They DID NOT want the world to SEE these PHOTOS

    On the morning of November 19, 2005

… Marines killed twenty-four Iraqi men, women, and children

… they shot five men who had been driving to a college in Baghdad

… They entered three nearby homes and killed nearly everyone inside

… youngest victim was a three-year-old girl

… The oldest was a seventy-six-year-old man

… later claim that they were fighting insurgents

… but the dead were all civilians

… two other Marines set off to document the aftermath

… marking bodies with numbers and then photographing them

… a collection of photographs that would be the most powerful evidence against their fellow-Marines

… The killings came to be known as the Haditha massacre

… Four Marines were charged with murder

… those charges were later dropped

… General James Mattis, who went on to become Secretary of Defense,

wrote a glowing letter to one of the Marines, dismissing his charges and declaring him innocent

… 2012, when the final case ended in a plea deal with no prison sentence

… in 2014, General Michael Hagee, who was the commandant of the Marine Corps at the time of the Haditha killings,

bragged about keeping the Haditha photos secret.

… “The press never got them, unlike Abu Ghraib,” 

… In 2020, our reporting team … filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Navy

… The Navy released nothing in response

… We then sued the Navy, the Marine Corps, and U.S. Central Command

… a colleague and I travelled to Iraq to meet with family members of the victims of the killings

… We asked … if they would help us obtain the photos of their dead family members

… They agreed

… two men went house to house in Haditha, explaining … what we were trying to do

… collected seventeen signatures

… filed the form in court … the military relented, and gave us the photos

… The New Yorker has decided to publish a selection of these photos, with the permission of the family members of those depicted, to reveal the horror of a killing that the military chose not to punish