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

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • IVAW: Manning is heroic

    I’m sure you remember Bradley Manning, the Army specialist who released classified material to Wikileaks which included the video known by the biased title “Collateral Murder”. Well, IVAW, that band of veterans who pepper their ranks with a few combat veterans to give themselves some measure of credibility, has decided that Manning is a hero for disseminating classified material;

    These videos and possibly more were reportedly leaked by SPC Bradley Manning. Manning worked as an intelligence analyst, and is currently under arrest in Kuwait. If true, Bradley’s actions are heroic and he deserves our support.

    I guess pretty soon they’ll be praising Faisal Shahzad for his attempt to bomb Times Square. Or BP for robbing us of material resources to fight the war. I don’t see any IVAW members trumpeting for Stanley McCrystal or his staff for saying the same things about the Administration that they’ve said.

    Yeah, calling Manning a hero is right up there with burning the flag. I guess Matthis has sent them down this path.

  • Your morning Matthis

    Someone sent me this link yesterday, and if you are still undecided about how Matthis (IVAW Board member and Election Committee Chair) makes you feel, this video will definitely push you over the fence;

    The video is from last year when he was discharged from the military at an administrative board and given a general discharge under honorable conditions for refusing his IRR recall.

    He’s jubilant as he comes out of the board. What he doesn’t tell the journalists is that he got the absolute worst discharge the board could give him – he would have gotten the same discharge if he hadn’t showed up at the hearing. Matthis acts like it’s some big victory, but the board screwed him to the wall. And, oh, despite the fact that he says he gets to keep his benefits, that’s not true. I have been in contact with Veterans Affairs Departmen’s Office of the Inspector General who is working on his case.

    He tells the interviewer that he suffered for his military benefits, when the interviewer asks him how he suffered when he’s never been to the war, he tells the journalist “That’s really unfair”. The interviewer really isn’t sympathetic to Matthis. It’s no wonder I haven’t seen this video before. When he can’t stick to his talking points, Matthis gets really flustered.

    The video is really satisfying.

  • Dissension in the IVAW ranks

    It’s that time of year again – time to nominate IVAW’s board. Oh, and guess who’s in charge of the Election Committee? Yep – Matthis. I’m just guessing, but that’s probably the work of Adrienne Kinne, easily the furthest left and radical member of the leadership of IVAW. She wears her International Socialist Organization (ISO) membership with pride, she’s Mattis’ main defender in IVAW, and she’s a mega-bully when people disagree with her. I guess it’s that shallow intellect.

    Well, anyway, Matthis’ committee sent out invitation to several members to invite them to run for positions on the board late last week because, supposedly, they were nominated by the membership. One nominee sent a letter back to the board rejecting their offer. Among his reasons for turning them down was, of course, Matthis himself;

    Matthis, being a key part of the elections, compromises the integrity of the elections. He has openly and deliberately offended members; expressed his intent to continue to do so and has openly called for us NOT to support soldiers. He states that it is impossible to support the soldier without supporting the war. I, and many other veterans and soldiers, find this idea repulsive. War leaves both sides devastated and by isolating and shunning the very soldiers we are trying to reach, we are only defeating ourselves. While I do not think that we should be supporting the war, every soldier is a human who faces a choice. Just as we wish our right to object should be respected, so we should respect the decsions that those who disagree with us make. We don’t have to approve of their choice, but we shouldn’t let their choice affect our willingness to be there. Regardless of a soldiers support or non-support of the war, when they return from overseas, they will need our help. Loving and treating one’s enemies with respect is never easy nor is it a swift way to bring about change, but it is the only way to affect real and lasting change.

    And, oh, by the way, this veteran who didn’t deploy doesn’t like hanging Iraq Veterans T-shirts on guys who went AWOL from the Coast Guard in Hawaii.

    I am not a deployed veteran and thus do not feel that I should be in a leadership position. To represent myself as something I am not, either by wearing a member’s only t-shirt (something I have stopped doing) or by taking a leadership position, I would be doing a great disservice to those who actually did deploy. The organization is Iraq Veterans Against the War – not Global War on Terror Veterans Against the War and our leadership, at the very least, should reflect that.

    But, real veterans in IVAW either must be getting few and far between, or they’re not getting the respect from the likes of Adrienne Kinne, Geoffrey Millard and Mathis Chiroux that they deserve in an organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War. It seems to me that more real veterans should get the positions, but what do I know? I find it real hard to believe that there are any real veterans left in the organization when I see who puts their faces out front these days. It’s looking more and more everyday like VVAW and VFP – no real war veterans. Just the Ward Reillys, Hal Muskats and Doug Zacharys.

  • No Time For Matthis

    Matthis Chiroux
    A few people have come on this blog and told us what Matthis was like during his service in the Army and after. Now, for the first time, we read about his pre-Army days – and the back story is not really that surprising. Matthis has changed his bio to to include this little fairy tale;

    Matthis was impressed into the U.S. Army at age 18 during a period of homelessness in Alabama.

    Well it turns that it’s not exactly true. He made a series of bad choices in his young life that left the Army as his own option according to his father who sent me the following email;

    Matthis was called to the Lee County Justice Center (Alabama) by his juvenile probation officer after his father reported he had discovered his son was selling mushrooms (the drug kind) in a playground next to the local elementary school. The father met with and invited the local army recruiter, located his son, who was staying in a tent in an older lady’s backyard, and transported him to the Lee County Justice Center for a meeting with his probation officer, his father and the army recruiter. Due to Matthis’ not insignificant juvenile history involving repeated drug and theft incidents Matthis’ father made it clear that Matthis had a choice of joining the army or his father would file a complaint with the Opelika Police Department and testify against him. Matthis probation officer made it clear that being found guilty of selling a controlled substance in such close proximity to an elementary school, combined with his juvenile history would likely result in a minimum 5-year sentence in the State Penitentairy as an adult convict. In the presence of his Juvenile Probation Officer Matthis then turned to the army recruiter and said, “It looks like I am joining the team”, to which the army recruiter asked, “So what do you like to do, besides drugs?”

    So, anyway off Matthis went to the Army and he actually fared pretty well – Sergeant in five years, made it through 5-jump-chump school, assignments to Japan and Germany, honorable discharge. And then the Army called him back for a few months of his IRR obligation and he decided that he didn’t want to cut his hair again and declared his intention to ignore the order and he made a big scene. His father visited him on Fathers’ Day 2008 when Matthis was “hiding out” in the DC IVAW treehouse. While they were down on the National Mall touring DC, Matthis threatened his father;

    …he threatened to reveal the details of how I pushed him into the army. The discussion ended abruptly when my response was “the truth was fine with me, go right ahead.” He looked perplexed…

    Oh, and that whole anti-war thing? For Matthis, it’s situational and subject to revision;

    I asked him earlier that day why he was doing this and he told me he felt the war in Iraq was illegal. I asked him what if the army would be willing to commit to send you to Afghanistan instead. He told me he would not hesitate to go, that war was sanctioned by the U.N. and was legal. He was very clear about that.

    That’s funny because in April 2009, he apologized for his minuscule part in the occupation of Afghanistan to Afghanistan peace activist Malalai Joya when he said “[I]n 2005, for a brief time, I helped occupy Malalai’s country, and it was wrong.”

    The only thing Matthis occupied in Afghanistan was the corner booth at the Baskin Robbins on Bagram airbase – if he even went at all. Thus far, I haven’t seen any evidence that he even went to Afghanistan.

    Oh, and the part about being homeless, well, it seems his father asked him what he was going to do after high school and he told his father he was going to “hang out” and his father told that’s not an option, that he had ten days to decide what he was going to do with his life. At the end of the ten days, Dr. Chiroux put Matthis’ stuff in a storage locker. Matthis pitched a tent in a friend’s yard and sold drugs at a playground near an elementary school. That’s homeless to Matthis.

    The only reason he was homeless is because he’d burned bridge after bridge behind him until he had no choices except the militar – and he was damned lucky they took him. So he repays the Army for giving him an opportunity to straighten his life out (and paying for college) by thumbing his nose at them when they needed him during the Surge. So he treated the Army like he treats everyone else in his life.

    And, oh, those schools that let him talk to their kids, I wonder how they’d like to know that he sold drugs at a playground next to an elementary school. Knowing schools these days, they’d probably make him a guidance counselor.

  • Ethan McCord: “360 degree fire” was SOP

    One of the two soldiers who have been the “go to” guys for the Wikileaks so-called “Collateral Murder” video, Ethan McCord charges that “360 Rotational Fire” was the standard operating procedure for reaction to an IED attack in Iraq in 2007. In an interview published in OpEd News, Steiber said;

    …we had a pretty gung-ho commander, who decided that because we were getting hit by IEDs a lot, there would be a new battalion SOP [standard operating procedure].He goes, “If someone in your line gets hit with an IED, 360 rotational fire. You kill every motherf*cker on the street.” Myself and Josh and a lot of other soldiers were just sitting there looking at each other like, “Are you kidding me? You want us to kill women and children on the street?” And you couldn’t just disobey orders to shoot, because they could just make your life hell in Iraq.

    Throughout the interview, there’s no unit designation, no one names the company or battalion commander – it’s just a completely irrational charge against some unnamed commander in an unnamed unit vacant of any details.

    Of the Wikileaks video, McCord says;

    McCord says the scenes captured in the Wikileaks video are “an every-day occurrence in Iraq.”

    Really?

    McCord says that when he found the two children wounded in the van, another soldier began to vomit and ran off.

    A soldier reacts by vomiting and fleeing to an “every day occurrence”?

    I ran up to the Bradley and placed [the injured boy] inside. My platoon leader was standing there at the time, and he yelled at me for doing what I did. He told me to “stop worrying about these motherfucking kids and start worrying about pulling security.”

    I would have told him the same thing. They were in an unsecured area in indian country and unsure of the situation. The first thing infantrymen do is secure the area. How much good would any of them been to the children if they were all dead? Typical private BS – they always think they know better than their leaders.

    Both Ethan McCord and Josh Steiber were in Bravo Company, 2d Battalion 16th Infantry when the video was shot in 2007. Steiber is a member of IVAW, and McCord may be a member by now, although I can’t find evidence of it yet, so they have an agenda.

    I have to think that there’s someone among my readers who was either a member of this company or knows someone who was there during this time who can verify or deny the accuracy of this order. My opinion, based on my decades-long experience as an infantryman, is that it’s bullshit, but I wasn’t there, so if you were, or if you know someone who was, speak up.

    Thanks to Rob for the heads up.

  • Logic Fail

    Logic Fail

    Yea, found this on Face-book and could not resist commenting on it. So this post is a full reply to a response that I got back. This is insulting beyond words. I am not sure about the rest of those that went but I made sure that I helped the people there when I could. Also it does not take into account that there are many photos like the one below.

    But we are the one’s without humanity because we are on guard due to the fact that the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda sending women, children and the infeasible to the slaughter as human bombs/shields?

  • One for the “Are you shitting me?” file

    From Cassy Fiano, who is quickly becoming my favorite blogger:

    Two teachers at Dennis Yarmouth Regional High School have touched off a firestorm after holding up an “End War” sign at a school assembly where six students who’ve enlisted in the military were being honored.

    Many in the community say the teachers crossed a line and treated their own students with disrespect.

    The students received a standing ovation, but at that point the two teachers sat down refusing to clap.

    Teacher Marybeth Verani defends her protest saying, “I’m showing students in a democracy how to exercise dissent.”

    This happened in Massachusetts, so one might be tempted to say, yeah, that’s Massachusetts. But I went to public school in Mass, and my Dad was a teacher there, and Asst. Principal. And although my Dad is a flaming lefty, he would have punched a teacher in the stones if they tried to pull this bullshit.

    Go read it all over at Cassy’s.

  • Kerry asked to step down from POW Commission

    1stCavRVN11B sent us an article about the reopening of meetings between the US and Russia to determine the fate of American POWs during the Cold War according to Bill Gertz in yesterday’s Inside the Ring column..

    The White House National Security Council has been press­ing for the commission to resume its efforts to gain access to Russian archives where secret files on the fates of hundreds of missing Americans from wars are believed to be held.

    A meeting of the U.S. side of the commission was held June 10 on Capitol Hill, but a key member, Senate Foreign Rela­tions Committee Chairman John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, was absent, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, has not assigned a Democratic House member to the panel.

    Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Geor­gia Republican and the chief of staff for Rep. Sam Johnson, Texas Republican and himself a prisoner of war in Vietnam for seven years, took part

    The absence of the Democ­ratic representatives was crit­icized by several participants. They also voiced concerns that the Defense Intelligence Agency failed to send one of its officials to the meeting.

    The Russians have recently opened their archives in regards to the Polish officers at Katyn Forest, which might signal a thawing of relations in that regard.

    U.S. officials have said privately that the Russians are believed to hold documents that will assist in the hunt for missing Americans, likely including those reported captured and held in Siberia during the Cold War and the Korean conflict.

    Russia has not released documents from this region since the commission was launched in 1992. POW activists suspect Moscow has blocked access to historical records because the records are expected to show the Russians executed scores, if not hundreds, of American POWs.

    Some groups assisting the Commission aren’t pleased with the participation they’re getting from the Democrats at this critical juncture;

    “We deeply appreciate the Obama administration’s efforts but are dismayed the Democratic leadership in Congress cannot find two lawmakers willing to support our POW/MIAs and their families. At a minimum, we call for Speaker Pelosi to fill immediately the empty commission seat for a Democratic congressional representative so that person can take part in the upcoming meeting,” said Dolores Alfond, chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families.

    “We also ask Sen. Kerry to step aside in favor of a senator willing to devote the time and energy needed for this critical mission,” she said.

    I don’t what John Kerry is doing with this commission, anyway. He left his shipmates embattled in Vietnam in 1969 and then bayoneted them all in the back (the same way he shot that wounded Vietnamese kid in the back) with his retarded behavior at Congressional hearings and at Winter Soldier in Detroit, not to mention his antics at various protests. Why does anyone think he’s going to give a tiny, furry rat’s ass about some POWs?

    He’s like Al Gore’s ritarded half-brother/cousin.