April 25, 2007
Haditha bombshell
Newsmax is reporting that an intelligence office provided substantial exculpatory evidence in the Haditha case, evidence he says the NCIS sat on, evidence that supports the defendants' version of the facts, and indicates the entire incident was an ambush which was being videotaped by our enemies who edited it and handed it over to anti-war activists to present the case in the worst possible way to our troops. If this is so, it would substantiate the belief Steve Gilbert who early on was skeptical of the claims underlying this case. From Newsmax:
In a nutshell, the case exploded when an intelligence officer dropped a bombshell on prosecutors during a pre-hearing interview when he revealed the existence of exculpatory evidence that appears to have been obtained by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and withheld from the prosecutors.This officer, described by senior Marine Corps superiors as one of the best and most dedicated intelligence officers in the entire Marine Corps, was in possession of evidence which provided a minute-by-minute narrative of the entire day's action - material which he had amassed while monitoring the day's action in his capacity as the battalion's intelligence officer. That material, he says, was also in the hands of the NCIS.Much of that evidence remains classified, but it includes videos of the entire day's action, including airstrikes against insurgent safe houses. Also included was all of the radio traffic describing the ongoing action between the men on the ground and battalion headquarters, and proof that the Marines were aware that the insurgents conducting the ambush of the Kilo Company troops were videotaping the action - the same video that after editing ended up in the hands of a gullible anti-war correspondent for Time magazine.When asked by the prosecution team to give his copies of the evidence to the prosecution, he told NewsMax.com that he was reluctant to do so, fearing it would again be suppressed or misused, but later relented when ordered by his commanding general to do so.Confronted by the massive mounds of evidence that Marine Corps sources tell NewsMax proves conclusively that the cases against the Haditha Marines are baseless, the prosecutors were forced to postpone the Article 32 against Lt. Col. Chessani and two of the enlisted men in an attempt to regroup.