US Army Ranger First Lieutenant Michael Behenna

The US Military’s Major Malfunction

By Jayme Evans
Monday, July 20, 2009

US Army Ranger First Lieutenant Michael Behenna comes from a long line of public servants. Like many young men today, he joined the military and became a US Army Ranger after seeing our country ruthlessly attacked on September 11th, 2001 . Sadly, like far too many soldiers and Marines of this politically-correct era, he was thrown into a deep, dark hole to die - not by the terrorists he was sent to fight in Iraq, but by the US military’s dysfunctional justice system.

Behenna answered his country’s call and was deployed to Iraq with 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment (1/327) in September, 2007. On April 20, 2008, three days before he was to return home for some much needed rest, two soldiers in Behenna’s platoon were killed and two others wounded in a brazen attack not unlike that which occurred a few years earlier in the Iraqi town of Haditha.

On May 5, 2008, known al Qaeda operative, Ali Mansur, was detained and interrogated for suspected involvement in the ambush on Behenna’s platoon. When the Army determined he no longer possessed any intelligence value, he was ordered released and escorted home by Behenna, another soldier and an Iraqi translator. Behenna maintains that while returning Mansur, he made one final attempt to interrogate the prisoner, and when the detainee lunged at him, Behenna killed him in self-defense. As a consequence of his service in Iraq, First Lieutenant Michael Behenna was summarily charged with murder, tried, convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Although prosecution and defense experts both agreed on the two bullets’ horizontal trajectories, they could not agree on which came first; the head or torso shot. The government hired internationally-recognized forensics specialist, Dr. Herbert MacDonnell, as an expert witness. But, MacDonnell’s findings didn’t support the government’s theory that Mansur was killed “execution-styleâ€