to Talk to you. The reality of this story was that it was very difficult for the survivors to talk to us, and yet the survivors really wanted to talk to us, and they knew it was going to be hard. They talked about that with us. But it was really important to them to tell their stories.
- [16:18]
Madelyn
Yeah. And I think we wanted to show some of that difficulty. Like, we did not wanna hide the fact that these were difficult interviews. And there's one moment in particular that really stands out in my mind for this. This is a moment that happens in episode seven. And we've gotten a lot of questions about this moment. It stood out to a lot of listeners. And this is when Madeline, you and I were talking to Najla and Ehab. These were the widows of two of the brothers who were killed that day. And this moment comes when were telling them what the investigating officer whose name was Paul Ware, had said about their testimony, basically that their testimony wasn't credible. And in that particular moment, like, hearing this, Najla gets extremely emotional. And actually, not just Najla, but our interpreter, whose name is Aya Muthana. It's this moment right here.
- [17:48]
Natalie Jablonski
I will probably listen to that later.
- [17:51]
Samara Freemark
On and translate it for you. They are heart. We are all heartbroken right now. A lot of listeners have written to us about this moment in particular, out of everything that they heard in the series, both this choice that we made to let Najla's. What she was saying, her tape play as long as it did, uninterrupted, untranslated. And the choice to show our interpreter Aya's reaction to what Najla was saying.
- [18:29]
Madelyn
Yeah, this was a moment that our whole team talked about and thought about a lot. Like, we went back and forth on this many times because the question was, like, how long can you expect a listener who doesn't speak Arabic to listen to tape they don't understand without it feeling confusing or almost unmooring? Like, where's this going? What is happening here? So you don't want to alienate the listener. But I felt really strongly that I wanted to let this scene play noticeably long, like, way longer than is normal. I wanted it to almost be possibly a little uncomfortable for the listener. And part of that is because I think for me, and I think for most people, there's a huge amount of information just in how Najla is speaking. Like, there's so much emotional content in her voice, even if you can't understand her words. You know so much from just listening to her voice there, even without any translation. And then there was also kind of this almost editorial point that I think that decision made. And it was related to the fact that the survivors of these killings have felt for years like their voices were in some ways taken away from them. Like they were never able to fully tell their stories. Even their names didn't appear at trial. Their testimony was discounted. And this decision to let Najla's tape play to the listener uninterrupted and to almost force the listener to listen to this woman's voice, to me, felt like a statement of, like, we are literally allowing this woman to have a voice to. To the public that maybe she felt like she didn't have before.
- [20:15]
Samara Freemark
And then what about this decision to play our interpreter's reaction to this? I mean, Aya breaks down crying in this moment.
- [20:25]
Madelyn
Yeah. This is also something that's really stood out to listeners. Cause, again, I think it's something you often don't hear when you're listening to audio or video stuff that involves translation. We tend to want to think of the interpreter as a. Almost a disembodied role. And I think for us, for starters, it's because it's what really happened. Right. Like, that was what happened in that moment.
- [20:48]
Samara Freemark
That's why you don't hear. I mean, of course, later we find out what Najla said, and we tell you that in the podcast. But in that moment, we are in the same position as the listener. We don't know, because I didn't know either, could not translate it psychologically, emotionally. She couldn't do it in that moment.
- [21:04]
Madelyn
Right. And we wanted to show the listener what that moment was like. We didn't want to clean it up and sterilize it and turn it into just a literal representation of what she was saying. So that was definitely part of it. Another part of it is that Aya herself, and we didn't get into this in the podcast, but Aya has her own story of war. And I think her reaction clearly is informed by that. Like, Aya was a child when the Americans invaded Iraq. She's from Baghdad. She lived through the invasion. She talked to us a lot. Again, this is not in the podcast, but, you know, she talked to us a lot about hiding from bombings, you know, cowering with her mother with the windows taped up. So she has been herself traumatized by war. And I think that helps explain part of her reaction. But I think also, to me, it felt like showing her reaction was cracking a little bit of a door open to the experience of other Iraqis, too. Like, this story is not just about the family members of the, you know, 25 people who died that day. It's also about what it means to live through war. And I think a lot of Iraqis have very similar stories. And I think letting. Letting Aya have that moment and showing that moment was a way to get at that larger experience.
- [22:49]
Samara Freemark
So we have another question here. This one is from a listener named Jen, and it's about the photos. So these were the photos that were taken by Marines after the killings, the ones that the commandant of the Marine Corps bragged about keeping from the public.
- [23:02]
Madelyn
Jen wrote in to us. To me, one of the main accomplishments of the podcast is humanizing the Iraqis as a counter to the way the US Military at so many levels dehumanized them. What went into your decision to so graphically discuss and then actually publicly post the photos? They were incredibly powerful and humanizing. And I'm sure this decision was weighed heavily by your team.
- [23:24]
Samara Freemark
Yeah, this was a really challenging decision for us to make and one that we took really seriously. We had a lot of discussions on the team, amongst ourselves and with our editors as well at the New Yorker. And, you know, what we wanted to do. The reason why we wanted to publish some of these photos was because we felt that they were journalistically important. And honestly, they were also historically important. They told the viewer something. What we didn't wanna do, though, is to just publish graphic photos for graphic photo's sake. And, you know, another thing that we that was important to us was to involve the survivors in making this decision. You know, this is a unique situation where we had, as you hear in the podcast, the surviv helping us get the photos by signing a form that we submitted as part of our lawsuit saying that they wanted us to have the photos of their dead loved ones. And also given the fact that in this situation, over the years, time and time again, the survivors described to us feeling, you know, pushed to the side by the US government, feeling left out, not knowing what was going on. So the last thing we wanted to do was to just do that again. So where we landed was that we only wanted to publish photos where we had the permission of the surviving family members of the people depicted in those photos. And we wanted to publish the photos that we thought were journalistically important, that had information that the public had to write and should know. I mean, one of the important pieces of this story were what those photos showed, not just at a visceral, emotional level, but what they showed forensically about what happened that Day. I mean, these photos were evidence in a criminal case. And one of the people on our team who did a lot of that work was our producer, Raymond Tangakar. So I thought we could call in Raymond and talk to him a little bit about this forensic aspect of the work. Raymond, are you there?
- [25:13]
Raymond Tangakar
I am. Hi, Madeleine.
- [25:15]
Samara Freemark
Hi. Great to see you. Raymond, can you talk about. I know you played a big role in this, all the work that went into understanding the forensic evidence and give us a sense of, you know, what kind of questions we were trying to answer.
- [25:27]
Raymond Tangakar
Yeah, sure. I mean, so we wanted a detailed accounting of the events leading up to the killings. And this was important for a number of reasons. I mean, we knew that it was important to the survivors, but also it was important to assessing the claims of the Marines, you know, especially this defense from some of them, that they had thought that they were engaging insurgents.
- [25:46]
Samara Freemark
Right. That the people they were killing were the enemy in some way.
- [25:49]
Raymond Tangakar
Right. And so, you know, we started by reading through the Marine statements, trying to make sense of what had happened that day. But, you know, we quickly ran into problems with that because, as you know, I mean, there were so many conflicting accounts with these statements.
- [26:01]
Samara Freemark
Yeah. The shooters were interviewed, many of them multiple times. Their statements change pretty much almost every time from statement to statement and then between each other's statements.
- [26:10]
Raymond Tangakar
Right. It was really difficult to get a real sense of what had happened that day. And so we turned to the forensic evidence in the hopes of getting some clarity out of that. And, you know, we spent hours and hours with Kevin Parmalee, the independent forensic expert, talking through what happened at the various sites, going through the photos, going through the other evidence and what it revealed.
- [26:34]
Samara Freemark
This is an up close and personal shot where you're putting a bullet into a little boy. He was executed from the back right to the front left temple while his face was down in a kneeling position. Raymond, can you talk a little bit about how we decided which details and honestly, how much detail to include in all of this?
- [26:56]
Raymond Tangakar
Yeah, that was like a really tricky part of working on this series. Right. I mean, we put a lot of thought into, you know, how much to tell the listener and what to tell the listener. Because on the one hand, we didn't want to be gratuitous or overwhelm the listener, but on the other hand, we wanted to present the specifics of what had happened that day.
- [27:16]
Samara Freemark
Right. That's the reality of what happened that day in Haditha. And what our listeners have said to us over and over again in response to this series is that, yes, those parts were very difficult to listen to, but it's important that I listen to it and that if this is something that our government, our military did, the least I can do is to listen to a description of it so that I know what happened that day.
- [28:16]
Madelyn
On October 3, 1980, a bomb was detonated outside a synagogue on Copernic street in Paris. Three decades later, French investigators finally identified a suspect in the case. Case a Lebanese Canadian sociology professor living a quiet life on the outskirts of Ottawa, Canada. Is Hassan Ziab guilty? Can you introduce yourself, or is he a scapegoat? Hassan Diab from Canada Land. This is the Copernic affair. Listen wherever you get your podcast.
- [29:02]
Samara Freemark
So shifting gears, we got a lot of questions about this other thread of reporting that we did that was really a key part of the season, which has to do with not just the Haditha case, but what happens in all these other cases of alleged war crimes Prosecuted by the U.S. military. So, so we had a lot of people writing to us saying that since our reporting clearly showed that the military justice system rarely convicts or punishes people accused of war crimes, people want to know, is there a chance of a change to this system? Are there reforms that are likely that are coming down the road? Are there different ways of handling these kinds of cases? So I wanted to bring back in Parker here. Parker, what would you say to these kinds of questions? What has your reporting shown?
- [29:45]
Parker Yesko
Yeah, it's hard to say. Since the season aired, I have reached out to a lot of Congress members who work in these issues. The people on the Armed Services committees, also the ones that were part of the have been part of efforts to reform the military justice system in the past, and I haven't gotten any comment from them. There were some reforms to the military justice system a few years back, and they were hard. They took a long time to get through, and they were pretty limited. They applied to a sort of short set of crimes, mostly sex crimes and also murder. And the big thing that they did was they limited the power of commanders in those prosecutions to charge and dispose of cases. But those reforms would not apply to the majority of the war crimes and alleged war crimes that we have in our database and that we came across, you know, things like assaults or shootings or cruelty and maltreatment towards detainees. And those aren't on the list of crimes that would be tried or handled differently. Based on the recent reforms, I've tried to get a sense for, like, if there's any ongoing efforts, sort of active efforts to broaden those reforms. And I don't hear of any. And I think one of the problems may be that, like, there's no constituency pushing for more vigorous prosecution of American war criminals. I mean, the victims of these crimes are not Americans, the ones that we were looking at post nine, 11. You know, they're Iraqis or Afghans, and they're not voters in America. And they're not calling our congresspeople and saying, hey, reform this system and hold these people accountable.
- [31:20]
Samara Freemark
Right. They're not creating a lobbying group and raising millions of dollars and testifying on the Hill and all of this.
- [31:27]
Parker Yesko
Right. Their stories sort of become known in these rare instances now where a team of reporters takes them on and publishes it in the US So we'll see. I think it's still an open question.
- [31:42]
Samara Freemark
Yeah. And one thing that's different now is that now the data's out there. I mean, you've compiled the data, we've analyzed it, and prior to this reporting, people really didn't have a clear answer to the question of how the military justice system is handling these cases. So, I mean, the hope, I guess, is, like, now people know at least, and that can maybe be the beginning of some kind of conversation or debate about what to do next with this information. Yeah.
- [32:05]
Parker Yesko
And I think it was always important to us throughout the reporting of this to, like, understand how the Haditha case fit into the bigger picture. You know, was Haditha and the prosecutions, were they an aberration or were they a symptom of the system? And it was really hard to get at the answer to that, but now we know it. The system, you know, has a tendency to let these prosecutions sort of end without meaningful consequence for the perpetrators.
- [32:33]
Samara Freemark
And certainly, if we are made aware of any moves to change a system or do things differently, we will follow up on those if they do happen down the road. And in case you haven't checked it out yet, you can see for yourself this entire database that Parker's talking about of possible war crimes that we compiled, it's on the New Yorker's website. You can just go to newyorker.com season three. So the last thing we're going to talk about is the final episode in the series. This is the episode that Samara, you played the lead role in reporting, the episode we called Patient Number Eight. We got a lot of questions about this one. And just a reminder, this is the episode about the man who went missing on November 19, 2005, the same day of the rest of the killings. And whose family had been searching for him ever since. And his name is Mamdu Hamid. And our reporting found he'd been killed by Marines and his body had been taken to a morgue in Baghdad and then buried. And we communicated all of this to the family, as you hear in that episode. So we got some questions about how the story of Mamdu Hamid came to be part of this season. One of these questions came from a listener named Amanda. She wrote, I'd love to know more about the last episode and the narrative process that went into how and why that got included at the end as a final but standalone episode.
- [33:55]
Madelyn
Yeah. So, like, we lay out in the podcast, as far as we could tell, there was no other reporting on Mamdu Hamid and this whole incident where Wooderish start shooting at these guys, and one of them was hit and another runs away and is killed by a different squad. This was never part of the narrative of the Haditha killings. So for years of this reporting, we had no idea that Mamdu even existed. But then, like you hear in the podcast, I stumbled across these mentions of this other shooting, and they really intrigued me, because, again, this was something that was not part of the Haditha narrative. And it seemed important just journalistically. And then when you and me, Madeleine, when we were in Iraq and Khalid Salman mentions this man who had disappeared and whose family had been searching for him all these years, I felt this immediate journalistic obligation and also just like a human obligation to report that out.
- [34:52]
Samara Freemark
And what do you mean?
- [34:55]
Madelyn
Well, Khalid was describing this family who had been living in this really awful limbo for almost 20 years, like, this limbo of not knowing. And I had a hunch that I might know or I might be able to find out what had happened to this family member and that I might be able to provide them some answers. And so that was where the moral obligation came in. Like, it just felt. It felt like if I knew this or if I could figure this out, that would be something that was worth doing. And then, of course, there was also the journalistic importance of looking into this shooting because it changed the story of what had happened that day. Because, like I was saying, all these years, the Haditha killings had been presented as having 24 victims, but I suspected there might actually be 25. And it felt like the record needed to be corrected.
- [35:44]
Samara Freemark
Right. And then what about this question of structure? Like, why? You know, we talked about this endlessly as all writing things are discussed, all of us, but, you know, can you talk a little bit, give people some Sense of how we landed on that. This should be the final episode of the series.
- [36:02]
Madelyn
Yeah, this was so hard. I mean, our whole team, our editor, other people at the New Yorker, really kind of banged our head against the wall on this question because, like, where do we put this episode? And I think we considered, like, three or four different places it could go in the series. Like, maybe it should go earlier, like, maybe it should go in the chronology of the day. But something about that didn't feel right to us. I think it's all part of the same story, but it also felt like a different story in some ways. Like, it did feel it has a standalone quality, like Amanda says, because, again, this was a totally unknown killing. No one was prosecuted for it. And so in many ways, it was different than these other killings. And so to us, it felt like putting it at the end made sense. And also, there was this quality that we felt of broadening out the series to make it a larger story about the Iraq War at the end. And again, to make this not just the story of these 24 people and what happened to them, but a larger story of this whole nation of people who have lived through war, chaos, lack of answers, like, the sheer quantity of that suffering that goes beyond all the other people we had talked to specifically for the story. And we really wanted to. We wanted the listeners at the end of the series to be thinking about all those people as well.
- [37:27]
Samara Freemark
Right. There's a scene in the morgue that happens where Mamdu's brother is looking through photos, and he's looking through photo after photo, trying to find photos of his brother. And you just get this sense of scale in that moment of how many dead there were, how many people who have not whose bodies are, you know, in an unmarked grave somewhere. Just the sheer scale of. Of what happened there, really, that story shows that quite clearly.
- [37:55]
Madelyn
Yep.
- [37:57]
Samara Freemark
I got a question here from a listener named Will asking was patient number eight's family, this would be Mamdu's family, interested in any type of reparation or legal prosecution? Or were they squarely focused on confirming what happened to their brother and putting this tragedy behind them?
- [38:14]
Madelyn
Yeah, it's a good question. I think by far the biggest priority of that family was finding out what had happened to Mamdu. That was. I mean, it's a kind of torture they had been living in. Right. I mean, there's the pain of losing someone, but I think there's a different kind of pain of not knowing what happened to someone you love. And I hope with that Episode, we were able to. To show what that looks like, to show a bit of, like, that specific kind of terrible pain of not knowing. And I think. I mean, this is something that you see in conflicts all over the world. Like, the mothers of Argentina are very famous, but this is. Every conflict has people who just go missing and their families are left in this wrenching, wrenching space. And actually, Madeline, I was thinking about how in season one, you know, we get into this with season one, which was about the disappearance of a boy named Jacob Wetterling. And in season one, his family had also been living in this terrible uncertainty for so many years. So the family wanted resolution. They wanted to end that pain. I mean, they knew there was a possibility that he was dead, but they really wanted to end that horrible uncertainty. So that was the biggest priority. But certainly they also want the Marines prosecuted for Mamdu's death. Definitely they do. They told me they would come to the United States, they would testify, they would do anything it took to get justice for Mamdu.
- [39:51]
Samara Freemark
So let's talk about that. As we say in the podcast, no one was ever prosecuted, no one charged, convicted for the killing of Mamdu. And we got a lot of questions from listeners about whether anyone could still be prosecuted for Mamdu's killing.
- [40:05]
Madelyn
Yeah. And we also got similar questions about whether any of the Marines involved in any of the shootings could be prosecuted again, if there was any penalty that they could face at this point. And we wanted to bring Parker back in to answer some of these questions, because she's been looking into this. Parker, can you take that question?
- [40:23]
Parker Yesko
Yeah. So all the Marines who were in Haditha that day and involved in the shootings are out of the Marine Corps. They're. They're long gone. And so that means that the military can't prosecute them. They're sort of outside the jurisdiction of the military. It is possible for the federal government, that is the civilian courts, to prosecute former service members for crimes committed while they were in the military. It's rare. I know of only two instances where this has happened, and this would be the DOJ prosecuting these cases, the Department of Justice. And they'd have to evaluate them on a case by case basis. Charging decisions are complicated. So we just don't know.
- [41:04]
Samara Freemark
And we certainly don't have any indication that they're going to do that.
- [41:07]
Parker Yesko
We definitely don't have any indication that they're going to do that. With the upcoming Donald Trump presidency, it seems even less likely that the DOJ would take action on this case. If they did, it would be high profile. And Trump, in his last presidency, intervened in quite a few cases of both charged and convicted war criminals in ways that made it pretty clear that he is not interested in pursuing these cases. He actually pardoned. He pardoned a former service member who had only been charged. The case hadn't even gone to trial. So I think he would certainly not have much appetite for pursuing a case against Marines from Hadithah.
- [41:54]
Madelyn
Okay, Madeline, last question for anyone listening who might have an idea of a story that we should cover. How can they reach us? How can they send us tips?
- [42:02]
Samara Freemark
So you can send us your tips and story ideas by emailing us@inthedarker.com I will say we can't possibly respond to every email we receive, but I promise we do read all of them and we are right now working on new stories to bring you next. So if you do have a story idea, this is a great time to let us know about it.
- [42:23]
Madelyn
Absolutely. We definitely want to hear it. Also, I should say, if you haven't checked out the absolutely incredible stuff we have on our website related to this story, which we mentioned earlier in this episode, I really cannot recommend it highly enough. It's amazing. You can find everything@newyorker.com Season 3. So that's where you can go to find the immersive interactive documentary called Cleared by Fire. It's where you can find the war crimes database, which is like this massive database of alleged war crimes that we compiled that Parker was mentioning. And it's also where you can find the photos that we published from the day of the killings. Again, that's new yorker.com season three.
- [43:05]
Samara Freemark
Thank you all for listening and caring about this story. It means so much to all of us.
- [43:23]
Natalie Jablonski
I'm Vincent Cunningham.
- [43:24]
Madelyn
I'm Alex Schwartz.
- [43:26]
Parker Yesko
And I'm Nomi Frye. And we're Critics at Large, the New.
- [43:29]
Madelyn
Yorker's flagship culture podcasts.
- [43:31]
Samara Freemark
Flagship.
- [43:32]
Madelyn
Flagship. Love that.
- [43:33]
Samara Freemark
We want to invite you to a special live event that's coming right up on March 11th at the bell House in Brooklyn. We're doing a show about a classic conundrum for critics.
- [43:44]
Parker Yesko
What happens when you write a review and you get it wrong?
- [43:48]
Natalie Jablonski
We will be looking back at some of the classic pieces of New Yorker criticism that may have missed the mark. Like, for example, a scathing review that.
- [43:56]
Samara Freemark
Declared the wizard of Oz a stinkeroo marred by eye straining Technicolor.
- [44:01]
Parker Yesko
Not a stinkeroo.
- [44:02]
Natalie Jablonski
Oh yes.
- [44:03]
Samara Freemark
And of course, we will also talk.
- [44:05]
Natalie Jablonski
About critics who got it right as well.
- [44:07]
Parker Yesko
So if you're in New York or.
- [44:08]
Madelyn
If you feel like traveling, come see us live at the bell House on March 11th 11th.
- [44:13]
Samara Freemark
You can buy tickets at thebellhouseny. Com.
- [44:17]
Parker Yesko
We'll see you there.
- [44:26]
Madelyn
From prx.