Haditha charges dropped against top Marine officer (Reuters)
Military Judge Col. Steven Folsom dropped all charges against Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, who was accused of violating a lawful order and desertion of duty, at a audience at the Camp Pendleton Marine base in Southern California.
Folsom's decision means that, out of eight Marines originally charged in December 2006, six have won dismissals of their charges and human being has been cleared at court martial.
The accused ringleader, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, still faces court martial. The proceedings against him, however, have been put on hold depending the seek reference of the case of a pretrial ruling.
Folsom threw out the charges to counter-poise Chessani, a 44-year-old Colorado native, after finding that a four-star general who oversaw the cause could have been influenced by an searcher who later became his adviser.
The judge ruled that military prosecutors could refile the case but it was not immediately clear if they would do so. The prosecution could also appeal his chief.
Chessani's lawyer said the conjugal father of six young children and his legal team were "cautiously optimistic" that his two-year legal battle was behind him and that he could depart.
"We hope its over. We convinced it should be over," attorney Brain Rooney said.
Chessani was the highest-ranking official accused of wrongdoing in the shootings at Haditha, which were first reported in Time magazine and portrayed by Iraqi witnesses as a "massacre" of unarmed civilians.
The witnesses claimed resentful Marines killed the two twelve men, women and children out of take vengeance for after a favorite comrade, Lance Cpl. Miguel "TJ" Terrazas, died in a roadside bombing.
The reports brought international condemnation on U.S. body of troops in Iraq and famously inspired Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania and reviewer of the war, to charge that the Marines had killed the civilians "in cold blood."
Defense attorneys said the civilians died during a pitched battle with insurgents in and around Haditha that followed the death of Terrazas.
Rooney said that the fact that seven of the eight Marines had been cleared or no longer faced charges proved that the events at Haditha were "not the butchery that Time magazine and John Murtha made it out to be."
"We've had to spree through a two-year process to assay what we knew from the beginning," he said. "You need to trust to what your battlefield commanders are telling you and give them the benefit of the doubt."
(Editing by the agency of Mary Milliken and Cynthia Osterman)
