"What the NCIS has done in their investigation findings, and what the Post has done in accepting those findings, is to portray this sequence of events in the worst possible light, to implicate the Marines to the greatest extent possible."

The Post reported that "one of the witnesses, a 26-year-old Iraqi soldier Sgt. Asad Amer Mashoot, who was in the Marine convoy, told investigators he watched in horror as the four students and the taxi driver fell. ‘They didn't even try to run away,' he said. ‘We were afraid from Marines and we saw them behaving like crazy. They were yelling and screaming.'"

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NCIS "is swallowing the visceral reaction of this Iraqi, hook, line and sinker," the Marine intelligence officer charged, adding that "the typical Iraqi soldier's reaction to a Marine squad in the attack is horror. The Iraqis are timid and deathly afraid of confrontation, and an Iraqi ride-along, witnessing Marines defending their position with all the accompanying yelling to each other, at the enemy, and the chaos in general is probably going to be shocked. This is a well known phenomenon in any engagement. To cherry-pick this Iraqi soldier's reaction to imply rage or out of control actions by Marines is disingenuous and deceptive."

At the time of the taxi incident, Sgt. Wuterich and his squad from Kilo Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment were under insurgent fire in a carefully planned ambush and the situation was chaotic. The NCIS report ignores this fact, giving the impression that the death of the men from the taxi took place as an isolated incident instead of having occurred when the Marines were engaged in a firefight with insurgent ambushers. The killing of the men did not occur in a vacuum, but in the midst of an ambush involving sustained enemy fire.

"In addition, the documents showed that Marine Corps officials have accused the troops of failing to identify their targets before using grenades and guns to kill 14 unarmed people in the houses, including several young children in their pajamas, in a span of about 10 minutes."

This last statement astonished our source, who commented "Damn right they were authorized to fire freely inside the two houses. Damn right they considered the houses hostile. There are two Purple Heart winners from another squad that day who received fragmentary grenade wounds from Syrian fighters defending from within the back bedroom of a house they were entering."

The state of mind of the Marines was totally ignored by the NCIS, although it played the key role in what happened that day.

That state of mind can be clearly understood when it is known that just one week a earlier, these Marines were briefed by an intelligence officer on how a Force Reconnaissance unit had entered a hospital bedroom tentatively, and the insurgents were lying in bed with AK-47s hidden under the blankets.

"Seven Recon Marines were killed that day because they didn't go in hard enough, and didn't lead with grenades," our source said. "Sgt. Wuterich and his Marines were doing exactly what they had been briefed to do, what their company commander had trained them to do, and what they had been authorized to do by every echelon of command in Al Anbar Province."

Moreover, that authorization was part of what was known as "Operation Rivergate" an intelligence briefing operation that covered a number of insurgent ambushes in early October and throughout the first months of the unit's deployment.

"These incidents of insurgent actions were reinforced in the Marines' minds during October and November in their daily intel briefings," our source said.

"This kind of thing is what will ultimately burn the NCIS," he predicted. "Their investigative techniques were so focused in interrogations, that they did not do the due diligence of documentary investigation so they didn't even consider the contents of all these briefs and intel reports as pertinent."

Our source said he learned that the NCIS was even unaware of the horrendous incident in the Haditha hospital, the details of which had to have burned themselves deep into the consciousness of Sgt. Wuterich and his men. He told NewsMax.com he couldn't wait until Marine intelligence officers bring into the courtroom actual photographs of the enemy's sandbagged positions in patients' rooms, or the line drawings of how the enemy killed those recon Marines while lying in bed with AK-47s under the covers.

Said our source "Every echelon of command in Iraq had the battalion's full debrief of the incident. No one doubted for a second, from the enemy indicators leading up to that day, as well as the intelligence gained after the attack, that this action was typical of insurgent activity and [Marines'] justified reaction to that incident."

"The Marines concurred that they were under fire from all sides, indicating that the incident was part of a complex insurgent attack that lasted much of the day. One Marine and two Iraqi soldiers told investigators that the men who had been in the taxi were standing in a line outside it, some with their hands in the air, when Wuterich began to fire on them.

"Wuterich said the men got out of the car, and he shot them because he considered them a threat. But Dela Cruz said the men were standing in a line when they started to fall.

‘As I crossed the median I saw one of the Iraqi civilians, who was standing in the center of the line, drop to the ground,' Dela Cruz told investigators. ‘"Immediately afterwards another Iraqi standing by him raised his hands to his head. I then heard other small arms fire and looked to my left and saw Sgt. Wuterich kneeling on one knee and shooting his M16 in the direction of the Iraqi civilians.'

"Dela Cruz told investigators that he pumped bullets into the bodies of the Iraqi men after they were on the ground and later urinated on one of them. Minutes later, a Quick Reaction Force arrived from the Marine base, bringing Lt. William T. Kallop, the first officer on the scene. Kallop told investigators he began to receive enemy fire almost immediately.

"About that time, Cpl. Hector A. Salinas spotted a man firing at the squad from the corner of a house on the south side of the road," according to the Post

"Are you confused just reading this?" the intelligence officer asked. "I am! Imagine what those Marines are dealing with as all this is going on. The enemy fire is still continuing when the platoon commander showed up at least 15 minutes later! One Marine's observation and reaction to an event will be totally different than another Marine that may be standing 100 feet away. To take their natural conflicting observations and use them to implicate each other or the situation in general is ridiculous.

"As for Dela Cruz' actions that he has admitted to - that is one of those things that you can't account for ... a young Marine by himself, doing something that makes you scratch your head. One thing occurs to me though. I wonder if he would have urinated on them if he hadn't thought at the time that they were enemy insurgents?"

Said our source "That is an understatement if I have ever heard one. One thing that bothers me is that a combat general like General Mattis didn't see through the NCIS narrative."

"Of course. NCIS uses the useless ROE card that division hands out, which doesn't have anything to do with the specific ROE briefed to the Marines for an operation in a well-known enemy-held territory," the intel officer explained. "Did the division follow the ROE card when it authorized TOW [Tube Launched optically tracked wide guided missile] Hellfire and GBU-12 [Guided Bomb Unit-12, a 500 pound general purpose warhead] drops on civilian residences four hours later?"

"Just how does this jibe with the accusation of ‘Marines in a rage?'" our source wondered. "If they had been in a rage, or otherwise been indiscriminately killing civilians, why did they stop here? The fact is, this house was well away from the road, posed less of a threat, and they were not under direct fire from this house. This allowed them to go in softer, and they made intelligent decisions about the threat level and the [actions] necessary to, counter the threat. Took them longer to get there also, so they were able to process the surroundings more thoroughly.

"The official inquiry began two weeks later, after the Time reporter sent a list of questions about the incident to Marine officials in Iraq. In his e-mail, the reporter raised the possibility that Marines had massacred civilians and executed the men from the taxi, based in part on a videotape made by an activist a day after the incident.

"[Division commander Gen.] Huck told investigators he dismissed the allegations, believing they were part of an insurgent campaign to smear the Marines. Other Marine officers, such as Davis, also believed that the allegations were outlandish. But Maj. Samuel H. Carrasco, then a battalion operations officer, said he and the battalion executive officer suggested an investigation to Chessani. Carrasco told investigators that "Lt. Col. Chessani then shouted, 'My men are not murderers.'" According to our source "This last part (as well as the couple of previous paragraphs) pretty much accurately describes the chain of reporting, and the fact that everyone knew, and treated it with its due attention.

"One thing glossed over is that quite a bit of intelligence reporting went into those condolence payments. The track record of insurgents using civilians as cover was clear - one example is the May 2005 ‘Mother's Day Massacre' in Haditha, where insurgents set up sandbagged defensive positions in the Haditha Hospital, and ambushed Marines after driving a vehicle suicide bomb into the middle of their convoy (sound familiar?). I love how [the Post] juxtaposes an otherwise unremarkable CO comment in defense of his Marines against the other officers' observations - totally out of context, as if to bolster the dereliction charge against Lt.Col Chessani."

The NCIS investigation began months after the incident on November 19, 2005, only after Time magazine had published an account based entirely on suspect sources and a video filmed by the insurgent ambushers that had been shopped around for months. NewsMax.com's source, an expert on insurgent tactics was present throughout the day's action and was in a position to monitor the events which amounted to a full day's combat in that insurgent-dominated city.

His revelation of the pre-November 19th action briefings casts a whole new light on what motivated Sgt. Wuterich and his men to act as they did on that day. Given their state of mind it is no wonder that he advised his men to shoot first and ask questions later. As past experience had proven, Marines who "asked questions first," did not live to shoot.

Marines familiar with the case told NewsMax that the government knows it cannot sustain murder charges in the case of the civilians in the two houses and having understood that, later focused on the taxi incident where the only so-called evidence are photos of the dead passengers and confusing testimony coerced from some of those present.

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