Miller said Gallagher, who had the nickname Blade, went on to stage a bizarre “re-enlistment ceremony” over the body of the captive. “I think Eddie was proud of it, and that was, like, part of it for him.”

“The guy is freaking evil,” special operator first class Craig Miller, one of the platoon’s most experienced members, told investigators in sometimes tearful testimony.

Members of Alpha Platoon’s Seal Team 7 alarmed by their leader’s conduct said they were initially shut down by military chiefs when they first spoke up, and told their own careers would suffer if they continued to talk about it.Įventually, the Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) began an inquiry and the platoon members were called to give evidence.

In a lengthy criminal investigation report, the navy detectives laid out other allegations against Gallagher, including shooting a schoolgirl and elderly man from a sniper’s roost.

In the interviews, conducted by navy investigators looking into Gallagher’s conduct during a tour of duty in Iraq in 2017, fellow platoon members told of a ruthless leader who stabbed the captive to death for no reason then forced his troops to pose for a photograph with the corpse.Īt his court martial, Gallagher was acquitted of murder but demoted in rank for the lesser charge of posing with the body – a decision Trump reversed. He was granted clemency by the president in November in a decision that angered military chiefs. Gallagher was convicted in July of posing with the dead body of a teenage Islamic State captive he had just killed with a hunting knife. The explosive testimony was published Friday by the New York Times, which obtained previously unseen video interviews and text messages from several former members of an elite commando unit once led by special operations chief Eddie Gallagher.

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