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Luncheon - Speaker

  • 19 Mar 2014
  • 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM
  • 8550 Memorial Drive
Luncheon Meeting
(Members and invited guests)

Speaker: Matt McCabe, Navy SEAL.

 One of the Navy SEALs who was accused of prisoner abuse after capturing the notorious "Butcher of Fallujah" tells Newmax TV that he and the other two soldiers were shocked by the court martial because they had not done anything wrong.

"We couldn't understand why we were being charged or why we were being alleged to have done something that we never had done and following that, the immediate lack of trust that came with it," Matthew McCabe says in an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV.  "No one was going to believe us and anything we said, no one meaning the leadership that was directly ahead of us."

McCabe tells his story along with New York Times Bestselling author, Patrick Robinson, in a new book just released on Tuesday titled "
Honor and Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Navy SEALs Who Captured the 'Butcher of Fallujah' undefined and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured."

McCabe and two other Navy SEALs were court martialed for prisoner abuse of Ahmad Hashim Abd al-lsawi, who earned the name "Butcher of Fallujah" as the mastermind behind the brutal murder of four American contractors in 2004 in which he "burned the Americans alive and hanged them from the bridge over the Euphrates River," co-author Robinson explains. 

McCabe helped capture Abd al-lsawi in September 2009 after their base in Iraq came under attack.

McCabe explains that the three accusations against him centered around a bloody lip, which is a tactic straight out of the terrorist playbook.  "As reported in the Manchester Manual, which is the terrorist playbook that everyone refers to, they are told whenever they are in custody of American soldiers to claim prisoner abuse only because it obviously has an impact in what happens afterwards where reports are filed and then there's an investigation, and that was the case with us," the Navy SEAL explains. 

When the accusations went public, it ignited public anger across the country, and even Congress appealed to then Defense Secretary Robert Gates to drop the charges.  "They kept going forward, they kept on making life hell for these guys who had done nothing wrong," Robinson says. 

According to Robinson, he and McCabe give a rare look into court martials, which is hard to find because "they're essentially secret."   "I was able to talk to seven lawyers involved in this and open a door for the first time, maybe the only time, on a real high-profile court martial notorious in its unfairness and anger making to the entire American public," the New York Times Bestselling author says. 

Robinson explains that one of the most shocking aspects to McCabe's story is that their commanders essentially hung them out to dry.   "They thought all they had to do was tell the truth and if they told the truth, everything would be find because their commanders, who they trusted, would stand beside them," Robinson says. "That did not happen. They were hung out to dry . . . It chilled me."

 

 

 







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