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.”