Taliban

President Trump should immediately free Army LT Clint Lorance unjustly convicted of murdering Taliban attacking his platoon

On July 2, 2012, in broad daylight, in Taliban-controlled territory, three men on a motorcycle were speeding towards Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance’s dismounted infantry platoon subordinates. They had ignored signs on the road saying it was to be used only by ISAF and Afghanistan military and police units. The Taliban had recently conducted several suicide attacks upon U.S. forces using motorcycles, the platoon had been repeatedly attacked during the past month, and they had been sniped at from that same road the day before. Then 27-year old Iraq War veteran Lorance had assumed command of the platoon 3 days earlier after the previous platoon leader and another soldier were badly wounded by an IED nearby. An endangered American soldier asked Lorance for permission to fire.

Lorance gave the order to shoot. Had he not given it, within seconds more American soldiers would most likely be dead or maimed for life.

Two Taliban riders died and the third escaped. (More about them in a moment.) While the motorcycle did not explode, it could not be recovered to check for bombs as an attack from another direction loomed. Villagers dragged off the bike and the dead riders were buried by locals without an autopsy to determine if the bullets that killed them were fired by U.S. troops of by Afghanistan Army troops who also fired at the motorcycle.

Even without knowing the exculpatory evidence – proof positive bio-metric and other evidence that the riders were Taliban bombers – which the prosecution later withheld from his defense lawyers and the jury, Lorance knew enough to make giving the order to shoot his duty.

A year later, Lorance was acquitted of ROE violations. Yet, incredibly, he was convicted of murder and is spending the prime years of his life in Fort Leavenworth’s prison for making the right, split-second decision. After nearly 10 years of honorable and heroic service in the Army, he may spend 19 years in a cell and be nearing 50-years old before he is freed.

President Trump has the authority to disapprove Lorance’s conviction with prejudice, restore him to military duty with back pay, and, by doing so, begin to reverse this travesty of justice.

According to military prosecutors, when the enemy acted as though they were about to attack, our troops were required under the Rules of Engagement (ROE) to delay firing their weapons until determining whether the fast-approaching motorcycle displayed a “hostile intent.” They then were to make a battlefield determination as to whether the fast-moving inbound motorcycle constituted a “hostile act.” But doing so would have increased the risk to themselves and the lives of their fellow troops. In other words, they were to play battlefield lawyer when all they did was sign up to defend our nation.

While Lorance was acquitted of ROE-related charges, his chain of command’s gutless, political and self-serving decision to charge him was all about ROE that should never been formulated or enforced. The chain of command – from the then President down to his company commander – more than failed Clint Lorance; they failed our country. They made an example of him. Yet they also empowered our nation’s sworn enemies with strategic and tactical advantages.

President Trump doing the right thing by Lorance would send two main messages to our military: stop prosecuting your troops for doing their sworn duty; and your mission is to win battles and help prevent further attacks upon our homeland and interests abroad.

An experienced and decorated American combat veteran soldier was convicted and incarcerated for the very thing his superiors gave him the authority and responsibility to do. Moreover, he did what the American people expect our small unit leaders to do. Clint Lorance made a combat decision to protect our side’s troops.

The American people don’t expect our troops to commit suicide to accomplish the missions we send them on. If anyone made that same decision 70 years earlier during WWII while fighting the suicide-for-their-emperor-loving forces of Imperial Japan, they’d have received praise from their superiors.

President Trump should act immediately. Clint Lorance has already spent 6 years in a cell.

Post updated at 12:22 PM, May 16, 2019.

Freedom Radio, 8 PM EDT SUN: Diana West, Tim Brown on GZ mosque; Bill Roggio on Shahzad, Taliban

Join Pat, aka Honest Conservative, 8 PM EDT Sunday evening, for the May 16 edition of Freedom Radio.

Update: Here is Tim Brown’s interview from Sunday evening:

Retired FDNY firefighter and 9/11 survivor Tim Brown of theBravest.com joins us to discuss the plan to build a sharia-complaint ‘Cordoba House’ within sight of where 19 followers of sharia law slammed Flights AA 11 and UAL 175 into the Twin Towers.

We’ll discuss with Diana West her latest column on TownHall.com, ‘Do We Deserve a Mosque at Ground Zero?’

The second attack on the World Trade Center is coming. It will stand 13 stories high, cost $100 million dollars and include a mosque. Known as Cordoba House — the name echoing an early caliphate that, of course, subjugated non-Muslims — it will be located two blocks away from where our magnificent towers crashed and burned, easy wafting distance for the Islamic call to prayer.

Maybe we deserve such a mosque at Ground Zero. It will serve as the perfect monument to post-9/11 America, a shining reproach to a nation that long ago capitulated through loss, or worse, absence of will. Not that it will be widely seen that way. Aside from the torment and seething of survivors, both family and professional family of the 9/11 dead, aside from blog noise and tabloid venting, the phony narrative of Cordoba House as a kind of healing outreach center — pure deception — appears ready for chiseling into stone. And that’s not because Cordoba’s flimflamming Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf obfuscates everything negative about Islam (jihad, for instance), and promotes everything antithetical to Western liberty (Sharia), often with jarring Western references. (“To Muslim ears,” he writes, “Sharia law means … the conditions necessary for what Americans call the pursuit of happiness.”) That is, it’s not only the efforts of Imam Rauf that are the problem. It’s because nearly nine years after 9/11, we are still stupid enough to buy them.

Bill Roggio of the LongWarJournal.org received an email from the Taliban within 8 hours of the May 1 attempt by Faisal Shahzad to set off a car bomb in Times Square. On April 30, the day before the attempted attack, the Taliban put their web site online and uploaded a video of their taking credit. Bill will explain what happened next and detail the players at the Pakistan end of the plot.

Here is the show link. The call-in number is 646-478-5613.

— Tim Sumner
Producer, Freedom Radio
Co-founder, 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America