Time magazine’s veteran foreign correspondent Tim McGirk has reported from postings such as Islamabad, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Baghdad and New Delhi, and is currently in the process of moving to Jerusalem to become the magazine’s bureau chief there. This past March, while in Baghdad, he was the first reporter to break the story of the alleged slaughter of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in the town of Haditha in November 2005.
Paul McLeary: In March, Time magazine broke the story of the alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha. How did you find the story, and how did you go about reporting it?
Tim McGirk: Well, we wanted to do a story that looked at civilian casualties, because in December, President Bush mentioned for the first time that there were around 30,000 civilian casualties. So we contacted the Hammurabi human rights monitoring group, since we did stuff with them before, and we knew that they had very good contacts in the Sunni triangle and could get places that we couldn’t get to. So, they came one day and they brought this horrendous video, and they didn’t know that much about it, they just knew that it came from Haditha, and there were two segments of it. The first showed relatives claiming the bodies in a morgue in Haditha, and the second showed interiors of a house where something awful had happened.
Then they said, “the Marines did this,” and I found it very hard to believe, you know? But what piqued my curiosity was that I went back and I saw that [in November, at the time the Iraqis claimed the massacre happened] there had been a communiqué that had been put out by camp Blue Diamond, [an American base near Ramadi] that said that one Marine had been killed and two wounded and 15 Iraqis were killed in the same roadside bombing, and it said that eight insurgents were killed in an ensuing gunfight. Then I looked at the video again, and thought “well, these bodies are women and children, and some were wearing their pajamas,” and you just wouldn’t find Iraqi women going out in the streets at 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning in their pajamas. The second thing is that all the damage was on the inside of the houses, so it was obvious that something had happened inside the houses. There were a few exterior shots of the houses, and there was nothing on the exterior. If it was a roadside bomb that killed these people, you know, the outside of the building would have been pockmarked, and it wouldn’t have accounted for the bullet holes on the inside of these rooms, too.
PM: How did you follow up with it, did you send Iraqi stringers out to investigate?
TM: We did it through the Hammurabi group, we got the local journalist who had shot the video and he came from Haditha, and through him…Well, first of all, we couldn’t send our stringers out there because even our stringers who had really good contacts with the insurgents, who wanted to go, were told by the insurgents, “Don’t even try it, because the guys out there are all crazy foreign fighters, and they’ll kill you as a CIA spy.” So the only way we could really get information was by making contact with people in Haditha, and getting them to come to Baghdad.
The thing that convinced me that I had to do the story was when we got this 8 year-old girl who came and just told this absolutely horrifying story, and what convinced me about her story was that she only talked about what she knew. She wasn’t being coached to talk about things she hadn’t seen or witnessed directly. She only talked about what she saw, and she saw two Marines in the doorway of the living room, who opened fire first on her 78 year-old grandfather – shot him twice, once in the chest, once in the head. They shot the grandmother, then opened fire at the group [of Iraqis] who were huddled at the far end of the room, and she was one of them, along with her younger brother, who also survived.
PM: And how long did it take you to put the story together after you saw the video and spoke with the townspeople?
TM We saw the video around the third week of January, and then we knew that there were other witnesses, a 13 year-old girl from a different house, the 8 year-old’s aunt who went out the back door with a baby, and her husband tried to follow her and he was shot and lay bleeding for six hours in the garden before he died. In the meantime, we also made contact with the mayor, we made contact with a lawyer in Haditha who was a go-between representing the families when the Americans came and gave them compensation, which was another strange thing, because the Americans never give compensation to civilians who are killed by insurgent activity. They only do it if they’re directly involved, and this was a case where they were paying off families.
PM: And had you heard anything from the military by this point?
TM: Yeah, we did. In the beginning after we saw the video and heard accounts from the military and the girls, we approached the military and said, “This is what we’ve got,” and the Marines’ first reaction was “Well, we think this is all al Qeada propaganda.” We told them that we’d like to go up and see the place for ourselves, but it was too dangerous for us to go up there alone, can [they] arrange an embed? So, they did, but the problem was that the ABC anchor [Bob Woodruff] had just been wounded the day before we were supposed to go out, and [Time managing editor] Jim Kelly, I think wisely, said that it probably wasn’t a good idea for us to go out to Haditha, and put our safety in the hands of the men that we were then going to turn around and accuse of having gone on a rampage and killed civilians.
PM: During your stint in country, how often did Time reporters go out on embeds?
TM: [Michael] Ware went out a lot. I think when I was there, I went out on three different embeds around Baghdad.
PM: How long were you in Iraq?
TM: Five weeks, but I was also there last summer, in June and July.
PM: And how would you compare last summer to your most recent trip this past winter?
TM: It was much worse this past time. When I came back in January there were entire sections of the city where we had been able to go six months before, and suddenly they were just too dangerous. Also the strains on the staff were much, much greater because we had a mix of Sunni and Shia, and all the reverberations of what was happening outside of the office were naturally affecting the people inside, too.
PM: How would you respond to the criticism coming from some on the Right [that] the press is trying to push the Haditha story because it makes the military look bad, and hurts the war effort?
TM: I just know in my case that we deliberately got all of our facts together, and then and only then did we go to the military. We gave what we had to the military and they said that they would launch an investigation into it. We held off on reporting it until we could get their side of the story. So, I don’t think we were in any great rush to accuse them of a massacre.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.