Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (42 page)

His story, however, was graphic, maybe too graphic. Brian outlined his own plight: working hard, dealing with long hours, trying to run security on this tough FOB. He liked the SEALs and enjoyed working with them. And he recounted how, when Al-Isawi was “rolled up,” Paddy took some processing photographs after his examination while he, Westinson, guarded the “box”—the holding cell converted from the shipping container.

Al-Isawi had then been placed in a chair, blindfolded, and his hands were tied. According to Westinson, Sam Gonzales then came in and said, “I gotta take a look at this guy.” Soon after that, Jason arrived.

And right here the master-at-arms moved into brand-new territory, at least it was for the lawyers. “Sam stood up and kneed the prisoner in the gut,” he said. “Jason stood by and laughed. They worked him over. Then Higbie showed up and ‘roared' at Al-Isawi, scaring him, since he was blindfolded.

“Higbie then went outside, grabbed a stick and started beating on the walls, and running that stick against the metal, to scare the blindfolded captive.

“Next McCabe and Keefe came in. One struck Hashim from behind, knocking him to the floor. Someone kicked Hashim while he was down, striking his ribs. He was helped up, only to receive a swift punch in the gut from McCabe.”

He added that the SEALs eventually left, and Westinson then tried to clean Al-Isawi, wiping blood from him. But the dishdasha was stained, and the terrorist's lip was bloody. The prisoner was given a new dishdasha to wear, but when the Iraqis came to pick him up, according to Westinson, the prisoner began to spit blood and said, “The Americans beat me, the Americans beat me.”

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.