Rifle & Facts In Hand No More

[HARDCORE]

12-17-2018

“Rifle Still In Hand, But Too Timid To Pull The Trigger in Times of War”, once again appears to be the order of the day in portions of our modern military? Or at least such seems to be the case again as it concerns the readiness, the timing, and the service support within our armed forces even today! (San Diego Union Tribune, Ref. - Trump will review case of soldier charged with murder!) But with what happened to Lt. William Calley, away back in March of 1968 (but a few conflicts ago), still fairly fresh in the memories of many, once again, the blazing hammer of questionable justice may be again slammed into the head of yet another trooper who was just trying to do his job – and a damned dangerous job it so often is!

I won’t go into the tragic details of what is currently happening to this Major (then a Captain), as that you can probably read about in your local rag (newspaper) today! But I will caution you however, about making a rush to judgment, as our own bloody history will attest to what sometimes happens when that all too often takes place! And it seems to me that many a good, and even innocent, man has been drawn and quartered over the last 242 years of our illustrious history, while some of the guilty have merely flown-away free, like a humming bird on steroids, and with their chests chock full of accolades and medals – unfortunate, but true!

And lastly, the bottom line here is always this: “Never judge any man or woman until all of the facts (and truth itself) are squarely upon the table?” And even then – “Always Be Careful About What You Say And Do, As It Could Someday Come Back To Haunt You?”

Hardcore
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/u...eyn-trump.html

Twist in Green Beret’s Extraordinary Story: Trump’s Intervention After Murder Charges
By Helene Cooper, Michael Tackett and Taimoor Shah
• Dec. 16, 2018
WASHINGTON — The long and winding case of Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn had all the elements of a story that would seize President Trump’s attention. A Green Beret charged by the Army in the killing of a man linked to the Taliban. Thorny questions about America’s longstanding entanglement in Afghanistan. And a Fox News program that lauded the officer as a war hero.
And so, on Sunday, Mr. Trump announced on Twitter that he would examine the case of Major Golsteyn, using, verbatim, language aired just minutes before by his favorite program, “Fox & Friends.”
“At the request of many, I will be reviewing the case of a ‘U.S. Military hero,’ Major Matt Golsteyn, who is charged with murder,” Mr. Trump wrote. “He could face the death penalty from our own government after he admitted to killing a Terrorist bomb maker while overseas.”
With that tweet, Mr. Trump made another extraordinary intervention into the American judicial system. A president who just last week threatened to stop a Justice Department effort to extradite a Chinese tech executive and who spends most days vilifying the special counsel had now stepped into a complicated legal and ethical case that goes to the heart of the fraught politics of the military’s rules of engagement.
The decision resurrected questions about how the military treats detainees and how soldiers should conduct themselves in places where lethal danger is ever present. But perhaps most viscerally, it reinforced the power of a single conservative news program to push issues onto the desk of an impulsive president.
As commander in chief, Mr. Trump immediately complicated the military’s case against Major Golsteyn, raising questions of undue command influence, as well as the possibility that the prosecution is bound to be short-circuited by a pardon. The president also left Afghans and others wondering whether they can expect justice if they are unfairly harmed by American forces.
“Major Golsteyn admitted to what appears to be a summary execution — a very serious crime under international law, and it is vital that the investigation go forward,” said Patricia Gossman, senior researcher for Afghanistan at Human Rights Watch. “There have been far too many cases of suspected killings by U.S. Special Forces units in Afghanistan where the results of investigations are never known and no one is prosecuted.”
By any measure, Major Golsteyn’s story is an extraordinary one — a soldier decorated for valor in combat who, during a job interview with the C.I.A. in 2011, volunteered that he had killed a suspected bomb maker a year earlier in Afghanistan. The Army opened an investigation but did not charge Major Golsteyn, instead stripping him of a Silver Star and an elite Special Forces tab, and issuing a letter of reprimand.
But then, five years later, in an appearance on Fox News, Major Golsteyn again said he had shot the Afghan. The Army opened a second investigation in late 2016, and charged Major Golsteyn with murder last week.
Now that Mr. Trump has weighed in, it is unclear how the Army will proceed, Defense Department officials said on Sunday. One official said the expectation was that the Army’s case would continue, but added that the president’s tweet put the military in uncharted territory.
The Army has yet to schedule a formal hearing on the murder charge; officials said it was within Mr. Trump’s power to pardon Major Golsteyn even before the case makes its way through the military court system.
In an interview, Major Golsteyn’s lawyer, Phillip Stackhouse, called the Army’s decision to charge his client with murder a case of “political correctness,” and said he was happy that Mr. Trump was going to look into it. “Hopefully Secretary Mattis will as well,” he added, referring to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Major Golsteyn was in Afghanistan in 2010 during the battle for the city of Marja in the volatile Helmand Province. The battle was huge — more than 15,000 American, Afghan, British, Canadian, Danish and Estonian troops assaulted the Taliban stronghold. Over the next several months, dozens of Americans were killed and hundreds were wounded.
In February of that year, a roadside bomb killed two Marines — Sgt. Jeremy R. McQueary and Lance Cpl. Larry M. Johnson — who had been working with Major Golsteyn’s Green Beret team.
There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. Army documents, which claim to recount what Major Golsteyn told the C.I.A., suggest that he and his team began clearing homes nearby, looking for the source of the roadside bomb, and eventually finding explosive materials similar to those used in the bomb that killed the Marines. The team took the suspected bomb maker back to its base, where the Afghan ran into a tribal leader, who identified him as a member of the Taliban.
The tribal leader became frightened that the suspected bomb maker, if released, would report him to the Taliban and he would be killed, the Army documents say.
The next year, in 2011, Major Golsteyn took a polygraph test as part of a C.I.A. job interview. Applicants to the C.I.A. are warned to disclose any potential skeletons in their past. Interviewers tell applicants it is better for them to reveal potentially compromising information than it is for the agency to discover it another way, according to an American official.
Major Golsteyn said the suspected bomb maker was not on a list of people whom American forces were authorized to kill without following rules of engagement that bar such action, according to Army documents.
But Major Golsteyn and another American soldier, concerned that the man, if released, would kill American troops or report that the tribal leader was working with the Americans, took him off the base, shot and killed him, and buried his remains in a shallow grave, the documents say.
Later that night, Major Golsteyn and two other soldiers dug up the remains, brought them back to their base and burned them in a pit used to dispose of trash, the Army says he told the C.I.A.
Major Golsteyn’s lawyer, Mr. Stackhouse, said the Army documents mischaracterized what Major Golsteyn told the agency.
After the polygraph test, the Army opened an investigation into the killing. The agency, according to Mr. Stackhouse, put Major Golsteyn’s employment on hold. Two years later, in 2013, the Army closed the case without charging Major Golsteyn.
But his story was far from over.
In November 2016, Major Golsteyn appeared in a Fox News special report. Asked by the anchor Bret Baier whether he had killed the suspected bomb maker, he replied, “Yes.”
One Defense Department official said on Sunday that Major Golsteyn’s admission had forced the Army to reopen the case. On Thursday, Major Golsteyn received written notification from the Army that he was being charged with premeditated murder. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
When Mr. Trump intervened on Sunday, it was not the first time he had inserted himself into military justice issues. As the Republican nominee for president, Mr. Trump called Bowe Bergdahl, the Army sergeant who was captured and held by the Taliban for five years after he walked off his post, a “dirty rotten traitor” who should be shot. After Sergeant Bergdahl was sentenced to a dishonorable discharge but no prison time, Mr. Trump tweeted that the sentence was “a complete and total disgrace.”
Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and the director of the undergraduate public policy program at New York University, said Mr. Trump’s intervention in the Golsteyn case was “a very bad thing for the president to do.”
“His job is to ensure that the system of justice is protected, not to be a thumb on the scale,” Mr. Naftali said, adding: “The president does not believe in separation of powers. Intervening by definition means that you don’t believe in separation of powers.”
Military justice scholars said the case was reminiscent of when President Richard M. Nixon tried to intervene in the case of William L. Calley Jr., a former Army officer convicted of killing 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre. Other presidents, though, have kept their distance. Former President George W. Bush did not intervene in the case of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the American military prison at Abu Ghraib.
The biggest casualty of Mr. Trump’s interference could be the image of American justice in Afghanistan, where 14,000 American service members are still advising, assisting, fighting and, in some cases, dying.
Abdul Karim Attal, a member of the Helmand provincial council, said in a telephone interview on Sunday that a pardon for Major Golsteyn would “give logic to those who say they are waging war against the Americans in Afghanistan because the Americans are not even committed to their own justice system.”
He added, “If they are freeing a murderer from their own military court who confessed to committing a crime, how would the people of Afghanistan expect the Americans to bring wrongdoers to justice?”
Part of the problem for the American military is that, as with any war — especially one that has lasted 17 years — there has been a long string of episodes in Afghanistan in which American service members have been accused of crimes.
“This is not the only case where they made a blunder; there are even more serious cases being committed by American soldiers in Afghanistan, like the one where a soldier killed two families, including women and children, and then burned them,” said Bashir Ahmad Shakir, another member of the provincial council.
He added: “For a strong country, there should be a strong code of law and order. If you break that code, it means you have no faith in justice and then the people of Afghanistan will doubt you when you ask people to adhere to principles of justice and human rights.”
Rachel E. VanLandingham, who was chief of international law with United States Central Command under Mr. Bush and President Barack Obama, said Mr. Trump’s interference could undermine trust in the military justice system even more broadly.
“We care because we expect the military to kill the enemy when they’re supposed to,” she said. “We do not kill them when they’re in our custody.”
She added, “That’s the difference between rule of law and ‘Lord of the Flies.’”
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William Calley
From Wikipedia
William Calley
Birth name William Laws Calley Jr.
Born June 8, 1943 (age 75)
Miami, Florida

Allegiance United States of America

Service/branch United States Army

Years of service 1967–1971
Rank Second Lieutenant[1]

Unit 1st Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division (Americal)

Battles/wars Vietnam War
• My Lai Massacre

William Laws Calley Jr.[1] (born June 8, 1943) is a former United States Army officer convicted by court-martial of murdering 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. While not technically exonerated, after three and a half years of house arrest, Calley was released pursuant to a ruling by federal judge J. Robert Elliott who found that Calley's trial had been prejudiced by pre-trial publicity, denial of subpoenas of certain defense witnesses, refusal of the United States House of Representatives to release testimony taken in executive session of its My Lai investigation, and inadequate notice of the charges. His initial conviction faced widespread public opposition both due to the campaign circumstances of civilian embedded Viet Cong, and due to Calley being singled out as the sole officer convicted with respect to the massacre.[2]
Early life
Calley was born in Miami, Florida. His father, also William Laws Calley, was a United States Navy veteran of World War II. Calley Jr. graduated from Miami Edison High School in Miami and then attended Palm Beach Junior College in 1963. He dropped out in 1964 after receiving unsatisfactory grades, consisting of one C, two Ds, and four Fs.[3]
Calley then worked at a variety of jobs before enlistment, including as a bellhop, dishwasher, salesman, insurance appraiser, and train conductor.[4]

Military career
Calley underwent eight weeks of basic combat training at Fort Bliss, Texas,[5] followed by eight weeks of advanced individual training as a company clerk at Fort Lewis, Washington. Having scored high enough on his Armed Forces Qualification tests, he applied for and was accepted into Officer Candidate School (OCS).[4]
He then began 26 weeks of junior officer training at Fort Benning in mid-March 1967. Upon graduating from OCS Class No. 51 on September 7, 1967,[4] he was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry. He was assigned to 1st Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade,[1] and began training at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, in preparation for deployment to South Vietnam.
Calley's evaluations described him as average as an officer.[3] Later, as the My Lai investigation progressed, a more negative picture emerged. Men in his platoon reported to army investigators that Calley lacked common sense and could not read a map or compass properly.[6]
A number of men assigned under Calley claimed he was so disliked that they discussed fragging him.[7]
In May/June 1969 near Chu Lai Base Area, Calley and 2 other Americal Division officers were in a jeep that passed a jeep containing 5 Marines. The army jeep pulled the Marines over and one army officer told the Marines "You soldiers better square away!" One of the Marines replied, "We ain't soldiers, m***********, we're Marines!" The Army lieutenants dismounted for further discussion of the matter. The ensuing fight ended only after one of the officers pulled his pistol and fired a round into the air. Two of the officers were briefly hospitalized while Calley was merely beaten up. The Marines pleaded guilty at special courts-martial, in each of which it was stipulated they had not known the soldiers had been officers.[8]
Murder trial
The events in My Lai were initially covered up by the U.S. Army.[9] In April 1969, nearly 13 months after the massacre, Ron Ridenhour, a GI who had been with the 11th Brigade, wrote letters to the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense and 30 members of Congress. In these letters Ridenhour described some of the atrocities by the soldiers at My Lai that he had been told about.[10]
Calley was charged on September 5, 1969, with six specifications of premeditated murder for the deaths of 109 South Vietnamese civilians near the village of Sơn Mỹ, at a hamlet called My Lai, simply referred to as "My Lai" in the U.S. press. As many as 500 villagers—mostly women, children, infants, and the elderly—had been systematically killed by American soldiers during a bloody rampage on March 16, 1968. Upon conviction, Calley could have faced the death penalty. On November 12, 1969, investigative reporters Seymour Hersh[11] and Wayne Greenhaw[12] broke the story and revealed that Calley had been charged with murdering 109 Vietnamese.[13]
Calley's trial started on November 17, 1970. It was the military prosecution's contention that Calley, in defiance of the rules of engagement, ordered his men to deliberately murder unarmed Vietnamese civilians even though his men were not under enemy fire at all. Testimony revealed that Calley had ordered the men of 1st Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry of the 23rd Infantry Division to kill everyone in the village.[citation needed]
In presenting the case, the two military prosecutors, Aubrey M. Daniel, III and John Partin, were hamstrung by the reluctance of many soldiers to testify against Calley. In addition president Richard M. Nixon made public statements prior to the trial that were prejudicial to the defense, resulting in a letter from Daniel taking the president to task. Some soldiers refused to answer questions point-blank on the witness stand by citing the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.[citation needed]
However, one holdout, a soldier in Calley's unit named Paul Meadlo, after being jailed for contempt of court by the presiding judge, Reid W. Kennedy, reluctantly agreed to testify. In his testimony, Meadlo described that during the day's events, he was standing guard over a few dozen My Lai villagers when Lieutenant Calley approached him and ordered him to shoot all the civilians.[citation needed]
When Meadlo balked at the orders, Calley backed off 40 feet (6 m) or more and opened fire on the people himself, and Meadlo joined in. Another witness named Dennis Conti, who was also reluctant to testify, described the carnage, claiming that Calley had started it and the rest of the 105 soldiers of Charlie Company followed suit. Another witness, named Leonard Gonzalez, told of seeing one of the soldiers of Calley's unit herd some men and women villagers together and order them to strip off their clothing. When the villagers refused, the enraged soldier fired a single round from his M-79 grenade launcher into the crowd, killing everyone.[citation needed]
Calley's original defense, that the death of the villagers was the result of an accidental airstrike, was overcome by the few prosecution witnesses. In his new defense, Calley claimed he was following the orders of his immediate superior, Captain Ernest Medina. Whether this order was actually given is disputed; Medina was acquitted of all charges relating to the incident at a separate trial in August 1971.[14]
Taking the witness stand, Calley, under the direct examination by his civilian defense lawyer George W. Latimer, claimed that on the previous day, his commanding officer, Captain Medina, made it clear that his unit was to move into the village and that everyone was to be shot, saying that they all were Viet Cong.[citation needed]
Twenty-one other members of Calley's "Charlie" Company also testified in Calley's defense and corroborated the orders. But Medina publicly denied that he had ever given such orders and stated that he had meant enemy soldiers, while Calley assumed that his order to "kill the enemy" meant to kill everyone. In his personal statement, Calley stated that,
I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were all classified as the same, and that's the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.
After deliberating for 79 hours, the six-officer jury (five of whom had served in Vietnam) convicted him on March 29, 1971, of the premeditated murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians. On March 31, 1971, Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labor at Fort Leavenworth,[15] which includes the United States Disciplinary Barracks, the Department of Defense's only maximum security prison. Calley was the only one of the 26 officers and soldiers initially charged for their part in the My Lai Massacre or the subsequent cover-up[clarification needed]. Many observers[who?] saw My Lai as a direct result of the military's attrition strategy with its emphasis on body counts and kill ratios.
Many in the United States were outraged by Calley's sentence. Georgia's Governor, Jimmy Carter, future President of the United States instituted American Fighting Man's Day, and asked Georgians to drive for a week with their lights on.[16] Indiana's Governor Edgar Whitcomb asked that all state flags be flown at half-staff for Calley, and the governors of Utah and Mississippi also publicly disagreed with the verdict.[16] The legislatures of Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, New Jersey, and South Carolina requested clemency for Calley.[16] Alabama's governor, George Wallace, visited Calley in the stockade and requested that President Richard Nixon pardon him. After the conviction, the White House received over 5,000 telegrams; the ratio was 100 to 1 in favor of leniency.[17] In a telephone survey of the American public, 79 percent disagreed with the verdict, 81 percent believed that the life sentence Calley had received was too stern, and 69 percent believed Calley had been made a scapegoat.[17]
Many others were outraged not at Calley's guilty verdict, but that he was the only one within the chain of command who was convicted. At the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War January 31–February 2, 1971, veterans expressed their outrage, including 1st Lt. William Crandell of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division:[18]
We intend to tell who it was that gave us those orders; that created that policy; that set that standard of war bordering on full and final genocide. We intend to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence, other than, perhaps, the number of victims killed all in one place, all at one time, all by one platoon of us. We intend to show that the policies of Americal Division, which inevitably resulted in My Lai, were the policies of other Army and Marine divisions as well. We intend to show that war crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Son My or with one Lieutenant William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide.
In a recollection of the Vietnam War, South Korean Vietnam Expeditionary Forces commanding officer Chae Myung Shin stated, "Calley tried to get revenge for the deaths of his troops. In a war, this is natural."[19] Conversely, Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. declared that Calley and Medina should have been hanged, drawn, and quartered, with their remains placed "at the gates of Fort Benning, at the Infantry School, as a reminder to those who pass under it of what an infantry officer ought to be."[20]
House arrest
On April 1, 1971, only a day after Calley was sentenced in prison at Fort Leavenworth, President Richard Nixon ordered him transferred from Leavenworth prison to house arrest at Fort Benning, pending appeal.[21]
Calley served only three and a half years of house arrest in his quarters at Fort Benning. He petitioned the federal district court for habeas corpus on February 11, 1974, which was granted on September 25, 1974, along with his immediate release, by federal judge J. Robert Elliott. Judge Elliott determined that Calley's trial had been prejudiced by pre-trial publicity, denial of subpoenas of certain defense witnesses, refusal of the United States House of Representatives to release testimony taken in executive session of its My Lai investigation, and inadequate notice of the charges. The judge had released Calley on bail on February 27, 1974, but an appeals court reversed Elliott's ruling and returned Calley to U.S. Army custody on June 13, 1974. Consequently, his general court-martial conviction and dismissal from the U.S. Army were upheld; however, the prison sentence and subsequent parole obligations were commuted to time served, leaving Calley a free man.[9]
After release
In 1975 Calley married Penny, with whom he has one son. The couple divorced in 2005 or 2006. He studied and became a gemologist, working at his father-in-law's jewelry store.[22]
On August 19, 2009, while speaking to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Calley issued an apology for his role in the My Lai massacre. Calley said:
There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry ... If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a Second Lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them—foolishly, I guess.[23]