Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the Butcher of Fallujah -and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091)

by Robinson, Patrick

  The master-at-arms admitted “freaking out” when he understood that the SEAL officer who was handling the exchange, Lieutenant Jimmy, started asking questions, and that’s when Westinson stated that he needed to make a report.

  Brian recalled going to camera operator Friant and saying that something needed to be done. And Lieutenant Jimmy confirmed he would be taking statements. Westinson then said that Sam Gonzales told him, “We gotta get this straight. This is bullshit.”

  And right then Reschenthaler knew this entire story was suspect, “because by then I knew Sam pretty well, and this sudden outburst and rough language was just not his style. But Westinson pressed on with his account, explaining how he balked at fabricating a story and how Sam once more approached him and said he better get on board.”

  “I just want justice,” Brian concluded. “I want to do the right thing.”

  And that essentially wrapped up the interview. Westinson had demonstrated credibility. “He was sincere,” said Reschenthaler, “and his words seemed heartfelt. But he was lying and we all knew it. The problem was, would the jury agree? I’ll admit it. We had big concerns.”

  By the time they were all scheduled to leave for Iraq, the attorneys had interviewed Westinson three times, including once by McCormack, who was probing for inconsistent statements to use against him at the trial.

  Right now it looked as though Jonathan Keefe would be the first of the three to face the court-martial, and that was precisely what McCormack wanted: the opening shot at the master-at-arms and the prisoner in the witness-box, in front of the court. Sam Gonzales’s trial would be up next, immediately after the court had decided whether Jon had been somehow derelict in his duty.

  And in the final few days before departure there was heavy activity in the Navy legal department, as cases were brought up to date prior to the defense attorneys’ departures.

  Nowhere was busier, however, than the office of Guy Reschenthaler, who was organizing the case files, drafting questions, both cross and direct, for each witness, and sending them over to the senior attorneys, Drew Carmichael and Monica Lombardi. The point was that Carmichael and Lombardi had a lot of other work, whereas for Reschenthaler, Sam’s court-martial was an absolute priority.

  It was his first real US case, one that looked certain actually to end up in court. Above all else, he did not wish to screw it up. Thus, Reschenthaler’s preparation on behalf of his team was meticulous. “I didn’t mind, he said. “I was working all the hours God made for Sam because I did not want to let him down. And I really did not want the government to win.”

  Running concurrently to all this detailed documentation was a whole string of requests from lawyers who had not served before in Iraq. Reschenthaler and Matt McCabe’s JAG, Lieutenant Kevin Shea, were the resident experts, so they fielded all of the questions: What do we bring? Are there showers? Should we bring food? Can we drink the water?

  There was one task, however, that faded almost completely from view: the endless number of inquiries usually made by command, wanting to know about status, motions, strategy, and prospects. But in this case there was nothing.

  “Command treated it as if the court-martial did not exist,” says Reschenthaler. “Kinda like the red-headed stepchild. No one in our leadership structure ever talked to me about it. Even the executive officer and the CO never mentioned it to me.”

  Reschenthaler thought this was a wise strategy on the part of command; after all, anyone who wanted to stage this court-martial on the combined word of Brian Westinson and a wanted Iraqi terrorist might be well advised to say as little as possible.

  The large naval court-martial group flew first from Norfolk to Washington/Dulles International Airport, twenty-six miles west of downtown Washington, DC. Almost everyone involved in any way was traveling on the same commercial flight to Iraq, and this caused a rather unusual atmosphere.

  This began at the main airport itself, where a whole conglomeration of SEALs, men who had served together in combat many times, were joshing and joking, recalling times past and trying not to appear too frivolous in front of the judge and, for all they knew, the jury. Because this was a major gathering of defense attorneys, support staff, witnesses, and prosecutors all flying halfway across the world for a truly bizarre pair of court-martials, at God knows what expense, in the same aircraft. Even Westinson was there.

  Jon was with his buddy Matt, who was traveling with his two JAG attorneys. Neal Puckett, his civilian counsel, was unable to attend, though his presence was not essential because Matt would be there as a witness for the defense, to stand up whenever he was called upon to speak for the excellent character of either Jon or Sam.

  Jon recalled, “I think the defense outnumbered the prosecutors by about five to one. There must have been thirty of us, all headed to Qatar out of Dulles. In one sense it was fun to meet my old buddies, guys we’d fought alongside in Iraq, all of them ready to stand up for me in court.

  “But I felt kind of strange. Waiting in line to board the aircraft, the judge was in front of me and the prosecutors behind me. In the aircraft Westinson was two rows ahead of me. Can you imagine how awkward that was? Especially being surrounded by a dozen hard-trained, beefy SEALs, dressed in smart civilian clothes, trying not to laugh.”

  For Jon the whole scenario seemed unreal. “Just looking ahead at Westinson, sitting there, saying nothing, refusing to make eye contact with any SEAL throughout the entire flight,” he remembered. “Here was the guy who was accusing us of beating up a terrorist. I’m telling you, it was weird. Really weird.”

  “It was not so long ago,” said Jon, “that a Navy commander and a SEAL master chief wrongly thought someone had kidnapped him when he’d gone missing.”

  And here they all were, every one of them, attack and defense, plus the judge, hour after hour on this seven thousand-mile journey to Qatar, through seven time zones. And all to decide whether the devoted SEAL and patriotic Virginian Jonathan Keefe had been derelict in his duty, and whether the senior SEAL petty officer, Sam Gonzales, already decorated for valor, had been equally derelict.

  Not to mention the guilt of a cover-up, impeding the investigation. No wonder the rest of the SEALs were laughing. They must have been thinking, Could this be real? I have to be dreaming. It was as though the military, in particular the US Navy, had totally forgotten who these people were.

  The flight to Arabia took almost fifteen hours, and they came in from the east, over the blue waters of the Gulf in the early morning, with the wheels of the Boeing reaching out for the near-three-mile long, sand-swept runway, the largest in the Middle East.

  For those who had not been to Qatar, Doha International Airport, gateway to the fabulously wealthy desert kingdom, was something of a shock, particularly if they were expecting a few Bedouins propped up against some ramshackle Arab hut, jammed between the date groves at a dried-up oasis.

  Doha has parking bays for forty-two airliners, with sixty check-in gates and parking for a thousand cars. The court-martial special came howling out of the hot morning skies with the sun directly astern of the tail’s plane. And the US military were waiting to move the Americans on, through the baggage hall with practiced speed before transporting them west by bus across the desert to the Al-Udeid Air Base, home to a major forward headquarters, US Central Command.

  On arrival the lawyers and witnesses began to get organized. And there were a lot of them. Lynn Friant was there to give her evidence, as was Paddy, the medic who looked like a pirate. Paul Franco, a Navy reservist who had once worked as a New York firefighter, was there as Westinson’s boss, and he intended to stand up in court for Jon and Sam to confirm what everyone now believed about the nerve-wracked young master-at-arms. Paul was a very formidable ally for both accused SEALs: in 2010 he was on the short list for Sailor of the Year... that’s the entire US Navy—nothing local.

  There were all kinds of SEAL officers, one a naval commander, plus the command XO and Special Agent Stamp, with a senior man
from the West Coast to speak up for the military character of both Sam and Jon. They also flew in another master-at-arms who worked alongside Brian. He was there voluntarily to validate that, in his opinion, Brian was unstable.

  The group stayed in Qatar for two days, during which they may have appeared like one big happy family. But this they were not. The tensions were sometimes unbearable. The SEALs did everything together—ate, slept, and lifted weights, but Jon sat near the judge in the dining room, and this felt extremely awkward.

  Perhaps anyone would feel this way—sitting a few places away from the man who would soon determine his fate militarily and, perhaps, for the rest of his life. Much of the time the SEALs spent with the defense JAGs—Reschenthaler, Shea (observing on behalf of Matt), Carmichael, and Paul Threatt. They became friends during this time, and in a sense this probably heightened the attorney’s determination to clear their names. The guys from Team 10 were nothing if not a close fighting unit.

  When they finally left, bound for Baghdad, the SEALs were dressed in their field cammie uniforms. And they traveled, as they often did to a combat zone, in one of those huge Boeing C-17 aircraft.

  “It was all very familiar to us,” recalls Jon. “But it was again darned awkward for me. I was sitting five feet away from the people who were trying to throw my ass in jail.”

  The seven hundred-mile journey north to the Iraqi capital took a couple of hours, as they flew up the Gulf and then over the desert. They arrived late morning and touched down at Camp Victory on the western side of Baghdad, hard by the International Airport.

  It’s rather a gaudy place in some ways, built as it is around Saddam Hussein’s grandiose Al-Faw Palace, which still stands in all its splendor, its thousands of lights glittering nightly over a large ornamental lake, which was all suitably ostentatious for the murderous old Lion of Babylon.

  Of course, the gaudy part was somewhat diminished by the twenty-seven miles of concrete barriers surrounding the vast US military complex, which at the peak of the war with Iraq housed forty thousand troops and thirty thousand contractors. There have been moments of great triumph here behind these barriers and great speeches delivered in the marble halls that the Americans commandeered.

  But for Saddam the glory of conquest swiftly faded. He was incarcerated in a cell at Camp Victory for three years and then tried and executed there, within sight of his once-lavish presidential lifestyle.

  For the two accused SEALs coming into land, this was a place of military folklore, but they had many more pressing things on their minds. For here they would be stationed for more than two weeks while two veritable armies of lawyers prepared to thrash out the gigantic mystery of whether Matt McCabe, from Perrysburg, Ohio, actually did thump Al-Isawi right in the gut.

  If he did not, then it would be over as suddenly as it had begun. If he did, however, anything might happen. Judge Tierney Carlos had a lot on his mind. And he strived to keep to himself throughout these fiendishly unusual pretrial days.

  In the opinion of the SEALs and the defense lawyers, however, Judge Carlos, the straight-talking, pragmatic New York lawyer, had always looked askance at this prosecution, especially at the government’s rather eccentric stand against three of its most elite warriors.

  During the long, hot days when the court-martial personnel were in residence, Brian Westinson hardly ever showed his face, nor did the other master-at arms he had brought along in order to put a more positive slant on his character than the rest of the witnesses would.

  Weston and his “minder” were both mostly missing, believing—and with good reason—that the SEALs did not include either of them among their favorite people.

  Also missing were Greg McCormack, Jon’s lead civilian counselor, and Monica Lombardi for Sam. Both these ultrabusy attorneys were arriving a couple of days later, but not in the same aircraft.

  And right there, fate stepped in with an unforeseen hand. On April 14, as McCormack was in a plane racing across the North Atlantic toward a European landfall, an unbelievable incident broke out some five hundred miles north of his aircraft. Clear of the Labrador Sea, the plane was approaching the earth’s 20-West line of longitude, southeast of Greenland’s Cape Farvel, when a gigantic volcano almost blew itself apart in neighboring Iceland.

  No one can pronounce its name, but the power and wrath of Eyjafjallajökul in the south of the ice-bound country was suddenly unleashed. The glacier-topped volcano hurled thousands of tons of molten rock clean through the ice cap, hurling a gigantic wall of ash, dust, and steam six miles into the air.

  It slowly formed a vast cloud of dust, ash, and cinders, which climbed into the North Atlantic jet stream, producing a satanic darkness that was instantly capable of clogging aircraft engines on one of the world’s busiest flight paths, south of Greenland. And the eruptions kept going, so steadily that no one knew when they would stop or whether another of Iceland’s twenty-two highly erratic active volcanoes would also erupt.

  At this point the world’s airlines went into a collective flat spin. Dozens of flights were diverted and ordered to return from whence they came. Airports were closed and twenty countries shut down their airspace, stranding millions of passengers all over the world. It was only the third time since the Vikings showed up in the ninth century that Eyjafjallajökul had blown. But two centuries ago it blew intermittently for fourteen months!

  Jon put the whole thing down to the obvious displeasure of an even greater power than General Charles Cleveland: one of the largest black clouds ever witnessed was drifting over northern Europe and heading directly southeast toward Greece and then Baghdad. “It’s an omen,” he muttered. “We could be here for a year. They’ll have to cancel it! God is on our side!”

  Meanwhile McCormack’s flight was diverted to Amsterdam, stranding him there without luggage, waiting for the cloud to disperse. And in turn this caused havoc back at Camp Victory, where McCormack’s client, Jon, was scheduled to face the court-martial first, six days from then, April 20. This was when McCormack, with his meticulous preparation, would have been first in line to tackle Westinson and the shackled terrorist in the witness box.

  The unavoidable delay of Jon’s lead civilian counselor now made this questionable, because no one knew how quickly the ash cloud would disperse to allow the attorney to get out of Holland. Indeed, the court may be forced to reschedule and instead bring forward the Sam Gonzales case. Sam’s lawyers—Monica Lombardi, Drew Carmichael, and Guy Reschenthaler—were by now all in Iraq, but right now the issue was very much up in the air (unlike McCormack).

  And right here in Camp Victory this very expensive group had to somehow find their own level, passing the days by working long hours, brainstorming, planning, strategizing, and, in the case of Threatt, poring over the highly variable statements made by Westinson, who was, in company with the crazed jihadist, public enemy number one to Jon and Sam.

  Threatt had long realized that the conduct of the master-at-arms held the key to the entire operation. So he made a study of any circumstances surrounding Westinson’s activities.

  He noted that after the Marines left the huge Baharia Base, the Schwedler Camp was left to defend itself, and their departure had unnerved Westinson.

  To improve security, Westinson had managed to get an elevated camera installed. And once it was in place, he watched the camera-feed obsessively. Although he was often told to take only a three-hour shift, he had been watching the camera feed for twenty hours when Echo Platoon arrived with their prisoner. Threatt concluded, “He was exhausted, agitated, and extremely nervous.”

  As he searched through various statements, Threatt was certain that Westinson was not at his peak when the lieutenant handed over the prisoner to him alone, an action that required him to walk Al-Isawi across the camp to the detention cell.

  Now according to Al-Isawi’s testimony, he was struck as soon as he entered the detention cell, or Conex Box. This was the one lie about which the detainee was consistent through all his statement
s and testimony.

  “This is important,” noted Threatt, “if you believe the detainee at all. Because there is a lot of other evidence establishing that MA3 Westinson was the only person with Al-Isawi when he first entered the cell.”

  In fact, based on all the statements and the medical report, Threatt’s theory was that MA3 Westinson himself had kicked the detainee into the chair, which caused him to fall, hurting his lip. The prisoner then aggravated the damage to his lip and spit blood onto his dishdasha to create the impression of abuse. “There is,” he noted, “simply no evidence of the kind of vicious beating that Westinson and the detainee allege.” And then he added, “When the officer in charge initially questioned MA3 [Westinson], he claimed ignorance. But after it became apparent that the damage to the detainee happened while he was alone with Westinson, then [he] concocted the story of McCabe’s punch. Which then evolved into a story which had every special warfare operator in the camp beating on the detainee.”

  Threatt supported his opinion of Westinson’s unreliability by noting that Westinson himself had admitted that he “was bored” and felt he was “wasting his life” at the camp. And in a later statement, Westinson admitted to not “patting down” Al-Isawi when he was being processed.

  Lieutenant Threatt also noted conflicting evidence from the medical evidence: “MA3 says the detainee was struck on the left side. The detainee says he was hit in the face and kicked while on the ground. The photos indicate slight discoloration on the right side.”

  And he concluded, “Basically it appears the government cannot firmly establish damage to the detainee beyond the sore on the inside of his lip. And a dentist asserts that was unlikely to be the result of blunt-force trauma to the lip, due to the absence of a clear cut. Rather the damage of a fever blister.”

  Reschenthaler also took the opportunity to get close to the SEALs and, slightly to his own surprise, swiftly discovered that Sam was their undisputed leader. “Everyone looked up to him,” he recalled. “I could scarcely believe that this respected and blunt-spoken assault warrior, twice decorated for valor, was being charged by his own side with dereliction of duty and with covering up an alleged flagrant assault on a prisoner by another decorated SEAL. I guess you had to know Sam to understand the pure futility of such charges.”