On November 19, 2005, a convoy of U.S. Marines was travelling down a road in Haditha, a town on the Euphrates River in western Iraq, when one of their Humvees hit an improvised explosive device. A Marine was killed, and two were injured. The Marines had just pulled over a car carrying five men on their way to a college in Baghdad; after the explosion, they shot them to death. They then went into a nearby area and, in the course of a few hours, killed at least nineteen more people—men, women, and children. The oldest victim was a seventy-six-year-old grandfather; the youngest was a three-year-old girl. Some of them were shot in the head at relatively close range, inside their houses.

The events of that day came to be known as the Haditha massacre, and, after they came to light, President George W. Bush promised a full investigation. Four Marines were charged with murder. The massacre was no secret: a report in Time had helped bring it to public attention. But, in the end, only one of the Marines was convicted, of the minor crime of negligent dereliction of duty. He served not one day in prison. By the time that case ended, in 2012, few people had the appetite to engage with the continuing legacy of the Iraq War. The country had moved on.

Four years ago, the “In the Dark” podcast, produced by a team of six people led by the investigative reporter Madeleine Baran, began looking into the Haditha massacre. They interviewed more than a hundred sources, both Iraqis and Marines, and repeatedly sued the military for the release of thousands of records, in order to learn why a well-documented mass killing had gone virtually unpunished. Last year, “In the Dark” joined The New Yorker, and this summer, in nine episodes, the team laid out the maddening, appalling conclusions of their reporting. Though the shooters had claimed that the victims included insurgents, the team found that they were all civilians. The podcast features a lawyer in Haditha who lost fifteen members of his family that day, and who has spent the past nineteen years searching for justice.

In the calculus of modern warfare and international law, killing a civilian is not necessarily a crime. But the podcast uses the events in Haditha to underscore the inherent problem of the military using its own legal mechanisms—an array of self-protective reflexes, presumptions, and conditions—to hold its members to account. Investigations were conducted, and one was quite thorough, but, when it came time to bring the Marines to trial, the inadequacy of the military-justice system was laid bare. Only one of the Marines charged with murder was brought to trial; the charges against the others were dropped. As in other such trials, the jury was made up of fellow-Marines, and they made it plain that they would trust the testimony of a Marine over that of an Iraqi.

In fact, “In the Dark” ’s reporting showed that much of the Iraqis’ testimony was simply cast aside; survivors gave sworn depositions, but they were not used in court. When the officer in charge of another proceeding in the investigation was asked if he placed value on that testimony, he told our reporter, “No.” The victims were not even named during the trial; instead, they were referred to by the numbers that Marines had scrawled on their bodies, visible in photos taken in the aftermath of the killings. (Last month, with the permission of the families, The New Yorker published a selection of these photos, to help expose the brutality of the incident.)

One of the Marines whose murder charges were dropped had been accused of killing three men, unarmed civilians who were shot in the head. The Marine Corps general who dismissed the charges, James Mattis, wrote to him, “You willingly put yourself at great risk to protect innocent civilians.” In 2017, Mattis, who had become Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense, told The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins, “You can’t criminalize every mistake.”

If this was the outcome of a widely publicized mass killing, what happens to the incidents that don’t get mentioned by the President or receive extensive media attention? In theory, reporters, members of Congress, and others should be able to request the records of such cases, which each branch of the military is required to keep. Yet, after repeatedly suing for access, “In the Dark” found that one of the branches could not provide any records; for others, only limited information was available, and much of that was heavily redacted, making it nearly impossible to assess how the military investigates allegations of war crimes.

The team decided to create its own database. By combing through thousands of old news stories, human-rights reports, and detainee-abuse records, and by suing the military for additional information, they amassed what appears to be the largest collection of possible war crimes investigated by the U.S. military—seven hundred and eighty-one in all—from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The database, which will be published on newyorker.com this week, allowed “In the Dark” to analyze how the military treats allegations of war crimes. The findings are dismal. More than sixty-five per cent of investigations were dismissed. In the remaining incidents—those which were determined to be criminal—fewer than one in five perpetrators appeared to receive any kind of prison sentence.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq left more than two hundred thousand civilians dead. It’s a numbing figure, almost impossible to contemplate. Within this number, it’s easier to focus on specific events: the battles for Falluja, in which more than a thousand civilians were killed; the battle for Baghdad, in which an estimated several thousand Iraqis died. And then there are the atrocities with smaller yet more vivid death tolls: in Baghdad, U.S. soldiers bound and blindfolded at least four men, then brought them to a field outside the city, shot them, and dumped their bodies in a canal; in Mahmudiyah, five soldiers were involved in the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl, after which they murdered her and her family, to cover up their actions. Such incidents are often referred to as war crimes, a term that, amid the horror of conflict, aims to outline the unthinkable. A nation is judged in many ways; surely one is by how it deals with the war crimes it commits.

“In the Dark” ’s reporting leaves little doubt that, in the case of the Haditha massacre, the United States failed a grave moral test. The killings were a tragedy. The aftermath may have been worse. ♦