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Poetrooper sends us another article, which uses Chief Gallagher’s trial to address how findings by five of nine unelected judges have tied the hands of the Commander-In-Chief, and therefore placing the lives of our military members at great risk. We’re all familiar with the Court Martial and subsequent legal maneuvering that resulted in the firing of the SecNaV, Richard Spencer, for attempting to circumvent his chain of command and go straight to the White House with a dubious scheme, allowing the Chief to retire with his SEAL Trident intact, while the Navy conducted a bogus Admin Board.<\/p>\n
The courtroom confession of Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, who admitted to asphyxiating the captured prisoner instead of allowing him to suffer torture at the hand of our Iraqi allies, sank the prosecution’s murder case. The question is why was this act necessary? Shouldn’t the prisoner be turned over to Intelligence personnel and interrogated, and then locked up? In a sane world, yes. Read on.<\/p>\n
By: Richard Fernandez<\/strong><\/p>\n ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<\/p>\n The problems began to spread beyond Gallagher after he was acquitted of murdering a captured enemy combatant when one of the prosecution’s witnesses dramatically told the court that he, not the defendant, had killed the prisoner in question. “On June 20, 2019, during Gallagher’s trial, one of the platoon medics from Gallagher’s team testifying as a prosecution witness said that although Gallagher did stab the ISIS fighter, he did not actually kill him. The medic, Special Operator First Class Corey Scott who testified under an immunity agreement, testified that he himself had killed the wounded prisoner by covering his breathing tube and asphyxiating him. Scott called it a ‘mercy killing’ and argued that the victim would have been tortured by Iraqi personnel due to his connection to the Islamic State.”<\/p>\n With that admission, the case against Gallagher fell apart. “Gallagher was acquitted on six of seven charges on July 2, 2019; the jury found him guilty of the seventh charge, of ‘wrongfully pos[ing] for an unofficial picture with a human casualty’. That charge carried a maximum prison sentence of four months. Since Gallagher had already served more time in jail than the sentence, he was released.”<\/p>\n But concealed behind that measly court-martial result was a much larger issue: the 2008 no-prisoners policy, which was extensively discussed by Attorney General William Barr in his recent address to the Federalist Society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Now, to my mind the most blatant and consequential usurpation of Executive power in our history was played out during the Administration of George W. Bush, when the Supreme Court, in a series of cases, set itself up as the ultimate arbiter and superintendent of military decisions inherent in prosecuting a military conflict — decisions that lie at the very core of the President\u2019s discretion as Commander in Chief.<\/p>\n This usurpation climaxed with the Court\u2019s 2008 decision in Boumediene [v. Bush]. There, the Supreme Court overturned hundreds of years of American, and earlier British, law and practice, which had always considered decisions as to whether to detain foreign combatants to be purely military judgments which civilian judges had no power to review. For the first time, the Court ruled that foreign persons who have no connection with the United States other than being confronted by our military forces on the battlefield had \u201cdue process\u201d rights and thus have the right to habeas corpus <\/strong>to obtain judicial review of whether the military has sufficient evidentiary basis for holding them as prisoners. …<\/p>\n The impact of Boumediene has been extremely consequential. I see its consequences everyday. For the first time in American history our Armed Forces are incapable of taking prisoners. We are now in a crazy position that, if we identify a terrorist enemy on the battlefield, such as an ISIS leader, we can kill them with a drone strike or any weapon — summarily. But if we capture them, the military is tied down in developing evidence for an adversarial process and must spend massive resources in interminable litigation as to whether there was a sufficient basis to capture this prisoner.”<\/p>\n Boumediene set the whole tragedy up. Special Operator First Class Corey Scott’s argument that he killed the young ISIS prisoner out of “mercy” was consequent to the U.S. inability to hold prisoners. He could only turn them over to torturers in Iraq to meet a fate worse than death. One might argue there is no such thing as mercy killing, but the twisted policy atmosphere didn’t make the choice any simpler for anyone concerned.<\/p>\n In reality, the ISIS prisoner was dead the moment the SEALs didn’t kill him on the battlefield. Boumediene created the absurd and no-win situation that has so far claimed the life of the ISIS fighter and the careers of Eddie Gallagher and now Richard Spencer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Refs: PJ Media.com<\/a> and\u00a0 Cornell Legal Information Institute<\/a><\/p>\n Not mentioned, on 28 October 2009, then President Obama signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2009, which amended the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and provided new rules for the handling of commission trials and commission defendants’ rights.<\/p>\n Thanks, Poe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"