His vision of how to act “tough” extends from war crimes to police brutality and doesn’t stop there.
Last year, a federal jury in Washington convicted Nicholas Slatten, a former security contractor, of first-degree murderfor his role in killing one of 14 Iraqi civilians who died in 2007 in a shooting that also injured more than a dozen others. Matthew Golsteyn, an Army Green Beret, was charged late last year with the murder of an unarmed Afghan man during a 2010 deployment. Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who served in Iraq, was reported to authorities by his own men, who witnessed him “stabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death,” “picking off a school-age girl and an old man from a sniper’s roost” and “indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine-gun fire.”
There are others — all accused of war crimes while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Trump apparently wants to give them a presidential pardon, timed for Memorial Day. Trump is not responding to a groundswell of public support for these men. Nor are current and former military leaders calling for leniency. Just the opposite: They have urged the White House to abandon this plan. “Absent evidence of innocence or injustice the wholesale pardon of US servicemembers accused of war crimes signals our troops and allies that we don’t take the law of armed conflict seriously,” Martin Dempsey, a retired general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Twitter.
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But Republican lawmakers and conservative television personalities have lobbied in support of accused war criminals — Gallagher in particular. “He risked his life serving abroad to protect the rights of all of us here at home,” Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina said during a March rally on Capitol Hill, where he was joined by Representatives Duncan Hunter of California and Steve King of Iowa. Norman urged authorities to release Gallagher from confinement ahead of his trial “in light of his bravery, his patriotism and his rights as an American citizen.
