Longreads Best of 2020: Investigative Reporting
All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.
The California Sunday Magazine)
In July 2012, U.S. Army First Lieutenant Clint Lorance gave an order that killed two Afghan civilians on a motorcycle near an operating base outside of Kandahar, in a volatile region in Afghanistan. Lorance was convicted of murder. The narrative weaved by Sean Hannity and others at Fox News framed Lorance as a war hero; he was pardoned by Donald Trump in November 2019 and served six years of a 20-year sentence. The former Army officer, who had been advised to take interviews only from conservative media outlets, agreed to talk with Nathaniel Penn, and the result is an incredibly riveting and comprehensive piece on his case.
committee. we need answers. need a secretary of the navy who is focused on these issues. brian: here is the big question, michael, especially you as a special operator yourself. we need to know they have our backs in the times of war the everyone tense city we don t understand civilians. how do you do that and still have a sense of justice out in the filed? do you think we got that breakdown down? no. i have looked at all of these cases. and the case you have lieutenant lorance, recently pardoned. i have read that case cover to cover and received a lot of counsel. there is a big difference between a mistake, even an an error in judgment and a war crime. and when you have men and women down range making these decisions in split seconds in the pressure of combat. brian: got charges they can t have lawyers back in washington with a 5,000-mile screwdriver second guessing and monday morning quarterbacking. the big difference in that
after accusations of war crimes. go to republican michael walz, veteran and former member of the armed services committee. welcome to the show. do you support these moves by the commander-in-chief. tell us why. i do. in the case of lieutenant lorance i ve read this case very carefully and been studying it for some time and out there in afghanistan just before the incident that he was convicted of happened. here is the thing, bill. we have to be very careful and we have to draw a distinction. in his case he ordered his men to shoot at approaching afghans on a motorcycle. his predecessor had been killed a few days before in the same type of incident. it turned out those men weren t armed. we have to be very careful about making a distinction between mistakes in combat even bad judgment, even things that might get you relieved in command and war crimes.
about that is that that evidence has been in the possession of the government at the time of the court-martial and at the time leading up to the court-martial. we think that had that evidence been presented to the chain of command and to the and/or the jury, that they may never have had a court-martial or had we had a court-martial, that the outcome with have been entirely different. john, general richard clark was a well regarded general, head of the 82nd airborne, a great soldier is going to make the ultimate decision under the cold of military justice. why is this case particularly suited to clemency, this allegation there was not disclosure of terror ties. there was a failure to disclose evidence that it was an unfair trial, that there was a lack of due process. why is this particular case involving lieutenant lorance suited for clemency? i think that is the question for this case. it strikes at the very heart of clemency. that being major general clark con congratulations
recent promotion to general, he has the authority to take this case and he can dismiss all charges, all specifications and he s particularly suited to do that for many of the reasons you just articulated. he knows things that the judge and the jury and those officers who recommended court-martial never did. because of that superior knowledge, he is rightly and correctly able to substitute his judgment as the convening authority for that of judge and jury and do right by clint, his family, the 82nd airborne division, the army, and the country. you had the capacity to find out the people involved with this potential attack may have been scouts. they may have been jihadis. they had business in the past in terms of i.e.d.s and you reference in your papers ten different intelligence sources, computerized sources, that showed this. why didn t the prosecutor present that evidence to lieutenant lorance and then his