RE: READER MAIL: Charlie Savage

["Savage, Charles" <savage@nytimes.com>]

Mr. Faraj,

Thanks for writing. No slight intended and we weren't deliberately avoiding reaching out to you. In fact, I'd like to get to know you. 

The article was admittedly limited in a number of ways; with more time and space, I would have liked to have dived much deeper on each of the cases we mentioned and a bunch that I looked at but didn't end up mentioning. The idea going in was to do a survey of the landscape of 10 years of civilian killings cases, using the Haditha case conclusion as the news peg, rather than a deep dive on Haditha specifically - e.g., what are the larger patterns from the decade of war and courts-martial arising from it. 

Even as it was, we had more Haditha material than we could use; for example, I spent a fair amount of time gathering material about the prosecutorial decision to spend/waste 2 years going after the 60 Minutes tape, on the apparent premise that the journalists would have had some bombshell in the outtakes that they inexplicably didn't include in the broadcast, talking to Dwight Sullivan etc about the two appeals, and how when the full tape was finally played it was irrelevant. And, from others, how one consequence of the prolonged delay was that when the trial finally came, US troops were out of Iraq, so the possibility of retaliatory attacks on US troops because the military struck a plea deal like this was sharply diminished. But again, because the article wasn't a deep dive on Haditha itself, we ended up not even mentioning the tape.

If we had called you, what would you have said?

Charlie
________________________________________
From: ordercs@nytimes.com [ordercs@nytimes.com]
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2012 11:12 PM
To: Savage, Charles
Subject: READER MAIL: Charlie Savage

Email: Haytham@puckettfaraj.com
URL:Haditha
Comments:Mr. Savage,
 I'm one of the two attorneys that represented SSgt Wuterich in the Haditha deaths case. I conducted the voir dire, opening and examined the majority of the witnesses. It was after my cross examination of the government's star witness that their prosecution collapsed. It seems you have reached out to all the people who know nothing about the case for comment. Is there some reason why you avoided asking me questions about the case?

 Best
 Haytham Faraj
 760-521-7933