Betrayal: Toxic Exposure of U.S. Marines and Red Dragonfly II

A panel discussion will follow the film with MAM organizer Tami Canal, COVVHA activist Lorena Hansen, Tim King and myself as moderator.

BETRAYAL on Amazon

(SALT LAKE CITY) - Operation Red Dragonfly will be coming (former marine Tim King on his motorcycle) to Salt Lake City the weekend of may 16-17 2014. Tim and former Marine Robert O'Dowd have written the book "Betrayal: Toxic Exposure of U.S. Marines, Murder and Government Cover-up."

I was one of those former Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune.

We are planning a book event with Tony and Catherine Weller for Friday the 16th. we have reserved the downtown public library for the showing of the MSgt. Jerry Ensminger's (USMC ret.) documentary film "Semper Fi, Always Faithful."

A panel discussion will follow the film with MAM organizer Tami Canal, COVVHA activist Lorena Hansen, Tim King and myself as moderator. We'll bring you more information on this event in the near future.

Semper Peace

Aaron Davis

Background:

As was his custom when expecting a visitor, Marine Colonel Jim Sabow placed his television on mute, arose from his easy chair, and left his house through the patio door. He walked the length of the patio, called the dogs in the back yard and enclosed them in the garage. Whether he opened the front door to greet his visitor or went out the back door onto his patio is not known, but we do know that he had only moments to live.

Colonel Sabow, decorated Vietnam fighter with 221 combat missions, met his death at the hands of others on January 22, 1991. The unexpected blow to the right side of the head was violent, resulting in unconsciousness. Occipital skull fragments from the shotgun blast penetrated into the back of his brain. He was near death due to the massive brainstem trauma in which agonal hyperventilation characteristic of this type of injury occurs. Sabow was aspirating blood from a wound in his pharynx that resulted from a basilar skull fracture. In fact, the tracheae, bronchi, bronchioles and alveoli were filled with blood, doubling the weight of the right lung. There was no mention of the depressed skull fracture from the violent blow to his head in the autopsy report.

Government investigation reports made no mention of the intrusion of three men who entered the crime scene with government credentials, forcing Naval Investigative Service (NIS) agents and Marine MPs to leave the crime scene and wait across the street until ordered to return. A Marine MP told a documentary film maker in 2013 that the patio chair was placed over the body by an NIS agent (now a senior executive in the NCIS) to support the official report of suicide as the manner of death. Another Marine MP at the crime scene who was a reservist called to active duty in 1991 and a full time Detroit police officer could not be located because the Marine Corps denied the availability of the duty roster, which would identify the man. The duty rosters are maintained on file at Quantico but the El Toro duty roster for MPs from January 1991 was not available, even when a FOIA was submitted to the Corps.

A doctored autopsy photograph was submitted to Congress in 2004 and a sworn affidavit to the NIS by a renowned pathologist who reported homicide and crime scene tampering was unexceptionally withdrawn. Michael Jacobs, the former Supervisor, Homicide Trials Division, Orange County District Attorney's Office, reported that, "Colonel Sabow's death could not have been a suicide but had to have been a homicide inflicted by the hands of another." Gene Wheaton, a former military investigator and expert in homicide investigations, told Dr. David Sabow, the younger brother of Colonel Sabow, that a military assassination team within the DoD/Pentagon exists to murder military officers who are a threat to blow the whistle on covert operations. The evidence strongly supports that Colonel Sabow was murdered by this assassination team. There’s every reason to believe that this assassination team remains in place today.

The motive for the murder was to prevent the disclosure of a covert operation to ferry weapons to Central and South America and government sanctioned narcotrafficing into El Toro. Data processing records were purged on the maintenance of unmarked C-130s; a Marine with knowledge to purge the records transferred and murdered several years later; drums of TCE toxic waste buried on the base; a Marine who never served in Vietnam died from cancer that VA doctors had to be caused by Agent Orange exposure (the Marine's job was to take empty 55 gallon drums to the base landfill); base wells sealed in concrete without a thorough inspection; and a huge maintenance hangar with radiation contamination shuttered and sealed 14 years after the base closed. At the direction of the California Department of Public Health, the Navy is conducting a second radiation survey of the hangar. No Marine veterans of El Toro were notified by the government of their possible exposure to toxic chemicals and radiation and their health effects.

In 1985 when TCE was found in several agricultural wells off of El Toro, Camp Lejeune on the East coast was forced to close down wells contaminated with TCE and other contaminants. As many as one million veterans and their dependents were exposed to Lejeune’s contaminated wells over 30 years (1953-1987). Congressional hearings and the testimonies of veterans and dependents pressured Congress to pass health care without any provision for disability compensation for Lejeune’s survivors. El Toro closed in 1999 and sold at public auction in 2005 is not on anyone’s radar.

Semper Fidelis, the Marine Corps’ motto, was tarnished by the murder of one of its senior officers and other Marines. At El Toro, over 40 years of water distribution engineering drawings and original well construction drawings are missing while the Navy and Corps support a fabrication that the base wells were abandoned over 60 years ago for municipal water—a scarce commodity in arid Southern California. The base wells were more likely than not still secured to El Toro’s water distribution system in 1985 when the Orange County Water District found TCE contaminated agricultural wells on and off the base. In 1986, El Toro at considerable expense had an agricultural and engineering firm redraw the entire set of water distribution engineering drawings. No base wells were in the 1986 engineering drawings.

Tim King

Robert O'Dowd

BETRAYAL, self-published on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-Exposure-Marines-Government-Cover-up/dp/0615828949) was written by two former El Toro Marines, Robert O’Dowd, investigative reporter and Tim King, photojournalist, war correspondent, and Executive News Editor of Salem-News.com. 

Learn more by visiting Robert O'Dowd's Website, mwsg37.com; that is the name of the Marine aviation squadron both O'Dowd and King served were attached to.