Navy Captain: Higher-Ups Okayed Videos
CNN reports:
The Navy captain whose high-flying career was clipped over his raunchy videos shown aboard the USS Enterprise now says his superior officers knew what he was doing and repeatedly praised him.
Capt. Owen Honors defiantly defends himself in a 15-page written statement to investigators, saying the videos prompted not a single complaint and had the "affirmative and tacit approval" of senior Navy leadership.
"Their consistent encouraging feedback constituted approval and affirmation that my conduct was within acceptable Navy standards as the ship's Executive Office," Honors writes in his declaration, first made public by the Navy Times. Its legitimacy has been confirmed by CNN.
"These leaders understood the challenges we faced on Enterprise and understood the context and training purposes for the skits," he writes.
"I was neither formally counseled nor told to stop producing the videos," the statement says.
Honors, a former "Top Gun" fighter pilot, decorated combat veteran and highly praised officer, was second in command of the aircraft carrier when he created and starred in the videos in 2006 and 2007. Honors said they were never intended for public consumption and were created only for the ship's closed-circuit television system to introduce the movie of the week. He maintains they successfully kept morale high on board the Enterprise and conveyed serious information about important issues such as safety, water conservation and responsible alcohol consumption.
The videos included obscenities, a variety of other objectionable material including partial nudity, homophobic jokes and simulated masturbation. But Owen said in his statement that his "PG-13 adult level humor" of his amateur video skits was less offensive than the R-rated commercial movies they preceded.
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