Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (27 page)

Long days of this kind of punishment were interspersed with regular sessions of lectures, as the Army's legal men tried to persuade them to accept a General's Mast. Apparently General Cleveland was prepared to see them only under these circumstances, when they would, of course, be required to “confess their crimes.” But the SEALs refused to answer, saying nothing and remaining stubbornly righteous to the end, while everyone waited for the court-martial papers to come through.

This happened on October 5, and at last, a few days after their teammates, Matt McCabe, Jon Keefe, and Sam Gonzales were released to return home. They flew commercial from Qatar to Washington and then down to Norfolk. They were under strict orders not to discuss the case with anyone.

But they did talk to their parents, who had no idea what had happened or why Team 10 arrived back without them. This was not a joyful reunion, and the atmosphere of gloom and dread would remain with them all for the next six months.

Shame affects everyone, especially a young serviceman whose honor has been challenged. It happens very rarely, but when it does it's an insidious thing:
My son is accused of assault and lying ... My son is accused of dereliction of duty ... Can he be guilty? ... Why would the US Navy do this to him if he were innocent? ... Can there be this much smoke without fire?

In these three cases the friends, relatives, and, especially, family members were dumbfounded. Matt, Jon, and Sam were such obviously upstanding people—the charges against them were unthinkable. No one was supposed to say anything about the forthcoming trial, but the rumors were rocket boosted as soon as Team 10 arrived home without them.

The families had been assured they were not dead, injured, or missing in action, but this served only to deepen the mystery, which then had about four days to burgeon into a cauldron of speculation, wild guesses, and despondency. The military is extremely competent at keeping a lid on things, and thus far, despite the breathtaking “news value,” not a word had leaked beyond the Virginia Beach and Norfolk Bases.

As the mystery for the families deepened, inside the Pentagon there was growing dread that the Army was about to hurl the Navy into the worst possible light, led by the convening major general, Charles T. Cleveland.

And those growing dreads grew more realistic every day. And the arrival of the court-martial papers in the first week of October effectively cast the one-month-old saga into stone. There was no going back now. All three SEALs were in the process of hiring civilian lawyers. The high command of the US Army temporarily sidelined the Navy.

The official papers were arriving almost hourly—statements, affidavits, and, worst of all, charge sheets. Jon was almost physically sick at the sight of them:

In that Special Operator Second Class Jonathan E. Keefe, SEAL Team TEN, Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, Virginia, US Navy, on active duty, who should have known of his duties, at Camp Schwedler, Baharia, Iraq, on or about 1 September 2009, was derelict in the performance of those duties in that he willfully failed to safeguard a detainee, Mr. Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi, as it was his duty to do.

That was Jon's violation of Article 92 (UCMJ). The violation of Article 107 was worse, alleging that

with intent to deceive, made to Special Agent John Stamp, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, an official statement, to wit: “I did not see anyone abuse or mistreat Mr. Al-Isawi” or words to that effect, which statement was totally false and was then known by the said Petty Officer Second Class Keefe to be so false.

They hit Matthew McCabe with those exact same charges and then added his alleged violation of Article 128:

In that SPECIAL OPERATOR SECOND CLASS MATTHEW V. MCCABE SEAL TEAM TEN ... on active duty, did at Camp Schwedler ... same date ... unlawfully strike Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi in the midsection with his fist.

Matt's accusers were listed as Staff Sergeant Scott K. Ashcraft (US Marines), the man who had first brought in the charge sheet drafts for them to sign, and Commander T. C. Huntley, legal assistant to General Cleveland, the man who had refused to listen to one word of their protests of innocence and who had convened the courts-martial.

Those charge sheets represented the drawing of battle lines. In the coming weeks of October Jon hired the famous Virginia Beach no-holds-barred attorney Greg D. McCormack as his lead defense counsel in addition to the Navy JAG Paul Threatt.

McCormack had the reputation of a formidable court-martial trial advocate. He was himself a former member of the US Army's JAG Corps, serving first as a military prosecutor and then as a defense counsel for three years until he left the Army in 1982.

McCormack had over thirty years experience of litigation and was licensed to practice law in all military appellate courts. His acknowledged expertise has always been in criminal cases, where his fast, adversarial manner has helped win the release of many, many falsely accused men.

And like Paul Threatt, McCormack made up his mind very swiftly about Jon. He would later state that from the very first he found it utterly impossible that the big Virginian would have dreamed of lying to the SEAL authorities or that he had seen his teammate Matt punch the blindfolded prisoner.

For McCormack it did not add up. Jon was about as blameless as any serviceman he had ever defended. And when the renowned courtroom aggressor felt like that about any accused man, he would go to the ends of the earth to protect him, if necessary. And that included Iraq.

Matt too made a major move toward hiring the very best legal assistance. He went to the former US Marine Lieutenant Colonel Neal A. Puckett, a thirty-five-year courtroom veteran, having been a former JAG and military judge with a towering reputation for combative court-martial expertise.

Puckett had represented the accused in a series of high-profile military cases. But the one that propelled him into national recognition was that of Lieutenant Colonel Allen West, former battalion commander in the 4th infantry division in Iraq and, later, congressman for Florida's 22nd District Republican Party.

West had been facing charges of detainee abuse in Iraq in 2003 when, admittedly stepping out of line, he had fired a pistol straight past an Iraqi detainee's head and frightened the living daylights out of him during a robust interrogation.

There had been mitigating circumstances—insurgents were plotting to kill West. In addition, the colonel believed the detainee had substantial information about terrorist activity and was determined to get it out of him.

He confessed to losing his temper and equally to taking a few whacks at the prisoner. But, in precisely the same manner as the case against Matt, Jon, and Sam, the entire thing got rapidly out of hand, despite no one having come to much harm. And the gunshot had worked: the prisoner immediately divulged plans for an upcoming attack that would probably have cost many American lives.

His CO, Major General Raymond Odierno, brought down the guillotine on the well-regarded West, immediately relieving him of command, which instantly killed his career. The colonel faced the prospect of resigning his commission just before qualifying for his retirement pension and benefits or facing court-martial, which could have brought him eight years in a military prison.

The colonel acknowledged he had not followed “proper procedures” but insisted that he had acted as he did to protect his men. He stated at his hearing that he would “walk through hell with a gasoline can in my hand to protect any one of them, if need be.”

Puckett leapt to his defense. In a memorable exchange with the military authorities he warned them of the rising anger of the American
people and compelled them to back down. In the end Colonel West received a letter of reprimand from General Odierno and was allowed to retire from the Army with his pension and rank intact. In turn, people both within and outside the military congratulated Neal Puckett. And when Petty Officer Matthew McCabe walked through his office door in Alexandria, Virginia, Puckett could not help but draw sharp comparisons between the two cases, the main difference being that Matt had done nothing wrong in the first place.

Major General Odierno, promoted under Bill Clinton, had plainly shot himself in both feet, not the least of which for arousing enormous public fury at the cruel way he had tried to force an outstanding officer to forfeit his entire pension when he was just seventy-two hours short of qualifying.

The general should, of course, have just let the clock run out over three days and then quietly sent the colonel home with a letter of reprimand, with his pension for a lifetime of service intact. Instead, however, in the interests of “human rights,” and “being seen by the terrorists to be fair,” he had caused near-riot conditions among the right-wing media and placed the military in a most unfavorable, utterly heartless light.

So far as Neal Puckett could see, this Major General Charles Cleveland was well on his way to doing precisely the same thing if he wasn't very careful.

7

SOUND AND FURY IN CONGRESS

These SEALs are exceptional, having captured a terrorist who not only killed Americans, but also maimed and mutilated their bodies. We believe that prosecution of the SEALs will have a negative impact on others in the military, who risk their lives in dangerous, often ambiguous situations.

—Congressional petition

T
he world's largest naval station occupies more than seven miles of pier and wharf all along the Hampton Roads Peninsula in Norfolk, Virginia, home to some seventy-five US fighting ships and their support.

Given that each one of the two or three gigantic aircraft carriers on the jetties contains at least two thousand telephones, communication in this secretive enclave of the US Defense Department is, shall we say, awesomely effective.

Marginally swifter, however, is the ship-to-shore, jetty-to-quarterdeck, harbor launch-to-ops room, and bush telegraph of rumor, report, buzz, and speculation. There are other places in the world with standard rumor operations and half-witted publications to project the type of drivel that Hollywood show business adores, but when even a whisper of something truly major breaks out in the US military, that sprawling Norfolk Navy yard is atomic by comparison. And if you
really want to set the lines of communication vibrating, just start arresting US Navy SEALs who have just returned from a highly dangerous and successful combat mission.

US Navy personnel are masters at short, terse, signals that convey everything very, very quickly:
Hear they're planning to court-martial three guys from SEAL Team 10? That's Echo Platoon, right? ... The guys who grabbed that killer, what'shisname? Al-Isawi? You have to be kidding me! You could start a civil war doing that! I hear a lot of the guys are very upset. Not half as upset as the American public when the friggin' media gets ahold of it!

And this was not mere gossip among the rank and file, although the yards were buzzing with speculation about the three SEALs who did not come home with the rest of Team 10. This was also rapidly making its way into the upper reaches of the military citadel across the Potomac from Washington, DC.

Senior officers, at least those with a semblance of recollection about the world beyond the five giant outer walls of the Pentagon, quietly considered the actions of Major General Cleveland and found them to be about as ill advised as they could possibly be.

The Navy had somehow jumped all over an unreliable statement from a stressed-out kid in one of the SEAL bases in Iraq and taken the colossal step of believing it and then acting as though a heroic SEAL platoon did not have an honest man among them.

They were effectively branding the SEAL Team leader a bully and a liar, the senior enlisted man of the entire base both a liar and guilty of dereliction of duty, and, perhaps the bravest of them, the mighty breacher from Virginia, the God-fearing Jonathan Keefe, a liar and a disgrace to the SEAL uniform.

If anyone truly had an ambition to denigrate the US Navy and open a veritable Pandora's box of universal contempt for the service, this was a pretty good way to start. Any junior copywriter in the public affairs department could have forecast a firestorm of criticism via radio, television, newspapers, tweets, blogs, Internet, World Wide Web, and God knows what else.

And for what? Did these senior officers really wish to turn against three of the SEALs' finest on the word of a wanted mass murderer
and terrorist and a young serving sailor who was caught absent from his post—twice—and who was reputed to be a stressed-out kid?