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

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • What’s in a name (or a report)

    Well one of the newest thing going around thanks to the group Rethink Afghanistan. The report is this one by a independent group titled The Effect of Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. So of course Rethink Afghanistan jumps all over it with this follow up story.

    Yea like we are not trying to do this already.

    Also the photo is worth a look.

    A few things come to mind. The first is a absolute desire from the person taking the photo to cause the viewer to become distanced from the Solider. Following that it is trying to do the opposite with the children in the photo. Lastly, does it not look like there is a cap on that M16?

    It is just frustrating I mean that people do not see things like this. I mean how would it change the story if they used a photo like this instead?

    Oh if that was not enough, Russia media is now claiming that the US military sent “Hardcore Neo-Nazi’s” to Iraq and Afghanistan.

  • IVAW Board candidates

    One of my fans in the IVAW sent me the latest list of IVAW Board candidates. It’s chock full of ISO goodness;

    I’m trying to get more info on them but off the top of my pointy head, here’s the members I’ve already written about;

    Mike Prysner – I wrote a post about him along with his records last December.

    Sara Beining wrote a post supporting Matthis’ flag burning on her own blog.

    Addrienne Kinne is the main ISO force in the IVAW leadership and a big supporter of Matthis. She probably put him in charge of the vetting process for the Board.

    Eddie Falcon did a “First Casualty” thing out in San Francisco once.

    Robyn Murray was on the stage with Matthis when he burned the flag. She was also the clueless clown in this video.

    Robin Long was one of James Branum’s first clients – he absconded to Canada, returned, got imprisoned, wrote a letter to Obama requesting leniency and is currently on tour with Matthis explaining the “Collateral Murder” video to high school kids even though he never set foot in any war zone.

    Geoff Millard is one of our first Stolen Valor cases.

    Chris Capps hangs out with real honest-to-God communists like Darnell Steven Summers in Germany and helped Andre Shepperd abscond from the Army.

    TJ Buonomo     was on the Board and resigned last year because of IVAW’s retention of Carl Webb as a member.

    Garret Reppenhagen was a good buddy of Rick Duncan aka Richard Strandloff and probably brought him into IVAW in the first place despite the fact that Strandloff had never in the military. Last I heard Reppenhagen was working at Veterans Green Jobs.

    I like Logan Laituri – we emailed or talked on the phone or something a few years back and I think he’s probably the only genuine CO in the entire organization. So I guess I just sank his candidacy.

    I’ll write more as I get information.

  • Duff laments Hussein’s removal

    I try to stay away from Veterans Today and Gordon Duff the website’s chief editor. But it’s like trying to look away from an eclipse – you know it’s bad for you, but you can’t look away. Duff took the opportunity this 4th of July weekend, usually a time to celebrate the promise of America, to blame the US for all wars in the last century.

    Duff goes on to suggest that if the US should have joined the kaiser in The Great War instead of the allies, that would have prevented all of the wars which followed. I guess he never heard of the Zimmerman Telegram or the sinkng of the Lusitania.

    But the best paragraphs are about our more recent wars;

    Saddam simply couldn’t believe the United States was so stupid. He kept extremists at bay, kept terrorists out of Iraq, produced oil for the United States and kept it flowing as expected, bought everything we had to sell and paid his bills on time. Can we believe all the terrible things he did? Yes, some of them. Inside his own country, the sheiks with the real power were getting sick of him.

    Saddam was sounding more and more like, well, Dick Cheney, a liability even in a dictatorship. In the end, however, whatever bad Saddam had done, paled in comparison with the damage America did, bringing in mobster-bankster rule, starting a civil war, loading Iraq withterrorists, and leaving the country in ruins with well over one million dead and millions more in poverty.

    Kind of like saying “Well, at least Hitler kept the trains running on time”. Duff buys into every conspiracy theory about Iraq in the space of a few paragraphs. But he doesn’t stop there. he turns his pop gun on the Afghanistan war;

    There would be no reason to draw the United States into Afghanistan, certainly 9/11 had nothing to do with it, there were no terrorists in Afghanistan at that time, unless something else was going on. What was going on that needed the US to be pushed into an area so remote that resupplying troops is almost impossible, an area where running terrorist operations from is equally insane.

    I don’t think even the IVAW, which opposes the Afghanistan War, too, is stupid enough to claim there were no terrorists in Afghanistan on 9-11, and no one was running terrorist operations from Afghanistan. But at least we know that IVAW foes have a fan base at Veterans Today.

  • Pakistanis blame US for suicide bombers

    According to Associated Press, two suicide bombers killed scores of Pakistanis at a shrine in Lahore today. Of course, the Pakistanis blame the US;

    “America is killing Muslims in Afghanistan and in our tribal areas (with missile strikes), and militants are attacking Pakistan to express anger against the government for supporting America,” said Zahid Umar, 25, who frequently visits the shrine, where 180 people were also wounded.

    Pakistanis are suffering because of American policies and aggression in the region, said Mohammed Asif, 34, who runs an auto workshop in Lahore. He and others said the attacks would end if the U.S. would pull out of Afghanistan.

    It sounds like their talking points are coming from the anti-war far-Leftists in the US. Of course it’s our fault because 9-11 never happened. bin Laden and Mullah Omar were sipping camel-dung tea one day when George Bush personally flew aircraft against the poor souls.

    Of course, what good would it do to blame the real terrorists – they don’t have any money.

    Washington “is encouraging Indians and Jews to carry out attacks” in Pakistan, said Arifa Moen, 32, a teacher in the central city of Multan.

    Don’t forget Eskimos and midget wrestlers.

  • Matthis is Batman

    I dunno, someone sent me this today and I thought it was hilarious. You might not think so and that’s OK.

    I think the funniest parts are the Polly Purehearts who worry about his well-being. What a bunch of doinks.

  • WCW at Warped Tour

    This very mature group of veterans manned a booth at the Warped Tour punk rock concert in Mountain View, CA this weekend for World Can’t Wait‘s We Are Not Your Soldiers.

    Oh, wait, there’s only one veteran in the group – Robin Long who absconded to Canada before his unit deployed to Iraq. And he’s the expert on the Iraq War;

    Some people thought Iraq had attacked the US on 9/11, and they didn’t know the difference between Al Qaeda and the Taliban. We asked them how Islamic Fundamentalists became a force in the world, and many of them would say that they have been around forever. They insisted that civilians being killed by the U.S is not the fault of the military but the result of “bad apples.”

    Robin talked about his experience in boot camp, where people are TRAINED to kill civilians – and that is why he resisted. He gave examples of being taught to shoot civilians and degrade people, especially Middle Eastern people. People would bust through the crowd and jump into the conversation, saying that these wars were wrong and they were on our side and would sign up on the spot.

    Yeah, that’s how you win wars – by training to kill people who have nothing to do with the war. Long is still trying to make excuses for his bad behavior.

    I wonder who the giant pedophile is in the back row of the picture.

  • Swanson still whining about the Left

    Last year, I caught mighty communist David Swanson whining about MoveOn and TrueMajority, Leftist organizations which had previously opposed the Republican war, now they were silent while Democrats occupied both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Well today, on War Is A Crime he expands his list of organizations who previously opposed the war but no longer;

    1. Organizations that opposed wars when Bush was president but don’t now:
    Campaign for America’s Future, the Center for American Progress, DailyKos, Democracy for America, Moveon.org, National Organization for Women, Open Left, the Out of Iraq Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, Talking Points Memo, True Majority.

    2. Organizations that still opposed war funding in 2009 but not now:
    Alternet, The American Friends Service Committee, The Backbone Campaign, Calitics, Declaration of Peace, Docudharma, FireDogLake, The Hip Hop Caucus, Humanists for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, The Nation, The Out of Iraq Blogger Caucus, Peace No War, The Urban Journal, The Young Turks.

    Now, first of all, War Is A Crime.org changed their name from After Downing Street.org – that was clearly a reference to the Downing Street Memo which was supposed to be proof of some sort malfeasance on the part of the Bush Administration. Last i checked, we’re still in a time that is after the Downing Street memo, so why the name change, Dave, since you’re a founder?

    Notice in his list #2 Swanson includes the IVAW probably because he recognizes that IVAW is an impotent group of non-war veterans who are more concerned with getting out of debt than any real opposition to the war. Well, other than hanging a banner in an empty building in Detroit or alienating most of the real veterans in this country by burning a flag without apologies.

    Winter Soldier was the closest thing to an effective campaign IVAW has assembled. What do they have now? Matthis on a cross-country bus tour talking with high school kids about things he knows nothing.

  • Dirty Hippie starts new website to “Free West Point”…

    Not much to see there yet, but this website bears some watching to see if we can get any good humor out of them. The About Us section doesn’t have much:

    Over the last nine years, peace workers in the lower Hudson Valley have gone to West Point to call for an end to the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. An ad hoc group of us want to go beyond what can be said on banners and placards, using this website to raise basic questions for cadets and educators, provide news and analysis and stimulate debate.

    For myself, I can not wait to hear what they have to say. Right now you get a meager faire of asinine questions like:

    Question for West Point cadets and educators:

    Is it consistent with international law, human rights, common decency and the good order and morale of the military to send US forces to secure resources in other countries?

    Go ahead, try to answer that question. Only…..I thought those decisions were made by our civilian leadership? Aren’t they the ones who are supposed to address those issues? I only bring this up because I know the dirty hippies will answer with some long ridiculous answer citing to the Nuremberg trials, all the while forgetting that the same dirty hippies were mad last week at Stan the Man for taking it upon himself to have an opinion. Now they want the cadets to take in mind common decency when factoring in whether to go where they contractually are obligated to go.

    So far this website has only three links. One to some bullshit Marjorie Cohn, formerly of the National Lawyers Guild, wrote bashing Obama. I had the sorry displeasure of reading her shittastic Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. My review on Amazon was this:

    Vigorously fact-checked by a pride of glue-sniffing marmosets with a Ouija board, Rules of Disengagement is a useless compendium of all the debunked canards from the last 7 years. I wish that instead of spending the $14.95 on this piece of crap I had simply replicated the experience of reading it by giving myself a scrotal laceration and then dipping it in turpentine and lemon juice. The legal reasoning behind this book it is roughly as logical as eating an omelet made of pigeon droppings.

    Majorie Cohn has gotten every one of her clients that I can find the worst possible judgment. You are better off getting legal advice from a hobo on a train.

    If you are a troop who wants to get out, do it without this bufoon who is more interested in making political points than aiding clients. Seriously, it is easy to get out, but not with her driving the clown car.

    Next up we have a piece by Bob Herbert of the NYT who hasn’t written a sensible word in 20 years.

    Lastly we get a link to a video by PBS between Bill Moyers and Andrew Bacevich. The latter is a Gold Star Dad, so I won’t speak ill of the man, but he might have a bit more emotional investment than one might deem proper.

    Anyway, I for one love these dirty hippie sites, since I think their sense of humor is second to none.

    BTW- Thanks to our friend Greta Perry of Hooah Wife for forwarding that little bit of insanity.

    UPDATE: Oh for the love of Spongebob….look at who is involved in this crap, Tom Hayden.

    You know, former husband of Jane Fonda and founder of SDS.