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

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • They can’t end the war, so they’ll end troops’ futures

    Does this sound like the military you guys served in;

    It’s a place where drug abuse is rampant, suicide is common, and mental health is severely placed at risk. One in three women stands a chance of being raped — as do one in four men — and the violence directed toward each other undercuts the real fight against the enemy.

    Not mine. But that’s what’s being described by “IV”AW members Cherish Summer Ray Hodge and Brigitte Wooten to their local media in Ventura County, CA.

    What sounds like a prison environment in theory was a near reality for people like Cherish Hodge or Brigitte Wooten, members of a local peace group formed by recent veterans of the Iraq Conflict.

    Their search for new members willing to come forward and join the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) punctuates the proud military sentiment set forth this season, after the passing of Veterans Day, with a sharp caveat: awareness of the injustices and dissent within the ranks of the U.S. armed forces’ own soldiers.

    “It’s different for us to be in an environment where there’s so much racism and bigotry and homophobia,” says Hodge, 26, president of the IVAW Ventura branch. “The military is a melting pot of all of those things. Suddenly, you’re exposed to that.”

    Of course, both of them have never been to Iraq or Afghanistan, that’s a membership requirement now, apparently. So they’re not speaking of the war, although they’d like to think they are. Here’s Cherish Blah Blah Blah’s profile from IVAW;

    cherish-summer-ray-hodges-ivaw-profile

    Brigitte doesn’t have a profile on IVAW, but in the article she describes her military service;

    Wooten was discharged from the Navy one year ago this month after a five-year stint in the Navy that sent her to Kuwait for about eight months. Having served as a hospital corpsman, she, too, was witness firsthand to blatant drug and alcohol abuse, which, among other soldiers, led to medical problems from drunken brawls, near overdoses and attempted suicides.

    “I went in knowing I would be seeing some things. I didn’t think I would have seen as many rampant things,” Wooten said. “When you go to boot camp, you’re taught to look up to your officers and enlisted; you expect a certain amount of professionalism and a family-type bond. But you don’t see that very often.”

    Someone buy Wooten a dictionary, or tell her what “rampant” means.

    And, of course, they have Dahr Jamail and his useless contribution to bolster their yammering;

    Jamail recounted stories about women GIs stationed in the Middle East, so afraid to use latrines after dark, for fear of being jumped and assaulted by their fellow male soldiers, that some died of dehydration.

    Yeah, that story came from Col. Janis Karpinski and her useless testimony to the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration which has been thoroughly discredited for nearly four years by Greyhawk and Soldier’s Dad.

    “A lot of veterans, the last thing they want is to get back into these problems,” [Cher-blah-Summer-blah-blah] said. “Just because there [aren’t] a lot of outspoken veterans, doesn’t mean we aren’t here.”

    Or, maybe, you just like wearing a shirt that says “Iraq Veterans” on it. The lie that IVAW has 1700 active members is false – with all of the resignations, has anyone seen the number fall even a hair? What was it 79 members who showed up at Silver Spring? 1621 were busy that weekend? Only had enough money to provide Carl Webb with free transportation?

    Out of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who’ve served, IVAW can scare up 79 for their annual convention. Well, 78 and Carl Webb – as long as IVAW pays.

  • Two stories of GI Resistance

    The IVAW is running an article on their website about two brave GI Resisters. Here’s the screen shot about Ryan Jackson and Marc Hall;

    jackson-hall

    We’re already familiar with Ryan Jackson, since he spent a lot of my bandwidth trying to rehabilitate his image on another post a week or so ago. Basically, Jackson got popped on a urinalysis test and then went AWOL and James Branum got him locked up. Of course, Ryan’s story is that he became a peace activist and pissed hot on purpose, however the sequence of the events leading up to his trial aren’t in his favor.

    Now, Marc Hall, on the other hand, is new to us. Just judging by what the folks at IVAW wrote on this little story, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He’d done a tour of Iraq with the 3rd ID, came back, was getting ready to ETS and they stop-lossed him. I’ll admit that sucks and he has a right to be angry, but he didn’t stop there.

    Hall claims he is a musician and song writer, but that’s all a matter of taste. When he got stop-lossed, he wrote a song called “Stop Loss” (figures, right?). Now he claims it’s his 1st Amendment right to write whatever he wants – but his unit put him in jail for his little ditty. Why? I listened to his song, even though I’m not a big rap fan, and in it, he sings (is that the right word?) that he’s going to lock and load a thirty-round magazine and kill all of the E-7s and above – less than a month after another soldier shot scores of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. Can you really blame his chain of command for locking him up for Hall’s and the Army’s protection?

    Well, all of the usual suspects are calling for Hall’s immediate release. Seriously. The IVAW, Courage to Resist and Labor Against the War all posted the phone number to “the jail” so the hippies can all feel good about themselves by calling Hall’s jailers and demanding his release (yeah, that’ll work overnight). They also posted his company commander’s name and his unit address (although according to AKO, Hall is assigned to a Forward Support Battalion and the address they posted is to an infantry company).

    I guess the Army can’t do anything right as far as the IVAW and their cohorts are concerned. Too bad Branum isn’t defending Hall.

  • The Clinton strategy returns

    The Obama Administration has dusted off a Clinton-era strategy of dealing with terrorists by firing off a couple of Cruise missiles into Yemen. ABC explains the objective;

    One of the targeted sites was a suspected al Qaeda training camp north of the capitol, Sanaa, and the second target was a location where officials said “an imminent attack against a U.S. asset was being planned.”

    Of course, none of our resident anti-war folks are calling this an “attack [on] a third world country that didn’t attack us” and it appears that the Obama Administration has found value in the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes in dealing with terrorists. But luckily for Obama, he doesn’t have to deal with the Left questioning his motives and accusing him of using fear mongering to accomplish political objectives.

    Does anyone else thinks it’s a little strange that we’re firing off missiles into Yemen while contemplating releasing some Yemeni detainees from Guantanamo back into the wild there?

    The Stars & Stripes reports that 34 terrorists were killed in raids in Yemen. The main target of the strike, a guy who escaped from prison in Yemen, reportedly avoided his ultimate demise, though.

    Al-Raymi is one of 23 militants who broke out of a prison in San’a in February 2006 and is at large. Yemeni authorities have said they believe he was involved in the July 2007 suicide bombing that killed eight Spanish tourists and two Yemenis visiting a temple in central Yemen.

    Christopher Boucek, a Yemen expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said al-Raymi is deputy commander of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and has managed to escape several previous attempts by authorities to get him.

    The Yemeni embassy denied that the US used missiles, contrary to ABC’s report. Of course, eye witnesses in the AP report at S&S report that most of the dead were civilians.

  • Gitmo-on-Spring Lake (Updated)

    Rumors over the last few weeks that the Obama Administration is planning on renovating a prison in Thomson, IL to house Guantanamo detainees are proving to be true;

    Administration officials as well as Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin and Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn will make an official announcement at the White House.

    Officials from both the White House and Durbin’s office confirmed that President Obama had directed the government to acquire Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Ill., a sleepy town near the Mississippi River about 150 miles from Chicago. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting Tuesday’s announcement.

    So now the hippies, the ACLU lawyers, Mathew Alexander, Code Pink, Keith Olbermann and the sundry other peawits all have a place they can go camp out to prove their commitment to human rights for subhumans.

    Residents of the small town feel that it’s worth it to house the most terrible criminals in the world so close to the families;

    “This town is slowly but surely dying off, and I mean that literally because the people that are retired are dying off and there’s no young people coming back in to take their place. There’s nothing here to draw them,” said Richard Groharing, a 68-year-old retired Florida corrections officer who was born in Thomson, a farming community about 150 miles west of Chicago.

    The prison was built in 2001 with the promise of thousands of jobs. But because of state budget problems, it has been largely vacant since its completion. It has 1,600 cells, but only about 200 minimum-security inmates are held there.

    I hope Thomson IL residents are ready to assume the mantle as the worse place on earth when Guantanamo is closed. Of course, the ambulance-chasers will probably double the town’s population and bring in some money. At what price?

    ADDED: Of course, dicksmith at VoteVets thinks this is a good idea;

    Outstanding. The Obama Administration is taking a step closer to ending the use of a facility that has been one of the most effective recruiting tools for extremism and terrorism across the globe. Not only that, it’s simply the right thing to do.

    Yes, the rest of the world will automatically think that we’re treating detainees well just because they’re in Illinois now. How the Hell will that change anything? Seriously. If we put them all up in a Las Vegas hotel, THAT would become part of the new recruiting cry from terrorists, you dumbass.

    I swear, is there anyone on the Left with an ounce of common sense anymore? Has every single thing they say become just a knee-jerk reaction?

  • Anti-war movement has petered out

    chiroux-and-mckinney

    The anti-war crowd had a protest yesterday at the White House called the “No You Can’t” rally. It’s gone virtually unnoticed by the media (and unnoticed by me, too – I was pimpin’ my crib yesterday). Despite being headlined by the most famous of the moonbat ranks, even the LA Times wasn’t impressed by the 300 participants;

    “People are burned out,” explained the rally’s organizer, Laurie Dobson. As she and other antiwar activists struggle to remake their movement, they also acknowledge there are obstacles.

    “We’re fighting a harder fight right now,” said Dobson, who said antiwar efforts had been upstaged by the battle for healthcare reform and had been hampered by the bad economy. She and others also acknowledge a certain awkwardness: Activists now find themselves up against the same politician many of them helped elect.

    “The peace movement has a new adversary in front of them,” said Tom Hayden, a former California state senator who was a leading critic of the Vietnam War. “He’s intelligent, speaks the language of the peace movement and is trying to reach out to the center-left of the country with his message. It’s much more formidable to argue with Barack Obama than it was with Bush or Cheney.”

    Hayden said many of the activists who once used antiwar protest to convey their contempt of President George W. Bush have been reluctant to criticize Obama, who, while he was a candidate, made much of his opposition to the war in Iraq.

    Some media outlets are pumping up the numbers of protesters to 1500, but even on Matthis Chiroux’ Facebook page World Can’t Wait admits to only 300;

    facebook-protest-numbers

    So Brower is still tossing shoes – that’s so last year, Elaine. But that’s kind of the story of the whole peace movement, isn’t it?

  • Chiroux and Brower; being something they ain’t

    One of my spies who has infiltrated Chiroux’s inner circle on Facebook (he won’t “friend” me for some reason he can’t explain) sent me this video that he linked;

    In the beginning of the video, Chiroux says “I know from experience that [the war in Afghanistan] is genocide” – “From experience”? Sitting at Baskin-Robbins on Bagram for six days (give or take a few hours)? Of course, none of the hippies to whom he’s speaking care – as long as he wears his BDU jacket and stands in front of them, that’s all they need.

    He says he’s a veteran of “the situation”. What situation, Matthis? Does he mean “the situation” in Germany and Japan, because those are the only places he’s been.

    Elaine Brower screeches that she doesn’t want her son to have to go back to the war. That sounds like something she needs to take up with her son. Last I knew, he’s a staff sergeant, so he’s reenlisted a few times – no one is making him go back. I’m sure he’s a smart guy and could get a job somewhere else, if he wanted.

    Brower wants to be seen as a victim of the government’s war – she’s not. She’s a victim of her son’s personal decisions. So was my mother when I was in the Army. Chiroux wants to be regarded as an eye witness to something he’s never seen. He’s another Ward Reilly. 30 years from now Chiroux is going to be a scraggly old man clinging to the days he was drilling hairy-legged hippie chicks.

    Of course, these two need the war. The last thing they really want is for it to end.

    By the way, someone tell Bill Perry (he commented on the Facebook entry) that I think it’s hilarious that he’s using a picture I took of him as his avatar on Facebook. I’m glad he’s a fan of my work.

  • Millard explains Webb’s expulsion

    A couple of our resident IVAW refugees sent me screen shots of the entire statement that Geoff (Stolen Valor) Millard wrote and posted (somewhere) on their website explaining why the board voted to expell Carl Webb. Here’s the first part;

    letter1

    Millard goes on to explain why they banned Casey Porter for the remainder of his lifetime for advocating for the expulsion of Webb. I guess Millard doesn’t realize that Porter taking the extreme actions that he took were necessitated by the board’s inability to take decisive action against Webb.

    Millard is steeped in the mantra of “racist Americans” – if I remember correctly, his major in college was African-American studies. In his typical liberal fashion, Millard, like the Army in the case of Fort Hood murderer Major Hasan, bent over backwards to excuse Webb’s behavior based solely on Webb’s race. Um, Geoff, there are other Black members of IVAW who don’t advocate for killing our troops.

    It’s as if the Little Rascals grew up and formed a club.

  • Chiroux tells his legions to be an insurgency

    One of my readers took up my challenge to “friend” Chiroux and returns with this intel. Of course, Obama drove Chiroux to this – Obama must be feeling like Nixon about now;
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