If there was prosecutorial misconduct in the process, that should be investigated and if appropriate, disciplinary action taken.
More generally, is it my imagination, or have the military investigative and prosecution organizations been rather hostile to troops whose "sin" has merely been being effective? It seems like there have been a number of cases of prosecutorial over-reach and abuse.
@PeterS The unimaginative "wear red and march in a straight line" senior officers have ALWAYS hated anybody and anything new or out of the norm. Special Forces soldiers were dealing with this nonsense in VN,and it took Westmoreland putting his foot down to get them to back off. Like a child with a hammer that sees everything as a nail,these cretins would look around the areas they were based in or operating in,and see a remote SF camp off by itself somewhere,with just a few Americans and couple of hundred locals. They immediately came to the conclusion that since they would make EXCELLENT recon teams under THEIR command,and sometimes even ordered the local camp commander (A 0-3) to fall in line. This order was always refused because we had other things to do,and weren't even in their chain of command. This would REALLY piss off the Generals,who know that all of the SF troops in VN came under the command of a "lousy Colonel",so they would order the 5th SF Group Commanding Officer to "order your people in "xxxxx" to report to me tomorrow morning for a briefing". This was always followed by "No,I can't do that. MY commander is General Westmoreland in Saigon,so contact him and get him to tell me to do that,and I will. Until then I am going to continue to follow the orders I have already been given."
I have no doubt that a time or two they may have even been told to go piss up a rope,but was never in any of those meetings.
There was even a USMC General in I-Corps that Westmoreland personally flew to Da Nang to relieve him of his command and appoint his exec to replace him because a SF camp in his area of operation was overran that day by a mainforce NVA unit with 3 or 4 Soviet tanks,and several SF team members were killed as well as hundreds of locals that lived near the camp and worked there. They had repeatedly radioed this General for help because he was tasked to send them a relief force if they were ever being overan,and he flat refused. Even stated within the hearing of others that he didn't care if they all the insubordinate SOB's got killed.
IIRC,this was in 1967.
The few Americans who survived that day survived because another SF base was listening in on the radio messages,and they put together a small relief force and got a VN Air Force pilot to fly them there the next morning at dawn. They dug the wounded out of the collapsed command bunker,and rescued a couple of guys who had been outside and who fled to the jungle to hide once the NVA got through the wires.
Those men died PURELY because a USMC General Officer got his little feelings hurt because they wouldn't follow the illegal orders he gave them.
BTW,I forgot to mention he also refused to follow the radioed orders sent directly to him by Westmoreland that night to get his forces moving. THAT is why Westmoreland flew up there the next morning at dawn to relieve him and assign another officer to take over his command. There is no way in hell a 4 star general can allow another General Officer with fewer stars ignore his orders that were pretty much made in public. He might have some political pull in DC that would allow him to get away with the lie that he was somewhere out of touch by radio and never received them,but there was no wall in hell he could get away with that after Westmoreland called him to attention in his office and issued the orders to him while looking him in the eye.
