During the next several hours, Marines killed twenty-four Iraqi men, women, and children. Near the site of the explosion, they shot five men who had been driving to a college in Baghdad. They entered three nearby homes and killed nearly everyone inside. The youngest victim was a three-year-old girl. The oldest was a seventy-six-year-old man. The Marines would later claim that they were fighting insurgents that day, but the dead were all civilians.
After the killing was over, two other Marines set off to document the aftermath. Lance Corporal Ryan Briones brought his Olympus digital camera. Lance Corporal Andrew Wright had a red Sharpie marker.
Briones and Wright went from site to site, marking bodies with numbers and then photographing them. Other Marines, including one who worked in intelligence, also photographed the scene. By the time they were done, they had made a collection of photographs that would be the most powerful evidence against their fellow-Marines.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent has been charged after being accused of ordering women to...
