How An Officer Destroyed His Career Trying To Save Haitian Lives

[NATO AIR]

I was rereading the book, "The Immaculate Invasion" about America's intravasion of Haiti 11 years ago and came across the same story that gave me pause the last time I read the book.
Hackworth's death reminded me of a column he had written about this officer and his court-martial.
I admit his actions were bizzare at times to say the least, but I believe that what he was doing was right in the face of the disregard his chain of command was showing for the lives of the locals (including his intelligence assets) and he got screwed by his chain of command for acting in the face of their incompetence.

This also seemed another prime example of Clinton's misleadership and misuse of the military where he put them in these situations and then expected them to operate by different rules at different times without any clarification.

What do you think?

http://www.hackworth.com/23may95.html

WHILE JUSTICE SHIRKS, AN AMERICAN OFFICER STANDS TALL

On May 13, a court martial panel at Fort Drum, NY, unjustly threw the book at Capt. Lawrence P. Rockwood when it found him guilty of disobedience, disrespect and conduct unbecoming an officer. After 15 years of exemplary service, Rockwood, 36, was ordered cashiered from the Army.

The verdict should make every American shudder. The trial itself should make us all question the integrity of the U.S. military judicial system.

Rockwood's problems started last September in Haiti when, after concluding that his superiors were indifferent to human-rights violations in that country's prisons, he took it upon himself to inspect the national penitentiary in order to document the prison's subhuman conditions.

A few days before Rockwood forced his way into the prison, he told his boss, Lt. Col. Frank B. Bragg, that human-rights abuses were rampant there. Bragg ignored Rockwood's pleas to have the prison inspected, saying it was "not a priority."

After Rockwood's prison visit -- where he found conditions reminiscent of World War II Germany's concentration camps -- he told Bragg during a red-hot screaming match, "I am an American military officer, not a Nazi military officer." The Army considered Rockwood's heated words as "disrespect to a senior officer."
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http://www.smartvoter.org/2004/11/02/ca/state/vote/rockwood_l/paper3.html
A Question of Duty How an officer destroyed his career by trying to liberate Haitian prisoners.
By Stephen Wrage Newsweek, November 22, 1999

When Capt. Lawrence Rockwood of the 10th Mountain Division arrived in Haiti in September 1994 along with 20,000 other American troops, he thought his mission was to keep atrocities from happening. An idealist, Rockwood liked to quote Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "The protection of the weak and unarmed is the very essence and reason for [a soldier's] being." Very noble and romantic, but Rockwood's commander, Gen. David Meade, had a different notion of this particular mission. Meade was in charge of "intervasion" force that had been allowed into Haiti to oversee the peaceful transfer of power from Haitian strongman Raoul Cedras to democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Meade's first priority was protecting his own troops. The Army commander was following orders: "force protection"--avoiding casualties--has become the mantra of the Pentagon brass uncomfortable with the Army's new peacekeeping role. But it meant that U.S. soldiers--mocked as "Ninja Turtles" in their heavy body armor--had to stand aside on the first day and helplessly watch as Haitian thugs beat to death a supporter of Aristide's.

For Rockwood, the Army's passivity was intolerable. The son, grandson and great-grandson of military men, he once studied to be a Roman Catholic priest. His duty to obey his commander conflicted with his duty to his conscience. So he decided to take matters into his own hands: to personally liberate the most notorious of Haitian prisons, the National Penitentiary. Rockwood's defiance of orders cost him his career, and his story, taken from interviews and his court-martial record, dramatically illustrates the dilemma of a modern peacekeeping Army.

As a counterintelligence officer, Rockwood was supposed to develop informants. But in his first week in Haiti, his informants began to mysteriously disappear. Reading intelligence reports--a beheaded body found in a swamp, a mutilated torture victim spirited out of a local jail at night--Rockwood could guess at their fates. Determined to try to save his informants, Rockwood lobbied his superiors for permission to inspect the Haitian jails, particularly the National Penitentiary, where 85 percent of the inmates were political prisoners. Repeatedly rebuffed, he grew anxious, then angry. He thought his commanders were guilty of "moral cowardice." As a little boy, Rockwood had been taken to visit a Nazi concentration camp by his father, an Army Air Force officer in World War II. If he failed to act, Rockwood feared, he would not be able to face his own children.
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[Merlin1047]

In case you have not figured it out for yourself already, here's a military axiom that has ended many a distinguished career - the brass will forgive you for being wrong, but they will NEVER forgive you for being RIGHT.