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

  Jon refused to answer.

  And once more his inquisitors swerved onto a slightly different tack, urging him to accept what the US Army refers to as Article 15. The Navy has its own procedures for lower-level punishment, dating back to the days of sail. It’s called a Captain’s Mast, a method of non-judicial punishment (NJP) in which a sailor who has committed an offense appears before his commanding officer on board a warship and may be reduced in rank or pay or even discharged. He will not, however, face really serious punishment like jail or, in days of yore, the lash.

  These days there is more often a procedure called Admiral’s Mast, in which an alleged offender may appear before a fleet commanding officer and admit the error of his ways. Again, the process is more or less unchanged—nothing as serious as court-martial but still requiring an admission of guilt. For whatever reason, in the US Marines, their NJP procedure is always called Office Hours.

  US naval personnel only rarely refer to the Army’s very similar Article 15 because it only rarely affects anyone wearing dark blue. But in the case of Matt, Jon, and Sam, something very significant had happened. The case had moved over from naval jurisdiction to that of the Army. Those who mattered now were Major General Cleveland and his staff. And there was now a rumor that General Petraeus himself would be involved and, indeed, may be obliged to give the green light to any judicial matters involving the three SEALs.

  Faced with the silent Jon Keefe, the inquisitors now urged him, over and over, to take Article 15, effectively the General’s Mast. They told him an admission of guilt would be ideal, all three SEALs could renege on previous statements involving the nonstriking of the jihadist, their “lies,” “dereliction of duty,” “false statements,” and so forth.

  Instead, they should throw themselves upon the mercy of Major General Charles Cleveland. They again gave Jon reassurance that if he admitted he had seen Matt punch Al-Isawi, his own part in the debacle would be glossed over.

  “Do you have any questions?” they asked him.

  “No,” replied Petty Officer Keefe. It was the only word he uttered throughout the entire interview.

  As he left the room Jon had only one thought in his mind: These people would do anything, say anything, promise anything, or, if necessary, threaten anything in order to get a confession. Obviously Jon had not been in the other rooms while Matt and Sam were being “persuaded,” but he had a pretty good idea they too were being lied to, tricked, and otherwise hoodwinked, not to mention humiliated.

  This day had been a game changer, and now the gloves were off. There would be no more trust, no more cooperation, no more nice guys. From now on the three SEALs would fight tooth and nail to the bitter end—a state of mind in which they were all hard trained. There would be no surrender inside or outside the courtroom.

  Jon, for the twelfth time, requested a Navy lawyer to help him, as had the other two. At this point, however, only he understood, after his third-degree going-over by General Cleveland’s legal staff, that this was all headed for the highest level of the military judicial system. Jon already knew he needed an expensive civilian lawyer, a ruthless courtroom operator who would protect him and get Westinson on that witness stand to tear his “evidence” to shreds.

  The three SEALs regrouped and exchanged updates, agreeing among themselves that they had to get top-class civilian attorneys, skilled advocates who could punch holes in all the lies and distortions being leveled at them.

  At this stage the authorities seemed to consider Jon an easier target than Matt. At least they apparently thought it might be easier to get him to say that Matt had whacked Ahmad Hashim than it ever would be to persuade Matt to admit to having done so. Wrong. Jon was as determined as any man could be. He would never even consider surrender.

  There was also the slightly uneasy situation with Sam Gonzales, who was very senior, very highly regarded, and very important on the SEAL base. His evidence would certainly prove damning to the prosecution, as he had been there or thereabouts throughout all of the critical hours and encounters.

  He would hear not one word against Matt or Jon nor against any other SEAL Team member. He had dictated a sworn affidavit that the men were completely innocent. He had been there with them at the holding cell and had seen everything there was to see. Also, he was taking a somewhat skeptical, sideways look at Westinson, who he thought was acting pretty “stressed out.”

  Looking back, it was quite possibly the presence of Sam that was generating such urgency when questioning Matt and Jon. The military legal team was anxious to deliver a confession to their masters simply to avoid a trial, at which SEAL Petty Officer 1st Class Sam Gonzales was perfectly capable of blowing them all out of the water. Judge, jury, naval officers, courtroom guards, stenographers, and clerks—they would all believe him.

  The trick was either to get Matt to admit his “crime” or for Jon to say he saw it as an eyewitness before the matter ever got to a court. They could then hang Matt out to dry in front of the general. And the Pentagon would have its headlines when the media had liftoff. A spokesman for the Navy would quietly confirm that they had dealt with the matter in the severest possible way. As was only to be expected.

  Meanwhile the pace quickened. Within the hour the SEALs were once more summoned to the US Army’s legal offices. Matt was escorted into a different room and found himself again face to face with Master Chief Lampard and the army sergeant major, General Cleveland’s senior enlisted adviser.

  And there, for the first time, he was formally told the assault charge was by no means the only accusation he faced. He was also being charged personally with dereliction of duty and false statements. No one had ever told him he would be arraigned on three counts, that he had three very serious, almost criminal charges lined up against him.

  Matt stood tall, ramrod straight, facing his accusers, every inch a US Navy SEAL Team leader who only one month previously had courageously smashed his way into the armed headquarters of Iraq’s most dangerous terrorist and grabbed and “cuffed a wanted killer who had evaded capture for almost five years” but now found himself on the wrong end of Matt’s M-4 rifle.

  “I suppose none of that counted anymore,” he said later.

  And for the umpteenth time on this day Lampard and the sergeant major verbally tackled Matt, asking him twice more to confess.

  Matt refused to answer. He just stood there, staring straight ahead. And for some reason his accusers thought his silence signified submission, and they were plainly expecting him to request clarification, maybe even advice about his chances before the general if he took Article 15.

  What lenience could he expect? Did he need to admit all three crimes? Would he risk losing rank? Could he count on some senior character witnesses, men who would stand up for him in court, citing his impeccable record? Above all else, would they take away his Trident?

  Never have two legal military interrogators been more widely off track. Matthew McCabe, like all of his kind, had an inner core of pure steel. He never flinched and never spoke.

  Finally, Master Chief Lampard, fully expecting a climbdown, asked him persuasively whether he had any questions.

  “No,” snapped Matt.

  “And,” Matt recalled, “they both looked absolutely astounded. And I just left the room.”

  It was precisely the same for Jon and Sam. Both men were given details of the newly written charges against them.

  Jon was asked: “Questions?”

  “No.”

  “None at all?”

  “No.”

  “We’d all had quite enough of their lies, tricks, glibness, and threats. Not to mention their stupidity,” he said. “None of us had anything to say, at least not to them.”

  All three men had by now requested, over and over, the assistance of a Navy lawyer, just to have someone for the first time standing in their corner. They all knew this was a standard right for any naval personnel accused of anything. Jon had asked for Lieutenant Paul Threatt, who was based
in Norfolk, but so far he had heard nothing.

  Day after day Jon, Matt, and Sam heard nothing. And they were as alone on these days as they had been throughout their ordeal. Hour after hour they had faced experienced inquisitors, men of a higher rank who, so far as anyone could tell, had pulled just about every trick in the book to persuade them to make confessions—to sign admissions of guilt.

  These were unfailingly presented as “no-big-deal formalities.” But these three smart Special Forces operators, though young and inexperienced in the guiles of martial law, knew instinctively their signatures would almost certainly prove fatal. Thus, they had not given way. And they had treated the offered pens and paper as bomb disposal men treat a ticking roadside IED.

  And then their accusers summoned Jon to face a gimlet-eyed Army staff sergeant who thrust three legal documents in front of him.

  Jon perused them swiftly and noted they dealt with three separate subjects. “They could hardly have appeared more legal,” he remembers. “Kind of papers you’d expect for the trial of a mass murderer like Al-Isawi, not me.”

  The staff sergeant told Jon to initial each page where he indicated and then to sign them.

  “I’m not signing anything until I have legal counsel,” replied the heavyweight SEAL breacher from Virginia.

  The sergeant paused and stared hard at Jon, and then he softened a bit and continued, “You must sign them. And when you’ve done it, you can speak to a Navy lawyer in Norfolk.”

  Jon just stood there, entirely alone, and flatly refused. But the staff sergeant came back, again and again, first cajoling, then persuading, then threatening. But Jon stood firm. “I am signing nothing,” he repeated, “not until I have counsel.”

  Finally, when it was clear that this was going nowhere, the sergeant left and returned with General Cleveland’s head legal counselor, another member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), who selected one of the three sheets and removed it.

  This left just the two charges, and for the last time, the sergeant told Jon to sign them, confirming the third one had gone.

  And Jon, still patient and polite but nonetheless very scared, uttered the same phrase he had uttered so many times before: “I will sign nothing.”

  At which point he was left alone, and after a few minutes the phone on the desk suddenly rang. Jon answered it, and a voice said, “I’m calling you from US Naval Base, Norfolk, this is Lieutenant Paul Threatt. I’m a Navy lawyer, and I’m here to help you.”

  A tidal wave of relief swept over the big Virginian. It was the first time anyone in the world had stepped up to offer help to any of the three of them. Paul Threatt was the lawyer Jon had requested. One of his SEAL brothers had strongly recommended the attorney because he was a stern intellectual moralist and, if necessary, a courtroom brawler.

  “It was as if my prayers had suddenly been answered,” says Jon. “For a few moments I couldn’t even speak.”

  When he did he just blurted out his profound thanks and then told the JAG officer from Norfolk about the two legal sheets of paper he had been told to sign.

  Very carefully, Threatt asked Jon to read the words out to him slowly. And it was clear to Jon that the lawyer was listening with rising anger. At the end of the section he snapped, “DO NOT SIGN THAT.”

  Right here Threatt had some kind of sixth sense, because he could feel that the SEAL was very tired, mentally beaten down by days of questioning and persuasion. “There was a weariness in his voice which I did not like,” the lieutenant recalled. “Of course I did not know Jon. But even at that distance I could tell he’d taken some kind of a battering. I needed to be stern and very definite. Jon Keefe did not want to hear vacillation.”

  And he repeated the phrase, “DO NOT SIGN THAT,” again and again, as Jon worked his way down the pages, dictating the accusatory words halfway across the world to the headquarters of the US Navy (legal department), where Lieutenant Threatt sat almost in disbelief at the cruel and ruthless way this Navy SEAL was being treated.

  “I am afraid I had to be harsh with Jon,” he remembered, “Short with him. Staccato, rude. But I had to keep him focused. I did not want him to relax. And I just kept going, making sure he could never lose concentration. He probably thought I was some kind of ogre. But I never lost him, and his determination stayed high.”

  Lieutenant Threatt later told Jon: “I knew from those initial moments that you were tired but completely innocent. How did I know? Don’t ask me. I just did.”

  For the next forty-five minutes the two men talked, with Threatt explaining to Jon, chapter and verse, what it would mean if he accepted the General’s Mast (Article 15) and agreed to stand before Cleveland and confess that he had indeed lied to the authorities and been derelict in his duty of care to a captured prisoner.

  “If you do that, it is very likely you will receive nothing much worse than a reduction in rank and pay and that your loyalty to your teammates will be taken into consideration.”

  “I cannot do that,” Jon told him. “I have not lied, and I cannot say I did, because that wouldn’t be true either. They’ve already asked me to lie about a dozen times, and I can’t do it.”

  Seven thousand miles away, Threatt smiled the smile of the legal predator. Rarely had he interviewed an accused man so plainly not guilty.

  “Well, Jon,” he said, “Article 15 is the easy way out for you, the path with the least risk to you personally. The other way is court-martial. And that’s considerably more serious, because that can very easily involve jail. For Matthew, on an assault charge, that could mean five years, if the three of you were found guilty.”

  “I cannot do anything which requires me to admit any wrongdoing,” replied Jon. “Either by my teammates or by myself. None of us is guilty of anything.”

  “And that,” said Threatt, “leaves us with the courtroom. And there you will be given a clear opportunity to defend yourself, and your legal counsel will cross-examine the prosecution’s witnesses.”

  “So if we want to fight it, we elect to be court-martialed?” Jon had swiftly grasped the situation.

  “That is correct,” said Paul. “It’s a dangerous course of action because of the obvious downside with a guilty verdict ...”

  Jon remembers interrupting: “Paul, there can be no guilty verdict. All three of us are one hundred percent innocent. Every SEAL Team member will stand up in court and speak for us. We already have those assurances. The prosecution has nothing except the word of the master-at-arms kid who deserted his post at least twice during that evening. And he’s a nervous wreck. I wouldn’t believe him if he told me it was daylight.”

  Threatt calmly warned that “trials can go wrong, and innocent men have been found guilty ...”

  “Yeah, but no three people in the history of the US Navy have ever been as innocent as us,” replied Jon. “Matt McCabe never laid a finger on that little Iraqi creep. Neither did Sam, and neither did I. Matt didn’t lie, Sam didn’t lie, and I didn’t lie.”

  He added that this Westinson character had been wrapped up in cotton wool and protected, encouraged, and even guarded from the very beginning, “ever since he came out with that cockamamie story about Matt,” said Jon. “No one has corroborated it, and no one with a lick of sense believes it. That’s all they’ve got, Lieutenant Threatt. Nothing else.”

  “Then, Jon, it’s my duty to advise you to go to court-martial. And there I will do everything in my power to defend you. I will come to see you as soon as possible, and you should consider the possibility of retaining a civilian lawyer as well.”

  Jon knew nothing about legal expenses in the civilian world. He did, however, understand that it was unlikely to be cheap. “Are we talking $50,000, maybe $100,000?” he asked.

  “Very possibly,” replied Threatt.

  “Well, my family does not have that kind of money to throw around, and I really do not want to involve my family. The shame of my situation would be bad enough.”

  “In this case it’s p
ossible the money may come from somewhere unexpected,” said the naval lawyer mysteriously. He would elaborate no further. But already there was a seed planted in his mind.

  Somewhere deep within him, Threatt knew the American public was capable of rising up in fury when they heard that three heroic Navy SEALs were being court-martialed in Iraq for allegedly punching the local mass murderer—the same man who in 2004 had publicly strung up the bodies of four US citizens after having shot and burned them alive—the Butcher of Fallajuh, no less.

  Jon hung up the telephone and waited to consult with Matt and Sam. By the time they met, all three of them had spoken to naval lawyers, and it was decided they should make one last-ditch effort to get out of all this with a plea to the highest authority.

  They each requested a General’s Call—a far less serious meeting with General Cleveland than Article 15. This was a meeting at which they could once again protest their innocence without signing a written confession, which was, in truth, abhorrent to them all—to Matt, because he had not whacked anyone, to Sam who knew darned well Matt had not whacked anyone, and to Jon because of the lies.

  But all of this swiftly became irrelevant, because the request to plead their case in front of Major General Charles Cleveland was refused. And that concluded phase one of their ordeal. On the night of September 25, 2009, the three SEAL petty officers, Matthew Vernon McCabe, Jonathan Keefe, and Sam Gonzales, formally requested courts-martial, a drastic step in anyone’s fight to establish innocence.

  A court-martial was the only avenue left open to them, as Major General Charles Cleveland would neither listen to nor even see them. And thus far the only intellectual drift any of the SEALs had seen from the General’s henchmen was either accusatory, disbelieving, manipulative, or occasionally scornful. A meeting with Cleveland was a dead end.

  For the first time Jon, Matt, and Sam understood they must go to trial and plead their case in a room of strangers, before a judge and/or jury.

  Still, at least the strangers would be neutral, which was a sight more than anything they had encountered thus far. And certainly they realized that a naval court-martial was an extremely serious matter, its origins stretching back to the days of sail, to the eighteenth century, when it adopted procedures from the 1749 British Naval Code.