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Marine describes scene where 24 Iraqis killed

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. — An officer who saw the corpses of Iraqi women and children sprawled across a bed in a home said Wednesday in recorded testimony that he believed that “my Marines were doing the right thing” when they killed them.

Marine 1st Lt. Max Frank’s videotaped testimony appeared at the military equivalent of a grand jury, which will determine whether the commander of the Marine battalion accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians, should stand trial for on charges of dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the civilian deaths. It is the biggest U.S. criminal case involving civilian deaths in the Iraq war.

“From my perspective at the time, my assumption was my Marines were doing the right thing,” testified Marine 1st Lt. Max Frank, who arrived at the scene about four hours after the attack.

“I rationalized it to myself as they were taking fire. The Marines could have come in, yelled at them to come out, and when they didn’t come out they cleared the room with a fragmentation grenade,” he said.

Frank, whose deposition was recorded in March before his return to Iraq, was the first witness to be heard at the hearing for Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani. Chessani is the highest-ranking of seven Marines accused in the case.

Chessani said little during the proceeding, speaking only to answer procedural questions from the investigating officer for the hearing, Col. Christopher Conlin.

Frank, a platoon commander, said he saw a total of 24 bodies, including five men who had been shot beside a white car, an elderly man whose leg had been eviscerated and a woman and child curled up in another home.

The two dozen people were slain on Nov. 19, 2005, after a roadside bomb killed a lance corporal driving a Humvee. In the aftermath, Marines went house to house looking for insurgents.

The Marines have said they believed they were taking fire from the houses. They used fragmentation grenades and machine guns to clear the homes, but instead of hitting insurgents, they killed civilians.

Frank testified that he and another Marine loaded the corpses into Humvees. No one else wanted to perform the task, since there was a shortage of corpse-handling gloves and body bags.

“The Marines didn’t believe it was a job they should do,” Frank said. “A lot of the Marines were really disturbed by it.”

The bodies were first taken to a Marine base and then to the morgue in Hadithah, where one Iraqi hospital worker vomited when he saw the corpses, Frank testified.

Frank is one of several Marines given immunity to testify in the case. He said the consensus at the time was that the Iraqis died as the result of an insurgent-initiated attack, and there was no need to investigate the deaths further.

A fellow officer, 1st Lt. Adam Mathes, told Frank that “we were to go out and say this is what happens when you let the terrorists use your house to attack our troops.”

Mathes was not present during the killings.

Frank also testified that he took photos at the scene, but Mathes deleted the electronic images because he thought they were not allowed to have pictures of dead Iraqis on personal equipment.

If convicted, Chessani faces up to three years in prison.

Chessani had inspected the general scene after the Nov. 19, 2005, killings and “saw no law-of-war violation,” said his attorney Brian Rooney. He said Chessani immediately reported to his boss, the commanding officer for the 2nd Marine Regiment.

“We want to make sure the American public know that officers didn’t cover up anything,” Rooney said.

The hearing is expected to last for 10 days, and Rooney said the defense would be calling about 25 witnesses, including a two-star general who knew about the killings but also did not order an investigation.