Lawyer: Officers not targeted in Haditha probe

Cameras confiscated
In separate interviews with The Associated Press on Monday, the parents of two of the Marines who were members of a unit sent into Haditha to help remove the bodies said their children have been traumatized by the experience.

Lance Cpl. Andrew Wright, 20, and Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones, 21, were ordered to photograph the scene with personal cameras they happened to be carrying the day of the attack, the families said. Briones’ mother, Susie, said her son told her that he saw the bodies of 23 dead Iraqis that day.

“It was horrific. It was a terrible scene,” Susie Briones said in a tearful interview at her home in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Navy investigators confiscated Briones’ camera, his mother said. Wright’s parents, Patty and Frederick Wright of Novato, declined to comment on what might have happened to the photos their son took but said he turned over all of his information to the Navy.

“He is the Forrest Gump of the military,” Frederick Wright said. “He ended up in the spotlight through no fault of his own.”

Ryan Briones told the Los Angeles Times that Navy investigators had interrogated him twice in Iraq and that they wanted to know whether bodies had been tampered with. He turned over his digital camera but did not know what happened to it after that.

'Traumatic' for the soldiers
Susie Briones said the military had done little to help her son, who goes by his middle name, deal with his post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It was very traumatic for all of the soldiers involved with this thing,” said Susie Briones, 40, an academic adviser at a community college.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday on CBS’s “The Early Show” that “it would be premature for me to judge” the situation.

But he added that it is critically important to make the point that if certain service members are responsible for an atrocity, they “have not performed their duty the way that 99.9 percent of their fellow Marines have.”

Asked how such a thing could have happened, Pace replied, “Fortunately, it does not happen very frequently, so there’s no way to say historically why something like this might have happened. We’ll find out.”

A bloody scene
Briones’ best friend, Lance Cpl. Miguel “T.J.” Terrazas, had been killed the day of the attack by the roadside bomb, his mother said. Briones was still grieving when he was sent in to clean up the bodies of the Iraqi civilians.

“He had to carry that little girl’s body,” she said, “and her head was blown off and her brain splattered on his boots.”

The Wrights declined to say whether their son witnessed the killings or what he thought of the allegations against other members of his unit.

He was under so much pressure because of the investigation that he had consulted with an attorney, they said. He has also experienced psychological trauma.

Wright and Briones are both recipients of the Purple Heart, given to soldiers wounded in battle.

Wright was injured during an assault on Fallujah in January 2005. He voluntarily rejoined his unit at Camp Pendleton the next month.

Briones was on his second tour of duty in Iraq. He received a Purple Heart during his first tour.

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