CSIndy – Air Force clears Born in COIN allegation

Selected Article Excerpts:

• An Air Force lawyer at the Pentagon has essentially cleared Brig. Gen. Dana Born, the Air Force Academy’s dean of faculty, of ordering a counterinsurgency against the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
• The attorney, W. Kipling At Lee Jr., the Air Force deputy general counsel, also found that an investigation into the poisoning of David Mullin’s service dog, Caleb, was “inconclusive.”
• In a Dec. 9, 2011, deposition given by Born in an unlawful dismissal lawsuit filed by Mullin, Born testified she didn’t order a COIN, which both Mullin and MRFF’s founder Mikey Weinstein say constituted perjury.
• “I think it is criminal obstruction of justice,” Mullin says of the investigation. “They performed an incompetent and incomplete investigation. For instance, you do not go and interview suspects more than a month after the incident, and that’s exactly what they did.”
• Referring to At Lee’s findings, Weinstein said, “You can’t waive a wand and say no dog was poisoned there, no COIN ordered there, there was no problem between the head of security forces and my body guard. You can’t say, ‘We are an island of constitutional conformance when in fact the opposite is true.'”
• As a footnote, At Lee was at the center of controversy when a special congressional panel was formed in 2003 to investigate the sexual assault scandal at the Air Force Academy. The panel, chaired by the late Tillie Fowler, concluded, in part, “It is clear from our review of nearly a decade of efforts to solve this problem that the common failure in each of those efforts was the absence of sustained attention to the problem and follow-up on the effectiveness of the solution.”

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