Transcript
Madeline Barron (0:01)
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Previously on in the Dark.
Parker Yesko (0:27)
Oh my God. Sure it was. He was a goofball. He was very much into the pop punk. So like the sum 41 blink 182. That was his shtick. He loved that stuff.
Madeline Barron (0:38)
He said I popped your 9 mils cherry. What did you think when he said that? What did I think? I assumed it meant that he had fucking shot someone with it.
Samara Freemark (0:52)
So they just came out one after one and they all stood there on their grand father's front yard. You and you and you, you and you and you. They pointed at each one to go inside the house. So Ahab saying that this Marine who's claiming that this was his truth. She said that he knows the truth as she knows it. She doesn't care at all what he says.
Madeline Barron (1:43)
One day just before Christmas in 2006, a little over a year after the killings, a Marine colonel took the podium in a drab briefing room at Camp Pendleton. On the morning of 19th November 2005.
Parker Yesko (1:55)
A four vehicle convoy of Marines was moving through Hadithah.
Madeline Barron (2:00)
The colonel told the press gathered in front of him that the investigations into what had happened were nearly complete. Based on the findings of the investigations.
Parker Yesko (2:08)
Various charges have been preferred against four.
Madeline Barron (2:10)
Marines relating to the deaths of the Iraqi civilians on 19 November 2005. These charges include murder murder charges against four marines brought by the US military itself the within its own justice system. That's the way war crimes for the most part are handled in the US in house. The first case to move through the military courts was the one against Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, the squad's gunner who bragged about killing people Punisher style. Sherritt was charged for what had happened in that final house where the four brothers were all shot in the head. Sherritt was charged with killing three of the men. Sherritt's story about what had happened inside that house was dramatic. He described for investigators how he and his squad leader Frank Wouterich had gone into the house and had been confronted inside by armed insurgents. Sharrett had said that his assault weapon jammed so he quickly drew his 9 millimeter pistol and shot the men to save his own life. The Iraqi story of what had happened was so different from Sharratt's that the two accounts were almost irreconcilable. The surviving relatives had told us the Marines marched the four unarmed brothers away. Then they heard gunshots. They ran into the house and found the brothers, Jamal, Katan, Chasib, and Marwan lying dead. These two stories would collide in a public forum, a courtroom, and from there, they would wind their way through the opaque inner workings of the military justice system. They would climb up a hierarchy of men who'd each pass judgment until they reached a top commander who would decide which story was true. This is season three of in the Dark, an investigative podcast from the New Yorker. This season is about the killing of 24 men, women and children by US Marines in Haditha, Iraq. It's a story not just about the killings themselves, but also about the failure of the US military to bring the men responsible for them to justice. In this episode, we're going to start with the prosecution of Justin Sharratt, the first case to fall apart. Its collapse would shake the foundations of all the Haditha cases to follow. This is episode seven, Innocent in My eyes. Justin Sharrott's case began the way almost all serious military prosecutions do, with something called an Article 32 hearing. It's unique to the military justice system. Defendants get to have a kind of pretrial where both sides can present evidence to determine whether the case should go forward to a jury. The person who presides over the hearing and weighs all that evidence is a sort of judge called an investigating officer. And the way it worked in murder cases back then is the investigating officer would make a recommendation to a commander as to whether the case should go any further. Sherrod's Article 32 hearing happened at Camp Pendleton in June 2007. Newspapers across the country printed photos of Sherritt's arrival at the courthouse. He was escorted by his lawyers in their dark suits. Sherritt was wearing his combat fatigues, sleeves rolled up to his biceps, big black aviator glasses covering his eyes. Sherritt carried a binder and a stack of case documents so thick he could barely wrap his hands around them. As for what happened inside the courtroom, that was a little tricky to figure out because the military hasn't given us records of the hearing. Fortunately, we did end up finding unofficial transcripts on a now defunct webpage that was archived online. In reading through those transcripts, it was clear that prosecutors had a lot of evidence against Sherritt. There were the forensics and the photos showing that one of the men had been shot after jumping into a wardrobe, and another man had been shot while sitting or crouching on the ground. There was the fact that all four men had been shot in the head. None of this was what you'd expect to see in a life or death fight against armed enemies. There were details about who these men were, that there was no evidence that any of them had any connections to insurgents, and that, in fact, they all had regular jobs. One worked at a car dealership, one was a government engineer, one worked as a customs officer on the border with Jordan, and one was a traffic officer. And then, of course, there was the most powerful evidence of eyewitness testimony, the kind of thing that every prosecutor wants in a criminal case. People who saw what happened, who weren't themselves involved in the crime. Ehab Najla and Khalid Jamal said they'd witnessed the Marines taking the four brothers away unarmed and then heard gunshots. These Iraqi witnesses had given statements where they recounted all this in detail. The job of Sherritt's lawyers, of course, was to call all of this evidence into question. And that's exactly what they did. Those jobs the brothers had, car dealer, engineer, customs worker, traffic officer. Those, according to the defense, gave the men a grab bag of skills and resources that actually made them a, quote, ideal insurgent cell, a sort of village people of the insurgency. But what to do about the eyewitness statements, the ones that absolutely contradicted Sherritt's account that these men had pointed AK47s at them, so they had to kill them? Sherrod's lawyers brought in an expert witness to cast doubt on those statements. His name is Barack Salmoni. Salmoni worked for the Marine Corps, training Marines on Iraqi culture, and he has a doctorate in history and Middle east studies. On the stand, Somoni testified about why he thought the statements of the Iraqi witnesses, Ehab Najhl and Khalid Jamal, might not be credible. He noted that though they did give sworn statements, they weren't asked to swear an oath on the Quran itself. He suggested that because the interviews were conducted by outsiders, by non Muslims, the witnesses might have felt less compulsion to tell the truth. But what stood out to me the most about Simony's testimony was what he had to say about the value of the testimony of the Iraqi women. In particular, Simone testified that in Muslim society, traditionally, the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. He cautioned he wasn't necessarily saying that the testimony was half as truthful, but he did say that maybe it was less significant we wanted to ask Simony about all this, and so our producer Samara called him up.