Review No Time For The Truth, The Haditha Incident And The Search For Justice

Helms, Nathaniel and Faraj, Haytham, No Time For The Truth, The Haditha Incident And The Search For Justice, New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016

 

No Time For The Truth, The Haditha Incident And The Search For Justice by Nathaniel Helms and Haytham Faraj is about the Haditha massacre where a group of Marines were charged with killing civilians in western Iraq in 2006. The authors were both sympathetic to the Marines with Faraj being one of their defense lawyers. They argue the Marines were following their training when they attacked two houses and therefore did not commit murder. The authors then focus upon how the government tried to scapegoat one Marine for the entire incident.

 

On November 19, 2005, an IED went off on a Marine patrol that killed one member of the unit. They were then attacked by insurgents. A group of Iraqi men in a car by the explosion were shot after they began to run. Some of the Marines believed they were being fired upon from a series of houses and moved to clear them. After the battle AK shell casings were found outside the houses proving that insurgents were there. The authors lay out the training the unit went through which was also shaped by several members being veterans of Fallujah which involved tough urban fighting. That led the Marines to throw grenades into each room in the house and then fire into them. They then went back through both houses shooting the bodies to make sure their rear was cleared. 14 civilians were killed as a result. The Marines then went onto other houses as there was fighting going on throughout the city.

 

3 weeks later Time magazine ran a story claiming the Marines killed the civilians in the two houses out of revenge for their loss. The story came from one of the survivors and two men who claimed they were part of a human rights organization. They were both likely insurgent sympathizers. The article and subsequent reporting was what led to 8 Marines being charged with murder in December 2006. Only one ever went to trial and pled guilty to a lesser charge which the authors thought was an injustice. The other Marines who admitted to killing the civilians or could be proven they did so were either let off or given deals to testify against the one remaining defendant Sergeant Frank Wuterich.

 

No Time For The Truth reads like an unfolding court case. The authors go through events in chronological order laying out the evidence as it was discovered and the testimony as it was given from both the Marines involved and Iraqis. You get multiple perspectives from different people as well as the authors’ own opinions.

 

Halms and Faraj believed that the government decided early on through a special group put together in the Pentagon that it was going to make scapegoats out of the Marine unit to save face and then decided that Sergeant Wuterich would be the sole person to be prosecuted. The defense lawyers tore apart the government’s witnesses who gave contradictory accounts of the events. The author found other holes in the prosecution as well. In the end Wuterich pled guilty to negligence and was demoted to a private. This was something Faraj was deeply opposed to because if the trial had gone to its conclusion he believed Wuterich would have been found innocent but another one of the sergeant’s attorneys got Wuterich to agree to a deal instead. The authors repeatedly write that the point of the trial wasn’t justice but to create a fall guy. The government ended up failing at that.

 

Helms tries to give a bigger picture about the situation the Marines found themselves in during their deployment to Haditha in 2006. The American command was pushing counterinsurgency which meant trying to win over the Iraqis while fighting the insurgency but the Marines were not following that new strategy. Helms argued all their training was on urban warfare and their commanders were pushing offensive operations not counterinsurgency. This was supported by one government investigation that blamed the Marine leadership for Haditha more than the individual unit.

 

Going in chronological order means the reader can get lost in all the different versions of the same event being repeated again and again. In the end however, it proved to be an effective technique because it brought out the contradictions in the different testimonies and helped show how the case against Wuterich was deeply flawed.

 

Reading the book will also be difficult and controversial. The immediate question for many is how could Marines kill so many civilians in two houses and not know what they were doing? Helms shows how the homes were labelled as hostile because there were insurgents shooting outside and the Marines followed standard procedure in clearing them. What also becomes apparent is that one or two Marines went back into the houses to make sure they were secure and shot all of the civilians in the head. Those members of the unit showed no qualms about what they found because they believed there were militants inside the domiciles and the women and children were collateral damage. They were also let off or given plea deals by the Marine Corps. The dead were reported but it took quite some time for the Marine command to realize what happened and order an investigation. The book repeats again and again that lots of Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. forces during the occupation for all kinds of innocuous things like being in the wrong place at the wrong time such as the men gunned down in the car after the IED went off. They were simply students who found themselves in the middle of an insurgent attack and died as a result. The American mindset was this is what happens in war. That will be hard to digest for many readers.

 

No Time For The Truth can be faulted for being biased towards Sergeant Wuterich since it was partly written by one of his lawyers. At the same time, it does provide a slew of firsthand accounts of the Haditha incident and makes a convincing argument that this was not an intentional massacre and that the Marines were not looking for revenge. It does point out the heavy cost Iraqi civilians paid during the war at the hands of the Ameircans. It also goes after the government for attempting to scapegoat Sergeant Wuterich and not looking at the larger U.S. strategy in Iraq at the time which was failing.

 

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