via Marine Corps Times.
A New York district court judge has ordered the Marine Corps to answer allegations of wrongdoing in the administrative hearing of Maj. Jason Brezler, a Reserve civil affairs officer recommended for separation last year despite testimony from defenders who called him an exceptional Marine.Read the entire story.
Signed by Judge Joseph Bianco of Brezler's home state of New York, the Dec. 22 order requires the Marines, the Navy, and Marine Forces Reserve commander Lt. Gen. Richard Mills to answer Brezler's claims that the proceedings against him were so flawed they should be thrown out. A response to the order is due by Jan. 16.
In a motion filed this month alongside a lawsuit asking for relief, Brezler said the transcript produced by the Marine Corps following his December 2013 three-day board of inquiry contained numerous inaccuracies. The document contained 1,548 instances of the word "inaudible," and by dint of its insufficiency and the delay in producing it, violated his due process rights and military regulations, according to the motion.
I don't quite get this. Not at all. Unless reports are wrong, this Marine acted to save lives and deserves a medal.
This kind of thing is heartbreaking. My hope was that this thing would have been allowed to quietly die once the former Commandant left office. Instead we have this Shiite.
The Marine Corps had better have a care.
A hard won reputation for being fair, prizing individual effort and rewarding selfless acts of courage while not following the zero deficit stupidity of society is being lost.
Stories like this don't help.
One question though. Why would he pursue a civil law suit instead of requesting a review by General Dunford?
Brezler acted to save lives, but he got no support. Then came the murders, the actions against Brezler and the coverup even toward the victims' families.
ReplyDeleteFoxNews, Dec 29
Family of murdered Marine suing military over alleged cover-up
The family of murdered Marine Greg Buckley just wants answers. Three days before he was scheduled to come home, in 2012, Lance Cpl. Buckley was killed in Afghanistan, in the one place he was supposed to be safe.
He wasn't killed in a firefight on a battlefield, or by a roadside bomb while on patrol. The 21-year-old was working out with fellow Marines at the base gym when an Afghan teenager walked in carrying an AK-47 -- and emptied the clip, killing Buckley and two others.
The New York family's lawsuit accuses the department of hiding details surrounding Buckley's death. His father says supervisors ignored warnings and allowed an unsavory Afghan police chief named Sarwar Jan to live on the base. Jan allegedly was involved in selling drugs, uniforms and weapons to the Taliban and brought young so-called "tea boys" on post to serve as sex slaves.
Buckley's lawyer says the Marine Corps has been blocking the family's efforts to get investigative and autopsy reports, which every Gold Star family is entitled to under federal law.
The reason he is getting hounded is because he sent his communications over open e-mail and even saved some sensitive information on his desktop. His actions were well intentioned, but you cannot let spillage get away without punishment or your OpSec goes out the window. I think a NPLOC is well deserved and no more
ReplyDeletespillage? there was a tremendous bottle neck with getting time sensitive information out to the units. this guy cut through the bullshit and got it to the people whose lives depended on it. even with those efforts he was late. NPLOC i could live with and so could his career (if i was the presiding officer i'd include a letter of explanation) but this dismissal from service is just plain Amos-ism. i thought his leaving office would have ended that foolishness but it appears that a faction has developed in the Corps that thinks like he does. All Politics..All The Time.
DeletePolitics or not Sol, it's still a crime and still mishandling of information. Though the term "crime" might be too strong. Misdemeanor might be more appropriate.
ReplyDeleteIt all depends on the severity of the information he was tossing around and if the allegations have anything behind it. If the Afghan chief was innocent, then the Maj was simply being involved in a smear campaign against an ally, wittingly or unwittingly, which could have consequences. Nothing pisses people off like a wrong accusation from an ally and if the chief was innocent, it could have broken the working relationship between him and the US.
Inversely, it could be that the guy was already under covert investigation, and the e-mail spam could have blown the case and given him time to get away.
The last thing the USMC needs is a "wikileaks". Though I do agree dismissal was a bit too extreme, unless he was hoarding something really explosive in his drive. Or he was hoarding a lot of information to pull off an Assange. We really need more information before we can call anything, especially since the articles give only one side of the story, his.
Sometimes you have to stand there and watch your people die.
ReplyDeleteSometimes you have to know when not to duck a blow.
OpSec is there for a reason, yet this was his only crime in announcing in the clear his well meant cry to duck.
I would have done the same and hit what ever rocks and shoals came my way though.
I am the Master of my fate and the Captain of my ship.
To my own laws I will be true.
No body is gonna kill my buddies for free.
I remember reading, a fair while back, that the Army was running a system to disseminate critical threat intel from a secure database and that database monitoring system was so screwed up that nobody could find their laces by running their hands down past the knee.
DeleteThey switched to an SOF equivalent system and 'Hey Presto!' the database not only became searchable but had good meta content tracking (so you could see how many times a given individual had come up for inquiry among other, secondary, indicators). And now the Army uses a system which works while they _continue to wait on_ a system that is lost in development hell.
The failed system in fact being an 'interim solution'.
The difference being that the SOCOM system was civilian with a few, front-end, security modifiers for access limits and sourcing protection layered ontop, whereas the All Army system was it's own screwup, done by a major defense contractor and written in a language at once both arcane and archaic.
If this guy is trying to bypass that through a private information dissemination system, good on him. Give him some proper tools, given him a provisional rank/mission status that let's him EXCEL in a duty at what he has been doing on his own.
That is what is called Recognizing Potential.
I'm more worried about the 'tea service' boys and why the kid thought to empty his clip into a bunch of sweaty Marines specifically. Please don't tell me that there is a homosexual underage pandering problem here that isn't being discussed.
Please tell me that the kid was a Taliban infiltrator and not simply a mad little bitch with a blackened thumbnail, angry because his sugardaddy didn't treat him right.