The Daily - A Secret in the Navy SEALs

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

Navy SEAL commandos said they had seen their decorated platoon leader, Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, commit war crimes. They were warned not to report it. They did so anyway. Guest: Dave Philipps, who covers the military for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.Background reading:A confidential Navy criminal investigation report obtained by The Times paints a disturbing picture of a subculture within the SEALs that prized aggression and protected wrongdoers.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, Navy SEALs were warned not to report their platoon leader for war crimes. They did it anyway. It's Thursday, April 25th. Dave, when did you first hear about Chief Edward Gallagher? I first heard about him when he was arrested in September. And what caught my eye is that this was not just any sailor who was getting arrested.

It was a special operations chief in the Navy SEALs, sort of the top, the elite of the entire Navy. Dave Phillips covers the military for The Times. And even within the SEALs, this guy, Eddie Gallagher, was a big deal. He'd been in for almost 20 years. And in that time, he had qualified for everything pretty much that you possibly could. He was repeatedly awarded medals for heroic actions. He was an expert medic, a crack sniper, expert in explosives. He had been a trainer at the SEALs bud school, you know, literally the guy who's yelling at you

while he's making you crawl through the surf. And he had this reputation among SEALs as this real hard-charging warrior, respected, loved. So to see him suddenly arrested was really something. And Dave, what were the accusations against Chief Gallagher? What the people in the platoon say is that when they deployed to Iraq in 2017, he kind of went off the rails. He spent most of his time in a hidden sniper perch,

where he would fire five or ten times as much as other snipers. They say he would shoot indiscriminately at civilians in the city. At one point, he shot a girl who was wearing a flowered hijab who was going down to the river with friends. And other SEALs, through their scopes, saw the body carried off by the other girls.

And in another case, he shot an old man, they say, and that man collapsed. This is just an old man walking down the street. That's what they say. I mean, this is a war zone, but it's also a place where millions of people live. And so that was common. And in fact, the SEALs say that they grew so concerned about him firing at civilians

that they would regularly fire warning shots, you know, sometimes only a meter or two from civilians to scare them away so that their chief wouldn't have a clear shot. And then in May of last year, something else happened. And then in May of last year, something else happened. They were behind the lines during a battle where the Iraqi special forces were fighting ISIS fighters. And during this fight, an ISIS fighter was wounded in the leg and he was brought back a little ways behind the enemy lines. This is a kid who was somewhere between 14 and 17 years old.

He was conscious at the time. He was even able to be interviewed by a journalist that was there. Then he was brought to the SEALs, and the SEALs say they put him on the ground and started giving him medical care. And what the SEALs say is that while they were in the process of giving this guy medical attention, Chief Gallagher came over and took out a custom-made knife

that he'd brought with him, and without saying much or anything at all, they say he stabbed the captive in the neck and in the torso and killed him. A short time after that, he gathered the platoon together over the body of this dead teenager and performed an enlistment ceremony while someone from the platoon took photographs. This is a ceremony where every so often you have to voluntarily re-enlist, raise your right hand and swear to uphold the Constitution. And Chief Gallagher, he wanted to do it over the body of this dead ISIS fighter. And Dave, what are you thinking

when you hear these gruesome accusations against Chief Gallagher? What I thought at first was, look, here's a guy with an exemplary record as a sailor. Here's a guy who's done eight deployments since 2001. And my first inclination was maybe so many deployments had left him with post-traumatic stress disorder or a traumatic brain injury or all of the above. And if that was true, I thought that was a really important story to tell. So what I did is I reached out to his family.

I spoke to his brother. I spoke to his family. I spoke to his brother. I spoke to his wife. And I spoke at length about his record, trying to parse out, were there things that had happened in the past that might contribute to this idea that he was injured and that the SEALs had failed to see that?

And the family said emphatically, no, that's not what's going on here. And they told me a really startling story. They said, what's going on here is that Eddie's men turned on him and they wanted to get rid of him. And so they started concocting lies. First, it was just stealing snacks. And then it was bad leadership and bad tactics. And when they realized that their small lies weren't enough to get rid of him, they started making up stories about even worse things that he did. Eventually, it was that he had murdered people. So while the members of the platoon

are leveling these extremely serious accusations of war crimes against Chief Gallagher. In the telling of his wife and family, they have concocted these stories because they hate him and they want to ruin his career and they don't want him to be their chief. Right. What they say is that he is such a demanding leader, so tough on them, such a warrior that they can't hack it. And they've come up with a plan to get rid of him.

And they don't just say this to me. There's no way to describe what it looks like to be maliciously lied about, to be at the end of a game of telephone that now has resulted in my husband's life is on the line. They start talking to local TV news in San Diego, where all the SEALs are based. And for something like this to have been perpetrated against him and his family is nothing less than disgusting. And then to national news.

If you want to know what a real Navy SEAL is like, look at someone like Eddie, who literally just faced down death. And go repeatedly on Fox News. They made up stories to cast dispersions, and these stories were swallowed whole by a prosecutor who had no idea what he was doing. And really portrayed the chief as a hero who's being wrongfully targeted by, you know,

the very government that he swore to serve. Is that the way you treat a decorated Navy SEAL? It's preposterous, Brian. And before long, they find an ally in Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter. You have a malicious prosecution that can use every dirty trick in the book to try to get their point across. Who's also a military veteran. So even if everything that the prosecution said is true, So let's say that Chief Gallagher killed a verified, designated ISIS combatant. My answer is, so what? That's his job. And he starts agitating that the chief is being mistreated.

And soon he and the family get the support of first a handful of other congressmen and then 40 congressmen who sign a letter saying that the chief must be released before trial so that he can defend himself. But we need the intervention of the president of the United States, sadly. Please review that letter. What is happening here isn't right and we need help. This entire system is broken and so that's why we're calling on the president of the United States to fix it. And at the end of March, Trump tweeted, in honor of his past service to our country, Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher will soon be moved to less restrictive confinement while he awaits his day in court. Process should move quickly.

So a couple hours later, Eddie Gallagher, who's been sitting in the Navy brig for months, is moved to a much less restrictive environment at a Navy hospital in San Diego, where he awaits his court-martial trial in May. Meanwhile, while all this is going on with the family defending him in the press, I get this thick stack of confidential documents that show this case is way more complicated than either the family's story or the platoon's allegations. And what kind of documents do you suddenly have? It's summaries of interviews with more than a dozen SEALs. It is background information on previous things that the chief was alleged to have done and we had known nothing about. And it is hundreds of text messages between Chief Gallagher and other SEALs that were seized when his phone was taken when he

was arrested. This is the type of stuff that we never get to see. And what story do these documents tell you? What are you finding? Well, for a long time, the SEALs have had a growing reputation as the most elite commandos in the United States military, right? These are the guys who killed Osama bin Laden. And so we know that they are this very special and secretive commando organization deployed all over the world. And they have limited oversight

because of this special mission that they have. Because of that, there's this subculture that has grown up within the SEALs. Some people call them the SALTs. Other people call them the pirates. But we're talking about these roguish warfighters, the guys who've really been there and done the stuff. And those people are really prized in this culture. You know, it is a culture of warfighters and they celebrate toughness and they celebrate killing in ways that I think a lot of us would find kind of shocking. And to a certain extent, they care less about the rules than they do about getting things done. And they will cover

for each other when necessary. And these documents prove that that pirate culture is there, but they also show us this whole subculture we never knew about. People who disprove the pirates, that don't agree with what they're doing, that don't think they should be able to get away with things, that think they should be reported. And those people, one of the SEALs described them to me as the Boy Scouts. And so you're seeing in these documents a conflict between these two camps in the SEALs, one you knew about, the pirates, the other, which is new to you,

the Boy Scouts. Right. And the pirates, I think, would argue, hey, look, war is messy and we can't be tied down with expectations that were made at a desk somewhere in the United States. And the Boy Scouts see that as a very slippery slope and say, no, we need to follow the rules that are given to us as professional soldiers. So how exactly do you see that conflict play out from these documents inside this platoon? You can see the schism starting to widen the day that the captive is stabbed and killed. That night, the leader of the enlisted men, this is the guy who's just below Chief Gallagher. He brings them all together, according to the documents, and has a meeting without the chief there. And he says, hey, guys, here's what happened today.

Is anyone okay with it? And they all said no. And they started to plan for what they were going to do if the chief tried to do something like that again. And they decided, clearly, we need to keep all captives away from him and we need to keep anyone else away from him who might be endangered by him. Well, while they're having this meeting,

the chief walks in and it's clear to him, according to the documents, what they're talking about. And what the documents say is that his response was, well, that's how we used to do it. And if you have a problem with it, I won't do it around you anymore. And when they continued to press him, he said, well, you know, they do a lot worse to us. According to the documents, a few hours later, they report the chief to his commander. Now, the commander is a young lieutenant.

Technically, he's superior to Chief Gallagher, but he's also a lot less experienced and a lot younger, about 10 years younger. What the documents say is that the lieutenant said he would take care of it, but he apparently never does anything. And so a few weeks later, the platoon comes back again and says, we still have these concerns. What are you doing? And the lieutenant says, I'll take care of it. But again, nothing seems to be happening. And so they hope when they get home from their deployment at the end of 2017 that maybe they can get something started by going to higher members in the chain of command.

And so next they go to the lieutenant's boss, and they tell him the same thing according to the documents. And they get the same kind of answer. Which is what? Okay, we'll look into this. And then months go by and there's a growing suspicion that nothing is going to happen. And at this point, what are these platoon members saying to each other about what they're experiencing? And why do they seem so determined to keep

trying to report this? It would have been really easy for the platoon to just walk away. But they were concerned that Chief Gallagher was going to be promoted and put in even more responsibility than he had been in as their platoon leader. They thought he might be in charge of several platoons or in charge of training other people to go to places like Iraq. And so in March of 2018, they called this confidential meeting where they got their troop commander, a lieutenant commander who was in charge of several platoons on the team, and his right-hand man, who is a master chief, and called them into an empty classroom at the naval base on Coronado, where they had this sit-down. And they said, look, we want to make sure you understand.

Here is what's going on. He killed a little girl. He killed an old man. He stabbed this person. We want you to start an investigation. So this is by far the most important, consequential, serious audience they have reached in their attempts to get this hierarchy to pay attention to their allegations.

And what did these two senior officials say in response? The documents say that they essentially cautioned the SEALs that this was a really bad idea. The lieutenant commander said, hey, look, the Navy's not going to look kindly on a bunch of lower ranking enlisted guys making accusations against a decorated chief. You know, you could lose your place in the seals over this. Wow. He said, you know, they'll pull your birds, which is a way of saying they will take away this coveted pin that all of the seals wear that has an eagle on top of a trident.

And then the master chief, the senior enlisted guy, he pipes in and he says, you know, the frag radius of something like this could be very big. The frag radius, what's that? Meaning, how big is the area of damage from an explosion? And he said the frag radius of a war crimes investigation could be big enough to pull in a lot of other SEALs. And the documents say that the SEALs left this meeting with the takeaway that the command wanted them to stop talking about this. So do they drop it? No. In fact, they get more and more frustrated because at the same time that they're going to the chain of command with

concerns, with reports of war crimes, the chain of command is heaping praise on Chief Gallagher. They named him their top chief in the team, the top of 12. They said that he should be promoted right away. And not long after this meeting, he is awarded a bronze star for valor for heroic actions in Iraq. Even though those around him who awarded him this would probably have known about these allegations. Right.

David, at this point, how much does Chief Gallagher know about these allegations and the platoon's efforts to report them up the chain of command? What the documents tell us is that though the upper-level members of the team were not starting a formal investigation, they were telling Chief Gallagher about the accusations. And he was then using that information to try and intimidate the men who were making accusations against him and to a certain extent, subvert any investigation that might happen.

And how was he doing that? Well, Chief Gallagher had a really broad reputation all over the SEALs. Remember, he was an instructor for years. So there were hundreds of SEALs who went through their initial training with him and knew him and looked up to him. their initial training with him and knew him and looked up to him. So he started tapping into that network of SEALs and SEAL veterans, essentially passing the word that these guys were snitches and that they should be treated harshly, ostracized, blacklisted. And that's a very big deal because all of these guys are going on in their careers.

They've just come back from a deployment. They're getting new assignments. And if he spreads the word that, hey, this guy is a snitch and he's speaking out against Eddie Gallagher, they may find themselves unwelcome in all sorts of coveted career fields. in all sorts of coveted career fields. So while this is all going on, the guys in the platoon have one more meeting with the chain of command where they walk in and say, unless you report this to Navy investigators right now, we will go to the media

and we will go to the very top brass of the Navy. At that point, the chain of command blinks, according to the documents, and says, fine, let's do it right now. Almost immediately, criminal investigators start interviewing SEALs from the team. They raid Chief Gallagher's house. They eventually put him in the brig. They start gathering information. They even go to Iraq to try and turn up physical evidence of some of the bodies in these allegations. And the investigation they conducted is what I've got in my hands. And where does the investigation stand right now? Chief Gallagher's been charged with premeditated murder and attempted murder and nearly a dozen other charges.

And if he's convicted of that first charge, he could spend his life in prison. Dave, the information that you have gleaned from these documents and the consistency of the platoon members' allegations and the persistence with which they have pursued them all feels very damning. Yeah, it does. But remember, we haven't heard from Chief Gallagher yet or his defense. And a lot of times in these types of cases, the facts don't really matter. of times in these types of cases, the facts don't really matter. This isn't just in the SEALs, but in our culture as a whole. Over and over in these war crimes cases, I think people look at them through a lens of seeing this person as the hero who is trying to do something, and war is a dirty business, or through a lens of seeing them as a war criminal who's the inevitable product of a horrible part of our world. Some people will

defend the war criminal no matter what. It happened in the Iraq war. It happened in Afghanistan, even when facts were really clear. And it even happened in Vietnam during the My Lai Massacre, which is the worst war atrocity in what was a very, very dark war. We now see that as something reprehensible. But at the time, there was a huge part of the culture that defended what happened. And when a young lieutenant named Lieutenant Calley was prosecuted and convicted, they marched in his support. They wrote songs about him. And one of those songs became a top 40 billboard hit. It was called the Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley. But the story we're talking about now is not just that familiar story of people defending our defenders

at all costs. In fact, it's about a group of platoon members who are very much defying that expectation and that culture and are persisting in making these allegations in the face of all that pressure

to keep quiet. And I wonder if that means that we're in a kind of new era for the U.S. military, and especially for the Navy SEALs. I don't know if we can say that this is a new era, but there is this really telling moment in the documents. It's a confidential text conversation between Chief Gallagher and one of his longtime friends,

another SEAL. And Chief Gallagher is talking about the investigation and how he thinks these guys are traitors. And then the other SEAL says, I never thought that other SEALs would tell on each other in this community. And Chief Gallagher says,

me either. Those days are gone. Dave, thank you very much. Thank you. I'm a soldier of this land. I've tried to do my duty and to gain the upper hand. But they've made me out of villains. They have snapped me with a brand. As we go marching on. The trial of Chief Edward Gallagher is scheduled to begin on May 28th. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. Some of the suicide bombers, most of them come from maybe middle or upper middle class, so they are financially quite independent. On Wednesday, authorities in Sri Lanka offered the most detailed portrait yet of the nine suspected suicide bombers who carried out last week's massive terror attacks. Some of them have, I think, studied in various other countries. They all degrees, so, you know, they're quite well-educated people.

One of them had studied in Britain and completed postgraduate studies in Australia before returning to Sri Lanka. Two of them were a married couple. Is it confirmed that the ninth suicide bomber was a woman? Yes. Okay, and was she trained as a suicide bomber?

Whether she was trained, I cannot say at the moment, but she definitely did commit suicide by blasting a jacket. So far, police have arrested 60 people for allegedly playing a role in the attacks and warned that additional attacks in Sri Lanka are still possible. And the Times reports that in the months before President Trump forced out his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, she had tried and failed to focus the administration on the ongoing threat of Russian meddling in U.S. elections. Nielsen was blocked by Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who told her not to discuss the

issue in front of the president because he still equated any discussion of Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his 2016 election. Eventually, the Times found, Nielsen gave up her effort to organize a meeting of cabinet secretaries to coordinate a strategy for protecting the 2020 election against Russian interference. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.