Free Republic

These words come with more news about the passing of General Wayne Downing, one of America’s finest. This rare man was highly respected by the best of the best. I had the honor of talking several times with General Downing in Iraq earlier this year. He was still leading the way, providing his seasoned analysis on the air with NBC’s Brian Williams. At the time, I wrote of meeting General Downing in a dispatch entitled “Ernie is Dead”:

Khobar Towers June 23, 2006 The Wall Street Journal Louis J. Freeh Ten years ago this Sunday, acting under direct orders from senior Iranian government leaders, the Saudi Hezbollah detonated a 25,000-pound TNT bomb that killed 19 U.S. airmen in their dormitory at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The blast wave destroyed Building 131 and grievously wounded hundreds of additional Air Force personnel. It also killed an unknown number of Saudi civilians in a nearby park. The 19 Americans murdered were members of the 4404th Wing, who were risking their lives to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq....

April 2006, Vol. 89, No. 4 The Khobar Towers commander thought he had finally received justice, but the story had an unhappy surprise ending. The Second Sacking of Terryl Schwalier By Rebecca Grant Remember Brig. Gen. Terryl J. Schwalier? A decade ago, he was a rising star in the Air Force, wrapping up a successful tour as commander of the 4404th Wing (Provisional) in Saudi Arabia and on the list for promotion. Then, disaster struck his troops. On the night of June 25, 1996, an unprecedentedly large terrorist truck-bomb exploded outside the Khobar Towers military billet in Dhahran, killing 19...

The Empire Strikes Back--at Schwalier: Defense Chief Robert Gates, top Pentagon lawyer Daniel Dell'Orto, and unnamed Justice Department confreres have struck yet another blow at Terryl J. Schwalier, Washington's designated Khobar Towers scapegoat. They have forced USAF to halt and reverse its efforts to restore Schwalier's second star after a 10-year struggle. The new decision was elaborated in a March 28 letter from Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne to the Air Force Review Boards Agency, ordering it to halt implementation of its recent decision to correct "an injustice" and retroactively promote Schwalier to major general. That corrective...

Brig. Gen. Terryl Schwalier was stunned when he read the account of the June 25, 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that appeared in my recent book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran. I was writing many years after the fact, drawing on sources from inside Iranian intelligence but also on published U.S. government reports. It was those U.S. reports that prompted General Schwalier to contact me a few months ago. “You paint a picture of significant government awareness that “Iran was up to something” in the months prior to the Khobar Towers attack,” he wrote...