The NYT is
reporting:
Marine commanders in Iraq learned within two days of the killings in Haditha last November that Iraqi civilians had died from gunfire, not a roadside bomb as initially reported, but the officers involved saw no reason to investigate further, according to a senior Marine officer. ...
But the handling of the matter by the senior Marine commanders in Haditha, and whether officers and enlisted personnel tried to cover up what happened or missed signs suggesting that the civilian killings were not accidental, has become a major element of the investigation by an Army general into the entire episode.
Officials have said that the investigation, while not yet complete, is likely to conclude that a small group of marines carried out the unprovoked killings of two dozen civilians in the hours after a makeshift bomb killed a marine.
A senior Marine general familiar with the investigation, which is being led by Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell of the Army, said in an interview that it had not yet established how high up the chain of command culpability for the killings extended. But he said there were strong suspicions that some officers knew that the Marine squad's version of events had enough holes and discrepancies that it should have been looked into more deeply.
"It's impossible to believe they didn't know," the Marine general said, referring to midlevel and senior officers. "You'd have to know this thing stunk." He was granted anonymity, along with others who described the investigation, because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it.
In recent weeks, investigators have interviewed the Marine commanders who were serving in Iraq at the time of the killings, including Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Johnson, commander of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, and Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, commander of the Second Marine Division, a senior Pentagon adviser said.
Officers knew something had happened that did not jibe with the initial report, but they did not do anything about it. So, will these officers be punished in some fashion commensurate with their inaction? Because, by NOT investigating, they contribute to the spreading of rottenness from the few "bad apples" in that Haditha Marine squad to other squads in the barrel. By accepting the suspicious version they were presented with, they turned a blind eye to what really happened in Haditha and made it more likely that a similar incident would happen again.
And while no single incident may be as bad as Haditha will turn out to have been, it is clear from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's condemnation not just the Haditha killings but what he called "the practice" of occupying forces' disregard for civilians that that there have been many other incidents.
Where were the "core values" teachers then?
"The list might be long, because this has become a phenomenon among many of the multinational forces that they do not respect the civilian," Maliki ... told reporters after a cabinet meeting. "They run them over and leave them, or they kill anyone suspicious."
If the government probe confirms what the NYT says above, will those same people who called Jack Murtha a traitor for raising questions about Haditha apply their smear to active-duty Marine generals as well?