US Army LT sentenced to 20 years; charged with murder for protecting his men from Taliban
Clint Lorance is a loving, caring, hardworking, determined, friendly, positive person who has dedicated his life to the Army. He was an enlisted soldier who was the first in his family to graduate college, which he did while serving in the Army before becoming an officer. Clint is from Oklahoma and spent time in Texas, where his family lives now. First Lieutenant Clint Lorance has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for murder because of an unfortunate incident while Clint was deployed to a volatile area of Afghanistan in July 2012, Panzai, in Kandahar province. Only 96 hours after he took charge of his platoon, who had already been in the area for 7 months, Clint gave a difficult order under pressure in order to stay true to the only promise he made to his men - that he would not lose one of them. This was a bold promise since the platoon had suffered four casualties already, including the previous platoon leader who Clint was brought in to replace. Three Afghans came speeding toward Clint's platoon and their Afghan National Army counterparts on a known enemy route where they had been attacked just days before. Clint gave the order, responding to his soldier's verbal warning, to his men to engage the threat, and two of the men on the motorcycle were killed and the third escaped.
Allen West details on his Facebook page:
"In July 2012, 1LT Lorance ordered the engagement of two Taliban scouts who were tracking his platoon’s movements while on a patrol in Kandahar province, a platoon that had recently experienced losses, including the previous Platoon Leader.
"According to our ridiculous Rules of Engagement, soldiers in a combat zone are told to hold their fire unless there is evidence of hostile action or direct hostile intent.
"I spent two and a half years in southern Afghanistan, and we all knew the Taliban utilized fighters on motorcycles and cell phones as scout/trackers. If there are enemy combatants reporting your patrol movements in order to facilitate an attack, how is that not hostile intent?
"CPT William Miller, the government prosecutor, said 1LT Lorance “used his rank and position to harass, intimidate, threaten, and murder Afghans.”
"What an incredible dilemma for our men and women in combat: fight and kill the enemy and be sent to prison. Or be killed by the enemy and be denied your death gratuity benefits.
"This is utter BS and I implore true Americans, and veterans, to melt down the White House, DoD, and Department of the Army phone lines and email."
To further explain the ludicrous parameter of our military’s ROE (Rules of Engagement), consider the words of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, from his epic narrative, Lone Survivor:
"Our rules of engagement in Afghanistan specified that we could not shoot, kill, or injure unarmed civilians. But what about the unarmed civilian who was a skilled spy for the illegal forces we were tying to remove? What about an entire secret army, diverse, fragmented, and lethal, creeping through the mountains in Afghanistan pretending to be civilians?
"But we were also told that we could not shoot that camel drover before he blew up all of us, because he might be an unarmed civilian just taking his dynamite for a walk."
And a couple pages further:
"The truth is, in this kind of terrorist/insurgent warfare, no one can tell who’s a civilian and who’s not. So what’s the point of framing rules that cannot be comprehensively carried out by anyone?
Rules that are unworkable, because half the time no one knows who the [bleep] enemy is, and by the time you find out, it might be too late to save your own life. Making sense of the ROEs in real-time situations is impossible."
Luttrell sums up the problem of ROE written up by political heads in the safe and sterile environment of DC:
"Thus we have an extra element of fear and danger when we go into combat against the Taliban or al Qaeda — the fear of our own, the fear of what our own navy judge advocate general might rule against us, the fear of the American media and their unfortunate effect on American politicians."
This is what our soldiers are up against. Marcus Luttrell’s worst case scenario was played out in real life for 1LT Clint Lorance.
