MUST-VIEW: Frontline - Feb. 19 "Rules of Engagement: What Really Happened in Haditha?"

Check local listings.

Watch previews at the website:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/haditha

FRONTLINE cuts through the fog of war to reveal the untold story of what happened in Haditha, Iraq—where twenty-four of the town’s residents were killed by U.S. forces in what many in the media branded “Iraq’s My Lai.” With accusations swirling that the Marines massacred Iraqi civilians “in cold blood,” the Haditha incident has led to one of the largest criminal cases against U.S. troops in the Iraq war. But real questions have emerged about what really happened that day, and who is responsible. Through television interviews with Iraqi survivors and Marines accused of war crimes, FRONTLINE investigates this incident and what it can tell us about the harrowing moral and legal landscape the U.S. military faces in Iraq.

FRONTLINE INVESTIGATES HADITHA KILLINGS AND HOW U.S. TROOPS STRUGGLE WITH RULES OF ENGAGEMENT DURING BATTLE

FRONTLINE presents
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Tuesday, February 19, 2008, at 9 p.m. ET on PBS


www.pbs.org/frontline/haditha

“A U.S. Marine and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha,” read a U.S. military press release in November 2005. Four months later, Time magazine would report that it was U.S. Marines—not a roadside bomb—who were responsible for the deaths of unarmed Iraqi civilians. Soon after, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) would claim the Marines killed the Iraqis “in cold blood,” igniting a media firestorm which labeled Haditha a “massacre” and one of the worst atrocities of the Iraq war. But what really happened that day reveals a far more complex story that gets to the heart of the war troops are fighting.

Through interviews with the highest levels of the U.S. military, personal accounts from Marines involved, documents obtained by FRONTLINE, never-before-seen unmanned drone footage of the actual day’s events, and an exclusive television interview with an intelligence officer who watched the day unfold, FRONTLINE investigates what occurred in Haditha.

In Rules of Engagement, airing Tuesday, February 19, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE examines how the rules of war are interpreted in theory and in battle and what that says about the war in Iraq.

The story begins in October 2005, when the Marines of Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment arrived in Haditha, a town in the Sunni-dominated Anbar province. They anticipated heavy combat similar to what the company had experienced in the second battle of Fallujah where civilians were evacuated, allowing the Marines to aggressively pursue insurgents house to house in the most intense urban combat since Vietnam. Kilo Company was the battalion’s tip of the spear in that battle, leading the charge and emerging as heroes. Now the company found itself in a much more complex situation, in a relatively quiet town where insurgents often hid among civilians. But all that would change on November 19, 2005, when a Humvee in a convoy carrying 12 Marines was hit by an IED (improvised explosive device), instantly killing Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas. At first the Marines said the explosion also killed 15 Iraqis. The incident was barely covered by the press until Time magazine received a gruesome video from an Iraqi human rights group showing the dead Iraqis, including women and children, maimed by gunshot wounds, not by an IED, as the original press release had stated. The total number of civilians reportedly killed that morning rose to 24 when a number of “insurgents” shot by the Marines were reclassified as “noncombatants.”

Some of the Iraqi civilians were killed inside their homes. A young girl who survived the Haditha incident told FRONTLINE what she says she saw in the first house that was raided: “They came in and killed my father. Then they killed my grandfather,” said Iman Walid, who was 9 years old at the time. “After that, they threw a grenade in the hall where we were sitting. Everyone died except me and my brother.”