Over at The New Yorker

The New Yorker has a Sept. 10, 2024 piece by Parker Yesko titled The Failures of the Military-Justice System. The War Crimes That the Military Buried can be found here. It is a companion piece to the "In the Dark" podcast:

In nine podcast episodes, the third season of In the Dark examines the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, in November 2006. The investigation looks at the subsequent probe announced by the American military, which followed an outcry in the global media and a pledge of accountability by President George W. Bush—but resulted in no prison time for anyone involved.

The series, a product of four years of reporting, is based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of previously unreleased government documents. It will be accompanied by several multimedia features. America’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have largely faded from the headlines, and this project uncovers new information, not previously reported, about war crimes committed during America’s so-called Forever War. 

Excerpt from Ms. Yesko's Sept. 10 piece:

Of the seven hundred and eighty-one cases we found, at least sixty-five per cent had been dismissed by investigators who didn’t believe that a crime had even taken place. Soldiers would return to the United States and confess—to women, health-care workers, job interviewers—that they’d murdered civilians or prisoners, but military investigators would find that the allegations couldn’t be substantiated. Detainees at Abu Ghraib prison reported abuse by their guards, but investigators did not find sufficient evidence to confirm that it had happened. Civilians driving distractedly or too fast were shot dead approaching traffic checkpoints, and investigators deemed these killings acceptable escalations of force. Young men were found unresponsive at Camp Bucca prison, and their deaths were attributed to natural causes.

In a hundred and fifty-one cases, however, investigators did find probable cause to believe that a crime had occurred, that the rules of engagement had been violated, or that a use of force hadn’t been justified. These include the case of soldiers raping a fourteen-year-old girl and subsequently murdering her and her family; the alleged killing of a man by a Green Beret who cut off his victim’s ear and kept it; and cruelty toward detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and at the Bagram Air Base detention facility. They were offenses that even a military-justice system vexed by the difficulty of collecting evidence in war zones and forgiving of deadly errors in judgment had identified as warranting prosecution or punishment. Yet, even in these cases, meaningful accountability was rare.

We identified five hundred and seventy-two alleged perpetrators associated with these hundred and fifty-one criminal cases. Only a hundred and thirty of them were convicted. The records show that they rarely received lengthy prison terms. Much more often, their cases were dealt with by commanders, who have broad discretion to punish their troops with extra duty, demotions, or reprimands, circumventing formal prosecution altogether. (The commanders themselves almost never seemed to face consequences for the misdeeds of their subordinates.) Fewer than one in five alleged perpetrators appear to have been sentenced to any type of confinement, and the median sentence was just eight months. “The conviction rates and the rate of sentencing for these kinds of very serious person crimes is just far below what you would see in the civilian system,” [John] Roman said.

We sent summaries of our findings to the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Air Force, and requested an opportunity to present their leaders with the details of our analysis. None took us up on the offer. The Army replied that it “holds Soldiers and Army Civilians to the highest standards of personal conduct.” The Marine Corps didn’t respond.

The In the Dark project is supported by The Pulitzer Center. 

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