Haditha charges dropped against top Marine officer

Chessani was the highest-ranking officer accused of wrongdoing in the shootings at Haditha, which were first reported in Time magazine and portrayed by Iraqi witnesses as a "massacre" of unarmed civilians.

The witnesses claimed angry Marines killed the two dozen men, women and children out of revenge after a popular comrade, Lance Cpl. Miguel "TJ" Terrazas, died in a roadside bombing.

The reports brought international condemnation on U.S. troops in Iraq and famously inspired Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania and critic of the war, to charge that the Marines had killed the civilians "in cold blood."

Defense attorneys said the civilians died during a pitched battle with insurgents in and around Haditha that followed the death of Terrazas.

Rooney said that the fact that seven of the eight Marines had been cleared or no longer faced charges proved that the events at Haditha were "not the massacre that Time magazine and John Murtha made it out to be."

"We've had to go through a two-year process to prove what we knew from the beginning," he said. "You need to trust what your battlefield commanders are telling you and give them the benefit of the doubt."