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

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • Bishop gets a year in jail

    travis-bishop-perp-walk

    SGT Travis Bishop, a Fort Hood, Texas soldier who thought that Victor Agosto had the right idea and decided to miss movement for his deployment to Afghanistan like Agosto was court martialed today. According to Courage to Resist, he was sentenced to a year in prison.

    travis-bishop-jailed

    That’s the only place I can find the outcome of the court martial, I guess they’d know.

    Bishop thought he was going to get 30 days like Agosto, but Travis didn’t decide to miss movement until the day his unit pulled out, then he was AWOL for a week after they left. Agosto, on the other hand, made his intentions clear before his unit left. And Bishop made the mistake of blabbering about how he’d been inspired by Agosto. I guess that’s worth 11 months.

    I’m sure that Bishop had been listening to his idiot lawyer, James Branum, who has successfully had each of his defendants imprisoned. Why those clowns keep hiring that doofus is beyond me.

    More on Bishop at the Killeen Daily Herald.

    UPDATED: Photo added and more info from Killeen Daily Herald.

  • IVAW explains why they are all Carl Webb now

    One of our resident IVAW refugees had an email exchange the other day with Geoff “Stolen Valor” Millard, Adrianne Kinne and TJ Buonomo in regards to the vote on the resolution to punish members who advocated violence against our deployed troops which I mentioned the other day.

    From Millard;

    The reason why this did not pass is because members disagreed on wording not the meaning or intent behind it. Therefore the Board will be drafting a different more inclusive policy that will be adopted by the Board and then voted on by the full membership at the next opportunity.

    Ah, the law school grads of the IVAW membership were upset at the wording. What wording? Buonomo explains;

    I voted against the resolution because the language has the effect of restricting free speech and asserts an explicit and unqualified moral judgement on the use of violence and sabotage, which I considered to be inappropriate.

    Buonomo isn’t explicit about what wording he’s talking about, but I don’t see anything that would restrict free speech, as the Supreme Court defines free speech. Buonomo must be one of those super-legal eagles. Or maybe not. He continues;

    First, my understanding is that part of the motivation for this resolution was provoked by Carl Webb’s vocal sympathy toward the use of violence by the occupied in opposition to their foreign occupiers. While he may have voiced this viewpoint in an unnecessarily inflammatory manner, I do not view it as controversial. In fact on numerous occasions I have heard and read military members and veterans- including non-IVAW members -say that were they in the same position they would likely do the same thing.

    This is hardly a radical viewpoint.

    In other words, Buonomo is defending his vote against the resolution by claiming that he has heard other members of the military say they’d resist an enemy who attacked the US. He makes some lame comment about how he’d willingly fight the Chinese if they invaded – I chuckle. Buonomo would be welcoming them on the drop zones with flowers and wine.

    It’s important to understand that IVAW continues to call the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq “occupations” – that’s how they defend their votes against the resolution. As long as they can ignore that we fight the enemies of Afghans and Iraqis for their own benefit, they can advocate for sabotage against our troops.

    Buonomo continues;

    It is painful for me to read about our troops getting killed and maimed but this does not negate the fact that the U.S. military is a foreign occupier, that in the case of Iraq it had no real justification to be there in the first place, and that the political leadership under the Bush administration betrayed the trust of the Iraqi people at our troops’ expense.

    So let Carl Webb advocate for their deaths. That’s how painful it is for him. Buonomo, being a blowhard, waxes endlessly about how brave he was for bailing out on the American people with his free Air Force Academy education.

    Adrianne Kinne chimes in with her history lesson;

    I don’t know about what Carl said exactly… but you do realize that in the history of GI resistance… soldiers sabotaged THEIR OWN equipment!!! They threw wrenches in engines to stop them from working and anything they could do to break transportation equipment to stop themselves from shipping and arms from shipping. Please do a little research about the history of the GI resistance movement…

    Yes, that makes sense – the troops deployed in combat would sabotage their own equipment. Especially since they’d be the ones that either depended on it to save their lives or had to repair it.

    The consensus seems to be that the best thing IVAW can do for the troops is to end the war, and that sabotage speeds them to that end. To quote Buonomo;

    As for helping veterans, in my opinion the best thing we can possibly do is to help bring an end to these occupations so that they don’t have to go on three or more deployments and suffer from PTSD, TBI, etc. I’d say our approach is reventative, though certainly not as effective as we’d like. That distinguishes us from most other veterans organizations

    Yes, it certainly does, TJ. I have a text file of the entire exchange that I’ll gladly share with anyone who asks by email. Buonomo is a real blow hard and I just don’t want to waste the bandwidth on him, but his yammering is certainly instructive. I’ve cut the text of the responses of our refugee out, so all you get is pure loon.

    Their defense of Carl Webb’s unrestricted free speech makes them all Carl Webb, now. There’s nothing in the resolution that restricted constructive discussion. Buonomo and the 40 others who voted against the resolution can gaze at their navels and pat themselves on their backs, but at the end of the day, they are complicit in Carl Webb’s treasonous preachings.

    How soon do you think they’ll have another resolution ready to put to a vote? I suspect they’re just biding their time hoping everyone forgets about it. Not if I can help it.

    And if IVAW has 1700 members, why are there just 70 people voting on these things?

  • We owe Ralph Nader an apology

    CRaisi sent me a link from Truthdig in which they lament not listening to the brilliance and intellectual depth of such thinkers as Ralph (Unsafe at any Age) Nader and Cynthia (Does my hair make me look insane) McKinney;

    They were right. If a few million of us had had the temerity to stand behind our ideals rather than our illusions and the empty slogans peddled by the Obama campaign, we would have a platform. We forgot that social reform never comes from accommodating the power structure but from frightening it. The Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists who battled for women’s rights, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement knew that the question was not how do we get good people to rule—those attracted to power tend to be venal mediocrities—but how do we limit the damage the powerful do to us.

    Of course, all it’s really just a way to absolve themselves of the shit-stain that is the Obama Administration;

    The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

    They act surprised. The far-Left lives in a fantasy world where the laws of nature and economics don’t apply. Every Left administration that gets in office gets gob-smacked by reality when they discover that their campaign rhetoric would probably drive the nation right into the ocean if applied in the copious amounts that they’ve promised.

    At least the partisan Democrats don’t just crouch down and cry in the middle of the street like the hippies do.

  • If you want them so bad, keep ’em, Canada

    rivera-family-in-canada

    The Canadian judiciary has once again decided to hold on to deserter and manipulator Kimberly Rivera and her herd a bit longer. I first wrote about Rivera earlier in the year just before she was ordered out of the country, then given a stay which expired recentlyand now the Canadians have awarded her another reprieve.

    The Canadian Press/CTV write;

    On Tuesday, [Judge James] Russell tossed out the existing review, ruling it contained “no meaningful examination” of whether Rivera would face targeted prosecution for having spoken out against the war in Iraq — a major concern for Rivera’s defence team.

    Had the ruling gone against her, Rivera would likely have been deported to the United States, where she could face a court martial and a potential prison sentence.

    You’re damn right she would. Ya wanna know why? She took a $10,000 bonus from the Army for enlisting (which she spent on a leather couch that she left behind when she deserted with her herd and her fat-assed, lazy husband) and absconded to another country to avoid fulfilling her contract.

    Every time I tell the story about the loving Rivera family, I get stares like I’m making it up. Her husband and she worked at WalMart until he knocked her up – they got married and moved into her family’s basement – literally. Somehow living her family’s basement, they incurred a lot of bills, so her fat-assed husband convinced her to join the Army (since, by his own admission he was too damned fat to get in the Army). She joined the Army and – SURPRISE – they sent her to Iraq. After a few months she got a mid-tour leave to see her family. She thanked the Army by packing up her kids and fork-lifting hubby-the-fat-ass to Canada where they’ve been living off the Canadian taxpayers for the last two year and change.

    They went to Canada because hubby was upset that he had to take care of the kids by himself and it really cut into his computer game playing. I guess Kimberly has taken him away from his gaming at least once, because they’ve had another kid to saddle Canadian welfare with since they moved there.

    Now it looks like they’re going to get a four-month reprieve while the judge gets briefed by the feds on what Rivera will face when she returns.

    In his ruling Tuesday in Ottawa, Justice James Russell said an officer from Citizenship and Immigration Canada who performed a pre-removal risk assessment of Rivera did not consider whether she and other outspoken Iraq war objectors would face “targeted prosecution” based upon their political opinion.

    In an email to CBC News Tuesday evening, Liberal MP Gerard Kennedy said [Immigration Minister Jason] Kenney “continues to abuse his position as minister by substituting his personal opinions for public policy.”

    “Mr. Kenney knows full well that the American military continue the policy of stop-loss — compelling service after contracts have ended — and other forms of compulsion,” Kennedy wrote.

    What stop-loss? The peckerhead deserted while she was on active duty, ya stupid hippie.

  • Meet the new IVAW Executive Director

    One of our resident IVAW refugees just wrote that the new Executive Director of the Iraq Veterans Against the War is Jose Vasquez – another IVAW member who has never deployed to Iraq nor Afghanistan according to his own profile at IVAW;

    jose-vasquez-ivaw-profile

    So despite all of the guarantees that we’ve heard in recent months about the change at IVAW, there will be none, apparently. He’s a marginal improvement over the last ED who went AWOL from the Transportation Department to keep from managing fisheries in Hawaii.

    Yet another Veteran Against the War with no duty in IRAQ. In fact, before he was a conscientious objector, he was an Army medic – precisely the kind of job a CO should want if he cared about the troops the way he claims. This is from a Salon article;

    After 9/11, he would have served in Afghanistan with few reservations; but by the time his unit got the call for Iraq in 2005, he’d been having doubts not only about the efficacy of the war but about the morality of serving. As a medic, he patched soldiers’ wounds so that they could head out on another mission and kill again. After “a lot of soul-searching,” Vasquez applied for conscientious-objector status, and more than a year later he separated from the Army with an honorable discharge. When he described the day he told the men he led that he was not going to Iraq with them, Vasquez sounded remorseful and sad. He misses the Army and his Joes.

    Yeah, he would have gone to Afghanistan but the Army wouldn’t accommodate him. We’ve heard that one before, haven’t we?

    According to some preliminary research on him, he was the guy in charge of the IVAW Verification team at Winter Soldier II. How could he verify testimony without having spent a day in country himself. He organized First Casualty in New York City two years ago – bringing the Iraq war experience to civilians. How could he do that with any measure of accuracy without his own experience.

    And now he’s going to lead an organization of Iraq veterans, never having been one. Funny, but when I talk to member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, I can reasonably assume that the guy I’m talking to was a veteran of a foreign war.

    Peter Griffin says this about IVAW’s choice;

  • Code Pink: Our crazy works; yours not so much

    The “mainstream media” portrays exercises in freedom of expression as “disruptions” by “mobs” like this report from MSNBC (thanks to Tankerbabe for the link);

    Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

    Notice that the AFL-CIO is sending their “activists” (read: thugs) out to townhall meetings.
    (more…)

  • dicksmith is a’skeered of the boogeyman

    Our buddy dicksmith, the new senior editor of VetVoice, tells us how he’s been a’skeered of the boogeyman since George Bush was President. He begins his missive quoting John Brennan, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor;

    “But describing our efforts as a ‘global war’ only plays into the warped narrative that Al-Qaeda propagates,” Brennan said in comments prepared for delivery to a think tank here.

    dicksmith applauds the Obama Administration’s name change;

    This is an extremely smart policy move. For eight years, we have sent our finest men and women to fight a war against an undefined enemy. Shifting a way from the “GWOT” nomenclature will give service members what they deserve: a defined mission with a defined enemy. No doubt, we’ll still see the “terrorism” boogey-man thrown into the debate, but at least now it won’t be official policy.

    An “extremely smart policy move”. Changing the name we call the war changes the whole mission, apparently. It gives us definition. Any of you guys fighting the old Global War On Terror remember needing the mission defined, or did you have any doubt who was the enemy? Well, dicksmith was a’skeered;

    For the record, I’m not saying terrorists and terrorism doesn’t exist. They are, however, extremely broad terms that have been used in the fear-mongering process of the past. Anything and everything we didn’t like was chalked up to “terrorists” or “terrorism”, but usually only when it applied to actions perpetrated by foreigners.

    Because we’re racists who only react negatively to terrorism committed by them ding-dang fur-ners. He’s upset that we didn’t call domestic crime “terrorism”. That’ll apparently all change now that we call it “The War Against Al Qaeda”.

    Now, hopefully, we can move away from the previously flawed practice of boogey-man fear mongering and set clear definitions for who our enemies are.

    Aside from the fact that the senior editor of VetsVoice ends his thought with a preposition, that sentence is the most bizarre that I’ve ever read. The Global War on Terror was supposed to be just that. It was a call to the world to pull together and stop the animals that were killing innocent people to make a political statement. We were fighting terrorists in the Middle East, Colombia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Africa, Europe – ya know – globally.

    Now we’ve put Al Qaeda on a pedestal and given them the recognition that they’ve wanted since the mid-nineties. During the Bush Administration we were fighting injustice everywhere, now we’re chasing some guys in manjammies around the mountains trying to kill them all.

    Not only is this a piss-poor policy decision, it’s playing right into the hands of Al Qaeda. So now we’re beefing up our forces in Colombia – do we have to give that war it’s own name, too? Fighting the Moros in the Phillipines will be a different war?

    The thought that dicksmith put into his little Obama tongue bath was pretty superficial. All he needed to hear was that it was not a Bush idea and he was all for it.

  • Ackerman; Too bad Agosto wasn’t a birther

    Spencer Ackerman, who has been fired from nearly every Leftist rag on the East Coast, takes up for Victor Agosto at his latest employment venture, the Washington Independent;

    agostoackerman

    Ackerman probably doesn’t understand the difference between a Reserve Officer who volunteered for duty, then changed his mind and a Regular Army soldier who was ordered and then refused to report for duty. Of course Ackerman sees political expediency as the reason that Cook didn’t go to jail and ignores the rules that govern personnel issues of military members.

    Yeah, Ackerman put a partial explanation in parenthesis, but it’s all secondary to the point he wanted to make that birthers get a pass with Obama administration pulling strings to hide their boss’ deep dark secret.

    That’s probably why Ackerman can’t keep a job.