June 04, 2007 03:33 PM UTC

Did Coffman Lie About Haditha?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Last week, we discussed the history of Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman’s statements to the press regarding the Haditha massacre, which he was involved with as a civil affairs officer during his recent tour of duty in Iraq. Specifically, Coffman is on the record stating that local Iraqi officials didn’t complain about the massacre during his time in Haditha. As the Denver Post reported last June:

Colorado state Treasurer Mike Coffman, a Marine major who recently returned from a voluntary tour of duty in Iraq, was assigned to the area around Hadithah after the November incident and met there with Chessani. As a civil affairs officer, Coffman said he took Chessani to the Hadithah city council after the shooting.

There were many complaints from Iraqis, but not about a massacre…[Pols emphasis]

Which is also what he told the Washington Post, as we recounted last week:

When the Haditha city council met in January for the first time in many months, “none of them [Iraqi members] ever raised it as an issue,” said Coffman, who attended the meeting.

A story in this weekend’s Washington Post casts serious doubt on the truthfulness of these statements.

In the week after Marines killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, an angry group of townspeople went to the local military base alleging a “crime of war” and demanding an investigation, a military prosecutor said Friday.

The town council, the mayor and 14 other town leaders spent a “heated and emotional” 45 minutes with Marine officers. They presented an account of the deaths and a written demand for an investigation, translated into English, the prosecutor said at an investigative hearing here. [Pols emphasis]

But though the Iraqis met with the Marine battalion’s commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, and two other officers, news of the meeting did not travel up the chain of command as it should have, a two-star general testified Friday. An investigation was not launched until four months later…

We don’t claim to know the truth of what happened in Haditha, that’s for the court martial presently underway to determine. Coffman was a civil affairs liason officer to the Iraq government, not a part of the chain of command for the combat forces accused of the illegal killing of 24+ Iraqi civilians.

But if he has not been truthful with military investigators, or with the public, as news reports increasingly indicate…this would make the scandal over partisan operatives in the SoS Elections Division look like small potatoes indeed.