DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Trump's Pardons of Servicemen Raise Fears That Laws of War Won't Apply

What an absolute disgrace.

https://news.yahoo.com/trumps-pardons-servicemen-raise-fears-172350934.html

Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance changed out of the drab inmate’s uniform he had worn for six years Friday and left the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas a free man. He arrived minutes later at a nearby hotel, where his family swallowed him in a group embrace, crying tears of joy.
“I want to say thank you to President Trump,” he said amid a throng of well-wishers. “And I want the rest of the country to do that, too.”
The president Friday cleared Lorance and two other servicemen accused or convicted of war crimes, drawing cheers from thousands of supporters who said the men had been unfairly punished for decisions made in the confusion of war.
But many in the military, especially in military legal circles, are not celebrating. Trump’s reprieves, issued against the advice of top defense officials, were seen as a sign of disregard not only for the decisions of military juries but also for the judicial process itself.
Military officials publicly accepted the president’s orders — pardons for Maj. Matthew Golsteyn of the Army Special Forces and Lorance, and a sentence reduction for Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs — with a terse yessir.
“We acknowledge his order and are implementing it,” the Navy chief of information said on Twitter.
Privately, though, many worried that Trump’s actions could erode discipline by sending a message to troops and commanders that in some cases the laws of war would not apply.
“It’s just institutionally harmful,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and former judge advocate who teaches law at Southwestern Law School. “This isn’t about these three individuals, it’s about the whole military justice system and whether that system itself is something of value to the operations of the military.”
The president, she added, “is saying he knows best.”
While all three men were accused of war crimes, the details of their cases raised disparate concerns for military order.
Lorance was convicted at trial in 2013 for ordering the shooting of a group of civilians in Afghanistan, an order he then tried to cover up. He was given a full pardon.
Gallagher was charged with the murder of a captive in Iraq but was acquitted this summer of all charges except for the minor charge of posing for a photo with a corpse.
Golsteyn was awaiting trial on charges that he murdered an unarmed Afghan in 2010.
“Golsteyn is the most troubling, because the system was never given a chance to work,” said Charles Dunlap, a retired major general who was the deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force and is the head of Duke University’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security.
“A court-martial is the best way to determine the facts,” he added. “We were never able to find out whether the facts would clear Golsteyn or not.”
Many senior military leaders felt the pardons sent the wrong message, said Phillip Carter, an Iraq War veteran who researches military issues at the Rand Corp.
“Ever since Vietnam the leadership has sent a message that there is a link between discipline, respect for laws of war and military effectiveness,” Carter said. “The pardons send a different message that sometimes the laws get in the way.”
Trump is not the first commander in chief to wield the power of clemency in a polarizing way.
Washington pardoned men convicted of treason in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-94 despite howls of protest from other Federalists, said Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
President Abraham Lincoln repeatedly pardoned soldiers sentenced to death for desertion, even though his generals warned it would undermine battlefield discipline. President Gerald Ford announced in 1974 at a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that he planned to conditionally pardon 13,000 deserters and draft dodgers, which did not go over well with the audience of war veterans. His successor, Jimmy Carter, unconditionally pardoned hundreds of thousands of draft evaders.
“It has happened after every war,” Osler said. “Pardons are used as a way to forgive the crime and heal the nation. What is different now is, the signal here seems to be to embrace the crime, not forgive it. President Trump seems to be sending a message that the gloves are off, that we are not going to constrain our military.”
Reactions from combat veterans were split. Many thanked the president for intervening on behalf of men who had volunteered to serve and protect their country. Others said the gesture of forgiveness tarnished the service of troops who served in the same vexing conditions but did not break the laws of war.
“This is a sad day for the tens of thousands of us who led troops in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan who were proud of the way in which we maintained our good order and discipline in the face of many challenges,” Andrew Exum, a former Army Special Forces officer who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, said on Twitter. “These men, now pardoned, remain a disgrace to our ranks.”
But for other veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the pardons only brought back grim memories of violence and a counterinsurgency doctrine that often blurred moral lines.
Jorge Rodriguez was a Marine infantryman deployed to Afghanistan in 2008. Now a police officer in Texas, he remembered a day in southern Afghanistan when, as a lance corporal, his machine-gun team fired on two men fleeing a nearby village on a motorcycle — a village that commanders had said contained no civilians.
Like uncounted killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was never reported as questionable, and never investigated.
The bodies were left by the roadside 50 yards from his small outpost for weeks. They were young, Rodriguez said, and to this day he doesn’t know if they were Taliban fighters.
“It was war,” he said. “And people will never understand what they had asked us to do.”

Two neighbors, both ex-military, both Trump supporters (less now then in the beginning)..

They are ticked off at this. They had to follow the rules and feel as if rewarding those that didn't isn't the right thing to do.

Without specific facts of the individual cases, it's difficult to judge the merits of the pardons.

This article puts them in a bad light, focusing on the opinions of those against the pardons, but the facts are rather ambiguous as presented in the article.

We don't know about missions, accuracy of intel, and a plethora of other important details.

Personally, I don't have enough information to convict or acquit.

The military courts did.

I've always been torn on the subject of Military prosecution for war crimes or any crime committed in a war zone.

We take teenage to 20 something kids, tear them down emotionally and physically then mold them into trained killers. Even an army cook goes through basic training. Some then go on to become more sophisticated killers with special training. While others train for various support roles or specialty armaments roles in a vast war machine.

Then we send these 'war ready individuals' into hostile conditions where microseconds of delay in thinking and reacting can cost the lives of that soldier or others. We put them in impossible situations with modern rules of engagement, unlike the conquering hordes of old, they must act with certain self discipline in every situation. They are issued weapons that give them the power of life and death decision making in the most intense and hostile environments the world over. Shouldn't we expect that some will go too far? That mistakes will be made? That some situations have no right answer where the life or death decisions STILL have to be made?

I hate it that we put kids or soldiers in these situations, often tying their hands to do what is right with rules of engagement or orders formulated in some boardroom, like being ordered to guard poppy fields in Afghanistan! Or being ordered to search a village for insurgents that look just like the innocent families they are living with! There are too many variables at play in most of these cases to just be cut and dry criminal actions.

That said, we have rules of engagement and the code of military conduct for a reason. We are not barbarians. And the entire military would fall apart at the seams without rules and discipline. Breaking these rules simply can not go unpunished.

Still, knowing all of this, some part of my soul just despises what we do to these innocent kids in these cases. We make them who they are, put them in horrible situations, then ruin them for life when they screw up. BUT then I'm forced to remind myself that even though they were just kids, they volunteered, they signed on, they accepted the rules and the chain of command.

So even though they are adjudicated on a case by case basis, and heinous crimes are often fairly punished, I can't help but feel a sense of deep sorrow and partial responsibility every time I see a soldier go to jail for a crime committed in a war zone. I mean even in the worst of cases, I wonder what this person's life would have been like had they had other opportunities or just never enlisted in the first place. I also can't help but wonder what we did or didn't do as a nation in these cases that may have kept the criminal incident from happening in the first place.

So I'm torn. I don't have a clue if these guys deserved these pardons or not. What I do know is that part of me likes it and part of me doesn't.

They were tried and found guilty... what do you need to know

You know, a lot of Nazi's used the excuse, "I was only following orders."

Of course I know that. I also know that not following orders can get you in a world of hurt. BUT we're not talking about illegal orders, we're talking about rather these pardons were good or bad.

I think one needs to look at it in context. If you ever intend to hold war crimes against other nations for their actions, you must hold yourself accountable to the same standards.

I understand what you're saying. Putting young people in these situations has its share of consequences. We see it all too often with PTSD how it negatively impacts them. Yet by contrast we now live in an age where their participation is purely voluntary.

I would hate to see a precedent set where we expect other nations to be held accountable for things we refuse to hold ourselves accountable for.

It's not other nations I would be concerned about, as I would the militant groups who follow no rules. It's a tough position to be in, knowing you have rules of engagement but your enemy has no rules, I don't know how they do it.

When even a 10 year old kid could be a threat to you and your team.

I also think the 'purely voluntary' bit is questionable where the kid is trying to make something of themselves and joining the military is their only viable option to do that. We promise them free college in exchange for risking their lives. Many if not most who join for that reason have no real idea what they are getting themselves into. They just want the college that they can't afford any other way.

You won't find near as many wealthy kids enlisting as you will poor kids. It's almost like the whole volunteer military thing is just to keep the rich kids out of harms way... but this is a whole conversation of it's own to have on some dreary day.

i just want to remind the board that my first deployment, i was 19.

and i didn't do this:



and then i think some of you guys are missing the overall point:

trump once again pardoned someone who didn't even go through the court process yet. ya know, like that racist ass sheriff in arizona?

which means that the person he pardoned must accept GUILT in order for that pardon to take affect.

we have the geneva convention for a reason. we have ROE's and EOF's for a reason. those are what gives us the moral high ground in combat, to claim we're the good guys in a war zone.

when we excuse behavior unbecoming of a solider like this, we are sending a very clear message, and it aint the message Trump and conservatives think they're sending.

Well hopefully it's a rare act among young soldiers and You not doing it is more the norm. I don't condone or support the criminal acts, I just hate seeing the soldiers get themselves in this kind of trouble to begin with. I said the rules must be enforced.

That said, I defer to you as being the most recent to serve in this crapstorm we've created. You have more knowledge of what it's like on the ground. There were no endless wars when I served. It was another time, almost unrecognizable today.

My being torn is more of my feelings toward the soldiers in general than any one individual. I wish we could create like a billion drones to launch and control from remote command centers in safe zones so no soldiers faced real risks. But then, war would lose it's meaning.

Three totally different situations.. Lorance seems like he should have been in there for the duration...

Gallagher, posing with a corpse? Seems pretty minor...

Golsteyn, at least let the trial run its course and see what comes out and what the verdict is.. I mean, if you think he's worthy of being on the streets, doesn't that mean you should think there is a chance he can win..

All in all, if I'm the President, I'm leaning heavily on the military top brass for guidance on this.. and a lot of them seem to be opposed.. so...

so here comes the pardons.

As soon as someone who was actually in country during the alleged incidences with a direct knowledge of the circumstances denounces the pardons, I'll wonder a bit more about the "worthiness" of said pardons.

The article has some Air Force Lawyers, some top Navy brass who possibly never saw combat and didn't actually say anything against the pardons, and a random disgruntled former soldier who probably did his 4 to get his GI Bill and got out as soon as possible as the primary opposed views (and the opposition is the only perspective really shown).

That's not to say these guys aren't horrible and deserve to be punished. It's just hard to say from a distance.

Did Intel say that all civilians had been cleared from the area and the first officer expected only hostiles? Did he only find out afterwards that the "hostiles" he'd ordered engaged were civilians? It doesn't excuse the "cover up", but what exactly did that entail? How much were his higher ups giving him to the wolves to cover their own tails?

The 2nd one, could be the worst of them, but he wasn't proven guilty of the worst of it, thus "found innocent." If they only found him guilty of the photograph, but based his punishment with consideration of what they thought he did, but couldn't prove, that's not how our justice system is supposed to work.

As for the last "murder," it could have occurred as part of a black op. Squad's going in to take out a high value target and a random civilian stumbles on them. Do you risk the alarm being sounded? It's too late to pull out. Do you want the operation to be paraded about in open court? If that's what happened, it wouldn't make it "right," but war is rarely good or nice and neat.

I'm not going to try to judge without the full picture. That article didn't come close to the full picture, but it was rather a very limited, one-sided view that may have had a political agenda.

The full picture may end up supporting the article's version. I just don't know.

I encountered entirely too many know nothing, higher ranked military members (enlisted and officer) looking out only for their next promotion for me to take some hypothetical hand wringing as anything approaching truth and justice.

some or all of what you theorize may be true... but the first two have been through court, with the ability to make all of those arguments in front of a jury of military personnel and to call witnesses to confirm or deny anything/everything you said... their verdict has to count for something.

The other one never even made it that far.

Just another example of Trump pissing all over the norms and institutions of the country.

This is nothing more than a publicity stunt to get support from his base.

Anyone who thinks Trump has more facts about these instances than the Military - whether the courts or the Brass - is just in denial.

Courts get things wrong too often. New information comes to light. Unbiased juries/panels don't really exist. Some amount of bias is inevitable. Political concerns creep into legal matters. Cover your own behind is standard operating procedure in the military. To be seen to "condone" the alleged acts could be seen as career suicide regardless of the charges validity.

It's easy to say you wouldn't do something in a hypothetical situation. Actually being in a messed up situation isn't so easy. War has few situations that aren't messed up.

Presidential pardons aren't anything new. Obama gave 1,927 of them.

That still doesn't mean it was right to give these. But, I'll probably never have access to all the information necessary to feel comfortable judging.

Actually Swish was deployed over there and knows first hand. You know, like the very people you said you were looking for comments from?

Two neighbors both Hillary supporters and staunch libs are now for Trump over this …..see how that works

The people who had access to as much information as possible are the attorneys, the jury, and the judge..... and you don't trust them.

Sorry for the mess doing this from a phone. Here are some links to "the rest of the story." More of it anyways.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army...civilian-court/

https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/t...int-lorance?amp

Some seemingly relevant tidbits:






Not that those excuse him necessarily, but they illustrate that it is a more complicated matter than the original article indicated.

Bull, I have no doubt that it's far more complicated than any article is going to explain. I also appreciate you sending me additional information.

Honestly though, I don't think we need to re-litigate the case right here. My point is not that the jury was right or the jury was wrong or that this was easy or that it was open and shut... most murder investigations, especially in the theatre of war aren't going to be easy.... my point is that they had the opportunity to produce any/all of this evidence that you can find and a court heard it all and decided he was guilty.

And a person is innocent until proven guilty in this country... so I have to believe that our court system is correct until proven wrong... and there was no "proven wrong" in this case... it was just the President, absent any new information, swiping his pen to send the guy home.

Actually all the necessary information is available to to the public to comfortably make a decision.

Here’s one example.

‘Lorance was convicted of ordering an enlisted soldier to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghans in 2012.

One soldier fired two shots at three men who were riding a motorcycle. He missed. The men dismounted their bike and approached Afghan soldiers who were at the front of a mixed U.S. Afghan patrol.

The Afghan soldiers asked the three men to leave. Lorance then ordered his platoon’s gun truck to fire on the men, killing two.”

The way our criminal justice system actually works and the way it is supposed to work don't always align. The court system is right until proven wrong? Yikes!

He was convicted under the impression that all 3 men were civilians. One has been shown to handle an IED before the incident. The incident occurred in a hostile area days after the guy he was replacing was blown up by an IED. When a cellphone can be used to set off an IED, how exactly do you define unarmed? Are 3 grown men on one motorcycle shadowing a convoy in the desert normal civilian actions? A soldier fired at them and missed on their initial approach before his order, so he wasn't the only one who considered them likely hostiles.

Where was the assumption of innocence for him? It appears they came in wanting to punish him.

Trump was asked to pardon Lorance at least 2 years ago. It wasn't a spur of the moment thing. It was most likely (undoubtedly?) researched and vetted.


The assumption that Trump did something wrong is understandable. It's a pretty big assumption, though. It may have been his military advisors who urged him to grant the pardon. Troops worried about facing murder charges for trying to do their jobs aren't good for combat effectiveness, either.

If you insert the line "the men looked nervous and started glancing at the roadside" between those sentences would it change your opinion?

The one had handled IEDs before. Could they have set a remote IED a bit further along the road? If the soldiers hadn't fired and had been blown up down the road, would you feel better about being on the "moral high ground?"

You need to read up on ROE’s and EOF’s.

You’re argument is basically boiling down to “they deserved it” or “had it coming”.

Neither of those things are covered under UCMJ, nor the Geneva convention.

My argument is that wars aren't conventional any more. You don't have Redcoats marching in fields in uniforms and tight formations. You've got combatants hiding amongst civilians and using improvised weapons. You've got people willing to blow themselves up with bombs hidden on their persons.

Riding a motorcycle at a convoy with those surrounding circumstances is somewhat suspicious.

I'm not happy about the actions taken there. However, murder charges seem excessive. Kick him out OTH, fine. Five years, maybe. 20 to life after being put in impossible circumstances seems overkill.

I'm not a big fan of war in general any more. Money plays too big a role despite the publicly voiced reasons. However, if you are going to order people into life and death situations with heavy weapons, you shouldn't be surprised if people feel threatened and use them.

The guy he was replacing was just blown up. How is he not supposed to be on edge?

wars haven't been conventional since Vietnam. look at our history of combat in this country. other than some here and there, we've been at war with people who driving around in toyota pickup trucks and flip flops. guerrilla warfare has been a reality since before i joined in 2006.

whether its conventional or not, that doesnt excuse war crimes. what that soldier did wouldve been just as wrong had he did it to foreign POW's who were military combatants.

so again, you need to read up on ROE's and EOF's. and because of that, it doesnt matter what a suspected combatant did or didn't do prior to detention. if they were unarmed, and captured, then what went down was an execution. period.

the REASON we have ROE's, EOF's, as well as following the geneva convention is for these exact reasons. when we engage in activities like that, we become no better than the enemy we claim to have moral high ground over. we become the monsters we claim we're fighting against.

there is a solid reason why current and former military personnel, from enlisted to officers, dislike what the president is doing. he is sending a message not only to OUR military, but to our allies, that war crimes will be tolerated.

that is wrong. period.

Where are you getting captured from?

Is a remote detonator/cellphone a weapon?


I'd also argue our "moral high ground" has been a facade for a long time.

These weren't defenseless women and children gunned down in a village. There were 3 military aged males that approached a convoy on a motorcycle or if you insist, they were speeding away on a motorcycle. Did one look back and pull out a cellphone? One was tied to IEDs.

Specific US ROEs are classified, but none of them prohibit self-defense. I have read up some. We're talking about Myles' helmet as a weapon, so what is unarmed, really?

If a truck is driving at a military compound, do they always wait for it to explode to start shooting?

When the push of a button can wipeout a unit, and had his predecessor, you're trying to read minute details of everyone who approaches. The one man has been shown to have been tied to bombs. Did he read some sign of intent?

Lorance had been in prison since 2013. It's not like he got off unpunished.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Lorance

Wow. I didn’t know that soldiers in his OWN platoon testified against him. You do realize they were in the same situation he was in, right?

You’re trying to defend something without realizing one simple truth:

The fact that these are isolated events and not a rampant thing in the military tells us that these actions were considered criminal by even relax standards you are trying to use.

Also, once again, you’re wrong:

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/7-20/Appc.htm

Here are the rules of engagement, which aren’t classified. Why?

Those are the same exact ROE that we’re required for us to walk around with when we were deployed. Almost word for word actually. I still have all of my cards from my deployments, and it looks exactly like those.

You do understand you’re talking to someone who has deployed 4 times, right?

A military court, in front of a jury of his peers, with people in his own unit testifying AGAINST him.

Yea, we won’t agree at all.

Donald Trump says he will block military from removing Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher

https://news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-says-block-military-142550049.html

This is getting ridiculous.

bruh... If the seals don't want him, he's done. Trump is only making it worse for him.

They were given immunity for their testimony which makes them hardly unbiased. The incident occurred within his first week with them, so there wasn't really a lot of time to bond. Then there is the whole enlisted versus officer tension.

Those are generic Rules of Engagement and the adaptability section of the same page specifically mentions adapting the rules based on the "unique challenges of the LIC environment."

According to this ( Link ) the actual specific ROEs are classified as SECRET.

Was Afghanistan considered a low intensity conflict in 2012?

Are drone pilots that kill civilians charged with murder?

95 civilians were killed in the first six months of 2017. ( Link ) How many of the people involved were charged with murder?

Do I think what happened is messed up? Yes. Murder? Not unless you're going to dig through every single death in a war zone with a fine tooth comb and start calling every questionable decision murder.

He served 5 years in prison. I'm not saying give him a medal. I'm not saying I'd want him in the military. I sure as hell wouldn't want the burden of command and to have to try to make split second decisions involving potentially suicidal fanatics. It's one of the many reasons I got out.

How much did your view change over your four deployments? Do you remember your first week? Would you have enjoyed being the one that had to give the orders that first week when you were still trying to find your bearings? Being responsible for the lives of everyone else?

He was a (most likely scared) kid, who had been told he was replacing a guy who'd been hit by an IED. He probably soiled himself when the motorcycle roared up on the column. He wasn't a grizzled veteran. He didn't have a superior officer to ask. What was the senior NCO doing?

Now you’re trying to compare an unauthorized shooting with an authorized drone op with collateral damage.

That’s ridiculous. And you’re even further away from making your point.

Nice of you to avoid all the other questions.

The point of the comparison is that mistakes happen in war. The person who authorized the drone strike mistook civilians for combatants. They were no threat and weren't armed. He gave the order. No criminal charges were filed.

As "commander" of the patrol, who but the officer has the authority to order the engagement of hostiles? The men made a "hostile" approach on a motorcycle. They were fired at. They tried to speed off, perhaps to make another attempt on the convoy later, when they weren't stopped by the accompanying Afghanis and could instead do damage to the "foreign invaders". One has been found to be a bombmaker prior to the event. Why are they calling them civilians at trial? Even at the appeal because that argument hadn't been made at the initial trial and thus wasn't allowed? Lorance only gave the order as well, he didn't do the actual killing. He "mistook" them for enemy combatants, though one has since been proven to have been so. Are vehicles not considered weapons in Afghanistan?

My overall point has always been that his punishment seemed excessive and somewhat arbitrary. It felt more like a propaganda piece to prop up "our moral high ground" than a fair judicial inquiry and punishment. Offering immunity to the actual shooters who if they legitimately felt it was an unlawful order shouldn't have followed it?

American support of the war was falling in 2012. Link

That article also mentions "the high profile killings of Americans by their Afghan partners", which could have contributed to Lorance's decision. Did the after action report of the incident resulting in his predecessor's injuries give him reason to doubt the trustworthiness of his Afghan partners? Had they already passed the IED when it was detonated?

War is hell. War is hell when the sides are clearly drawn. War with dubious allies and enemies hiding amongst civilians is untenable.

I'm not trying to change your mind. I'm trying to get you to consider alternatives. If he'd lined up civilians against a wall and ordered a firing squad, as the initial article practically made it seem, I'd share your outrage. To me, it doesn't appear to have been that straightforward.

So 'war' excuses everything. Any conviction of any individual can be - probably should be based on what you say - pardoned and excused because war is hell and confusing and the top brass is rarely in touch with what's going on in the ground. To hell with eye witnesses, with norms and with the court process. That seems to be your take.

What Trump did was wrong - twice. If you want to invent rationale to explain it away, good luck. I did note how you went from fact based argument to emotive based argument once you got push back - talking about how the person felt and whether he crapped his pants.... all of which neither excuses or negates what took place, the process that was followed, the evidence that was supplied and how Trump crapped all over all of it. Twice.

Yes, but with all of Trump's military experience, how could anyone not see that he has a better understanding of what goes on in the face of war than a military court martial could ever comprehend?

Wait.... never mind.