Navy SEAL to Obama: 'Take the
handcuffs off', 'We are there to put bullets in bad
guys. We are not there to win hearts and minds' by Greg Corombos, 5/28/16,
WND
A former Navy SEAL says he is
honored to have served with his elite unit but is incredibly frustrated by a
military bureaucracy that ties the hands of service members, slapped him with
trumped-up charges and tried to sully his reputation after leaving the U.S.
Navy.
Carl Higbie is author of the brand
new book, “Enemies,
Foreign and Domestic: A SEAL’s Story.”
Higbie served two tours in Iraq in a SEAL unit. He said the second tour
aggravated him and his comrades because overly cautious commanders refused to
let them go on any missions.
“It was extremely frustrating,”
Higbie told WND and Radio America. “We were sitting over there as a SEAL
fighting force. This is what we were designed to do. We weren’t allowed to
action missions.
“The reason we weren’t allowed to do
anything was because the military at that time, because of Barack Obama, had
become so politicized and so top-heavy in their bureaucracy, they wanted to end
the war, but they didn’t want to end the war by actually fighting and winning
it. They wanted to end the war simply by calling us the victors.”
Higbie said the civilian leaders and
the top officers lost sight of what the military is for. “We’re soldiers in the
United States military, the most lethal fighting force the world has ever
known,” he said. “We are there to put bullets in bad guys. We are not there to
win hearts and minds. We are not there to rebuild schools, as we have been
tasked to do recently. We are there to kill the bad guy.”
At the very end of that deployment,
Higbie’s and his fellow SEALs finally got a mission: to capture the high-value
target known as Al-Isawi, otherwise known as the “Butcher of Baghdad.” Al-Isawi
was responsible for killing U.S. forces and hanging their corpses from a bridge
in Fallujah years earlier.
Thanks to elite skill and precise
intelligence, the mission went splendidly. Al-Isawi was captured alive. Higbie
said one SEAL mate deserves the most credit.
“The hero of the mission is Matt
McCabe. This guy tackled the butcher on target,” Higbie said. “[Al-Isawi] had a
gun, so [McCabe] was within his legal authority to shoot him. But McCabe knew
if he was to tackle this guy and bring him back that we’d be more likely to get
good intelligence to potentially save American lives.”
But shortly after Al-Isawi was
placed in custody, the nightmare for the SEALs began. The prisoner showed
officers blood on his clothes, and Navy commanders decided the SEALs were to
blame. They demanded to know who struck the prisoner. The entire team insisted
none of them had.
“I’m 240 pounds. This guy was six
feet, 130 pounds,” Higbie said. “If I had hit him, he would have known about
it. And we had an oral surgeon testify to the fact that there was no abuse
here; this was a self-inflicted bite wound. NCIS cleared us. Our SEAL
leadership chain of command is the one that hung us out, and it was a
travesty.”
How much blood were we talking
about? “Maybe a quarter of a teaspoon,”
Higbie said. “Your gums bleed more when you brush your teeth.” While defending themselves against
false accusations, Higbie still wondered why anyone would really care if they
had roughed up Al-Isawi.
“Who cares anyway? Even if we did
abuse this guy, who cares? That’s the problem. We’re developing into such a
politically correct nature that our troops are getting sacrificed at the altar
of political correctness,” said Higbie, accusing bureaucrats of losing the war
by being so careful as to avoid any bad press. Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with former Navy
SEAL Carl Higbie:
Next, the Navy tried to get Higbie
and his SEAL friends to turn on one another. It didn’t work. “They thought they
could break us by offering us plea deals or promotions if we ratted each other
out,” Higbie said. “But nobody did anything here. That’s the fundamental fact.”
All the SEALs were encouraged to
subject themselves to a general’s punishment to avoid courts martial. All the
SEALs rejected the offer, and they were all exonerated.
After returning home, Higbie put his
frustrations on paper, penning, “Battle on the Home Front: A Navy SEAL’s
Mission to Save the American Dream.”
The military requires all such books
to be submitted for review to make sure no classified material is included. The
review is to last no more than 30 days. After two years of waiting, Higbie
published the book anyway. At that time the government listed a number of
possible violations in the manuscript, although not in writing. That resulted
in another legal battle, which Higbie also won.
Next came the Navy’s treatment of
Higbie’s exit from the military. “They offered me an honorable discharge to get
out early. I took it,” Higbie said. “Six weeks after leaving the military, they
downgraded my discharge to a general (discharge), which is illegal. You have to
attend a court martial or an Administrative Separation Board. Both of those are
due process. They had the opportunity to do it. They didn’t.”
Another fight was on. “After two
years of fighting, we won with a 5-0 appellate court decision in my favor to
overturn my discharge back to honorable,” Higbie said.
Higbie says he wrote the new book to
prove you can challenge the government and win, but that you must be very
well prepared. As for the current state of the military, he said politicians
who were elected by people who never served in the military need to let the
military do the job it was meant to do.
“Our military has been and always
will be the most deadly fighting force the world has ever known, but you have
to take the handcuffs off,” Higbie said. “It is the command leadership that is
unwilling to fight this war.”
“You need war fighters and
door-kickers to make these decisions on site,” he said. “And you need to let us
do it.” Despite the myriad battles with the
Navy, Higbie cherishes the time he spent with his unit and said he will never
stop fighting for what is right.
“I was not the biggest, fastest,
strongest, best, sharpest guy in my unit by any stretch of the imagination,” he
said. “There were a lot of guys that were better than me and guys I learned a
lot from. To have the ability to serve with such a unit is such an incredible
experience. That’s why I fight for the principles I do in my books because I
genuinely believe they’re worth fighting for.”
http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/navy-seal-to-obama-take-the-handcuffs-off/
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