For some unknown reason they decided to do a friendly profile of the war criminal Eddie Gallagher last night. I’ll bet Gallagher is feeling pretty darned good about this morning. His former SEAL team and his victims probably not so much.
Gallagher acknowledges that people either love him as an American hero or despise him as a war criminal. He was charged with the premeditated murder of an ISIS prisoner in Iraq.
“Did you stab that fighter?” Gallagher was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent David Martin.
“No, I did not,” Gallagher said.
The ISIS fighter had been wounded in an American air strike during the battle for Mosul in 2017. Iraqi soldiers brought him to a compound they shared with the Navy SEALs. A half hour later he was dead and Gallagher posed for this photo holding his knife.
“That’s a trophy photo if I ever saw one,” Martin said to Gallagher.
“Yeah, yeah that’s what it was taken as,” Gallagher said.
“You were trying to make it look like you killed him?” Martin asked.
“I was trying to make it look tough, yeah,” Gallagher said. “I know how bad it looks when it gets out into the public, which it never was supposed to.”
It looked even worse when he sent it to a buddy with this text: “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.”
“That’s pretty incriminating,” Martin told Gallagher.
“Yeah, it is. It was like a joke text. Dark humor,” Gallagher said.
“It’s not often you see a photo of the accused murderer holding the alleged weapon at the throat of his victim,” Martin said.
“That is true, yeah, but they ran a test on the knife, the sheath. No blood anywhere on it. And if you look at the picture close, there’s no blood on the knife. There’s no blood anywhere on me,” Gallagher said.
When he was brought in, the fighter was barely conscious, probably suffering from internal injuries caused by the blast which struck the building he was in. Gallagher said he didn’t feel sorry for him.
“That’s war,” Gallagher said. “He was out there trying to kill us.”
Gallagher was a trained medic and if you listen closely to video captured by a fellow SEAL who was there, you can hear Gallagher say, “I got him.”
Gallagher said that meant he was going to treat him. He grabbed his medical bag and started working on the prisoner none too gently.
“You know, he’s an ISIS fighter I don’t want his hands anywhere near me. So, I pushed him back down forcefully,” Gallagher said. “He wasn’t breathing properly so I performed an invasive procedure, which is a crike.”
“A crike. And that’s basically sticking a breathing tube in his throat?” Martin asked.
“Correct,” Gallagher said.
There’s no video of that because the SEAL recording the scene turned off his helmet camera, but you can clearly see the breathing tube in a photo taken after the prisoner died – along with several other medical devices implanted but by other SEALs. Over the next few hours, the team mistreated the body, buzzing it with a drone, posing for their own trophy photos, then for a group shot with Gallagher front and center.
“But, you knew this was wrong,” Martin told Gallagher.
“It’s wrong. I’ll say it’s wrong now,” Gallagher said. “And I’ve definitely learned– learned my lesson. Yeah, it’s distasteful.”
“Well, it’s more than just bad taste. It’s against the law of war. It’s illegal,” Martin said.
“I’m pretty sure I’m the first person ever to go to a general court-martial for it– for taking a picture,” Gallagher said. “It’s been done on previous deployments.”
60 Minutes goes on to tell the story of Gallagher’s saga with the courts, talking to his lawyer and basically making it seem as though it was a hard call.
Here’s a small taste. Don’t watch the whole thing.
There was one man who loved that motto, I’m sure:
I’m not sure Dear Leader will like that “helped” business. But he’ll probably let it slide since he’s a psychopath. He’s Trump’s kind of guy.