CO of CGC Haley Removed for Fraternization.
Captain of CGC HALEY Removed permanently.
Commander Karl Gabrielsen,the CO of the USCGC Alex Haley, a 282 foot medium endurance law enforcement vessel stationed in Kodiak, Alaska, has been permanently relieved of command following nonjudicial punishment June 13 for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, and other charges.
Cmdr. Gabrielsen received a punitive letter of reprimand and fines worth up to $5,000 during an NJP (non-judicial punishment) conducted by Pacific Area Commander Vice Admiral Charles Wurster.
Few details have been released concerning the specifics of Commander Gabrielsen’s relationships. It was not revealed whether these relationships were while Commander Gabrielson was acting in an official capacity or while he was in a leave status unrelated to his official duties. Nor has it been stated whether these were social relationships that only amounted to a possible embarrasment to his wife and the officer corps. However, he was relieved of duty April 24 for “loss of confidence.”
An administrative investigation confirmed that Gabrielsen had several “inappropriate relationships” which “compromised his leadership ability,” according to Public Affairs Senior Chief Keith Alholm on June 18. Information obtained so far indicates that none of the relationships were with male or female members of his ship's officers or crew. That would leave the spouses of his officers and crew, and other military personnel (Navy, Army, Marine, Air Force, Alaska State Troopers, National Marine Fisheries and Forest Service members), civilian and Native inhabitants for Cmdr Gabrielson to form relationships with. College students and teenagers from the "Lower 48 Contiguous States" frequently flock to Kodiak to work in the canneries and fish factories. A few cruise ships with lots of lovely passengers frequently put into port there. The age of consent in Alaska is 14.
A 36-year-old Coast Guard officer assigned to Coast Guard Headquarters was arrested Aug. 10 after being caught "in flagrante delicto" in the Stafford, Va., in the bedroom of a 14-year-old girl by her mother.
Lt. Jason Frank, of Gaithersburg, Md., allegedly visited the girl’s home on three different occasions and had sex with her at least twice, according to an Aug. 15 Stafford County Sheriff’s Office announcement.
The girl’s mother allegedly found Frank in her daughter’s bedroom in the early hours of Aug. 1. The mother told deputies that after she told the Coast Guard officer her daughter was only 14, he jumped out the window and fled.
Informed sources said that Lieutenant Frank met the 14 year old girl in an Internet chat room. He was posing as a 28-year-old.
Frank has been charged with two counts of carnal knowledge of a child (statutory rape), taking indecent liberties with a child, soliciting a juvenile with an electronic device, breaking and entering, vandalism, and misdemeanor assault and battery.
Lieutenant Frank is assigned to Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he works in the Command Center, Coast Guard spokeswoman Natalie Granger said Aug. 20.
He previously served on the Coast Guard buoy tender Sundew, homeported in Duluth, Minn.
He is being held without bond at the Rappahannock Regional Jail in Stafford.
Some officers cannot even wait for the Alaskan maidens to reach 14. -- The Navy's former top ranking officer in Alaska was sentenced to two years in prison for the attempted sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl.
Commander Robert Schetky, 54 years old, should know discipline and should have been able to control his impulses toward the 12 year old girl, Juneau Superior Judge Larry Weeks said on 21 June2007 as he handed down the sentence, which includes two more years that were suspended.
"No one will ever know the damage done to her," Judge Weeks said. Prosecutors said Schetky touched the girl's breasts multiple times last year.
He was arrested and pleaded guilty in January. As part of the plea deal, he spent time at a treatment facility in Arizona that specializes in substance and sexual addictions.
Following his release from prison, Schetky will be required to register as a sex offender for 15 years. He is prohibited from contact with his victim without prior approval and from contact with girls under 17 and must submit a DNA sample.
Before his arrest, Schetky was the Navy's liaison to the Coast Guard as head of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Maritime Homeland Defense Detachment. It was not clear from the evidence whether his close association with some Coast Guard officers led to the decline in his moral character. Bad company corrupts good morals.
Schetky, who is still on active duty, could face military punishment including the loss of retirement benefits, said Shane Tuck, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
These cases brings to mind the bizarre love triangle between the male and female Naval astronauts and the Air Force captain at Orlando, Florida back in February 2007. Captain Lisa Nowak, a 43-year-old Navy captain (0-6)who flew last summer on the space shuttle Discovery, was arrested February 5, 2007 on suspicion of attempted kidnapping, and attempted burglary on a vehicle and assault.
Captain Nowak was arrested on charges that she tried to kidnap and kill Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, her rival, for the affections of Navy Commander William Oefelein.
Captain Lisa Nowak was fired from NASA on 7 March, a month after she had been booked. Commander Oefelein was also later dismissed from the Space Program. They are both at Naval Station Norfolk, Va awaiting final disposition of the charges against them.
Whether they get Non-judicial punishment at an Admiral's mast, suspension of a token fined, or a Punitive Letter of Reprimand, the punishment for these senior officers rarely fits the crime.
This again brings to mind the cases of the deaths of Lt. Jessica Hill and BM2 Steve Dudue and the three senior officers who literally got away with murder. Was Vice Admiral Charles Wurster, Pacific Area Commander correct when he said that the three senior officers assigned to the Coast Guard icebreaker CGC Healy during the fatal diving incident in the Arctic last year that resulted in the deaths of Lt. Jessica Hill and BM2 Steve Duque deserved nonjudicial punishment rather than facing criminal charges at a court-martial?
Admiral Wurster said that he took action to hold CGC HEALY's Commanding Officer, Executive Officer and Operations Officer accountable for failing to meet their personal responsibilities surrounding that mishap. He held a mast for the CO, XO, and the Ops Officer from the CGC Healy on January 14, the day before the Coast Guard released the Final Report of an investigation into the death of Lt. Hill, 31, and Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class Duque. He found the three — the commanding, executive and operations officers — guilty of dereliction of duty.
Captain of CGC Healey also Removed permanently.
The Coast Guard seems to be having problems with the officers of the HALEY and the HEALY when they are operating in frigid waters. Officers' brains seem to freeze over in Arctic environs. The same Vice Admiral Charles Wurster arrived at the same conclusion each time. That is that NJP is always an appropriate punishment.Captain Doug Russell, the CO, was relieved of command shortly after the accident. On January 14, his sentence was to receive a punitive letter of reprimand and a fine equal to one month’s pay.Commander Jeffrey Jackson, the XO, was sentenced to receive a punitive letter of admonition. The Operations Officer Lt. Cmmander. James Dalitsch was sentenced to receive a punitive letter of reprimand and a fine.All fines were suspended. The Admiral went through the motions, then he nullified it all. It was bad enough that he chose the lowest criminal forum available to punish these officers for their parts in the deaths of Lt. Hill and BM2 Duque, but he had the bad judgement to take back the token punishment.
“I believe that NJP was adequate,” Wurster said. “They took full responsibility.” This Admiral's Mast conducted behind closed doors the day before a report of the facts was released to the public is an outrage.
Cadets and junior officers are subjected to one standard of justice; and, senior officers and celebrities are subjected to another.
The Coast Guard seems to have lost complete faith in its Law Specialists. They are hardly ever used for military justice any more. The Line officers and the Operations officers do not trust them to bring home the bacon, so to speak. When senior officers want to punish someone, they do not want to waste time on ceremony, criminal rights, and due process. Moreover, they do not trust the fate of commissioned officers to jury panels that might contain former enlisted men as members. It is safer to just hold a captain's mast (NJP) and be done with the whole thing. Also, with budget cuts and fewer Law Specialists, a court-martial can be a very expensive and time-consuming enterprise.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace has a difference of opinion from senior Coast Guard leadership. The Department of Defense interprets the Uniform Code of Military Justice more strictly than does their cousins in the Department of Homeland Security. And, they appear to apply it more uniformly up and down the chain of command.
General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a native of New York City, and a 1967 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, said in an interview that his views on homosexuals in the military and the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Policy are based on his upbringing.
"As an individual, I would not want (acceptance of homosexual behavior) to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else's wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior," he said, according to the audio and a transcript released by his staff.
Kodiak is an island fortress with many other military components. Also, foreign fishing vessels have been temporarily docked there pending punitive actions by the US Attorney in Anchorage, Alaska. It has not been confirmed if the possibility of "pillow talk" has compromised any law enforcement or national security operations.
Further out the Aleutian Island chain, the Coast Guard maintains a joint military presence on Attu Island with the US Air Force. It is a big ear pointed towards the Kamchatka Peninsula between the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Okhotsk. Attu Island is the westernmost and largest island in the Near Islands group of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.
The 282-foot Alex Haley was Gabrielsen’s third command. A 1986 Coast Guard Academy graduate and alumnus of the Naval War College, Gabrielsen was formerly the CO of St. Paul Island, Alaska, LORAN Station, He later commanded the 110-foot CGC Nunivak.
Commander Gabrielsen is married and has two children.
The results of the NJP likely signal the end of Gabrielsen’s career.
“For a commissioned officer, the punitive letters have significant career impacts and trigger other administrative processes,” Alholm said.
CGC Alex Haley,homeported in Kodiak, Alaska, has been under the command of the XO, executive officer, Cmdr. Kelly Hatfield, since April 30. Cmdr. Kevin Jones will assume command of the vessel June 22 during a change-of-command ceremony in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Coast Guard Cutters are classed according to the length of the ship's hull, and while the hull of the Alex Haley is 283 feet, she is nonetheless classed as a medium endurance cutter (WMEC-210'). The cutter's primary mission is fisheries enforcement in the Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska and North Pacific.
ALEXANDER PALMER HALEY
To memorialize his contributions to the Coast Guard and to the nation, the Coast Guard named a medium-endurance cutter after its first chief journalist, Alex Haley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Roots. The Coast Guard commissioned the Coast Guard cutter ALEX HALEY on Saturday, July 10th, 1999 at the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore.
The Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley is based in Kodiak, Alaska, where it conducts the Coast Guard missions of search and rescue and fisheries law enforcement in the Gulf of Alaska, the Bering Sea and the North Pacific. The Alex Haley is the first military vessel named for a journalist. Haley, died in 1992, and had a long and distinguished career as both a journalist and a novelist, and began writing as a hobby while assigned as a steward aboard various cutters during World War II. As word spread of his talent, the Coast Guard assigned Haley to its New York public affairs office where he served as the Coast Guard's first chief journalist, penning stories about Coast Guard rescues and developing his trademark writing style.
Labels: Senior Officer NJP.
posted by ichbinalj at 12:03 PM
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared Pace, a four-star Marine General with 48 military decorations on his chest, to be "incompetent."
What incredible effrontery. Reid-who never wore the uniform-could have said he didn't agree with Pace's decisions or with the politically unpopular war in Iraq. He could have said he disliked the way Pace executed his responsibilities in advising the President.
But incompetent?
This kind of public disparagement of a military hero is disgraceful.
But Pace's career didn't end merely because of Reid's shoddy remarks. Pace, a faithful Catholic, also offended the secular god of Tolerance. He had the audacity to say that he believed sex outside of marriage was wrong, whether homosexual or heterosexual.
The New York Times instantly declared him a bigot. The rest of the media pack followed suit; few defended him. We are in real trouble, folks, if America's number one military officer cannot defend the proposition that the military should exemplify high moral standards.
President Bush decided not to send Pace's nomination up for the customary second term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Why not? Not because Peter Pace is incompetent; he was, after all, roundly commended b y the President and Defense Secretary Gates.
Gates recommended against Pace's re-nomination, and the President agreed, because his confirmation would have been subjected to Senate hearings-hearings that would have been grossly politicized.
Can you see the general sitting before a battery of senators cross-examining him, in front of the cameras, on whether he discriminated against homosexuals? Imagine the members of the Armed Services Committee-most of whom never served in the military-grilling Pace on whether his Catholic faith influenced his standards of prudery. At least two presidential
candidates serve on this committee. The hearings would have been a political circus.
It would also have been open season on second-guessing the war at the very moment our troops are in an offensive posture, chasing al Qaeda. The television reports, which our troops in the field see online, would have shown our so-called leaders berating the military and calling the cause in Iraq futile. They would have been demoralizing, to say the least.
But to our Senate leaders, the welfare of our soldiers is secondary to worshipping the secular god of Tolerance and raw politics; thus they have in effect drummed out of the military one of the most honorable public servants I've ever known.
We should mourn the fact that we have lost the services of this decorated and principled man. And we should mourn the loss of honor, duty, and common decency among our nation's leaders.
Balancing Needs of Law and War, by Glenn Sulmasy.
NEW LONDON -- LAW AND WAR have never mixed comfortably. This seems all the more true in the wars of the 21st Century. The recent military hearings on the conduct of Marines in the battle for Haditha, Iraq, exemplifies the ambiguities that U.S. forces now face when confronting the faceless enemy of al-Qaida.
LAs a result of this complex mix of law and war since the end of the Cold War, the involvement of military lawyers has aw is now involved in all layers of combat. Nations continue to struggle how best to incorporate humanitiarian, or chivalrous, principles into the ethos of war. Al-Qaida makes this all the harder since the enemy, as doctrine, flouts the laws of war and acts in complete disregard of humanitarian principles — let alone the laws of armed conflict.
increased dramatically. Once viewed as mere lawyers in uniform, they are now critical “players” at every layer of the command structure — and often in the field with combat troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Their steady, learned advice on the laws of war has understandably earned the “combat JAG” (judge advocate general) an enhanced status within the armed forces as well as within international human-rights organizations and U.S. civilian leadership.
However, as a result of this enhanced status, combat JAGs are in the unenviable position of advising on novel wartime legal issues as part of ongoing military operations — e.g., whether it is legal to attack a terrorist cell in the midst of a civilian population center; or to attack an apparent day-care center that the enemy now uses as a communications suite to order attacks against coalition forces; or determining whether apparent enemies are actual enemies or civilians mixed in with combattants (as in the Vietnam conflict).
It is an increasingly difficult task for commanders to make these decisions and ensure that they are not later labeled and/or tried as a “war criminals.” These decisions, of course, have to be made during the heat of battle. The commanders, therefore, come to rely in great part on their JAGs. Some in the military and academia question whether such legal involvement in combat is appropriate..
Coast Guard officer caught in bedroom with 14 year old girl.
(Patricia Kime, Navy Times, Sunday Aug 26, 2007.)
A 36-year-old Coast Guard officer assigned to Coast Guard Headquarters was arrested Aug. 10 after being caught "in flagrante delicto" in the Stafford, Va., in the bedroom of a 14-year-old girl by her mother.
Lt. Jason Frank, of Gaithersburg, Md., allegedly visited the girl’s home on three different occasions and had sex with her at least twice, according to an Aug. 15 Stafford County Sheriff’s Office announcement.
The girl’s mother allegedly found Frank in her daughter’s bedroom in the early hours of Aug. 1. The mother told deputies that after she told the Coast Guard officer her daughter was only 14, he jumped out the window and fled.
Informed sources said that Lieutenant Frank met the 14 year old girl in an Internet chat room. He was posing as a 28-year-old.
Frank has been charged with two counts of carnal knowledge of a child (statutory rape), taking indecent liberties with a child, soliciting a juvenile with an electronic device, breaking and entering, vandalism, and misdemeanor assault and battery.
Lieutenant Frank is assigned to Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he works in the Command Center, Coast Guard spokeswoman Natalie Granger said Aug. 20.
He previously served on the Coast Guard buoy tender Sundew, homeported in Duluth, Minn.
He is being held without bond at the Rappahannock Regional Jail in Stafford.
A Navy sailor has been charged with trying to entice 14-year-old into sex using the internet.
Naugatuck, Connecticut police have arrested a Navy petty officer and charged him with trying to set up a sexual encounter with someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl.
Police say Justin Williams, 24, who is stationed in Newport, R.I., has been charged with criminal attempt at risk of injury to a minor, criminal attempt at second-degree sexual assault and use of a computer to entice a minor to engage in sexual activity.
Naugatuck police had help with the investigation from Perverted Justice, a volunteer organization that targets predators.
Naugatuck Lt. Robert Harrison said his department conducted the investigation because an officer there who specializes in such cases made contact with Williams in a chat room.
“He wanted to have a sexual encounter with what he thought was a 14-year-old girl,” Harrison said. “He drove from Rhode Island to Connecticut thinking he was going to meet her.”
Harrison said Williams also set up a Web cam and, while in uniform, performed a sex act in front of it for the person he thought was the girl. He appears to have been on Navy time but was not using Navy equipment, Harrison said.
Court documents did not list an attorney for Williams. A spokeswoman at Naval Station Newport said Williams has been assigned there since 2006. The Navy has been cooperating with authorities and is not pursuing disciplinary action against Williams at this time, she said.
Williams, who lives in Wakefield, R.I., was held on $100,000 bond and is due back in court Monday, 7 January 2008.
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