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

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • The Jake Diliberto fairy tales

    I wrote about Jake Diliberto a few weeks back. He’s one of the founders of “Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan” which is a group of veterans who seek to have the US withdraw from Afghanistan. He appears on al Jazeera, the old, failed Olbermann show and Russia TV, like the clip above in which the presenter at about 1:18 into the video calls Jake an “Iraq and Afghanistan veteran”. Here’s screen shot that Hondo found from Jake’s time in college when he told the publication’s writer that he was in the Marines as a special operator;

    And here’s his HuffPO profile which says that Diliberto is a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq;

    EDITOR’S NOTE: Since I first took the above screen shot of Diliberto’s bio on HuffPo, he’s changed it to read that he served in “Af/Pak” in 2001 because I told him that I was publishing this and sent him a copy of the draft of this post.

    I’m having trouble getting his records, but I’ve got something better – I’m getting emails from his former platoon sergeant and squad leader and his battalion commander who tell me things that I wouldn’t find in his records anyway. It seems that Jake was a big shitbird and he was a shitbird before the war against terror even began.

    Some folks overheard him telling his mother that he was calling from a secret mission in Cuba in the Spring of 2001. When this was reported to his squad leader, Diliberto was punished for lying to his mother by being placed on guard duty, during which he fell asleep and was rewarded with Non-judicial punishment (NJP) which means he was fined and restricted with, perhaps some extra duties.

    In another incident, he was telling stories to a person he thought was a civilian about his time with Force Recon. Turns out that she was actually the battalion commander’s daughter. The BC was pretty angry about that and called him on the carpet.

    His squad leader also caught him on leave wearing a Force Recon T-shirt on his way home when he thought he was safe from his unit’s scrutiny.

    The unit deployed immediately after 9-11 by ship. his leaders put him on duty in the kitchen of the ship where he intentionally lanced his hand to get out of working there. When they got to Pakistan prior to their deployment into Afghanistan, Diliberto locked and loaded his weapon and threatened his corporal which resulted in the unit giving him another NJP action and included a bust to Private. His unit went on to Afghanistan while Diliberto went back to working in the ship’s kitchen.

    In 2002, when his unit got back on the ship, they heard stories from the sailors with whom he interacted about his wild tales of daring-do in Afghanistan. they also discovered evidence that he was emailing back to the States the same tales and that he was working with SEALs, so they took away his privileges to put an end to his antics. For the remainder of the cruise, Diliberto spent his time on paint duty. Here’s a statement from one of his senior sergeants describing his shitbird behavior;
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  • What Memorial Day means to NY Times readers

    Cortillaen sends us a link to an article in the New York Times which highlights the saddest images it can as their Memorial Day weekend remembrance, One image is probably one you’re familiar with – Katherine Cathey, camped out overnight by the remains of her husband LT James Cathey on the night before his burial. Cortillaen warned me in his eamil to not read the comments, but, I couldn’t help it;

    At the end of the article you ask an incredibly important question: What can I do?

    What can we do? We can push our state and federal representatives to more heavily subsidize higher education so that we can have a much larger percent of the population with fully developed intellects.

    […]

    Is there any doubt that with a more educated, more discerning, more deliberative voting population that George W. Bush would have ever been elected? A man that lacked the most essential quality that is necessary in United States President, i.e., intellectual curiosity.

    An educated people would have more broadly pinpointed his lack of intellectual curiosity and therefore would have concluded that he cannot handle the nuance of critical decisions because he lacks the self-derived onus to investigate these nuances. The Iraq war would never have happened and future wars can likewise be avoided. That is what we can do.

    Did you resist paying your taxes to fund these wars? Did you demonstrate, speak out, write to your political leaders, write letters to the editor? Did you, and do you, do everything you can to prevent needless wars? If the answer is yes, I salute you.

    The Iraq war is especially tragic, started by a bunch of psychopaths who do what psychopaths do: lie, self-serve, and enjoy the spectacle of the death and destruction they cause.

    Read Robert Hare’s book on psychopaths, Without Conscience, to understand how the Iraq war happened, how Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld came to power, how Little George was so manipulated; how dangerous Romney is.

    Nowadays, is the decision to enter the military merely and solely an economic one? If so, one will surely never see the top 1% submit to military service and go in harm’s way.

    What “American values” are worthy of this sacrifice? Do those values include “maximization of shareholder value”?

    Is it to be regretted that “corporate persons” are unable to go in harm’s way on behalf of their (financial) interests like flesh-and-blood human “resources” and “capital”?

    I remember the old anti-war phrase from the 60’s: “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” It’s a good question, isn’t it? Bush and Blair got America involved in a senseless war based on lies. There wasn’t even a draft in place. Why do men so willingly march off to kill on command in behalf of the Anglo-American oil cartel? Very sad indeed.

    He was sent to his death (by men who evaded military service themselves everyone of them) on the otherside of the world to kill poor people and farmers.

    Ask his widow what she thinks of the war

    Every solider, in every war, who is not sent because s/he is a literal slave, goes because s/he chose to go. If the soldiers would refuse to fight, we would have no war. War happens because people think war is exciting and noble, or necessary, or inevitable.

    The USA had no business going to war in Iraq and shouldn’t be in Afghanistan. The POTUS at the time lied, straight forwardly and stupidly, lied. I knew it then and so did many of my friends. Nonetheless, many people, men and women, chose to go to these places and fight.

    And then they wonder why there’s a gap between the military and the people they’re defending in this country.

  • Abdo guilty

    I’m sure no one is especially surprised, but Naser Abdo was found guilty after about an hour of deliberation. He’s admitted repeatedly that his intention was to kill Fort Hood soldiers in large numbers with a bomb in a local restaurant frequented by soldiers.

    Media interest has waned somewhat since they found out that Abdo was a conscientious objector and a child pornographer, you’d think that after the media’s overblown coverage in the first few hours of his arrest would have led to more on this subject. At least he’s knocked his lawyer James Branum out of the soldier-hustling business, since Branum was his lawyer in the proceedings for conscientious objector and then to defend him against the porn charges.

    I’m sure that if the Feds looked hard enough, they’d find connections to the Under the Hood Cafe, the IVAW’s local hangout that Branum frequented and trolled for prospective clients. Not that I think that IVAW knew about his bomb plot, but I’m sure that they supported him in some way. Why else would he have gone to Killeen.

    Waco’ News 25 reports that Abdo was found guilty of these charges;

    1 count Attempting to Use a Weapon of Mass Destruction
    1 count Attempted Murder of U.S. Officers or Employees
    4 counts Possessing a Weapon in Furtherance of a Federal Crime of Violence

    Abdo could now face up to life in prison.

    One less domestic terrorist to worry about.

  • Veterans Today: Tossing medals was an “heroic act”

    Those as yet unbeaten rented mules at Veterans Today have stretched the definition of “heroic” to include those douche nozzles in Chicago Sunday who tossed their medals at NATO. Of course, a featured photo is that of phony Ranger puss bucket, Graham Crumpner;

    What’s really disgusting about Crumpner and his phony Ranger act is that I know for a fact that IVAW knows that he’s not a Ranger, but they let him use that label in media interviews. But, that’s alright, because we finally have an address on him and the FOIA request has been submitted. You would have thought that they would have learned after fake Ranger Jesse MacBeth.

    But, back to the “heroics” of this act. What is so heroic about standing in a crowd of anti-war protesters and being their mannequin and making an anti-war statement? What might be more brave would be standing in a crowd of the Gathering of Eagles folks and proclaiming those words. But that would lean more in the direction of being foolish.

    What about the heroic people who left IVAW and the anti-war movement. After realizing that they were being used to project their own military service on to those who had never served, or those clowns who had never left the country, dozens decided to stand up for themselves and walk away, some more vocally than others. That’s heroic. They went against the grain and condemned IVAW’s heroes like Matthis and Carl Webb in the face of criticism and derision. Some of them even faced down the ass-munch clowns who tried to get them to desert or refuse their deployment orders “for the movement”.

    So where is Veterans Today on the case of the abused folks in the anti-war movement who stood up to the peer pressure and threats of acts of violence and go their own way? I didn’t see anyone being abused or threatened in Chicago. Those clowns were just going along with the crowd around them. How is that heroic?

    Thanks to TSO for the link.

  • Abdo’s dastardly plot revealed in court

    In U.S. District Court in Waco, TX, the prosecutors revealed the plot which PFC Naser Jason Abdo had planned for residents of Killeen, Texas last July. Associated Press reports;

    [FBI special agent C. Michael Owens] testified that Abdo told investigators he planned to put a bomb in what looked like a gift box, leave it a Chinese buffet frequented by Fort Hood soldiers, wait outside and shoot any survivors.

    “He said he wanted to give faith to brother [Maj. Nidal Hasan] … and said `People think he’s crazy, but he’s not crazy and I came here to remind the people,’” Owens testified.

    Owens testified earlier that Abdo said he had planned to offer a Fort Campbell soldier a ride, kill him and videotape it while reciting the names of people he felt had been wronged by the U.S. military – including Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was raped before she and her family were killed in 2006.

    His defense attorney rests his whole case on the fact that Abdo hadn’t built his bomb yet…if it hadn’t been for those meddling cops….

    I guess they should have let him go ahead with it and then arrest him among all of those dead bodies. They said that he survived on cash and gift cards. I wonder where those came from, well, I’m not really wondering because he’d been a cause célèbre of the antiwar left.

  • Phony IVAW Ranger tossing medals at NATO

    Art sends us a link to a local CBS TV station article in Chicago in which they interview Graham Crumpner about why he’s tossing his medals at NATO this weekend;

    “I wanted so badly to believe in the idea of America. I wanted to believe that every war we ever fought, we won; that we were always just; that we were always doing the right thing, and trying to help, and save, and protect,” said former Army Ranger Graham Clumpner, who was deployed twice to Afghanistan. “And I bought into it hook, line, and sinker.”

    Clumpner was given a Global War on Terrorism Service Award for his service fighting against the Taliban.

    He said he was proud to join the military, but grew disillusioned, and ashamed of how operations were carried out.

    Yeah, well, now the local TV reporter, Marissa Bailey, can be ashamed, because I emailed our buddies at the Ranger Training Brigade and they don’t have any record of Graham Clumpner attending Ranger School and they said any time he spent in the 2d Battalion would have been extremely brief.

    We got that 2nd Battalion thing from his IVAW profile, which he’s removed from the IVAW website, but the internet remembers;

    Maybe him and Ward Reilly can get together and tell phony Ranger stories about things that never happened to them.

    And, oh, by the way, Graham is another Matthis. According to this article, he avoided being recalled in 2008 and shopped around the VA for a doctor who would certify him for PTS and get him a discharge. So, yeah, when IVAW has someone representing them who’s not a derelict or a liar, let me know.

    Video below the jump:
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  • Barbara Lee’s attempt to cut money off to engaged troops fails

    Yeah, the usual suspects tried once again to cut off funding for the war in Afghanistan led by head moonbat, Barbara Lee, according to the Associated Press;

    “The American people are far ahead of Congress,” said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., sponsor of the amendment, who called on Congress to stand squarely with the American people. “It’s past time to end the war and bring the troops home.”

    Well, I guess the American people want the war to end is because this administration isn’t committed to victory, the White House and the Congressional Democrats are only committed to withdrawal. Barbara Lee and her band of half wits tried throughout 2007 and into 2008 to un-fund the war in Iraq and the surge – all the while unable to pass a national budget. What’s that old saw about the definition of insanity?

  • So Wikileaks Was “No Big Deal” . . . .

    You may have heard that yesterday, Iran hanged an alleged “Mossad spy”, Majid Jamali Fashi.

    Today, published reports indicate that Wikileaks may have been responsible for exposing this individual to Iranian authorities – and thus for his demise.  From the linked article:

    The Times of London reported Wednesday that a document from the US Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, seemingly drew attention to Fashi. The September 2009 US diplomatic document — identified by the code 09BAKU687 — quotes an Iranian source who was a licensed martial arts coach and trainer as describing to his American contacts pressure from the Iranian regime to train soldiers and militiamen in martial arts.

    Fashi was reportedly in Baku for an international martial arts competition only days before the US Embassy document was written.

    The suggestion is that the Iranian authorities identified Fashi as someone who was in illicit contact with the West on the basis of the document. He was arrested days after the publication of the document by WikiLeaks in December of 2010 and charged with carrying out the January 2010 assassination of nuclear scientist Masoud Ali-Mohammadi on behalf of the Mossad.

    I don’t have any idea whether or not Fashi was working for the Mossad, or what exposed him if he was indeed a Mossad agent.  But the above theory is plausible.  Whether it’s the truth or not, I don’t know.

    But it damn sure could be true.

    Congratulations, PFC Manning.  You may now literally have blood on your hands.

    And the next time anyone asserts that Manning giving those quarter-million classified documents to Wikileaks was “no big deal”, refer them to Fashi’s family.  I’m sure his parents and siblings will agree wholeheartedly that Wikileaks was “no big deal.”