An Army general’s lifting of reprimands against three senior officers for a bloody 2008 ambush of U.S. troops in Afghanistan—fixing the blame instead on the lower-ranked son of an Aiea man—reeks of the military brass protecting its own. The incident warrants a thorough congressional review.

The strange conclusions of a report surfaced in May, when Army Gen. Charles C. Campbell essentially rejected the results of an initial investigation of the incident and chose to take no action against the three officers. Since then, the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., has removed blame against the trio, calling their conduct "hardly an example of command neglect."

Instead, the report says 1st Lt. Jonathan Brostrom, the platoon leader, and eight other U.S. soldiers were killed and 27 others wounded in the Afghan village of Wanat because Brostrom’s choice of location for an observation post was "potentially fatally vulnerable." Brostrom was a Damien Memorial School and University of Hawaii graduate. His father, Aiea resident David Brostrom, who retired from the Army as a colonel in 2004, is rightly angry about the handling of the investigation, which has undergone twists and secrecy.

Military historian Douglas Cubbison wrote the draft of the Army’s report on the incident, concluding that the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team’s commanders "had grown complacent."

He added, "In their hubris, they forgot that a new position is most vulnerable in the early days of its formation." He found that the single platoon had "insufficient combat power" to create a new outpost while maintaining security. That assessment was deleted from the Army’s final report.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Richard Natonski, who headed the investigation of the period leading up to the battle, cited battalion commander Lt. Col. William Ostland, company commander Capt. Matthew Myer and Col. Charles Preysler, the brigade commander, to be derelict.

But Campbell rejected that assessment, asserting that the U.S. casualties "did not occur as a result of deficient decisions, planning and actions of the chain of command."

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., said in June that he found it "deeply troubling that the Army has exonerated these officers and in the process rejected the finding of the independent review."

Webb, a highly decorated veteran of the Vietnam War and later secretary of the Navy, should convene the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, which he chairs, to review the incident and the subsequent investigation. The jurisdiction of the subcommittee, which includes Hawaii’s Sen. Daniel Akaka among its members, includes conduct of members of the military.

Army Secretary John McHugh advised David Brostrom by letter that 800 pages of "additional materials and relevant evidence" were reviewed by Campbell—but they have yet to be made available to Brostrom.

The explanations given so far have been inadequate, and a congressional investigation is justified.