Thaer Thabet

Thaer Thabet al-Hadithi is an Iraqi activist. A native of Haditha and founder of the Hammurabi Organization for Human Rights and Democracy. ^[1] The day after a squad of US Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians after an improvised explosive device detonated by insurgents killed American soldier Miguel Terrazas,^[2]

Thabet, who claimed to live around 100 yards (100 m) away from the original IED blast in Haditha, videotaped the scene the day after the carnage. He then shared his tape four months later with Time magazine,^[3] Viewing the tape prompted them to run a story on the incident after McGirk found obvious discrepancies with the military's November press release about the IED and the injuries revealed by the tape, which obviously were not caused by shrapnel.^[4] From his Baghdad bureau, McGirk emailed questions, telephoned interviews, and eventually submitted the videotape to United States military officers, and together with the eyewitness accounts he quoted from child survivors, this evidence has spurred several US and Iraqi administrative and criminal investigations into what is now known as the Haditha killings.

According to the recently declassified testimony of Capt. Jeffery Dinsmore, the battalion intelligence officer monitoring the days events, al-Hadithi and his associate Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadan, a Reuters News Service reporter had been previously identified by battalion command as known insurgent propagandists. In fact, al-Mashhadan had spent several months in US custody on suspicion of insurgent activity. Yet the Sunday Times of London interviewed a human rights worker, Abdul Rahman al-Mashandani, who is unrelated to the Reuters stringer and one of 16 staffers of the Iraq-based Hammurabi Organization for Human Rights and Democracy. The similarity of the men's surnames led to confusion, according to some analysts.

Marine intelligence officers said frequent cellular telephone conversations between these two had been monitored. Hadithi, who was one of the sources interviewed by Tim McGirk of Time magazine, which brought the incident to light, presented himself as a "journalism student" who was embarking on a midlife career following the American invasion. Hadithi also claimed his group, which runs 14 local offices in Iraq, was affiliated with Human Rights Watch (HRW). After HRW denied having any official connection or ties with the Hammurabi Organization for Human Rights and Democracy, Time issued a retraction.^[5]

Time's McGirk, who now is the bureau chief in Jerusalem, declined to testify for the defense at the Marines' article 32 hearing.^[6] He was not an eyewitness to the attacks; his interviews have been published and are already in the public domain.

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