Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (30 page)

Twenty years ago the media uproar would have been all there was. Not so in the ninth year of the twenty-first century. This was the time of the personalized electronic superhighway, Facebook. And more mysterious forces in highly unlikely quarters were gathering, especially to express the fury of the US public at this apparent betrayal of everyone's heroes, the gallant and unimpeachable SEALs.

Perhaps the eye of this gathering storm was in a leafy suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona, way down in the southwestern Salt River Valley. There, Graham Ware, a thirty-year-old computer technologist and former East Scottsdale High shortstop, was so incensed by the apparent injustice that he charged to his Facebook account and let fly with a hard-hitting blog.

It should be recorded that Graham was a potential Special Forces man himself. Inflamed by the cruel audacity of 9/11, he had made instant moves to sign on for either US Army Special Forces or the Marines. He was young, fit, and highly athletic, as useful on the basketball court as he was on the baseball field. And in the moments following the Twin Towers collapse he had resolved to answer the call of his country.

“In my mind,” he says, “the bugle had sounded. Who did these people think they were? The only thing I wanted in all the world was to enlist, get trained, and get after them. I just wanted to help, any way I could.”

But his family stepped in. Graham had a younger sister and brother, and no one was pretending that armed service on behalf of the United States in the mountains of Afghanistan was anything but highly dangerous. “Hell, I was young,” he says. “And that's where I was headed.”

But family pressures increased. “They didn't mean it, but in the end I guess it was guilt they were laying on me. What if I should die, and all that? They didn't realize I was indestructible, at least I thought so, the way the young always do.

“And in the end they won. I never signed on. Then I kinda sat back and nursed my regrets for the next eight years, detesting the Taliban and al-Qaeda, always wondering what would have happened if I'd ridden rough-shod over the wishes of my parents and gone to war anyway. Guess I might have got shot. Like a lot of other guys.”

But the plight of Matt, Jon, and Sam ignited within Graham Ware a flame of the purest fire. And there was an immediate response to his Facebook blog. An atmosphere of universal outrage swiftly began to take root. Graham persuaded his local buddy Jason Watts to join him. And with thousands of bloggers jumping on the bandwagon, demanding exoneration for Matt, Jon, and Sam, a new and hugely popular website came into being.

Graham created a dazzling design and named it
SupporttheSEALs.org
, launching the site in the first week of December. The response was sensational, as the American public rose up in anger at how the three heroes from Echo Platoon, Team 10 had been treated. “At one point,” he said, “we were receiving ten thousand pledges of support a week! Not just in spirit but in promises of donations to help with their legal expenses.”

Matt himself was on the line to Graham, thanking him with a gratitude so profound that the Scottsdale IT expert admitted, “Suddenly I knew I was not meant to join the armed forces. I was born to do this venture. Not only to line up publicly with the three guys but to set an example, to stand out in front, demonstrate my belief in their innocence. Right here I could really help. And the Internet was my parade ground. I knew it like the SEAL instructors knew the Grinder in Coronado.
Hooyah, Graham!
”

In the coming weeks more than 280,000 people visited the website Graham Ware and Jason Watts had launched. SupporttheSEALs became a rallying point for more than a quarter of a million Americans, all demanding justice for the SEALs—to have the charges against them cast aside, to use whatever vestiges of common sense the military had left to put right this atrocious wrong against the three American elite commandoes.

Graham's skill at operating cyberspace was an enormous factor in the website's success. He had search engines colliding with each other in the stampede to find the place where help for the SEALs actually meant something.

Most people who hit the buttons looking for information on the court-martialed SEALs found themselves reading Graham's words and being guided to where financial contributions would be channeled directly to Matt, Jon, and Sam.

Inevitably it attracted several big hitters, wealthy men who would stand behind those anticipated legal bills on behalf of the three accused warriors. One of them, a wealthy hedge fund financier from Chicago with a heart the size of Wrigley Field, contributed tens of thousands of dollars, the maximum permitted under US tax laws for a gift, and fed the money through to the SEALs' families.

“When he contacted me by phone,” recalls Matt, “I just stood there, unable even to blurt out my thanks. I just knew that God was in his heaven and that we had a chance. We'd never asked for exoneration, but we wanted the opportunity to stand up in court with proper help and advice and prove our accusers were totally and utterly wrong. When I took that phone call somehow I knew we'd got that chance.”

It was now impossible to miss the avalanche of support building up in cyberspace. Graham and Jason were improving their website every day, and big dollars were pouring in, not necessarily in large bills and credit card donations but sometimes just five- and ten-dollar contributions from ordinary Americans, often people who could barely afford it. But always from people who just could not comprehend why the US Navy had turned their hand against three of its own outstanding people.

And this was indeed a mystery. Because those first couple of weeks in December were bordering on the momentous in terms of the critical path to court-martial and humiliation for one side or the other—the SEALs or the military. The stakes were so high that the Pentagon generals must have had to rethink what precisely they were getting themselves into.

Because it was not just members of the public who were furious at the prospect of these courts-martial. There was also sound and fury in very high places, not least of all in the great hall of the Capitol building, where the US House of Representative sits solemnly (mostly) beneath the Capitol's two thousand-ton cast-iron dome.

And among the many eminent members who sit in this chamber, there was the Republican Duncan D. Hunter of California's 52nd congressional district, son of the Republican Congressman Duncan L. Hunter, who retired after fourteen terms. Congressman Hunter won his father's seat with 72 percent of the vote.

But even more important than his rich Republican traditions, Congressman Hunter was a former captain in the US Marine Corps. He was one of only seven members of Congress who had served in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and he was the first combat veteran of either conflict to serve in Congress.

Captain Hunter was on active duty in Battery A, 1st Battalion, 11th Marines, fighting in Operation Vigilant Resolve when US forces laid siege to the city of Fallujah just four days after Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi swung the burned bodies from the bridge. Duncan knew of this fiendish action firsthand.

Captain Hunter had commanded his men in those rubble-strewn streets, heard the bombs and blasts as well as the cries and whispers of terribly wounded men. He'd hit back at the insurgents and come through the firefights. And he understood the enemy's fanatical intrinsic evil.

When he first heard that the very SEALs who had finally captured the Butcher were facing courts-martial, he could scarcely believe it. He could not recall ever being so disappointed and angry at the military in which he still served as a part-time captain in the Marine Corps Reserve.

Duncan Hunter was as much a patriot as the men who now faced disgrace. With similar emotions to those of the outraged Graham Ware three hundred miles away in Scottsdale, Arizona, the now thirty-three-year-old California congressman had charged out of his office on the day after 9/11 and joined the Marines.

And now, eight years later, he was looking at an astounding overreaction by the high command, which was marching down a highway that would lead to heaven knows where and probably cost the SEALs some of their best people.

At that moment Hunter was far more than the Marine captain or the US congressman; in his mind he tugged down his treasured camouflaged desert MARPAT (Marine Pattern) combat cap and went straight to work, taking the steps of the Capitol three at a time. This rubbish had to be stopped, and he, Marine Duncan Hunter, was the very guy to get the ball rolling.

He hit the Internet, accessed Graham's website, summoned his assistants to clip the newspaper cuttings, and called for transcripts of the FoxNews broadcasts. He began networking among his fellow Republican Congressmen.

No issue ever raised more eyebrows. Hunter's colleagues, men who would not ordinarily tune in to military matters, reacted as he had—with genuine astonishment.

Matt, Jon, and Sam had just made the leap from the dry and dusty couple of acres of Camp Schwedler to the heart of US government. Congressmen were speaking their names right there in the glorious rotunda of the neoclassical Capitol, where General Washington himself had set the cornerstone more than two hundred years before.

Months later Matt would wonder whether President Washington would have court-martialed his Virginian militiamen for whacking a redcoat. Highly unlikely, he concluded, especially if it weren't even true.

And one by one US congressmen agreed to sign, unconditionally, the petition Hunter drafted that would, in its final form, be forwarded to the highest military authority, urging that the three SEALs be exonerated.

Under the headed writing paper of the US Congress and dated December 4, 2009, it was addressed to the Honorable Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense, at his office in the Pentagon. It read,

Dear Mr. Secretary,

We are writing to express our grave concern over reports that three Navy SEALs will face court-martial proceedings over their handling of one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq. Based on the information we have, we believe that prosecution of these three men is not warranted.

As you are aware, in September, the three SEALs in question captured Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi [name corrected here], the alleged planner of the March 2004 ambush in Fallujah that resulted in the killing of four Blackwater contractors. We all remember the horrifying pictures showing two of these individuals whose bodies, after being burned and mutilated, were hung on a bridge over the Euphrates River.

Since 2004, Al-Isawi evaded capture. However, in September, Special Warfare Operators 2nd Class Matthew McCabe and Jonathan Keefe, and Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Sam Gonzales undertook a mission that resulted in Al-Isawi's capture. Soon after his capture, an investigation was conducted, based on reports that Al-Isawi had been struck in the stomach by one of the SEALs. As we understand it, there was no allegation of torture or sustained abuse. There was simply just this one alleged act.

Prosecuting individuals for such a limited act seems to us to be an overreaction by the command. As a result of the investigation, the three SEALs refused to accept non-judicial punishment believing, according to one of the defense attorneys, that they are innocent of the charges. If convicted they could face a significant punishment of up to one year's confinement, a bad conduct discharge, forfeiture of a portion of their pay each month for up to a year and a reduction in their rank.

It appears from all accounts that these SEALs are exceptional sailors, demonstrated by the fact that each had recently been advanced in rank. They captured a terrorist who had planned an attack that not only killed Americans, but also maimed and mutilated their bodies. We believe that
prosecution of these sailors for such an apparently limited action will have a negative impact on others in the military who risk their lives in dangerous often ambiguous situations.

Again, we strongly believe that these court-martial proceedings are not warranted and would urge that you review this matter.

The letter was signed first by Congressman Duncan Hunter and then by thirty-two others, including the future speaker of the house, John Boehner, who is now third in line to the presidency; he signed, right alongside Congressman Hunter, as house minority leader, the position he occupied at the time.

Then-Minority Leader Boehner was the US Representative from Ohio's 8th congressional district since 1991, the same state as Matt McCabe. The US Representative from Florida's 10th congressional district, Bill Young, the longest-serving Republican member of Congress, signed his name boldly beneath Boehner's signature.

Below that was South Carolina's Joe Wilson, the congressman who received international attention when he interrupted a speech by US President Barack Obama at a joint session of Congress. He is also the father of four sons serving in the US military.

Bill Shuster, the representative from Pennsylvania's 9th district, also signed, unsurprisingly, as a member of the Armed Services Committee and of the congressional subcommittee on tactical air and land forces.

Randy Forbes, the representative of Virginia's 4th congressional district and Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee's readiness subcommittee was another prominent signatory. Congressman Forbes is a member of the caucus for Army, Navy, Marines, and Special Operations Forces.

Perhaps the least surprising signer of all was Republican Congressman Robert Wittman, of Virginia's 1st congressional district. That's the one that stretches from the Washington suburbs right down to the Hampton Roads area, home of the US Navy. Congressman Wittman was as mad as Duncan Hunter about the entire court-martial episode, and he had almost certainly heard from several admirals who agreed
with him. Rob Wittman was also a member of the Armed Services Committee.