This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • Moonbats upset that military prison is difficult to enter

    The folks at FiredogLake tried to get a petition of 42,000 signatures to Wikileaker Bradley Manning in the military detention facility at Quantico, VA this weekend. It’s difficult to make out what happened from the posts I’ve read from shrieking harpy, Jane Hamsher or her associate Michael Whitney. I guess it’s all written in Moonbat.

    But as near as I can determine, the military decided that the duo wasn’t going to visit Manning, and they were successful. It also looks like that Hamsher’s car was uninsured so the military had it towed – that’s a pretty common occurrence. I’ve seen it happen on every military facility I’ve entered. That’s not harassment, it’s policy.

    It was really heartening to David to hear of everyone’s support when we were being threatened with arrest, searched and detained for two hours. What happened was not a surprise. It’s sad that this is what we have all come to expect when advocating for the civil rights of someone who has been identified as an “enemy of the state,” without benefit of a trial. But here we are.

    I don’t know what the “enemy of the state” thing is about, I haven’t heard Manning called that by anyone in or out of the military, so that it required “quotes”, but there’s been no trial because of Manning’s rights. Nidal Hussein hasn’t been to trial either, but it’s pretty clear that he pulled the trigger and shot dozens of people at Fort Hood. It’s also pretty clear that Manning did the Wikileaks thing and many of the security measures surrounding him are for his own protection – from himself as well as his fellow inmates.

    Hippies shouldn’t bother to evaluate the military culture and compare it to life outside of the military. They end up looking like morons. And, Jane, insure your car like a grown up.

  • Why do I do this to myself.

    Recently I have been on two different conversations that have me banging my head against the wall.

    The first one was a re-post on Facebook article by a guy by the name Scott Bonn. The standard claims, the UN did not approve, violated international law, we needed the UN’s approval for it to be legal, and accusations of war crimes.

    So I posted on the person’s post and she said that she was friends with the guy and that I would get a reply from him. I was thinking that I might get a decent reply: mistake one. He responded when I posted about the UN’s resolutions that supported us being in Iraq all the way until 2008. Which he replied.

    The resolution was to “inspect” not to bomb and kill tens of thousands of its citizens! An invasion requires a UN authorization which the Bush crowd sought but, when denied, they conveniently said they didn’t need it. The invasion also violated the Nuremberg Charter as an aggressive act of war and the occupation, torture and killing violated the Geneva conventions. Ask any other expert on the international laws of war and they will tell you the same. Thank you.

    So my douche bag dectector is going off big time, but I wanted to reply to this “expert” to see what his sources would be if I listed the UN resolutions regarding Iraq. I even gave him direct links to the UN resolutions right off the UN’s website. Also reminded him about the cease fire and that Afghanistan was a UN approved operation. So I was thinking maybe that just maybe I might get a response to these Resolutions. Mistake 2.

    Doesn’t justify an invasion. Plain and simple under international law.

    Yea, that counters everything, just reply back with a comment that all but says: “I am right because I say so”.

    I message the person to say that I am hardly impressed with her new “friend” and she was less then impressed as well about the exchange.

    Then there was another one were I was directed to this link after I used Iraq as a example of a working counter-insurgency place. The person that I replied to was making a comment that only a operation like the one in Sri Lanka.

    The article starts off with the again standard claim that there is a Civil War raging in Iraq

    Bombings took the lives of 62 Shiite pilgrims, mostly in the holy city of Karbala, but also in Diyala province. Sunni Arab guerrillas are still attempting to destabilize the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki by provoking Shiite-Sunni feuds and spreading a feeling of instability that interferes with investment and reconstruction. .

    The second I saw Diyala providence got my attention right away. For those that do not know I was stationed in Iraq from 2008-2009. So considering that I went on over 165 missions in this area, I wanted to know what he was trying to paint that place as.

    All these years after George W. Bush’s insane war of choice against Iraq, that country remains mired in civil war, as social scientists define it:

    Ugh, no it was not really as bad as he claims it is. You can read my thoughts on this on that link.

    Also his confidence in US and the Iraqi populations is less then stunning.

    The bad news is that there is no early prospect of this civil war ending, and security improvements have leveled off in recent months.

    All this is not to say that the 47,000 US troops still in the country should remain (at all!) If Arabic-speaking, Iraqi Shiite troops and police could not stop a truck bombing in Karbala, US troops wouldn’t have a prayer of doing so. This level of violence cannot in fact bring down the Iraqi government. But it can keep Iraq from attracting foreign investment and keep the population nervous, and so is an element of destabilization.

    Bush and the Neoconservatives’ shining beacon on a hill has in fact become a nearly 8 year long civil war, with no end in sight.

    But then again this is the same guy that said this.

    There are rumors that the Israeli government may declare a unilateral cease fire Saturday. They had better. Because if they ruin the Obama inauguration by splashing the bloody bodies of dead Palestinian children all over the press during the next few days, no Americans, even the most pro-Israeli, are going to forgive them.

    Why do I do this to myself thinking that I get a real conversation.

    ADDED:

    I just got this a reply.

    Of course there’s a civil war: that’s what the neocons wanted and that’s why there was no post-war planning. The Israel Lobby neocons pretend to be about spreading democracy whereas they actually are about destabilization. Michael A. Ledeen wrote in his 2002 book The War Against the Terror Masters: “First and foremost, we must bring down the terror regimes, beginning with the big three: Iran, Iraq, and Syria.” “Stability is an unworthy American mission…. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia…The real issue is not whether, but how best to destabilize.” Of course, fomenting civil wars and destabilizing the Muslim enemies of Israeli expansionism has been a longtime Israeli strategy. This policy was enunciated in February 1982 by Israeli strategist Oded Yinon writing in the World Zionist Organization magazine Kivunim. The idea was to dissolve Israel’s enemies into powerless mini-states. Yinon relished the Iraq-Iran War which he hoped would lead to civil war and fragmentation of Iraq, Israel’s most feared enemy. It did not. However, the Zionist neocons then lied us into the unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003 which did foment a civil war. Similarly, the current US/Israel-pushed Hariri tribunal is aimed at destabilizing Lebanon. That’s what the neocons want.

    **FACE PALM**

  • Matthis is bigger than life and MLK

    One of my ninjas sent me a loooong conversation Matthis had with his acolytes last night, reading through it all, it all boiled down to this single post;

    Yes, that makes complete (non)sense. He decides that because he is more radical than King, he’s more significant than King. Matthis drags out tired old rhetoric from Eisenhower’s final address to the nation about the military-industrial complex, and even though he compared himself to King last year at about this time, Matthis wants to disassociate himself this year;

    The reason? King doesn’t measure up to Matthis’ radical ideal. And somehow, he manages to claim that we’re afraid of black mens’ penises.

  • Images of war as propaganda?

    Just A Grunt sends us links to a Democratic Underground “discussion” about a Huffington Post article written by Michael Shaw who types while staring at his navel and ruminating about the photos which accompany his article;

    …[I]n the aggregate this is a stunning display of American chauvinism given the intimate framing of the war in such a redundantly heroic narrative, all eyes on our warriors as saviors on high.

    Just A Grunt reminds us that the three media sources which bring us the pictures in the article are attempts at recreating one of the iconic images that came out of the Vietnam War on the cover of Life magazine;

    See how chauvinistic? American military personnel are Americans before they’re anything. They are the kid that used to deliver your morning paper and mow your lawn…they weren’t raised on a soldier farm somewhere. They truly care about each other, they fight in your name, too, but mostly they fight for each other.

    They don’t need your asinine pontifications and analysis. Mostly they just need you to shut your fucking mouth for a few minutes while they do the job you don’t have the guts to do. The job you’re quietly glad they do without accepting your own responsibility for the reason they’re there in the first fucking place.

    Those hippies should really be afraid of their stupid rhetoric triggering some violence.

  • Things said in our names.

    Some of the newer things going around on Facebook, Conservatives growing weary of Afghan war: study

    A new survey commissioned by the Afghanistan Study Group reveals that conservatives and tea party voters are growing concerned about the sustainability of US operations in Afghanistan.

    Sixty-six percent of conservatives said the US should diminish its military presence in Afghanistan — 39 percent supported reduced troop levels while 27 percent championed prompt withdrawal.

    The only time I have ever heard people call for a draw down is that the President should go all in our all out, not a in between. But this is being passed around as it it is a sudden change that the those against the Wars are winning political ground.

    Of course that means putting out more videos like this one by Kathy Kelly.

    Just back from Afghanistan, Kathy talks about the impact of the war, Afghan desires for non-military solutions, and the role of the US peace movement.

    The second part can be found here.

    Of course videos like this would not be complete without anti-recruiting videos.

    Straight talk from soldiers, veterans and their family members tells what is missing from the sales pitches presented by recruiters and the military’s marketing efforts.

    So in short everything is your fault you blood thirsty bastard, but we really care about you.

  • What is going around on Facebook: Village Razing by US troops.

    I have a few friends on Facebook on the opposite side of the Afghanistan War so I get several links that pass around. This one caught my eye.

    The Unforgivable Horror of Village Razing

    Long story short is that the author is upset that we dealt the Taliban that kicked out the villagers and used their homes as weapons. But at a glance the article implies that we are randomly destroying villages to not “lose momentum”.

    Of course when people have mentioned that the town was a bomb they just started the insults.

    The point of these razing is not to hurt the people or even influence them – the purpose is to make safe the area for the civilians in the most effective and efficient manner possible.

    They didn’t raze a harmless village. The village was turned into a massive bomb by the Taliban. The US forces destroyed a Taliban stronghold that just happened to have been a civilian town before. The Taliban are the enemy of the people here, not the US Soldiers. If the Taliban hadn’t filled the place with bombs, after kicking out the civilians, it wouldn’t have had to have been destroyed.

    Here is another good one that the author does not consider.

    Yes, the explosives imbedded in the village would have made it difficult for the soldiers to “clear it” safely – without assistance from the villagers, that is. You have to wonder, if the village was turned into a “massive bomb,” how were the villagers able to live in it? Surely a little effort at diplomacy would have yielded the neccessary information, building friendships instead of hostility.

    I have seen it myself in Iraq in 2008. They drive out the local population and use the houses for House borne IEDs.

    But since people will just look at the photos make a false assumption about what is going on in Afghanistan.

  • IVAW and Jeff Hanks

    Jeff Hanks went AWOL last year when he was scheduled to deploy. His excuse is that he needs treatment for his PTSD. To prove that he didn’t go AWOL as a publicity stunt, he turned himself in after his unit deployed, on Veterans’ Day at a press conference. Yeah, I know.

    Well, of course, since it conveniently segues with IVAW’s Operation Recovery program which claims that wounded troops are being re-deployed while they’re still being treated, IVAW took up Hanks’ cause.

    Here’s video of someone (I think it’s Jason Hurd but who can tell with all of that fur) delivering an Article 138 complaint to the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division on Hanks’ behalf.

    For those of you who are wondering what an Article 138 is, it’s a complaint from a servicemember against his commander, because a service member thinks he or she is being mistreated. From the Navy’s IG website;

    Any member of the Armed Forces who believes he/she has been wronged by his Commanding Officer must seek redress with the Commanding Officer personally.

    What the above paragraph doesn’t say is that some random, unclean hippie off of the street can just walk into a brigade headquarters and file an Article 138 complaint on behalf of some member of the military. And I’m pretty sure that’s what the young staff sergeant in the video is thinking.

    That Navy website also says;

    Who should I contact to obtain more information about Article 138 procedures?

    Your legal officer or command Staff Judge Advocate.

    Notice that it doesn’t say “Ask any random, unclean, errant hippie off of the street”. The last word in the above quote is “personally”. The last time I checked, some unclean pot-smoking hippie handing a random staff sergeant a sheaf of papers isn’t “personally” between Hanks and his commander.

    So I guess this is just more ineffective theater on the part of IVAW in what could be a laudable and effective campaign if they kept words like “AWOL” out of it. How can we take IVAW seriously if they’re going to make the same empty gestures that they always make?

  • Ward Reilly; we’re all like Loughner or something

    I’m sure you remember Ward Reilly who we exposed as a phony Rangerhere, here, and here. Well, according to my ninjas, he decided that he’d make a useless point on his Facebook page last night;

    If I interpret this as he intended it, Ward is saying that we’re all like Jared Loughner because we kill armed insurgents intent on killing our soldiers. Is that what Loughner was doing? Yeah, it’s just the same, Ward…only completely different.