U.S. senators demanded on Tuesday that the Bush administration swiftly establish what happened in Haditha where U.S. Marines are suspected of killing 24 unarmed Iraqis.
They said only swift action could salvage the image of the military and U.S. international relations.
The Senate Armed Services Committee plans hearings soon on last November’s incident in the western Iraqi town and to determine whether the military tried to cover it up.
One Republican senator insisted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should be brought to account.
The senator, Susan Collins from Maine, said the committee must “ask hard questions such as, ’When did Secretary Rumsfeld learn of the allegations?’ and ’What action did he take?’”
Criticism only a ‘defense mechanism’
The senators spoke on the same day a senior U.S. State Department official brushed aside criticism from Iraq’s prime minister over the Haditha incident.
“It’s a defense mechanism ... I wouldn’t make too much out of it,” James Jeffrey, the State Department’s Iraq coordinator, said of the criticism from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
He said he believed U.S. forces were well-respected in Iraq and Maliki’s outburst was to be expected.
“There is a constant buzz in Iraq of what our troops did or didn’t do,” Jeffrey told a group of defense writers.
Last week, Maliki demanded the United States share files from the investigation of the Haditha killings, which he called a “terrible crime.”
Haditha ‘very untenable position’
Senators just back from a week-long recess blasted the Pentagon for taking months to start a probe of the incident first reported by Time magazine.
Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner wrote to Rumsfeld worried about its impact on U.S. relations “around the world, ongoing military operations, diplomatic initiatives and the struggle of the new Iraqi government to assume full responsibilities of sovereignty.”
The Virginia Republican asked Rumsfeld “the earliest possible date” the Pentagon could provide witnesses.
Warner said the first might be Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell, who is investigating whether Marines involved in the incident lied about it and whether Marine Corps officers sufficiently examined their accounts.
Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee’s top Democrat, said the delay in investigating Haditha “further embarrassed the military and put them in a very, very untenable position.”
Bush has said he was troubled by news stories about the Nov. 19 killings of men, women and children in Haditha, and a general at the Pentagon said the incident could complicate the job for the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
Dissimilar to My Lai
Senators said their constituents so far were lumping Haditha into Iraq’s daily violence and that it did not appear to be galvanizing opposition to the war, as the 1968 My Lai massacre did for the Vietnam war.
“Is this really crystallizing opposition? That’s not what I’m hearing from my constituents,” said Rhode Island Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who opposed the Iraq war.
But Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, who has backed the war, said, “It gives some justification or some credibility to some of the lies that have been told by people who are just anti-war. I think they’re rejoicing in this.”
The State Department’s Jeffrey said he did not believe the impact of the incident could be compared to the scandal over abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in which shocking pictures were published worldwide.
“I think this will not have the same impact in terms of insurgents turning the population against us or turning opinion in the Arab world against us. But that is something that has to be evaluated every day,” he said.
Asked whether the Haditha incident could erode Iraqi confidence in U.S. troops, Jeffrey said he believed Iraqis trusted American forces who were often viewed as neutral.