CNN reported that “Navy Secretary [Richard Spencer was] forced out after Trump’s war crimes intervention causes division and chaos in military.” The Independent said that “the ousted chief of the US Navy has attacked Donald Trump in his resignation letter, telling the president they do not hold compatible views on ‘good order and discipline’ in the military.” Ironically, Spencer was himself fired for violating the chain of command, for undermining good order and discipline.
Spencer offered a secret deal to the White House which would have allowed a Navy SEAL [Eddie Gallagher], found to have posed for a photo with the corpse of an enemy combatant, to retire offering “a secret guarantee that Gallagher would be allowed to keep his status as a Navy SEAL, according to the senior defense official.” When Spencer’s boss found out Spencer was cutting a deal behind his back, he was fired.
The move prompted Esper’s decision to ask for Spencer’s resignation, according to Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman. The defense official said that Spencer’s decision to circumvent his chain of command — namely Esper — and go straight to the White House was a violation of military policy.
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.”
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.”
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.
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’s discretion as Commander in Chief.
This usurpation climaxed with the Court’s 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 “due process” rights and thus have the right to habeas corpus to obtain judicial review of whether the military has sufficient evidentiary basis for holding them as prisoners. …
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.
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.
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.
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Books:
Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War, by Tim Bouverie. Drawing on deep archival research and sources not previously seen by historians, this groundbreaking history chronicles the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy and parliamentary infighting that enabled Hitler’s domination of Europe.
Revolutionary: George Washington at War, by Robert E. O’Connell. An introduction to Washington before he was Washington. This book from an acclaimed military historian is a bold reappraisal of young George Washington, an ambitious if reckless soldier destined to become the legendary general who took on the British and, through his leadership, defined the American character.
God: A Human History, by Reza Aslan. “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” This innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition, according to Aslan. In this book, not only does he take us on a history of our understanding of God but tries to get to the root of this humanizing impulse.
The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, by Martin Gurri. This book tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. It also ponders whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process, and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can emerge from the present political turbulence.
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Open Curtains by George Spix and Richard Fernandez. Technology represents both unlimited promise and menace. Which transpires depends on whether people can claim ownership over their knowledge or whether human informational capital continues to suffer the Tragedy of the Commons.
The War of the Words, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea, how China is restarting history in the Pacific.
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