Retired Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher — who was acquitted of murdering a 17-year-old ISIS militant in 2017 — has now claimed that his entire platoon agreed to kill the prisoner and practice medical procedures on him.
“The grain of truth in the whole thing is that that ISIS fighter was killed by us, and that nobody at that time had a problem with it,” Gallagher, 41, said in an interview on “The Line” podcast released Tuesday.
“We killed that guy,” he said. “Our intention was to kill him, everybody was on board.”
“He was going to die regardless,” added Gallagher, a trained medic, claiming “everyone was, like, let’s just do medical treatments on him until he’s gone.”
The bombshell came nearly two years after a military jury found Gallagher not guilty of stabbing the wounded teenager to death in Iraq, after he was accused of the act by some of his team mates.
He was, however, convicted of posing for a photo with the captive’s corpse and demoted. Former President Donald Trump, who publicly supported Gallagher during his high-profile court-martial, later restored his rank.
The ex-SEAL continued to deny that he stabbed the militant to death on the Apple TV+ podcast.
“I didn’t stab him. I didn’t stab that dude,” Gallagher said. “That dude died from all the medical treatments that were done – and there was plenty of medical treatments that were done to him.”
Gallagher, the senior enlisted leader of his platoon and a medic, claimed that the elite unit verbally agreed to the plan.
“Everybody knew what was going on,” Gallagher added. “It’s the only truthful thing to this whole process; and then the rest of it just is like a bunch of contorted lies to, like, pin that whole scenario on me.”
Asked why he cut an emergency airway in fighter’s throat and inserted a breathing tube, Gallagher said it was “Just for practice.”
“I was practicing to see how fast I could do one in,” he said.
Asked about Gallagher’s allegations at a briefing on Wednesday, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said he wouldn’t “dignify those comments with a response.”