Friendly Fire
Raising questions about 9/11 gets an Army sergeant demoted for “disloyalty.”

http://www.fwweekly.com/content.asp?article=6022

By STEPHEN C. WEBSTER
5/30/2007

Darren Cunningham and Buswell met and became friends in Iraq, and Buswell later helped Cunningham’s family deal with the MP’s death.

These days, Donald Buswell’s job is not as exciting or dangerous as it once was. For the past few months, his working hours have been spent taking care of some 40-plus wounded soldiers at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston medical center. The work is sometimes menial, even janitorial, but he doesn’t mind. After all, Buswell has been where these men are — three years ago, he too was recovering from wounds received in a battle zone in Iraq.

“I truly consider this an honor,” Buswell told his dad not long ago.

Still, it’s not exactly where Buswell expected to be after 20 years of well-respected service in the Army.

Since joining the Army in 1987, he had risen to the rank of sergeant first class, serving in both Gulf Wars, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Korea. He ended up with shrapnel scars and a Purple Heart and, back in the U.S. after his last tour in Iraq, a job as intelligence analyst at Fort Sam Houston.

He couldn’t have foreseen that one e-mail could derail his career and put him on his way out of the Army. One e-mail, speculating about events that millions of people have questioned for the last six years, was all it took.

Sgt. Buswell wants to know: What really happened on 9/11? And he said so in his e-mail. In the few paragraphs of that August 2006 message — a reply not to someone outside the service, but to other soldiers — Buswell wrote that he thought the official report of what happened that day at the Pentagon, and in the Pennsylvania crash of United Airlines Flight 93, was full of errors and unanswered questions.

“Who really benefited from what happened that day?” he asked rhetorically. Not “Arabs,” but “the Military Industrial Complex,” Buswell concluded. “We must demand a new, independent investigation.”

For voicing those opinions in an e-mail to 38 people on the San Antonio Army base, Buswell was stripped of his security clearance, fired from his job, demoted, and ordered to undergo a mental health exam.

(He was also ordered not to speak with the press. Information for this story came from documents, conversations with Buswell’s family members and friends, and sources within Fifth Army who asked not to be named.)

As if all that weren’t enough, Fort Sam Houston’s chief of staff penned a letter accusing Buswell of “making statements disloyal to the United States.”

His father, Winthrop Buswell, said that his son “is one of the most patriotic people I know.”

“Donald saw something that his conscience led him to dispute,” he said. “That’s just the type of man he is.”

For his dissent, Donald has paid a heavy price.

Baghdad’s early light danced across the surface of a man-made lake. For Buswell, that April 2004 morning was the perfect time for a run. Behind him, the soldiers of Baghdad’s Camp Victory were, for the most part, not yet stirring. The path he took was a historic one: In the palace just a couple of hundred yards away, surrounded by the lake, Saddam Hussein was in custody, locked away in a former torture cell.

Five miles into the jog, Buswell paused to catch his breath, and something splashed in the water nearby with unusual force. He jumped back, surprised, and surveyed the area with care. Seeing no threat, he resumed his run, heading toward a couple of Iraqi men painting a small building.

Seconds later, Buswell heard a growing whistle and turned just in time to see a 122mm rocket barreling toward him. He dove out of the way, and the round hit several dozen yards behind him. Picking himself up off the ground, he saw another white trail forming over the water. He started running again, but had made it only a few steps when the force of another impact blew him to the ground. Shrapnel, rocks, and dirt rained down on him. Ahead, a fourth round hit the Iraqi painters, blowing off body parts and engulfing them in flames.

Horrified, Buswell ran toward the men and tried to extinguish the flames. The men were still alive, screaming in agony. Then, he heard the increasingly familiar whistle of another rocket and once again hit the dirt. The one that struck the nearby road was a dud, like the first that hit the water. Had it exploded, Buswell probably would have died. When he turned to look again at the two Iraqi men, he saw they were dead, their bodies charred and smoking.

“It was like the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan,” his dad recalled him saying.

By this time, troops from the camp were running toward the scene. Only when the first of those soldiers arrived and screamed for a medic did Buswell realize he’d been hit. Sharp flakes of metal were embedded up and down his left leg and all over the right side of his back.

The relatively minor wounds Buswell suffered that day were his first in a battle zone, despite the fact that he’d served in southern Iraq during Desert Storm a decade before. In his first few years in the Army, Buswell had been a metalworker and had dealt with explosives. Since 1990, he had been an intelligence analyst.

Buswell’s wounds were cleaned and bandaged within an hour of the rocket attack, and he rejoined his unit almost immediately. But 2004 had more — and more pleasant — developments in store for him.

Two months after the attack, he returned to the United States, to Fort Hood in Central Texas, and married his girlfriend Lori, officially becoming step-dad to her 11-year-old daughter Kaitlyn, who calls him “DD” (Daddy Donald) for short. In one of those strange quirks of war, Buswell had actually met Lori’s ex-husband and Kaitlyn’s dad — Darren Cunningham — while both were based at Camp Victory. The two became close friends. When Cunningham, a military police officer, was killed in a rocket attack in October 2004, just a month before his retirement, Buswell became even more of a father figure for Kaitlyn — and in some ways helped Cunningham’s family deal with his death.

For the next two years, Buswell worked at his intelligence post at Fort Hood, then was transferred to a similar job in San Antonio. But as he worked, he studied and read about what had happened on 9/11 — and came to the conclusions that would get him in so much trouble.

The terrorist attacks of 2001 had a profound effect on Buswell.

Before the much-disputed presidential election of 2000, Buswell shared with his father a view that very few held at the time. He was convinced that if George W. Bush won, he would take the country to war with Iraq to finish his father’s work. He believed the younger Bush would be too beholden to oil interests — and feared what that would mean for America’s foreign policy.

When the planes hit the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, Buswell later told his father, he figured that war with Iraq was coming, even if the country had nothing to do with the attacks. Being a loyal soldier, he kept his views private for a long while.

“He didn’t want to rock the boat,” Buswell’s father said. “Like all of us, he was somewhat in shock after what happened on 9/11.” And, as he told his father, his job was to serve. He was proud to do it, no matter who was directing policy.

By the time he was transferred to Fort Sam Houston, Buswell had developed strong opinions about what had happened. He had come to believe that the World Trade Center attacks were aided by persons on the inside and that the planes that crashed into the towers were just one component of a larger, more complex attack. The career soldier had effectively become a member of what’s known as the “9/11 truth movement,” which has continued to grow in spite of news media coverage that has generally refused to take the questions seriously. The movement includes many factions, espousing theories from the somewhat plausible to the really out-there folks who talk about space weapons bringing down the New York towers. The doubters include people like Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who recently agreed to distribute Loose Change Final Cut, a 9/11 conspiracy movie, and actors Charlie Sheen and Rosie O’Donnell, whose 9/11 dissents have been well-publicized.

In light of his new job, Buswell wanted to make sure his superiors knew of his views. He went to Chief Warrant Officer Mario Torres, a legal advisor to his division at Fort Sam Houston. Buswell told Torres he would not be willing to write reports or give speeches that required him to say things he didn’t believe regarding 9/11.

End Part I