The Navy SEAL Crime And Cover-up

The NY Times front pages a story we would all rather ignore:

Navy SEALs, a Beating Death and Claims of a Cover-Up

The three Navy SEALs stomped on the bound Afghan detainees and dropped heavy stones on their chests, the witnesses recalled. They stood on the prisoners’ heads and poured bottles of water on some of their faces in what, to a pair of Army soldiers, appeared to be an improvised form of waterboarding.

A few hours earlier, shortly after dawn on May 31, 2012, a bomb had exploded at a checkpoint manned by an Afghan Local Police unit that the SEALs were training. Angered by the death of one of their comrades in the blast, the police militiamen had rounded up half a dozen or more suspects from a market in the village of Kalach and forced them to a nearby American outpost. Along the way, they beat them with rifle butts and car antennas.

A United States Army medic standing guard at the base, Specialist David Walker, had expected the men from SEAL Team 2 to put a stop to the abuse. Instead, he said, one of them “jump-kicked this guy kneeling on the ground.” Two others joined in, Specialist Walker and several other soldiers recounted, and along with the Afghan militiamen, they beat the detainees so badly that by dusk, one would die.

The four American soldiers working with the SEALs reported the episode, which has not previously been disclosed. In a Navy criminal investigation, two Navy support personnel said they had witnessed some abuse by the SEALs, as did a local police officer. Separately, an Afghan detained with the man who died provided a detailed account of mistreatment by American troops and Afghan militiamen in an interview with The New York Times.

The SEAL command, though, cleared the Team 2 members of wrongdoing in a closed disciplinary process that is typically used only for minor infractions, disregarding a Navy lawyer’s recommendation that the troops face assault charges and choosing not to seek a court-martial. Two of the SEALs and their lieutenant have since been promoted, even though their commander in Afghanistan recommended that they be forced out of the elite SEAL teams.

“It just comes down to what’s wrong and what’s right,” Specialist Walker said in a recent interview. “You can’t squint hard enough to make this gray.”

Navy SEALs are about as hardcore as it gets but Specialist Walker may be a bit of a stud himself, we should note:

With broad shoulders and blond hair — his nickname was Thor — Specialist Walker could not have looked more foreign to Afghans.

There was a mismatch of mission and training:

The small base at Kalach was just a speck in Afghanistan’s rugged terrain, dwarfed by the mountains behind it. The stone wall surrounding the outpost was barely chest-high, offering little protection from a Taliban attack. The objective was to get Americans close to the people they were training, instead of living behind high blast walls and shiny razor wire like most of the troops in the United States-led coalition in Afghanistan.

The outpost was set up by Green Berets, the Army Special Forces troops who recruited the Afghan Local Police. The militia program had become a crucial element of the American strategy to win over villagers and undercut the Taliban. The emphasis on counterinsurgency, as the strategy was known, aligned with the skills of the Green Berets, who were trained to wage guerrilla campaigns by working with irregular militias and supporting local communities.

The Navy’s nine SEAL teams, in contrast, typically conduct capture-and-kill missions and train militaries and counterterrorism forces in other countries. In a place like Kalach, “you need a combination of T.E. Lawrence, John Rambo and the Verizon guy,” said Scott Mann, a former Green Beret who helped design what were known as village stability operations in Afghanistan. “There’s a lot of the Special Ops community that would much rather shoot somebody in the face than do this kind of work.”

...

“We had to fill so many emerging requirements with units that weren’t necessarily as prepared as they could have been,” said Mr. Mann, the former Green Beret. “There’s a whole mind-set and training curriculum that goes with Green Berets that’s radically different from Navy SEALs.”

The change in tone was soon apparent. Staff Sgt. David Roschak, the Army squad leader at Kalach, said the new arrivals assumed “anyone near the base was, or linked to, the Taliban.” Some of the Team 2 members saw their job as killing enemies, not making friends, he and other soldiers said in interviews.

As others describe it, a serious attitude problem developed:

Serious discipline issues emerged, according to the soldiers. Apparently bored by the routine of life on the small outpost, several of the SEALs began using their weapons for sport. One shot his pistol wildly at a kitten under the ammunition shed, the soldiers said; anyone at the small base, then full of people, could have been hit by a ricochet. Another pulled a handgun on a soldier in the base gym, apparently as a joke.

“They were very sloppy, very boisterous: ‘We’re here to destroy everything,’ ” Specialist Walker said. In a situation with “a gun battle every day, that’s perfect,” he continued. But “we’re here to train people, assist, not there to gag ’em and bag ’em.”

Afghans described in interviews how the new group of Americans would shoot at the ground around farmers in wheat fields and almond groves near the base, or on the road to the market. A few times, they shot at trucks moving along a ridgeline. “They weren’t trying to kill anyone,” Mr. Gizabe, the Kalach elder, said. “They were toying with them, I think.”

The tenor of the meetings between the Americans and the elders changed, too, villagers said. The SEALs often shouted at the Afghans; when they disagreed, several elders recounted in interviews, the SEALs sometimes grabbed them by their shirts, lifted them off the ground and cocked their arms back as if preparing to hit them. “Each and every time we went to their base, we feared we would not come back out,” Mullah Muhammadzai said.

If I may engage in a bit of armchair psychologizing, this sounds like some of the stories that came out of Vietnam. Somewhat similarly, we had a long, seemingly pointless war with US troops planted amongst a civilian population of very different culture and physical appearance. Some of those civilians wanted to help the Americans, some wanted to kill the Americans. The tension was continuous. And, if the stories can be believed (and without exaggerating to Kerry's "Army of Ghengis Khan" level), one might argue that some soldiers some of the time engaged in dehumanizing of the locals.

One last thought, from the Times:

Brushing away serious charges, military justice experts said, reflects a breakdown of accountability that feeds the perception that SEALs and other elite Special Operations units get undue leeway when it comes to discipline. In murky wars with unclear battle lines, they warned, that can corrode ethical clarity and undermine morale.

“What’s the message for the 10,000 guys that were in the same moment and said, ‘No, we’re not crossing this line’?” asked Geoffrey S. Corn, a former military lawyer who was the Army’s senior expert adviser on the law of war. “It diminishes the immense courage it takes to maintain that line between legitimate and illegitimate violence.”

 

 

Comments

[peter]

The leftist media already helped us to lose Vietnam and Afghanistan wars. This is just toning their muscles for the next war.

[Threadkiller]

Was Ventura punched in any of these wild tales?

[daddy]

Ash Carter: And later there were plenty of people dur..., during the time that you're...taking office and so forth who explain to you what the... rules are about uhhh, e-mails, so this is...it's, it's not like uhhh... I didn't have the opportunity to...understand what the right thing to do is. I didn't do the right thing. This is uhhh entirely on me.

[daddy]

I'm already sick to death of Star Wars.

[daddy]

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS!

and the audience goes to sleep.

[Michael (fpa Patriot4Freedom)]

Happy Birthday, (A)Nother Bub!

Let us know how you're doing in your new locale, OK?

[Stephanie]

http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/continuation-executive-business-meeting-2013-05-21

Retweeted Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter):
For bloggers: Here is Schumer admitting Go8 was all about citizenship, as a result of Cruz's tactic. 5:38 mark

[Puddin Floppy-Feet]

Pure, unadultered bull shit.

[Captain Hate on the iPad]

I saw this headline and figured the dumbest retard to crawl out of Scranton was in jail for dropping a dime on the Seal Team that snuffed OBL. Yes, you can call me a dreamer...

[Carlos Fat]

War is hell.

[Cecil Turner]

If you read through that NCIS report, the witness statements don't support the story.