Washington
Navy Capt. Brett Crozier has been vindicated after warning of a dire coronavirus outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt—just not by the Navy, which announced that it will not reverse Crozier’s firing for the infraction of trying to save his sailors’ lives. Instead, the Navy leadership implied that Crozier was responsible for the outbreak that he loudly warned he needed urgent help from the Navy to redress. “If Capt. Crozier was still in command today, I would be relieving him,” the chief of naval operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, said on Friday. Less than two months ago, Gilday recommended reinstating Crozier. A final report into Crozier’s firing, released, accused the Roosevelt commander and his team of being “biased by groupthink, emotion and a loss of perspective as to the real risk at hand”—as well as an insufficient appreciation of how the fleet commander was working tirelessly to aid evacuation from the ship, something Crozier had challenged.
