Episode 2: I Have Questions
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Previously on In the Dark. In the morning of 19th November 2005, a painful distress has happened when an American soldier had executed three families with a number of... 24 people killed by U.S. Marines. Rashid Aida.

Some are comparing the Haditha killings to the Vietnam massacre at My Lai. What he noticed was gunshots. Most of them are gunshots in the head or in the chest.

Zaynab. Yunus. Saba. This is my sister, Asma. Waleed. This is her son, Abdullah, three years ago. Marwan. Qahtan. Wachasib.

He says they gave up on anyone talking about this case again or someone pre-investigate the case. He says that this is his duty for the truth to be told. One and a half miles and then there's going to be a sign towards Richmond.

One day, I drove with our producer Samara through the winding hills of Northern Virginia. All right, Samara, we're going to Quantico. I am feeling extremely good to be starting this stage of things. We were headed to the Marine Corps base at Quantico. Probably there's like 100 people on this base right now that we're going to return and talk to over the next two or three years or however long this takes. Two or three years? Two or three years, yes, two or three years. Stop it, Madeline.

I think we'll be done in a year. Samara, Samara, Samara. No way. It would actually end up taking us nearly four years. Okay, so it looks like the base is straight ahead. Yes. We were going to Quantico to see what records might be in the Marines' own archives on the killings in Haditha, to see what the Marine Corps itself knew about what happened that day. Exit 150A, Quantico.

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 U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq. It's a story not just about the killings themselves, but also about the failure of the U.S. military to bring the men responsible for them to justice. In this episode, we go on a quest.

A search for records on the killings in Haditha. Records the government has kept from the public for years. This is episode two, I Have Questions.

You can't just walk into the archive at Quantico. First, you have to get onto the base. You have to get registered. You have to provide all kinds of information, like your boss's cell phone number, and whether you've been convicted of a felony. You have to put your finger on a little pad that takes a digital fingerprint. You get photographed, and then you get a QR code. You take the QR code to a security checkpoint. Checkpoint, 1,000 feet. Show it to a Marine standing guard. Morning. Got these. And if all goes well, they let you onto the base. Thanks, you too.

The base reminded me of a big state university. The archive was inside a three-story reddish brick building that looked brand new. Like if bricks could gleam, these would. It's like a really nice-looking, newer building. A carpeted hallway led to an empty reception desk. Not a single person was there, other than a guy vacuuming the floor with one of those vacuumed backpacks. This is the most desolate archive I've ever visited.

We wandered upstairs to the third floor and found a man I'll call Jeremy. Jeremy was one of the archivists. He was extremely excited that two journalists had shown up in his archive. He was literally bouncing on his heels. He told us that people don't usually come in asking questions about the Iraq War. Far more standard was the World War II buff, who would show up during our visit a few days later, asking to look at a map of Iwo Jima. My first impression of Jeremy was that he appeared to have not seen another human being in a year.

And given that we were still not that far out from the COVID pandemic, it made sense. Within the first five minutes of meeting him, Jeremy had told us a condensed version of his own military history. He joined the army right out of high school and was deployed to Baghdad as a tank crewman during the war. One of the first things Jeremy said to us was, I have questions. Questions about the Iraq war. So many questions.

about everything from why they were given green armor to wear in the middle of a desert to why the U.S. invaded Iraq in the first place. Given the pandemic, Jeremy told us, he'd ended up having a lot of conversations about this with his cat, Chopstick. At this point, you may be wondering why you aren't hearing Jeremy saying any of this.

We did ask Jeremy whether we could record him talking to us, and perhaps giving us a tour of the archive. He said we'd have to ask his boss. So we went upstairs to talk to his boss, who told us, in the most friendly possible way, that to get approval to record an interview with Jeremy would take forever, like months. It might not even happen. And in fact, could trigger all kinds of unforeseen consequences for the archive and everyone working in it.

He said it would be an OPSEC issue, as in operational security. At one point, he rattled off a sentence like, if we ask to record, what's going to happen is that the ABCs are going to have to talk to the XYZ. And of course, that will trigger a 42B, which is obviously not good. Then before you know it, it's a whole 123. And probably, eventually, the 555 will get involved. And at that point, Jeremy and his boss both sighed knowingly.

This was perhaps our first inkling, that dealing with the military was going to be its own particular kind of difficult. By the time we were done reporting, we would have so many examples of military secrecy that this one would come to seem almost cute. Anyway, we agreed to just record ourselves in the archive, not anyone else. And Jeremy, by the way, is not even the archivist's real name. We explained to Jeremy what we were looking for. Any records of the killings in Haditha.

Jeremy remembered the incident. He said, didn't people get punished for that? I told him no. He looked surprised. How many people were killed in Haditha, he asked. 24, I said. Jeremy threw up his arms dramatically and said, and we wonder why they hate us. He then walked around the office, still throwing up his arms, repeating, and we wonder why they hate us. We wonder why they hate us.

Jeremy led us to an empty room. All right, where should we set up? I'm going to get out my computer. And then he started bringing us stuff. Here it comes with the boxes. What we found in the archives was nothing that could help explain what actually happened that day. No investigative records or anything like that. Instead, we found artifacts of the Marine Corps' efforts back then to manage the public's perception of the killings. All right.

There were talking points and press releases, and plans for news conferences. Headquarters public affairs office. And press clippings about Haditha. Media items on Haditha. And written reports, tracking the types of news coverage the case was getting. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times led coverage with four items each. None of this was all that interesting. But there was one thing we came across before we left the archive that got our attention. Oh, this is super helpful.

It was a list of oral histories, recorded interviews mostly with generals and other top-ranking Marines. One name in particular on that list stood out, Marine Corps Commandant General Michael Hagee. I knew that name well because General Hagee was in charge of the Marine Corps at the time of the Haditha incident. I tried to talk to Hagee, but he declined to be interviewed.

I had heard Hagee talk about the Haditha incident before, but only in press conferences, broadcast on TV for a national audience. Make no mistake, a Marine who has been found to have violated our standards will be held accountable. It is an important part of who we are and all Marines expect it. As Commandant, I am gravely concerned about the serious allegations concerning... That's what Hagee was saying to the public.

But the interviews mentioned on that list in the archive weren't recorded for the general public or ever broadcast anywhere, as far as I could tell. They had been done by an official Marine Corps historian as part of a collection of interviews with high-ranking leaders. We could see from the list we found that the interview existed, but the archive wouldn't give us the actual recordings. It ended up taking us years to convince the Marine Corps to finally turn them over.

This is an oral history recording with General Michael W. Hagee, H-A-G-E-E, by Dr. Fred Allison in the Commandant's Office at Pentagon. Good morning, sir. How are you today? Great, thank you. I'd like to start the interview sort of looking at some of the early... In the comfort of an interview with the Marine Corps' own historian years after the killings, Hagee talked about the Haditha incident in a way I'd never heard before. In more than 17 hours of recordings, Hagee never expresses remorse for the dead civilians.

Instead, what he talks about is damage control. Hagee had been prepared when the Haditha incident broke.

A few years before the incident, when he took over the Marine Corps in 2003, one of the first things he did was to hold a kind of public relations war game. We did an all-day Saturday drill there in Washington. I hired a small company and I said, I want you to come up with a scenario that would be catastrophic.

public relations office for the Marine Corps. And we spent the entire day working through that. Okay, how do we respond to such a thing?

This fake scenario, whatever it was, Higgy couldn't remember the actual details, seemed pretty involved. Higgy even had someone play the role of Congress, presumably asking questions about the incident and demanding answers. At the end of the day, it was a long day. It was a hard day. At the end of the day, we actually came up with a playbook. A playbook. If something like this happens, this is what we're going to do and how we're going to handle it.

About three years after that PR war game, in the spring of 2006, the Haditha incident hit the news. There was a month or so there, maybe 60 days. It was bad. You know, it was worldwide news. I had friends sending me articles from German newspapers, French newspapers, Japanese newspapers. It was worldwide news.

Hagee jumped into action. And what he did was pretty simple. Talk to reporters, seem accessible. I gave interviews to everyone. I talked with anyone. And go right away to Congress and talk to them, too. And then basically ride it out. And the way Hagee described it, it sounded like all that went pretty well. But Hagee had one very large problem. I found out that there were pictures taken. Pictures, he said. I saw them. There were photos. Photos of what had happened in Haditha.

The photos were taken by Marines shortly after the killings, inside the houses. Hagee didn't describe the photos, but whatever was in them was apparently so shocking that Hagee feared that if the photos ever got out to the public, it could devastate the Marine Corps. Just two years earlier, Hagee had watched the Abu Ghraib scandal hit another branch of the military, the Army.

Army soldiers were found to have been torturing and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners. And that story broke specifically when photos of the abuse became public. Those photos were broadcast by CBS News and published in The New Yorker and on the front pages of newspapers across the world. It had been a disaster for the Army. I was absolutely committed to not letting this happen to the Marine Corps.

Hagee was determined that the photos of what had happened in Haditha would never make it to the press. The press never got, unlike Abu Ghraib, never got the pictures. They got the pictures. That was what's so bad about Abu Ghraib. The pictures. That was what was so bad about Abu Ghraib, the interviewer said. And I learned from that. So, they did not get the pictures.

There are few things that motivate an investigative reporter more than a powerful person talking about how proud they are that they were able to keep something secret.

And here I was, listening to Hagee bragging about getting away with hiding these photos from the public, implying that the photos contained something important, so important that, in his opinion, the public should never find out what it was. As I listened to Hagee talk about this, I knew right then and there that I would do everything I could to pry these photos loose, to see for myself what they show. We'll be back after the break. Hi, it's Madeline. I'm going to be honest with you. This season almost didn't happen.

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It wasn't just photos that weren't released to the public. There were documents. Thousands of pages of internal records generated by the military about what happened in Haditha. Back in the months after the killings, President Bush pledged that the findings of the government's investigation would be made public. One of the things that happens in a transparent society like ours is that there will be a full and complete investigation. The world will see the full and complete investigation.

But that never happened. Despite what President Bush said, the world never saw that full investigation. And those hearings Congress promised to hold, they never happened either. The records that could help explain what had happened that day and why no one had been punished were kept in government offices, hidden from public view.

Four years ago, in 2020, our reporter Parker Yesko started filing public records requests with the U.S. military under the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA. We've got some going to the regular Air Force, Army CID, CENTCOM, Department of Army, Department of Navy, Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General. She was seeking all those records on Haditha and all the photos that the Marine Corps Commandant, General Hagee, had bragged about keeping secret. And submit.

But months passed, and we got nowhere. Where are we at with things right now? This is me talking to Parker a year into this saga. So we are like literally have made like no progress. We've gotten nothing at all. And that's because they are jammed up in like an epic bureaucracy. And we're sort of at this point right now where like, if we don't get that stuff, we have very little by way of records at all.

Some of these places hadn't even responded. One said the documents were in a records center that was closed indefinitely because of the pandemic.

Another had sent us a letter. CENTCOM sent us a letter saying, you're in a queue, we're processing it. And that we could check our progress in the queue by going online. Then I went online and I checked the queue and I saw that our little tracking number was number 1812 in CENTCOM's FOIA queue. They were processing requests placed back in 2015. The prognosis is very bleak. It's like whatever you're interested in,

Regarding the U.S. military, it better be like a long-term interest. Like it can't be something that you're curious about that you need an answer on tomorrow. You've got to like commit to getting this stuff in like 12 years or something. Yes. The way these agencies were acting wasn't just annoying. It was against the law. FOIA requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 business days. Instead, for the most part, they're just ignoring us. We got to like shake them loose somehow. Yeah.

We realized that if we wanted to have any chance of getting these records, we needed some way to force the government to follow the law. We needed a lawyer. And the lawyer we needed was a man named Matt Topic. Madeline Parker, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you in person.

Within the extremely dorky world of reporters seeking public records under FOIA, Matt Topic is kind of a legend. He's basically the person journalists turn to when they need help getting public records. Matt Topic works at a civil rights firm called Loewe & Loewe. He's the guy who sued over redactions to the Mueller report, and the guy who sued Chicago police to get the video of the murder of black teenager Laquan McDonald. What's the story with the...

Angry sun on the wall? Yeah. On the wall behind his desk, he has a big painting of a yellow sun up in the sky. The sun has a cartoon face with a snarling mouth. Its eyebrows are arched menacingly. Sunshine is sort of symbolic of the work I do. I also wanted something that, you know, was a little forceful. So the sun is like, you better turn over the records or I'm coming after you. Matt Topic has built his career suing the government. FBI, the IRS.

the CDC, the NIH, DOJ. If it has three letters in its acronym, we've probably sued it at some point. He was all too familiar with the situation we'd found ourselves in. FOIA has become completely broken. I think the courts recognize that it's broken. The agencies recognize that it's broken. We can all see that it's broken because you're supposed to be getting records within a few months of when you make a request.

And very often you will get estimated completion dates that are a year or two years or five years down the line. But Matt Topic told me there was another way. In fact, it appeared to be the only way to make sure our requests got looked at. And that was... You have to go to court. And that's how we decided to sue the United States military. We filed suit against the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, U.S. Central Command, and the Marine Corps.

We were seeking all the investigative and prosecution records on the Haditha incident, including all those photos. Met Topic introduced us to a whole team of lawyers and paralegals who would be helping us. But he told me even with the help of his entire team, under the best case scenario, this could still take a very long time.

At one point, I was talking to the paralegal, Blake Bunting, about all this. What do you think about our chances? Oh, gosh, with who you're up against, you know, and the records that were withheld and what they might imply in terms of our service members. Yeah, I don't know. So we crossed our fingers and waited.

All right, Parker just slacked me. She needs to call me about something. And I hope it's documents. Every time I would get a call from Parker, I'd be thinking, maybe she's calling me to tell me that the military had sent us documents. So she'll be calling me in a second. Hello. But... Okay, so...

I made this diagram that everybody hates, but I think is very helpful to me. She never was. And it sort of channels my love for Grateful Dead. But Space Com was disbanded. Many of these are geographic commands. Can I talk you through the part that's just like building the universe before we winnow it? All right. Bye. Bye.

There did seem to be a few promising developments. Like how after we filed one of our lawsuits, we'd ended up in a different, much shorter FOIA line. A line for people who sue. We'd gotten as close as number six in that line. And once we would get to the number one spot, U.S. Central Command or CENTCOM would start processing our documents. But then one day, Parker called to tell me, "We have actually moved backwards in the queue." Oh no. Backwards in line. I didn't even know that was possible.

was because of another news story involving the military. The U.S. military's withdrawal from Afghanistan and all the chaos that resulted. Crowds of people storming the airport, literally trying to jump onto military planes. What appeared to have happened was after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, a bunch of news organizations had sued for documents about the withdrawal. Their requests were more urgent because they involved something that was happening right now. So they were able to jump us in line. We better, there better be nothing, like, oh, that stinks.

I found myself starting to check the news on my phone every morning with an entirely new perspective, quickly scanning for any military news that could lead other reporters to file FOIAs that would push us even further back. Any conflict that the military would claim was diverting their attention from our requests.

We started to despair. Because by this measure, I mean, we're never going to get stuff. Something is always going to come up. I mean, also, you know what I bet? I bet when once they are done, once August 31st comes and goes, which is the deadline for withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan, will they just come up with something else? You know, it's like, well, have you heard about what's happening in Guam? You're like, oh, for sure.

The problems kept mounting. Okay, so with respect to the status of plaintiff's requests to the Navy. Another written update with bad news read to me by Parker. Unfortunately, the individual handling the release had an injury and was out of the office for a period of time. Are you serious? We're just annoyed. We're annoyed. So annoyed. It's ridiculous.

And then one day, Parker called again. That's after the break.

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Hello. Hello. Hey. Hi. One morning, almost two years after she'd filed her first FOIA request on Haditha, a reporter, Parker, summoned the entire team to a call. Okay, guys, I have never had bigger news for you. I am freaking out.

This morning, at 9.19 a.m. Central Time, CENTCOM released the investigative file for Haditha. What? We are in possession of it. Whoa. Right now. Oh my gosh. It had taken nearly two years and two lawsuits, but the government was finally releasing documents in response to our FOIAs. Suddenly, we had tens of thousands of pages of government records that, as far as we knew, had never been released to the public. This is crazy. This is...

This is very good news. The documents the government sent us spanned years. They included files from the military's investigations into the incident, along with many, many documents from the government's failed attempts to prosecute the Marines involved. There were court transcripts, testimony, emails, forensic reports, videos. One thing that wasn't in there were those photos that the commandant, General Hagee, was so proud had never been released.

As I read through the documents, I learned that photos of the incident had actually been sealed by a military judge at the government's request years after the killings back in 2012. As for the reason, the government had argued that releasing the photos to the public could be a threat to national security because it could be used as propaganda by enemies of the United States. And the government also claimed they wanted the photos sealed out of respect for the survivors of those killed. They said that the release of the photos would re-victimize the families of the deceased.

Reading this, I was curious what an actual survivor of those killed would think. So I called up Khaled Salman Rasif. Hi. Hello. The man who'd lost 15 members of his family that day. To explain to him what the government had claimed about the reasons for keeping these photos secret. To see what he made of it. I just want to make sure that you know the reasons why the photos were sealed. Khaled jumped in with his own guess. To protect the reputation of the U.S. military?

So the reasons they gave were that it would re-victimize the families of the deceased? Khaled found this argument literally laughable. He told me, the Americans have seen the pictures. I saw the reality. Hearing Khaled's reaction, it gave me an idea. Maybe there was another way to try to get these photos. I'm going to tell you about that later, much later.

In the meantime, there was a lot to get through and all the records we did have. So I started reading. All right, time to read the documents. Day one, page one. Opening the file now. Here we go.

All right. Day two, page 38. At a coffee shop, day three, page 233. It's day 15. I'm at a McDonald's and I'm starting at page 534. I'm at page 828. Page 9,454. Waiting for my doctor's appointment and I'm on page 12,387. Reading statements. Measure everything in page counts right now. Statements from Marines.

Who was there? What they saw? What they said to each other? What they did? Just like deposition after statement after deposition after statement. Statements from Iraqis. What they saw. How they felt. Making progress. Forensic reports. Testimony. Wow. Handwritten notes from investigators. Diagrams of the inside of the houses the Marines entered that day.

Things that definitely seemed important. This really is starting to change how I view this incident. Things it didn't. I don't know. And everything in between. This is so confusing. Everything the military knew about what had happened that day. I took notes on all of it. So many notes, I actually reached the length limit on a Google Doc, which I didn't even know was a thing. In case you're wondering, it's 1.02 million characters. It's going on and on and on.

By the end of our reporting, we'd received from the military a total of more than 25,000 pages, and we read every one of them. What I read in those records would help guide our reporting for years. The records would point us to certain people to talk to, certain evidence to consider. Over the rest of this series, I'm going to tell you about all of it. I want to start with one particular kind of document.

The statements of the Marines who were in Haditha that day. Not the Marines who killed the 24 people, but the Marines who responded to the IED explosion and saw the aftermath of the killings that followed. These Marines had had conversations with the shooters. They'd helped move the bodies of the dead. They described what the bodies looked like, what kinds of injuries they had. Their statements had details they'd never seen anywhere else. But there was a problem, and it was a big one.

The statements were littered with annoying little black rectangles, words, sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs that the government had redacted. Reading these documents, you'd be forced to interpret lines like, Redacted said he had a conversation with Redacted about what happened inside Redacted House. To make sense of these statements, I needed to talk to the Marines who gave them. But of course, thank you, military, their names were redacted too. It felt like we were stuck. But then, in a way that I could best describe as maddeningly roundabout,

We found a way to get unstuck. We'd seen a news story from 2012 about a group of hackers that broke into the email accounts of the defense lawyers for one of the Marines accused of the Haditha killings. The hackers downloaded a bunch of the defense lawyers' emails about the case. They posted them online somewhere. I thought what the hackers had posted might include something important. If it was still out there, I needed to look at it. But by the time we were reporting on the Haditha incident, a decade after the hack, I couldn't quite tell where these emails were.

Our producer Raymond Tangakar went looking for them. He started in all the regular places. Google, the Internet Archive. I didn't find anything. There wasn't like a website that I found where you can like just download all these emails, which is kind of strange. Like the whole point is to make it public. So where is it? Like, where are these emails? Raymond looked everywhere. He even ventured onto the dark web. Like that's where you go to like buy opioids, engage in human trafficking, etc.

ship large suspicious packages like in shipping carts overseas. I don't know. He downloaded secret browsers, got a special hard drive for an extra layer of security, did some academic research. I learned from an old master's thesis on hacktivism and a track down specialist who he thought could help. I like messaged one guy who described himself as like a data hoarder. A data hoarder? Yeah, like he had apparently this is a thing and I still found nothing.

But then, after weeks of trying to find the hacked emails from the defense lawyers on the Haditha case, Raymond called me up with some news. He'd been poking around on a website called DDoS Secrets. It's a massive repository for leaked documents. He tried searching for the emails using all the obvious search terms. Haditha, the name of the hacked law firm, the name of the Marine they defended. Sadly, he'd come up empty. I tried one more thing.

Raymond remembered reading that the hackers had a weekly ritual of releasing document dumps on Fridays. They even had a special hashtag for it. They called it Fuck FBI Friday, like a hacker's Taco Tuesday. And so Raymond typed in Fuck FBI Friday and hit enter and boom.

Tens of thousands of emails, court documents, and other associated files that were part of this major email leak. Whoa. Okay, that's crazy. Tens of, wait, how many? Well, so in total, there's like more than 30,000 files. Thousands and thousands of emails. Most of them were completely unimportant work messages, not newsworthy at all.

But amidst all this humdrum, we found an email attachment, a single document that would become our Rosetta Stone, a key that would unlock everything. It was a list of statements given by Marines to investigators on the Haditha case, basically an index. It listed the rank of the Marines who'd given the statements, the dates they were interviewed, and, amazingly, it listed their names, the names that had been redacted in the official files the government gave us. They were just there, out in the open.

Most of these guys had never talked to a reporter before, never told their story to the public. But that was about to change. Next time on In the Dark, we're going to tell you about November 19, 2005, from the perspective of the Marines who were there, from their own statements given to investigators years ago, and... Hey there. My name's Parker. I'm working on a project about the Iraq War. ...from the Marines themselves. That's next time on In the Dark.

If you want to listen to Episode 3 right now, ad-free, you can do that by subscribing to The New Yorker. Subscribers will get access to all of our remaining episodes ad-free a week early. Go to newyorker.com slash dark to subscribe and listen now. In the Dark is reported and produced by me, Madeline Barron, managing producer Samara Fremark, producers Natalie Jablonski and Raymond Tungakar, and reporter Parker Yesko.

In the Dark is edited by Catherine Winter and Willing Davidson. This episode was fact-checked by Lucy Kroening and Linnea Feldman-Emerson. A special thanks to our FOIA team at Loewe & Loewe. Original music by Allison Leighton-Brown. Sound design and mix by John DeLore. Additional music by Chris Julin and Gary Meister. Our theme is by Gary Meister. Our art is by Emiliano Ponzi. Art direction by Nicholas Conrad and Aviva Mikhailov. Legal review by Fabio Bertone.

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This summer, we visit a remote Danish island with strong Viking roots. So I think it was also part of the history you told yourself. We're strong women here. We're strong women. This is the culture of this island. We've crossed the country with a baseball stadium chaser. Some games could be a day game and then you drive to your next location and take in a night game. And then you turn around and try to get to a day game.

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