Marines Drop Charges Against Captain in Taliban Urination Case

Marines Drop Charges Against Captain in Taliban Urination Case

On Friday, the Marine Corps dropped criminal charges against Capt. James V. Clement, one of the officers in the case regarding urination on Taliban corpses. Defense attorneys had achieved a court order allowing testimony about senior commanders interfering in the case to push for a guilty verdict. Lt. Gen. Kenneth J. Glueck, heading the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico dropped the charges. John Dowd, the defense attorney, accused the Marines of trumping up a guilty verdict but using unlawful command influence. “The withdrawal of the charges was another act of cowardice by the commandant, his counsel and the Judge Advocate Division of [the Marines] to cover up the worst case of unlawful command influence in the history of the Marine Corps, which was beginning next Wednesday to be uncovered in a hearing before the Chief Judge … on several motions to compel discovery.”

Glueck said that email traffic “would have revealed that [the commandant] and his lawyers had engaged in a secret, corrupt effort to rig and control the investigations and dispositions of the so-called desecration cases.”

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