An assistant secretary of the Navy upheld the forced retirement of a senior chief accused of hazing junior sailors in a canine unit based in Bahrain.
The decision comes four years after a Navy investigation in which sailors claimed Michael Toussaint, a chief petty officer at the time, had acted as ringleader for a culture of abuse within the kennel between 2005 and 2006. Last February, Toussaint denied much of his alleged misconduct before a retirement review board that was convened months after he was censured by the Secretary of the Navy.
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A senior chief who was censured by the Secretary of the Navy for hazing sailors under his command may retire with a full pension, Navy officials say.
Since it was announced last October, the terms of Michael Toussaint’s retirement have come under scrutiny that is unprecedented for an enlisted sailor. The senior chief petty officer, who from 2005 to 2006 led a Bahrain-based canine unit that was plagued by widespread documented abuse, denied much of his alleged misconduct in February during a retirement board hearing, a proceeding normally reserved for commissioned officers.
The case will soon go to the desk of an assistant secretary of the Navy, who faces a choice: to approve the unanimous recommendation of the three board members who said Toussaint deserves to retire with a senior chief's pension; or to take a harder line and reduce him to a lower pay grade, as government lawyers had sought to do during the hearing.
Deciding against the retirement board's recommendation would be rare.
"I've never yet seen one (a board recommendation) that was overturned by a higher authority," said Eugene Fidell, a professor at Yale University and President of the National Institute of Military Justice.
But advocates for the sailors who were abused under Toussaint’s leadership said Navy officials had led them to expect a harsher judgement from the board hearing, which according to Navy guidelines determines the highest rank at which a sailor or officer has served honorably.
"I was surprised," said Aaron Tax, legal director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, “because we thought that the Navy believed this was someone who engaged in outrageous behavior." Tax said despite the board's recommendation, the Navy should lower Toussaint's pension to that of a first class petty officer, the rank he held before becoming chief of the Bahrain unit.
Last September, Youth Radio uncovered a 2007 Navy investigation into claims of the unit’s culture of abuse and connected it to two subsequent investigations into the suicide of a sailor implicated in the hazing scandal. While names in the copies of the Navy report were redacted, Youth Radio interviewed six sailors from the unit, all of whom named Toussaint as the ringleader of the abuse.
During the February hearing, Toussaint denied the most serious accusations against him -- that he ordered sailors to simulate sex acts during training exercises, that he threw parties with hired prostitutes, and that he condoned the humiliation of a gay soldier who was hog-tied to a chair and left in a dog kennel.
Toussant's lawyers claimed that four sailors who testified against him at the hearing were exaggerating the extent of the hazing. They accused one sailor, Joseph Christopher Rocha, of lying about Toussaint in the media to increase his own public profile as an advocate for the repeal of the U.S. Military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Rocha was discharged from the Navy under the policy after returning from Bahrain.
Youth Radio has obtained statements from each of the retirement board members -- an enlisted sailor and two Navy officers -- explaining why they sided with Toussaint.
"Senior Chief Toussaint has served honorably and was made the 'scape goat' in this case, for the benefit of one disgruntled sailor," wrote one of the board members, Lt. Cmdr. Angel Bellido.
Another board member wrote that he took into consideration the testimony of a Navy SEAL who said Toussaint saved his life last summer when he was shot during a combat mission in Afghanistan.
Toussaint included these statements in a March letter to Juan Garcia, the assistant secretary of the Navy who oversees personnel and will make the final decision on the retirement pay.
"The board's unanimous decision… is a clear repudiation of the allegations," Toussaint wrote in the letter, which Youth Radio obtained through his lawyer.
Military law experts familiar with Toussaint's case said he may be the first enlisted sailor to go before a retirement grade determination board, a proceeding that exists outside the military justice system.
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By Rachel Krantz
In the Persian Gulf, on the island of Bahrain, the U.S. Navy has a special division made up of bomb-sniffing dogs and the sailors who handle them. The Bahrain Military Working Dogs Division was featured in a Navy News spot highlighting the work involved in deploying these highly trained canines to sniff out narcotics and explosives coming through the Persian Gulf and into the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Developing trust between the dog and the handler is at the core of what makes canine detection work, as together, their job is to step into situations that can be deadly at any moment. However, that trust between the individual sailor and dog does not necessarily extend to the overall culture of the unit.
A Youth Radio investigation has found that between 2004 and 2006, sailors in the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain Military Working Dogs Division, or "The Kennel," were subjected to an atmosphere of sexual harassment, psychological humiliation, and physical assaults.
Joseph Christopher Rocha with an MWD in Bahrain.
It was inside that Bahrain kennel in July 2005 that Petty Officer Joseph Christopher Rocha, then 19 years old, says he was being terrorized by other members of his own division. "I was hog-tied to a chair, rolled around the base, left in a dog kennel that had feces spread in it."
Rocha says that beginning six weeks into his deployment, he was singled out for abuse by his chief master-at-arms, Michael Toussaint, and others on the base, once Rocha made it clear he was not interested in prostitutes. "I was in a very small testosterone-driven unit of men," Rocha says. "I think that's what began the questioning-you know-‘Why don't you want to have sex with her? Are you a faggot?’"
Youth Radio has conducted interviews and obtained documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) showing that the hog-tying episode was not the first or only case of harassment and abuse during Rocha's deployment. In another incident cited in the documents, Rocha was forced to appear in a twisted "training video." A member of the Working Dogs Division, Petty Officer Shaun Hogan, recalls the scene.
Petty Officer Shaun Hogan
"Petty Officer Rocha and another junior sailor…were instructed to go into a classroom by Chief Michael Toussaint, who orchestrated the entire training. And Chief Toussaint asked them to simulate homosexual sex on a couch," Hogan says.
Next in the simulation, Hogan says a handler and his dog barged onto the scene, and that's when "one person…would sit up, kind of wipe off their mouth, the other would get up, and they would be fixing their fly."
Rocha says Toussaint bullied him, "telling me I needed to be more believable, act more queer, have a higher pitched voice, make the sounds and gestures more realistic...I didn't think I had a choice…It made me feel that I wasn't a human being, that I was an animal, rather."
Rocha says at the time, he had no gay friends, no male lovers, and wasn’t even fully out to himself about his sexuality. "The fact that I was starting to figure out that I was a homosexual, it was the most degrading thing I've ever experienced in my life." Still, eight thousand miles away from home, he was afraid to report the constant hazing. And Rocha was not the only one.
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