Way back in 2012 the DailyMail reported that the Marine Corps said the urination took place during a counterinsurgency operation in the Musa Qala district of Helmand province on July 27, 2011. The decision to court martial Chamblin and Deptola was made by Lt. Gen. Richard P. Mills, the commanding general of Marine Corps Combat Development Command.
When the video came to light on YouTube, U.S. military officials sternly condemned the misconduct. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he feared that it could set back efforts to begin reconciliation talks with the Taliban.
Chamblin and Deptola also were charged with other misconduct alleged to have happened on the same day as the urination incident.
Marine Times however has brought an update to this story citing that a military court has dismissed charges against a former Marine scout sniper who pleaded guilty to urinating on Taliban corpses, finding that former Commandant Gen. James Amos had illegally interfered with the legal process at the outset.
Staff Sgt. Joseph W. Chamblin was reduced in rank to sergeant and ordered to pay $500 after he pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the 2011 incident in Afghanistan, which became a national scandal after video of the Marines urinating on the bodies was posted on YouTube in January 2012.
But neither Chamblin nor his defense attorneys knew at the time that Amos had replaced Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser as the first convening authority in the case after telling Waldhauser that he wanted the Marines involved with the urination incident to be “crushed” and discharged, the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Appeals found on Wednesday.
“This is an unusually flagrant example of UCI (unlawful command influence),” the court ruled. “We find that UCI this direct, and occurring at this level is highly corrosive to public trust in this proceeding.”
Which is interesting because there is another MAJOR case in which UCI also seems comes into play.
