It is important to ask Admiral Ostebo and the Coast Guard Senior leadership the same question lawyer Joseph Welch asked Senator Joe McCarthy during the famous Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, “ Have you no sense of decency?” Welch’s question to Senator McCarthy was prompted by the senator’s taking liberties with half-truths while at the same time accusing a young lawyer and Army veteran of assisting the Communist Party – a certain and swift career ending accusation.
Admiral Ostebo, in briefing the Coast Guard’s FAM, does not merely follow McCarthy’s precedent of half-truths, he will commit a far more serious blow to truth: he will disregard evidence demonstrating LT Leone’s innocence and, therefore, purposefully shield Coast Guard leadership from accountability for egregious lapses of safety concerns. The Coast Guard has institutionalized this disregard for the truth in its regulations. By its own rules, the FAM is a document used by the Coast Guard to summarize the usually lengthy Administrative Investigation Manual, known as the AIM. The FAM, prepared by the Coast Guard staff and signed usually by the Commandant of the Coast Guard, is meant to bring closure to accidents such as the one involving CG-6017. However, in this case Coast Guard regulations seem to indicate that the FAM summarizes only the AIM and does not account for any other evidence developed by other investigations. In essence, this procedure allows the Coast Guard Senior leadership to willfully disregard clear evidence that exonerates LT Leone and the crew, apparently because the logical inference would be to place accountability for this accident squarely on the Coast Guard leadership.
To recount, the AIM was finished and submitted on November 11, 2010, some sixteen months ago. According to the lead investigator there has been NO additional investigative activity since then. In late September 2011, Admiral Ostebo, contrary to the opinion of LT Leone’s commanding officer, caused criminal charges to be sent to an Article 32 investigation, similar to a grand jury. It was at this time that LT Leone’s defense team found and developed evidence that demonstrated that senior Coast Guard leadership recklessly failed to mark properly the 1900-foot span of wires that ensnared CG-6017 in July 2010. In addition, the defense found and developed evidence that showed the Coast Guard leadership’s blatant disregard for safety warnings voiced by one of its own Senior Enlisted leaders, the Officer-in-Charge of the Boat Station that had responsibility for the upkeep of the wires. The Master Chief in question testified clearly that in the year prior to the fatal mishap but before his own retirement, he notified his chain of command that the wires were inadequately marked and asked that they be fixed because he worried the wires posed a grave risk to aviators. The AIM mentions that the wires were invisible to the crew. It mentions little else about the deadly span that was the cause of at least two previous fatal entanglements. The first resulted in a federal judge ruling that the Coast Guard was negligent for failing to mark the wires adequately many years earlier. The Coast Guard’s Article 32 Investigator, a Senior Coast Guard Military Judge, found that “reasonable grounds do not exist “ to charge LT Leone with the deaths of his fellow crew members. Note – the standard used to forward the charges is not evidence ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ At the Article 32 stage of the process, the prosecution need only show a reasonable basis for the charges. The Senior Military Judge said, in essence, a person who views the evidence presented cannot link LT Leone’s actions or inactions to the deaths of the crew. He also said that a “reasonable” co-pilot doing LT Leone’s job that day would not have identified the wires as a hazard along the flight path since LT Leone had charted a course and set it on the autopilot which would have completely gone around and above any hazards.
Yet the FAM does not use this evidence. In fact, Admiral Ostebo expands the FAM by finding that LT Leone DIRECTLY contributed to the deaths of the crew while charting a course that headed directly into the wires. Admiral Ostebo and the FAM both articulate ‘complacency’ of LT Leone and the crew as a cause for the accident. Yet both fail to mention as a cause the complacency found in the execution of a robust safety program .
Today LT Leone faces the challenge of overcoming a flawed report which has led to a poor performance rating and other negative performance notes in his career personnel records. Why? I can only assume that Admiral Ostebo believed that these actions would not be subject to the scrutiny of anyone, most especially, the ‘Court of Public Opinion.’ It is the ‘Court of Public Opinion that the actions of Coast Guard senior leadership must be judged when they pervert their own investigative standards and regulations.
The Coast Guard has posted the FAM on its website, telling the public that the FAM is the ‘Final’ and ‘correct’ version of what happened. The Senior Coast Guard leadership wrote and approved this report purposefully laying the deaths of the crew at the feet of LT Leone. The Coast Guard leadership willfully disregards and omits evidence that points to the failure of accountability of the same leadership. The Coast Guard’s answer to its reckless failure to mark the span of wires properly is simple. They contend that any evidence that properly marked wires would have prevented this accident is “speculative.” This is the epitome of bureaucratic arrogance! Faceless ‘leaders’ make findings on an incomplete and biased report while blaming individuals who cannot speak either because they are dead or they are maligned by a system where their voice cannot be heard.
What is NOT speculation is that the Coast Guard’s failure to mark the wires, an action that would have cost less than $10,000, insured that the crew would never see the wires. The Coast Guard took away any chance for CG-6017 to avoid those wires by its failure to act on multiple occasions over the course of the previous decade.
I must question why the Coast Guard will use its considerable skill to castigate the crew of CG-6017 and single out the co-pilot, LT Leone, for blame. Perhaps the answer can be provided by the Commandant, Admiral Robert Papp, who so desperately wants ‘accountability.’ Can the answer be provided by Admiral Ostebo, who wants to give Admiral Papp what the Commandant wants most– an aviator held accountable. But it may be much simpler than that. If LT Leone is made accountable, the Coast Guard can absolve itself from the horrible reality that senior leaders in its own faceless bureaucracy negligently failed to mark wires that now account for three downed aircraft and three of its own dead.
The Coast Guard has mocked its own motto, “Semper Paratus”, always prepared. Its disregard for evidence clearing the dead crew generally and LT Leone specifically, begs the question, “Always prepared for what?” Prepared to use a flawed and biased AIM, prepared to eschew “accountability” for its own actions by publishing a report that intentionally and maliciously omits exculpatory facts?
Therefore, like Mr. Welch some 60 years prior, I must ask Admiral Papp, the Coast Guard Senior leadership, and Admiral Ostebo:
“Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Submitted by John M Smith, (Col, Ret, USA)
Attorney for LT Lance Leone
