IN BRIEF | comments (475) Rumsfeld After Haditha Inquiry: “Really, Really Bad -- As Bad Or Worse Than Abu Ghraib”...

Thomas E. Ricks Thomas E. Ricks June 4, 2006 at 08:31 AM

At 5 p.m. Nov. 19, near the end of one of the most violent days the Marine Corps had experienced in the Upper Euphrates Valley, a call went out for trucks to collect the bodies of 24 Iraqi civilians.

The unit that arrived in the farming town of Haditha found babies, women and children shot in the head and chest. An old man in a wheelchair had been shot nine times. A group of girls, ages 1 to 14, lay dead. Everyone had been killed by gunfire, according to death certificates issued later.

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