Posted on 12/30/2007 7:19:42 AM PST by RedRover
CAMP PENDLETON - On the legal front, the last 12 months have been a trying time for the Marine Corps.
While most troops went about the business of training and deploying to battlegrounds in Iraq and Afghanistan or spent months on expeditionary cruises, a series of hearings and trials involving men accused of committing murder or being derelict in duty in Iraq dominated much of the news coming out of Camp Pendleton, the service's premier West Coast base.
It was also a year in which the service cracked down on drill instructors at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, charging four with abusing enlistees.
At year's end, the service was dealing with yet another high-profile homicide case, this one alleging that current and former Marines murdered four insurgent captives during a fight for the city of Fallujah in November 2004.
Each case involves battlefield decisions. The cases have also raised issues surrounding the rules of engagement, the fog of war and whether anti-war politics in Washington influenced the decisions that led to criminal charges against the troops.
Taken together, the cases caused some to question whether the Corps was somehow losing its grip on its creed of honor.
Not so, say Marine commanders, who nonetheless were ordered by Commandant Gen. James Conway to conduct a unit-by-unit refresher in the laws of war.
Gary Solis, a military law professor at Georgetown University and a recognized scholar on the subject, said in an interview that he does not believe the Marine Corps has lost its way. But he and others said they do worry about the impact the prosecutions may be having on troops in the field.
"The prosecutorial focus has been centered on the Marine Corps, but that does not suggest it is out of control or has more lawbreakers than other branches of the service," Solis said. "Instead, it reflects a very aggressive approach the Marine Corps has taken to these kinds of charges.
"It does, however, set a high bar and we have to be careful that the aggressive approach does not become a case of eating our young."
The cases
The three cases generating the most notoriety involved incidents that took place in Iraq's dangerous Anbar province.
One case stemmed from an incident in the rural village of Hamdania northwest of Baghdad. Seven Camp Pendleton Marines and a Navy corpsman were charged with murder and related offenses in the April 2006 kidnapping and killing of a 57-year-old retired Iraqi policeman.
Only one of the men, squad leader Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III, remains in jail, convicted of murder and sentenced by a Camp Pendleton military jury to 15 years behind bars.
The men he led either served out the terms they agreed to in plea deals or had their sentences commuted by then-Lt. Gen. James Mattis.
Mattis ordered the men below Hutchins' rank released after a jury found Cpl. Trent Thomas guilty for his role in the incident but limited his sentence to time already served. In releasing the others, Mattis determined that Thomas' sentence created an unfair disparity for his squad mates still behind bars.
Haditha
The Haditha case involved four enlisted men accused of murder in the death of 24 civilians following a roadside bombing in November 2005.
Four officers were charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate a suspected war crime at Haditha, and three others received career-ending letters of censure from the secretary of the Navy.
At the end of hearings to determine if the charges against each of those Camp Pendleton-based men should go to trial, the Marine Corps withdrew murder charges against one enlisted man and the dereliction charges for two of the officers. Murder charges against another were withdrawn in exchange for his testimony.
One enlisted man, Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, and one officer, the battalion commander at Haditha, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, have been ordered to trial for the Nov. 19, 2005, killings at Haditha. Decisions in the cases of a third officer, 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson, and the squad leader at Haditha, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, are pending.
Fallujah
The Fallujah case has led to involuntary manslaughter charges against one former Marine based at Camp Pendleton, Jose Nazario Jr., and murder and dereliction of duty charges against an active-duty Marine, Sgt. Jermaine Nelson.
Attorneys for each man say they will vigorously contest the accusations and point out there are no complaining Iraqis, no bodies and no identities of the alleged victims. The case is instead based on interviews with some of the men in the squad Nazario led, statements that have not been made public.
The Fallujah case will also test the Military Extraterritorial Judicial Act and the legality of a civilian prosecutor charging a former serviceman with a crime on a battlefield.
Nazario's attorney, Kevin McDermott, said in a recent interview that civilians with little or no military knowledge may now have to decide appropriate battlefield conduct.
"It's one thing to have senior military officers and investigators decide there are issues on a battlefield that need to be examined," McDermott said. "We could now be asking civilians to issue their own second-hand opinions."
Issues and impacts
The Haditha case is the largest prosecution of a group of U.S. troops since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Coupled with Hamdania and now Fallujah, the prosecutions are sending a dangerous message, according to David Brahms, a former Marine Corps general who once was the service's chief legal officer.
"We are creating a mind-set in our troops and our commanders that has the potential to make them tentative on the battlefield," said Brahms, who represented a lance corporal in the Hamdania case. "The next benefit Congress ought to give is to provide legal insurance to all combat commanders so they can hire themselves a civilian attorney."
At the same time, Brahms acknowledged that in the Hamdania case, there was reason to believe the Marines and corpsman went outside the norm and proper behavior when they seized a man they believed was tied to the insurgency and responsible for attacks against them.
"But are these cases a permanent blot on the Marine Corps? I don't think so," he said. "Sometimes people make bad decisions, but that is in part the nature of the combat environment."
In the Haditha case, Lt. Col. Paul Ware presided over hearings for the three enlisted men charged with murder; he wrote extensively in his reports about his view of whether sufficient evidence had been demonstrated to win a conviction. In each case, he suggested there was ample room for a military jury to acquit the men.
Scott Silliman, a Duke University law professor and another recognized military law expert, told a conference in October that Ware, who was picked by Lt. Gen. Mattis to hear the cases, went beyond his responsibilities as a hearing officer in commenting on the evidence. Instead, Silliman said, Ware's only job was to determine if there was sufficient evidence to believe a crime may have been committed.
Solis, however, said he thinks Ware acted appropriately.
"He clearly had a strong belief and expressed it," Solis said of Ware's writings. "It may be unusual, but it's not wrong."
Also wrong, Solis said, would be if outsiders concluded that the number of men originally charged in the Haditha matter and since exonerated suggests a predetermined outcome. The pretrial hearings in the military justice system are in effect mini-trials where all the prosecution evidence is laid out. If that evidence is lacking, cases should not move on to trial, he said.
"The military system is separate and distinct from the civilian system," he said. "It serves different needs and sometimes has different imperatives. Those who have not sat through these hearings should be wary of criticizing the outcome."
Thad Coakley, a former Marine Corps attorney who served as a legal officer in Haditha before the civilian killing incident, said he is sometimes frustrated in watching the various legal cases unfold at Camp Pendleton.
"It's the manner in which some people are using them to support their political opinions and talking about the cases in very uneducated ways," he said.
In the end, however, Coakley said the cases do serve as a lesson for present and future Marines.
"No one has more of an interest in keeping their honor clean than the Marine Corps," he said. "Hopefully, at the end of the entire process, there will be enough facts for the commonsense American to understand what happened and why and be satisfied with the outcomes, whatever they may be."
The drill instructors
Far from the battlefield, the Marine Corps also sent a strong signal to its cadre of drill instructors, charging four of them with abusing recruits at the recruit depot in San Diego.
One, Sgt. Jerrod Glass, was convicted by a military jury of cruelty and mistreatment and sentenced to six months behind bars and a dishonorable discharge.
Two others, Sgts. Robert Hankins and Brian Wendel, also were charged with assault, maltreatment and dereliction of duty. Wendel was found guilty of dereliction of duty and violating an order but acquitted on assault and maltreatment charges. Hankins' case was pending as of mid-December.
Glass recently said that the training and acts he and his fellow instructors allegedly engaged in were nothing new.
"Recruit training is not being conducted any differently than it was before," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "It's not like all of the sudden this is happening. I think it has to do with the Marine Corps not wanting to admit to the public what it takes to train somebody ... to go to war."
Glass said his only motivation to testify was to bring to light to what he said were long-standing training practices.
"I just want the Marine Corps to say, this is the way we conduct our recruit training so the individuals, and by individuals I mean drill instructors, aren't singled out," he said. "I'm not trying to force anything on Hankins and Wendel. I'm just going in to say what happened."
Glass was convicted of, among other charges, ordering a recruit to jump into a trash can, hitting others with a flashlight and routinely destroying enlistees' personal property.
In an interview with the North County Times at his Pentagon office in October, Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway also said the drill instructor cases were "unfortunate," but a necessary step.
"There's only one way to teach recruits, and that's to demonstrate the right kind of leadership skills that you want them to use as a model for the rest of their time as a Marine."
once a Marine always a Marine. And there are a lot worse things to be.
—
He joined the Marines in 1943 at the age of 17.
ditto (1972 here)
Anyone have his e-mail?
For those reasons, Phil Brennan is the Defend Our Marines Man of the Year!
Outstanding!!
Phil deserves much credit for his excellent reporting and instigating the defense fund at NewsMax, my hat goes off to him.
Yes, I’ll send it via FRmail.
Well then it is simple. Try Ware for criminal negligence and free all the Marines in these cases from any wrong doing.
That’s what I am talking about!!! You got all the tricks!
A great bio of an aging Marine that takes his creed seriously. Watching his brother’s backs.
Thanks, Red.
Maybe our prayers will get answered in 2008, and these brave Marines can reclaim their honour and pride. Know that I am proud of them; that they have willingly placed themselves in harms way to help secure all of our freedoms.
Semper Fi, Marines, and God bless you all.
Indeed!
Absolutely!
Thanks for the ping, and I’m still chanting, “Exonerate in 0-8!”
It has been a very “trying” year for the Marine Corps, as North County Times suggests. Thankfully, there have been other voices (besides typical MSM pieces) reporting on these cases in 2007.
A big THANKYOU to Phil Brennon for his reporting which presented another side of the Haditha incident compared to the rest of MSM, and to NewsMax for an outstanding fundraiser for the Haditha Marines’ defense.
Red, your efforts through Free Republic, establishing the Defend our Marines site, and highlighting the investigative reports of Nathaniel Helms have also contributed immensely in providing information about the Haditha Marines’ (and other accused military) cases.
Love it.
You know it ; )
Another daate forgotten:
June 8, 2007: Gates refuses to renominate Gen Pace as Chairman Joint Chiefs becasue he was afraid of the Senate. (Gates’ first step in trying to be SecDef for the next administration)
Right Arm!
Happy New Year, Norms! I always appreciated getting news and analysis on your Hamdania and Haditha threads.
And thanks for your service!
Got it. Thanks.
Happy New Year as well! Boy, Time flies. I still have some original threads tucked away and posts..
Thanks to you and All those supporting our Marines and troops when the media and some wouldn’t.
April 26, 2006: Hashim Ibrahim Awad taken from his home and killed.
May 2006: Complaints from Awad’s relatives result in investigation.
And as this moron knows, the identity of the body was never proved, the family members all disappeared and there was zero forensic evidence connecting these Marines to the body.
Walker also knows that to a man, each one in private testifies to their own innocence and took plea bargains under direct threat of life in prison charges.
Walker also knows, because he attended the trials, that Lt Phan’s thumb drive was lost by NCIS, the evidence the men needed to exonerate themselves.
Mark Walker has no honor.
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