June 07, 2007 08:50 PM UTC

Don't Take This Personally, Major Coffman

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As you know, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman responded yesterday to posts we made in the last week about his service in Iraq around the time of the Haditha massacre.

The court martial for the commanding officer of the Marine battalion accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians in November of 2005 in Haditha is going on right now at Camp Pendleton, and last weekend the Washington Post printed new details from testimony that called into question statements Coffman made regarding his knowledge of the incident. As the Rocky Mountain News reports this morning:

Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, responding to questions raised by a political blog, has defended his service as a Marine working in an Iraqi town where 24 civilians were killed the month before he arrived.

On Wednesday, Coffman posted a statement on ColoradoPols.com, asserting no mention was made of the civilian deaths when he held his first meeting with members of the Haditha City Council in January 2006…

On Saturday, The Washington Post reported a group of angry Haditha residents, including the mayor and 14 town leaders, met with Marine officers the week after the killings and demanded a war crimes investigation.

That article prompted a posting on ColoradoPols.com Monday under the headline “Did Coffman Lie About Haditha?” The story stopped short of accusing Coffman of lying but raised questions about his previous statements that Haditha officials made no mention of the killings at the January meeting. [Pols emphasis]

Specifically, Coffman asserts in his statement:

The incident in Haditha where 24 civilians were killed by Marines following an IED attack occurred in November 2005.  I did not arrive in Haditha until January 2006.  There was no mention of the November 2005 incident at my first meeting with the Haditha City Council in early January 2006…

Which is consistent with his public statements on the matter since he returned from Iraq in March of 2006. Coffman goes on in his statement to us to note that he saw a media reference to a USMC press release containing information he knew to be inaccurate about the massacre after he returned, and in June of 2006 he reported that information.

We appreciate his response to our questions. But nothing in this statement, or his expression via spokesman to the Rocky Mountain News of ‘personal offense’ at our asking about his service in Haditha, clears up the original question.

The biggest problem is there is nothing in this statement that isn’t already well-known. We know he was transferred to Haditha a month after the killings. We know he claims that the Haditha city government made no mention of the killings when they met for, as the Washington Post wrote last year, “the first time in many months”–a meeting that Coffman attended.

Coffman says that Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, the battalion commander from Rangely now being court martialed, wasn’t present at his first meeting with the Haditha city government, and asserts that the Denver Post reporter who wrote that he “took” Chessani a second meeting with the city council “embellished” the story. These are relatively minor details, but we’re curious to know how Mike Soraghan and John Farrell feel about that.

The bottom line: last weekend’s report in the Washinton Post that the Haditha city government, consistently portrayed in press accounts (based on statements made by Mike Coffman) as a passive entity who didn’t mention the Haditha massacre to anybody was in fact outraged at the incident, got together and marched down to the local Marine garrison to demand a war crimes investigation immediately afterward is not consistent with anything Coffman has said about his interaction with them.

If he attended the “first” meeting of the Haditha city council since well before the massacre, as reported, it’s implausible that they would fail to mention this mass killing of civilians to him. Or the second meeting at which Chessani was actually present.

We have to take into consideration that numerous Marine officers have been implicated in the attempted cover-up of civilian killings at Haditha. If the combat chain of command could not be counted on to refer the concerns of the local population to higher authorities for investigation, the next logical place to look for that relief would be the civil affairs officer. The military officer most responsible for dealing with the local population. In Haditha, that was Maj. Mike Coffman. And contrary to every indication he has given, the local population of Haditha was more than a little upset about what had happened in their city in November of 2005.

Furthermore, a statement given to investigators in June of 2006, months after the killings and coverup had been thoroughly scandalized, by which time Coffman was already a candidate for his current office, is of questionable value. As a commenter noted yesterday, everyone knew by that point that these civilians hadn’t been killed by a terrorist bomb.

As the Rocky notes, we have been careful not to make any accusation we can’t prove here. We’re only asking questions. The fact that we’re not satisfied with the answers is based on facts that Coffman never addressed.