SEAL Of Disapproval

Click here for an article in Washington Monthly by Thomas E. Ricks entitled "Seal of Disapproval -- How the Navy failed to stop -- and Donald Trump championed -- a murderous special operations leader. It's the story of disgraced SEAL Eddie Gallagher, told in a new book, entitled "Alpha," by New York Times reporter David Philipps.

In recent years we’ve had a raft load of fanboy books by and about Navy SEALs and other special operators at war. But in Alpha, David Philipps, a reporter for The New York Times, has produced a serious study of a SEAL unit in crisis as it fought ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, in 2017. By Philipps’s credible account, the unit’s leader, Eddie Gallagher, was a one-man wrecking crew for ethical behavior.

It's a lot more than ethical behavior -- it's criminal behavior. It tells how Gallagher got away with inexcusable actions because those around him -- including his superiors -- were afraid that if they disciplined Gallagher or tried to rein him in, they would be murdered -- something easily accomplished in a war zone.

But Philipps’s book isn’t just about Gallagher. It’s about a system that enables evil because it doesn’t want to look bad.

Gallagher found support on Fox News, and then with Donald Trump and his sons:

When they finally decided to prosecute him for his other crimes, including killing the teenage prisoner, Gallagher found fast outside backing. The Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth conducted a campaign on the soldier’s behalf. He featured Andrea Gallagher, Eddie’s wife, in television interviews. She alleged that her husband was an innocent and noble victim of an ungrateful government. “These are atrocities being committed against our military service members, my family, my husband,” she claimed. She asserted that people who had never been in the fight were judging her husband, when in fact his accusers were members of her husband’s own team, who believed he had recklessly endangered them while undercutting the war effort by alienating Iraqis. Benefiting from Fox’s backing, Andrea Gallagher was able to raise roughly $500,000 for her husband’s legal defense fund. 

More importantly, Hegseth’s efforts attracted the attention of Donald Trump and his sons. The president called Richard Spencer, the Navy secretary, to chew him out over the service’s handling of Gallagher—and then told Spencer to call Hegseth, the Fox News contributor.

An interesting article -- and I'm sure "Alpha" is an interesting book.