Pete Hegseth a Home Run for SecDef: Take it from someone who knows him — and his heroic intercession for a wrongly convicted American soldier — personally

By Free Republic | Created at 2024-12-16 15:39:35 | Updated at 2024-12-16 19:02:26 3 hours ago

Pete Hegseth a Home Run for SecDef: Take it from someone who knows him — and his heroic intercession for a wrongly convicted American soldier — personally
American Thinker ^ | 12/16/2024 | Don Brown

Posted on 12/16/2024 7:37:55 AM PST by SeekAndFind

It was a moment I’ll never forget: Friday afternoon, November 15, 2019. After spending Veterans’ Day week in snowy, freezing Leavenworth, Kansas, I returned to Charlotte for a court appearance that morning in neighboring York County. I was talking to a friend on my cell phone, driving eastbound on Pineville-Matthews Road, when my phone beeped with an incoming call.

The screen flashed: The White House.

I pulled off the road into a Panera Bread parking lot and answered the call. It was the president’s military attaché.

“Mr. Brown, I’m here with the president. The president wants to know if he has permission to call your client.”

For me, this was one of those surrealistic, Forest Gump–like moments beyond description — where a country boy from Plymouth, N.C. gets a call from the Oval Office. Something seemed out of place about it all. But that call marked the first of five that I would receive from the White House that afternoon.

Our client, Army 1st lieutenant Clint Lorance, was a former 82nd Airborne paratrooper, railroaded by Obama’s Pentagon under suicidal rules of engagement. On July 2, 2012, Clint’s platoon faced a motorcycle speeding toward them in a restricted area in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. With VBIED (Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device) attacks against Americans becoming more frequent, four Afghan National Army soldiers accompanying the platoon fired first at the motorcycle. Clint’s men opened fire. Two of the three riders were dead. DNA evidence later linked two of the riders to Taliban bomb-makers, yet no bodies were recovered, and no ballistics matched American bullets.

Despite this, Obama’s rule of engagement dictated, “Don’t fire unless fired upon.” The Pentagon made an example of Clint, who never pulled the trigger. Positioned far back in the line, Clint couldn’t see the riders.

(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...

TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: defense; dod; hegseth; petehegseth

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Yet Obama’s Pentagon charged him with “murder” and coerced his men to testify against him under threat of prosecution for murder themselves. In August 2013, a military court convicted Clint, suppressing evidence and ignoring the lack of ballistic proof that American bullets had killed the riders. They sentenced Clint to 20 years in prison, stripped him of his uniform, and carted him off in an armed van to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth.

The Obama administration had an American scalp to hand to the Karzai government in Kabul and sent a chilling message to American soldiers: obey our suicidal rules of engagement, make them shoot at you first before you take a shot, or we will prosecute you, too.

I got involved as a former Navy JAG officer after writing a book on the shoot-down of Extortion 17, where 30 Americans, including SEAL Team Six members, died. I met Pete Hegseth in 2017, when he led Concerned Veterans for America. Five years had passed since Clint’s conviction, but Pete had never forgotten Clint’s story.

1 posted on 12/16/2024 7:37:55 AM PST by SeekAndFind

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