WASHINGTON – A senior American commander in Iraq ordered all coalition forces to have fresh legal, moral, and ethical training yesterday as Washington grappled with potentially its greatest military disgrace since the My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War.

The order came as investigators prepared to conclude Friday the first of two reports into the apparent massacre of 24 civilians by American marines in the town of Haditha last November.

No officers are said to have been present at the scene of the massacre, but a military report is expected to conclude that officers misled their superiors about the incident, according to the Washington Post.

The commanders were then negligent in failing to scrutinize the initial reports of the incident, an Army official told the newspaper.

Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the commander of American combat troops in Iraq, directed his officers to give all their troops a refresher course in “core warrior values training” over the next month.

“Of the nearly 150,000 Coalition Forces presently in Iraq, 99.9 percent of them perform their jobs magnificently every day,” he said in a statement.

“They do their duty with honor under difficult circumstances … and they do the right thing even when no one is watching. Unfortunately, there are a few individuals who sometimes choose the wrong path.”

His statement did not mention the town of Haditha, but it was clearly issued in response to the shocking reports that American marines shot dead 24 civilians there, apparently after a member of their unit was killed by a roadside bomb.

The massacre on November 19 is being widely described in the American press as a smaller version of the 1968 My Lai massacre. The slaughter there of hundreds of unarmed civilians by American soldiers fueled domestic opposition to the Vietnam War.

Military spokesmen initially described the Haditha incident as an ambush on a joint American-Iraqi patrol and suggested that 15 civilians had been killed in a roadside bombing.

A three-month investigation by an Army major general is expected to be formally handed to the Pentagon on Friday with the stark conclusion that there were “multiple failings.”

The finding will fuel accusations of a cover-up, a charge that President Bush attempted to defuse yesterday when he promised a “full and open investigation” in the best traditions of a “transparent” society.

A second, broader criminal investigation is to be concluded later this summer and is expected to result in marines being court-martialed for murder and other charges.

– The Daily Telegraph