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Lawyer keeps license despite lying to Army

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A trail of blood led from Calon E. Blackburn Jr.’s bedroom, through his home and out into the streets of the Qatar compound where he lived.

Outside, he lay on his back with a deep wound to his thigh, which he failed to stanch with an improvised tourniquet. Slashed knife wounds rendered his right hand almost useless.

As Qatari police and paramedics arrived, the longtime civilian attorney for the U.S. Army said a burglar had attacked him, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. “Lying there on the ground, fearing I might die, I told a whopper,” Blackburn later remembered.

Blackburn said he lied to keep a friend out of a Middle Eastern prison, but prosecutors say there was no noble intent. An Army investigation said Blackburn’s friend was a married Thai woman he kept as a lover and used as a maid; she apparently stabbed him when he tried to end their affair and he lied to avoid a possible court-martial.

“Mr. Blackburn nearly created an international incident by conspiring with [his maid] to make false statements in order to cover up an adulterous romance, a capital crime under Qatari law,” Maj. Patrick N. Leduc wrote in a report about the incident. “Any police force would have taken that [alleged attack] very seriously, especially given the sensitive nature of our important presence in the strategic Middle Eastern nation.”

Despite Blackburn’s claim that a burglar somehow penetrated a secure zone near the U.S. Central Command headquarters in the region — and his raising fears that terrorists might somehow follow — the Army let Blackburn retire quietly and the Arkansas Supreme Court allowed him to keep his law license.

Life in Qatar

Blackburn, 58, grew up in Arkansas and after law school joined the Army Corps of Engineers as an attorney, working out of an office in Mobile, Ala. After the war in Iraq started, he took a civilian job with the Army at Camp As Sayliyah, just outside Doha, Qatar’s capital. As a legal adviser to military officials on administrative law, contracts and other matters, he earned $87,039 a year and was required to follow Army protocol.

Col. Thomas F. Lynch, the camp’s commanding officer, stressed to all that security remained a top concern at the facility.

“We owe it to ourselves, our families and all the other service members at Camp As Sayliyah to remain vigilant,” Lynch wrote in a security policy letter to troops. “We remain located at ‘ground zero’ on the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and can not lose sight of that reality.”

Blackburn said later he didn’t believe Lynch’s concerns extended to the off-base residential compound where he lived. In this free environment, Blackburn took up playing tennis at a local club, where he met a woman nicknamed “Oh.”

The woman, whose name the Army redacted in all documents obtained by The Associated Press, was a Thai national married to a British expatriate. Blackburn later wrote that, over time, she became a “close friend” and later a paid maid.

“Lack of honesty and candor”

Just after midnight Jan. 19, 2007, a roving guard arrived at Blackburn’s villa and found onlookers, police cars and two ambulances. Drops of blood led into the villa. Paramedics took Blackburn out on a stretcher moments later.

By morning, Blackburn sat in a hospital bed, telling an Army investigator how he found a burglar inside his home and struggled with him over a knife. As Blackburn told it, the burglar went out a glass back door while he escaped through the front.

A little while later, Qatari police called the Army, saying they had Blackburn’s “wife” in custody. It was Oh, who told officers there had been no burglar.

By the time Blackburn made his own statement to police, he called the incident “actually an unintentional accident.” A report by another Army investigator shows Blackburn told officers that someone inadvertently stabbed him in the hand when he tried to take a knife away and “then tripped on his way out of the room,” stabbing himself in the thigh.

After the police interview, an Army official “confronted Mr. Blackburn about this change in the stories and Mr. Blackburn stated that (Oh) was going to be charged if it was not an accident and he was going to ‘help a friend,”’ an Army report reads.

According to Leduc, though, Oh had become enraged after Blackburn sought to end what had become a sexual relationship. After the stabbing, Blackburn conspired with Oh, who opened the back sliding glass door to make it appear a burglar left that way, Leduc wrote.

Blackburn gave investigators a sympathetic portrait of Oh as a woman who had attempted suicide in the past and remained locked in a marriage to a husband who had verbally and physically abused her.

“Although I do regret lying about the event, I could not in good conscience see a woman, who was a good friend for four years, go to jail in a Middle East prison,” Blackburn wrote. “Instead, I felt only empathy for her situation, ... abused wife ... and mother of a small child, who felt utter desperation to get out of an untenable marriage and who was put off by her one and only friend whom she believed might help her.”

But Blackburn’s “lack of honesty and candor” became too much for the Army to accept.

“He has compromised himself and cannot be trusted to do the right thing,” Leduc wrote. “If those he is expected to serve cannot trust Mr. Blackburn to offer ethical, candid and truthful advice, he simply cannot do his job.”

Reprimand and a $50 fee

Army officials let Blackburn request voluntary retirement March 14, 2007. On a form, Blackburn simply said he had made a “personal decision to retire.”

The Army sent a complaint against Blackburn to the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Office of Professional Conduct, which has the power to fine, suspend or disbar a lawyer. Stark Ligon, the executive director of the professional conduct office, said Blackburn and the office settled the case without a hearing.

Blackburn received a written reprimand and had to pay a $50 case fee. He may continue to practice law.

Except for a two-page order filed publicly — which hints that Blackburn lied to the Army and police “to avoid disclosing that the female friend had stabbed him” — the state case file is sealed.

Blackburn could not be reached for comment. His forwarding address leads to a post office box owned by his brother in Drasco. A woman answering a telephone number registered in his brother’s name said Blackburn returned to Qatar to work for an oil company, but declined to offer any more information.

“Whether she (Oh) intended the knife for herself or to threaten me or injure me, is not entirely clear,” Blackburn wrote investigators. “Although there was no time for all of this to go to through my mind in a logical fashion, this was what I realized led me to lie: Lying there on the ground, fearing I might die, I lied to protect her.”