Haditha report: Marines face action

Disciplinary action now seems likely, officials said, over failures by 2nd Marine Division officers in their command duty.

‘‘The Marines will go through their day of pain,’’ said a military official in Baghdad familiar with recommendations made by ground forces commander, Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli.

Its findings should be made public soon, possibly in a week, as US Generals and diplomats strive to assure a sceptical Iraqi public — and their new government — that soldiers are being held accountable for a string of suspected abuses.

Those include a rape-murder case that has outraged the nation and fuelled calls for the 127,000 Americans to go home.

It is for Casey to decide on what disciplinary action to take over Haditha. The report prepared by Major General Eldon Bargewell identified failings in areas ‘‘from reporting, to training to command environment’’, the military official said.

That action is likely is in little doubt, he made clear, while stressing the report is entirely separate from the criminal murder probe under way into troops accused by Iraqis of shooting the 24 people on November 19 after a bomb killed a Marine.

The key complaint against senior officers is a failure to question inconsistencies in their troops’ accounts of the day.

The Marines said in a statement the day after the killings in Haditha last year that 15 of the civilian dead were killed by the same roadside bomb which killed the Marine during a patrol.

At the heart of the Bargewell report is how that version was left uncorrected even after medical reports showed all the dead had gunshot wounds and survivors told Time magazine Marines went from house to house in a rage. Among the dead was a girl aged 3.

Time said that when confronted in January with a video of the dead in the city morgue, a Marine spokesman dismissed the allegations by Iraqis as al- Qaeda propaganda, even though a Marine officer had also paid out nearly $40,000 in compensation.

After Time published its story in March, three Marine field officers from the regiment involved, a lieutenant colonel and two captains, were relieved of their commands. The Marines’ top general flew to Iraq to remind his troops to kill only when necessary and to observe the laws of war.