Travesty of Justice: The Shocking Prosecution of Lt. Clint Lorance

by Don Brown

The Army Court of Criminal Appeals did not challenge the authenticity of the biometrics evidence, but instead, totally disregarded the biometrics evidence by claiming that Clint could not have known in advance that the motorcycle riders were enemy insurgents. Of course, to spew out such warped reasoning, the Army Court, led by Brig. Gen. Joseph B. Berger, III, had to ignore the fact that a) Clint was charged with shooting civilians, but these riders were wartime combatants and thus not civilians; b) the motorcycle came down a road (Old Chilliwack Road) controlled and used only by the Taliban; c) the platoon had been ambushed by sniper fire from that road less than 24 hours earlier; d) U.S. helicopters saw military-aged males gathering in the northwest corner of the village; e) Sgt. Herrmann’s men spotted Afghans with ICOM radios on the west side of the village; f) Clint had only a few seconds to react and gave the order from the bottom of an irrigation ditch between grape berms, unable to see anything other than an 8-foot-high wall of baked mud and grape leaves; g) suicide-by-motorcycle had become the murder tactic de jour by the Taliban for killing Americans and American-friendly Afghans; and h) the blimp operator at Combat Outpost Sia Choy observed three Taliban members, up armed with weapons and ICOM radios, shadowing Clint’s platoon on July 2 during the entire operation.