Not pardoning JBLM war criminal Robert Bales was right decision by Trump
As expected, President Trump issued a burst of eleventh-hour pardons before boarding Marine One and flying into history Wednesday. While the final list granted clemency to Republican fundraisers, rap music performers and disgraced former White House insider Steve Bannon, it happily didn’t include preemptive pardons for Trump or his family members.
Thank goodness another name was absent from the list, a man whose heinous actions endure like bloodstains in South Sound military lore: Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.
A former JBLM soldier and 10-year Pierce County resident, Bales slaughtered 16 Afghan civilians while he was deployed in 2012.
It was not a tragic mistake committed during a fast-moving firefight, nor the act of a young soldier grappling with fuzzy rules of engagement in the fog of war. It was a cold-blooded rampage by a seasoned team leader on his fourth combat tour who sneaked alone into an Afghan village wearing night-vision goggles, went door to door and opened fire.
Bales is serving life without parole at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and that’s where he should remain.
How unconscionable were his war crimes? Seventeen of the 21 people he killed or wounded in those early-morning hours nearly nine years ago were women or children.
Bales is also partly responsible for JBLM’s scandalous reputation during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. His atrocities, along with those of a self-appointed “kill team” of soldiers who murdered three Afghan civilians in 2009-10, fed the narrative of a “rogue” military installation south of Tacoma churning out bad soldiers.
National news stories branded JBLM as “America’s most troubled base” and “base on the brink.” Never mind that the vast majority of local soldiers and commanders were good and didn’t deserve such notoriety at a time when they were fighting and dying on foreign soil.
Bales’ request for a presidential pardon was a longshot, but it played into Trump’s hyper-masculine propensity to sympathize with former warriors facing long prison terms and his cavalier willingness to undermine the military justice system.
Trump raised eyebrows by giving get-out-of-jail free cards to others whose worthiness seemed questionable. In 2019, he pardoned Army Lt. Clint Lorance, who was serving a 19-year sentence for ordering platoon members to fire on Afghan men on a motorcycle, killing two, and Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, a Green Beret awaiting court-martial in the killing of a suspected Afghan bomb-maker in 2010.
Trump also intervened in the high-profile case of Eddie Gallagher, reversing commanders’ demotion of the former Navy SEAL master chief. Gallagher was acquitted on charges of killing a prisoner but convicted of posing with a corpse for a photo and described by fellow SEALS as “toxic” and “freaking evil.”
Bales cited these cases in a petition filed with Trump’s attorneys on Dec. 2. In what comes off as a desperate attempt to rationalize his actions, he wrote that “most of these men spent less time on the ground in hostile fire areas than I, they all outranked me, and all made more money than I.”
He also claims mental-health impacts from an antimalarial drug and has said he was a heavy steroid user while in uniform.
Bales may have felt a spark of hope before Christmas; that’s when Trump pardoned four former military contractors who’d been convicted on various charges for their roles in a 2007 Iraq massacre, in which 17 civilians were shot to death in a crowded public square in Baghdad.
But in his final days, Trump did the right thing by not adding Staff Sgt. Robert Bales to the clemency list.
The blood from those historic war crimes and the damage done to JBLM’s good name and our military’s reputation in Afghanistan can’t be easily blotted out. Certainly not with the stroke of a departing president’s pen.