Washington: Tensions between US military chiefs and President Donald Trump are booming after the president’s decision to intervene in the cases of three officers accused of war crimes, Prensa Latina publishes.
According to the television network, a long-standing military man told him that there is a moral problem in what happened, and some Pentagon officials said privately that they are worried about the behavior of the head of the White House.
Consternation in the Department of Defense has been accumulating due to sporadic, impulsive and contradictory decisions by Trump on a variety of issues, the media said.
But now there are new and significant concerns, as several current and retired officials say Trump's intervention in high-profile war crimes cases cannot be ignored, the television chain added.
This month, the head of state generated great controversy when he decided to forgive Clint Lorance, a member of the Army who since 2013 served a 20-year prison sentence for ordering his men to shoot three Afghans.
He also granted that benefit to Mathew Golsteyn, accused of murdering and burning the body of another citizen of Afghanistan and whose trial should begin in the coming weeks.
In addition, the president restored the rank of Edward Gallagher, a member of the Navy SEALs special operations forces who was charged with charges such as firing at civilians, killing a 15-year-old captive Islamic State fighter and threatening to kill those who reported him.
A martial court acquitted him of those accusations against him, but Gallagher was convicted of discrediting the armed forces when posing for photos with the corpse of the teenager, for which the Navy finally degraded him, until Trump intervened to reverse that decision.
This last case led to the dismissal last Sunday of the Secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, who in an opinion article published yesterday in The Washington Post described the interference of the president in military justice as "shocking and unprecedented."
"It was also a reminder that the president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the Army, fight ethically or be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices," he wrote.
Senior military leaders say they are concerned about Trump's divisive rhetoric and the politicization of the military, and fear that the president's management style, often expressed through tweets, may be undermining national security by making military planning be increasingly difficult.
The TV chain said it had learned that at least two senior military officials were reluctant to appear alongside Trump at events in recent months, due to concerns that he could make partisan political comments while they were present.
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