"This guy is freaking evil"
The New York Times has a long, blockbuster piece out this morning about the psychopathic war criminal Eddie Gallagher and it is stunning. In fact, it is enough to make you sick.
Here are the opening paragraphs:
The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears.
“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, said as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”
Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.
They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.
Such dire descriptions of Chief Gallagher, who had eight combat deployments and sometimes went by the nickname Blade, are in marked contrast to Mr. Trump’s portrayal of him at a recent political rally in Florida as one of “our great fighters.”
The article goes on to describe the impulsive killing of the half conscious teenager, after which he held "an impromptu re-enlistment ceremony over the body, as if it were a trophy."
“I was listening to it, and I was just thinking, like, this is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Special Operator Miller, who has since been promoted to chief, told investigators.
Gallagher's Trumpian response?
“My first reaction to seeing the videos was surprise and disgust that they would make up blatant lies about me, but I quickly realized that they were scared that the truth would come out of how cowardly they acted on deployment,” Chief Gallagher said in a statement issued through his lawyer.
“I felt sorry for them that they thought it necessary to smear my name, but they never realized what the consequences of their lies would be. As upset as I was, the videos also gave me confidence because I knew that their lies would never hold up under real questioning and the jury would see through it. Their lies and N.C.I.S.’s refusal to ask hard questions or corroborate their stories strengthened my resolve to go to trial and clear my name.”
The videos and text messages do not in any way appear to support that. If anything it's the opposite.
Gallagher was acquitted because one of the most important witnesses got immunity and then changed his story on the stand. I don't know if we'll ever find out the whole story about that.
The Navy Secretary just resigned when the president insisted on full exonerations of Gallagher and two other war criminals. He just partied with Gallagher down in Mar-a-lago and appeared on stage with another one. And all of this based upon the word of one disturbed right wing commentator on Fox News and his own depraved character.
The people who defend Trump on the basis of his isolationism had better hope that there is no national security emergency during this or any subsequent term because this demonstrates that his love of war crimes is no idle campaign rhetoric. If you liked Dick Cheney's torture program you're going to love it when Trump takes off the gloves.
We've been lucky so far. All he's done is make some impulsive decisions to abandon allies and dry up foreign aid and military support because of "the cost" even as he's created the most bloated, excessive military budget in history. He's celebrating war criminals and endorsing a breakdown of military discipline that could be catastrophic. And he's getting away with all of it.
We'd better hope that's the extent of the damage. If a real national security threat presents itself I honestly don't know what will happen.
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