Eight military personnel were charged with the murder of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha. After an IED attack on a convoy killed one Marine, troops from Kilo company went on a house-to-house excursion that ended tragically. Three of the troops in the Haditha case had their charges dropped by Lt. Gen James Mattis, the senior U.S. Marine commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force based in Camp Pendleton in Southern California.
Seven Marines and one Navy corpsman were tried for the kidnapping and murder of an Iraqi man from the town of Hamdania. The soldiers allegedly kidnapped the man and led him to a ditch for execution. Mattis dismissed two of the charges after one of the Marines agreed to testify in the case and another case lacked sufficient evidence to continue courts martial proceedings; the military equivalent of war crimes prosecution.
Critics are making claims of nepotism in the decision to drop murder charges against the Marines. Gary Solis of the Georgetown University Law Center, and himself a former Marine Corps prosecutor, considers whether the obvious sympathetic perspective of Mattis “extends to being a critical factor in releasing [the Marines].” Mattis has served back to back combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and may be sympathetic in the cases. Speaking in 2005, Mattis was quoted as saying “It's fun to shoot people.”
Supporters, however, note that Mattis’ decisions are based on his war-time experience. Tom Donnelly of the conservative American Enterprise Institute states that Mattis should “understand the individual pressures that any soldier or Marine would be subject to in fighting in an irregular combat.” Supporters of Mattis’ decision highlight the stress that asymmetrical combat can have. Mattis himself highlights the difficulties of combating guerilla tactics; “Our nation is fighting a shadowy enemy who hides among the innocent people, does not comply with any aspect of the law of war and routinely draws fire toward civilians.”
In assessing war crimes committed by the military forces of a sovereign nation, the decision to internally prosecute atrocities is seen as a positive step in reconciliation and of the political will to adhere to the international laws of war. Yet, on the broader scale where atrocities have ascended to the level of genocide, hybrid prosecutions which recognize both internal and international jurisprudence can hamper, delay, or even remove, and sense of justice. In the cases of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the Sri Lankan cases of using child soldiers, domestic reconciliation campaigns have nearly derailed. In the American system, as the case of Jose Padilla testifies, the use of conventional prosecutorial methods – be it the International Criminal Court or the U.S. District Court of Miami – may be a viable method of pragmatic justice.
