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

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • More on Duncan/Strandlof (Updated)

    If you haven’t read the Greyhawk family’s research on our favorite mental patient/IVAW member over at the Mudville Gazette, you still don’t know the whole story. They recount a scam in his pre-Rick Duncan days that landed him in mental health treatment and later led to his scamming of the anti-war movement.

    It seems that the Colorado Veterans Alliance has decided to fold under the weight of this investigation of Duncan/Strandlof’s deceit.

    UPDATE: Blackfive‘s Mr Wolf sends a Denver Post article that reports that Democrats are a little miffed at being fooled, too;

    He spoke at a Barack Obama veterans rally in front of the Capitol in July, co-hosted several events with then- congressional candidate Jared Polis and attacked Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer in a TV ad paid for by the national group Votevets.org.

    And the mostly Democratic candidates he supported — looking for credibility on veterans issues and the war — lapped it up appreciatively.

    Now, politicians are dealing with news that the man they believed to be a former Marine and war veteran wounded in Iraq by a roadside bomb, in fact, never served in the military — but did spend time in a mental hospital.

    Many of the candidates he supported won their elections handily and now say they were defrauded as much as anyone else.

    “His fraud is a slap in the face to veterans everywhere and a betrayal to us all,” Rep. Polis, a Boulder Democrat, said in a written statement Thursday.

    His fraud was easily detectable, the Democrats just happened to be enamored with his message more than verifying who he was. They liked the fact that a gay veteran was willing to speak out for them – never mind that he’s not who he says he is. After all, the Democrats have always placed more importance on form over substance. Who cares if Duncan/Strandlof wasn’t a veteran – he had a uniform on while he said all of the pretty words they wanted to hear.

    It’s the same reason that he was accepted into the IVAW and Vote Vets – he made a nice centerpiece and said everything they wanted him to say. Who cares if he was an empty suit.

  • Escaped Mental Patient stars in IVAW/VoteVets


    Greatest VIDEO EVEH. You’ll notice one of the Lieutenant Colonel’s supporters has a banner across his chest that says “Three Tours – Iraq” – that man is an escaped mental patient and, until yesterday, a powerhouse in the IVAW and Vote Vets, yet he’s never served a day in the Marines, as he has claimed:

    How many of you remember this post

    So, it came as no surprise today that I found one of the recommended diaries is by a guy named Rick Duncan, a wounded Marine Captain who served in Iraq. Now, I salute his service, as we all do, but this guy has been on my radar for quite a while for his deft (?) acrobatics on issues. For starters, it should come as no surprise that in addition to being a VoteVets guy, he’s also a member of IVAW…

    Well, I hereby take back that salute, and to my IVAW and VOTEVETS friends I once again ask, tell me how my ass tastes.

    The leader of a statewide veterans group who fought for homeless veterans in Colorado Springs is in jail in Denver today, unmasked as a former mental patient who posed as a wounded Marine officer and 9/11 survivor.

    The man who called himself Rick Duncan – purportedly a former Marine captain and 1997 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy – is in fact 31-year-old Richard Glen Strandlof, a former mental patient who never served in the military and falsely claimed that he was in the Pentagon during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to David Walsh of the Colorado Veterans Alliance (CVA), which Duncan founded.

    Walsh, who joined the board of CVA at Duncan’s request last year, said his colleagues in the organization grew suspicious of Duncan after discovering “significant inconsistencies” in his personal story.

    In a search of the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office records, for example, they found that the name Colorado Veterans Alliance had been reserved by “Rick Strandlof,” whom they had never met, Walsh said.

    While probing Duncan’s past, Walsh said, the group found evidence that he was a patient in a mental hospital in Washoe County, Nev., at the time of the roadside bombing in Fallujah, Iraq, that Duncan claimed left him severely wounded.

    The group contacted the FBI field office in Denver, which began investigating in early May and arrested Duncan Tuesday night in downtown Denver on a traffic warrant originating in El Paso County.

    I will be standing in the corner of my bedroom for a while doing the happy dance that YET ANOTHER phony of VoteVets and IVAW has gone down.

    Oh, and I have a call in to the guy responsible for the takedown, who as happenstance would have it, I know pretty well. Actually, my best friend is very close to him. Funny how small a world it is.

    This is Mr. Duncan/Strandlof’s biography at IVAW;

    UPDATE: “Rick Duncan” goes down the memory hole at IVAW. With no notice whatsoever. Well, good thing I have the screen shots, eh guys? The page above now looks like this in 4 hours;

    And here is an article he wrote at VoteVets blaming Bush and Cheney for the death of six of his Marines;

    Jesse MacBeth 2.0; A former mental patient rises to prominence in the Colorado anti-war movement. And notice that it’s in Denver so I’m pretty sure he had plenty to do with the IVAW theater there last summer at the DNC convention.

    How about Congressman Jared Polis cavorting with a mental patient/phony veteran;

    And Polis scores the escaped mental patient/phony veteran endorsement;

    He may have been crazy, but he knew how to play the press. In fact we’ve been in contact with KKTV out in Colorado who called us about digging more dirt up on him because they have miles of footage of interviews with Duncan and they want to hang him by the balls. He did interviews like this one in the Colorado Springs Gazette;

    At this point, I don’t even know where to put updates. So I am putting them here, and will try to make sense of this nonsense tomorrow. But I was just thinking to myself, what this post needs is a connection to Michael Moore and MoveOn.org. OK, check and check.

    All of the videos have been removed so we moved them below the fold;
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  • Kris Goldsmith leaves IVAW


    Another of the big guns,one of the real veterans of the Iraq War has resigned from the Iraq Veterans Against the War citing many of the same reasons as others who have resigned before. Below is his resignation letter (Any emphasis is mine);
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  • What Fragging? Where?

    When the media and the Left learn a term, they apply it to everything. Today’s word is “fragging”. The first place I saw in relation to the incident at Camp Liberty was on a VFP blog of sorts called “Imagine” (recalling the John Lennon song) in which the author, James Starowicz, one of the chief crackpots of the Geezers For Peace writes;

    Yeah, just like Vietnam – well, not really. There were 230 deaths from the practice we now call fragging (some Leftist sites say 730 – but that’s including attempts) over the 10 years we were in Vietnam. Since the 2003 invasion of Hussein’s Iraq, there have been three, this one being the third. The second one is unsolved and the motives are unclear. That doesn’t stop the Associated Press from falsely claiming;

    There have been several previous fragging incidents in the Iraq war.

    Yeah, um, three, including this one doesn’t make “several” unless you call one incident “many”.

    During and after the Vietnam War, the Left used the fragging incidents as evidence that soldiers were unhappy with their leadership in particular and the war in general. I disagree, but for the sake of argument, I’ll continue.

    Since this one seems to have been targeted towards a counseling clinic and the staff and SGT John Russell actually left his unit with the firearm and went to the counseling center kind of disproves that he was unhappy with his leadership and more unhappy with the medical treatment he was getting.

    That doesn’t stop the media from mischaracterizing this one, too;

    An American Army sergeant shot and killed five fellow soldiers following an altercation at a military counseling center in Iraq Monday, officials said. The attack drew attention to the issues of combat stress and morale among soldiers serving multiple combat tours over six years of war.

    Um, Russell was an electronics technician who was transitioning out of the service after 21 years – not someone who was being ordered to do something that would get him injured or killed. So frustration with the war kind of gets tossed out as an indicator, too. He was leaving the war and the Army for the last time.

    He was just one guy who snapped and did terrible things. Are all of those guys going to do what Russell did? Not any more than all Georgia professors are going to do similar things.

  • Code Pink assaults military’s display


    As I wrote last week, Code Pink had a vigil at the White House this weekend since most of the barren old hags don’t have children with whom they can spend Mothers’ Day. Among them was Uncle Jimbo’s heart throb, The Peace Fairy;
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  • Veterans/Troops become a political force

    We are living in historic times. We finally have a Democrat president and a Democrat Congress that supports veterans and that, at least in some small way, support our troops while they’re engaged with a foreign enemy. Returning troops are getting the medical attention they deserve in the president’s new budget. Of course, the vacuous, specious argument I read at some so-called “nonpartisan” veteran organizations is that Democrats care more about the troops than Republicans. While that may be true at the moment, it’s only become true in the last few months.

    This morning, the Stars and Stripes trumpets the DoD’s $500 billion budget;

    The proposal – part of President Barack Obama’s $3.4 trillion budget for fiscal 2010 – includes cuts to major weapons systems detailed last month and was billed as a “reform budget” by defense officials.

    But it also has new increases in troops Basic Allowance for Housing (6 percent) and Basic Allowance for Subsistence (5 percent) to go along with a 2.9 percent pay raise for all military personnel. House and Senate leaders have already promised to bump that to 3.4 percent.

    The plan also promises more money for wounded warrior support and no cuts in military health care services.

    “This is a long-term commitment by the department to take care of our people,” said Vice Admiral P. Stephen Stanley, director of force structure for the Joint Staff. “Those people who have gone forward and been affected, been injured, we’re going to take care of them. We’re going to take care of our families.

    That’s good news – pay raises, housing allowance increases, living facility improvements. That’s quite a difference from when my son was born in a forty-year-old wooden World War II hospital that had been intended to be temporary when it was built. That hospital was so bad that it made an appearance on “60 Minutes” the following year.

    So what has changed that Democrats have finally started paying attention to the needs of the troops suddenly? Because veterans have become a political force. While many veterans of WWII and Koreas sat out the Vietnam War on the sidelines for whatever reason, the Vietnam War veterans have refused to sit by while this wars’ troops get the same treatment.

    Instead of watching what the news organizations feed them on TV and standing by while old hippies and new anarchists spit on the troops, call them babykillers and allowing twisted, untrue stories to circulate about our troops’ behavior in combat, organizations like Patriot Guard Riders, Gathering of Eagles, Band of Mothers and Eagles Up use the same tactics of the Left to squelch behavior that had been tolerated in the ’60s.

    When Code Pink decided to protest outside of Walter Reed when wounded troops arrived there, it took only a few days for Free Republic to assembled a larger number of supporters to drown out the hippies. When ANSWER marched on the Pentagon, within a few weeks, thousands of veterans descended on Washington to steal ANSWER’s stage and demonstrate to those serving overseas that they weren’t alone.

    We now have websites like Blackfive, The Long War Journal and Michael Yon who have put people on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan who brought us the stories to our living rooms that the media with it’s Democrat-leaning agenda refused to tell America. That was especially important in the last two years when the media went dark on the success of the ‘Surge”.

    Also, in the 60s, some of the more traditional Veterans Service Organizations like the VFW had denied membership to returning Vietnam veterans. During this war, the VSOs have taken the lead in the proper treatment of returning veterans. The American Legion, especially, has led the VSOs in turning back legislation from this administration that would harm returning troops and is actively lobbying for better treatment. The VSOs have become more than a cheap place to drink PBR and swap war stories.

    In short, veterans have come into their own as a political force to be reckoned with – we always knew it was possible with the millions of living military veterans and the millions more who lay at rest as a testament to our dedication to this country.

    However, we know how the party which currently controls the purse strings would rather treat veterans and how they’d rather take our earned benefits to pay off welfare queens and drug addicts for their votes instead, so even though we have arrived, it will take continued vigilance so that we don’t lose the voice we’ve built over the last decade.

  • American Legion takes on ACLU’s FOIA

    This is exactly why I joined the American Legion last week. David Rehbein, the national commander of the American Legion writes a fiery missive in the Wall Street Journal today in regards to the ACLU’s FOIA filing for photographs of alleged abuse of detainees at the hands of US forces in Iraq. Mr. Rehbein’s piece is titled “Photos that could cost lives“;

    Releasing photographs of alleged or actual detainee abuse in the War on Terrorism is not worth the life of a single American. Of course, as some have noted, the incidents at Abu Ghraib have already endangered our troops. So did any orders and policies that may have led to those incidents. But what is to be accomplished by continuing to provide ammunition and provocation to the enemy?

    ACLU’s filing is nothing more than a transparent attempt to turn the world against us. That world that riots at the sight of political cartoons and unfounded rumors about Korans flushed down the toilet. Al Qaeda claimed that their beheading of Nick Berg was in retaliation for the last photos that were released in regards to supposed torture. Two American soldiers held captive were also beheaded in retaliation. How many lives is ACLU willing to sacrifice for the next round of scandal?

    Mr Rehbein continues;

    I was deeply disturbed by the images of Abu Ghraib. The military, however, has investigated the abuses and punished those involved. Moreover, the photographs that are now about to be released are already being used for investigative purposes. Other than self-flagellation by certain Americans, riots and future terrorist acts, what else do people expect will come from the release of these photographs?

    At least the American Legion is willing to stand up for troops and says what needs to be said. In fact, the American Legion has led the VSOs in standing up for the troops since the war against terror began, they’ve been especially vigilant over the last few months when we’ve need them most. Mr Rehbein explains why;

    As commander of the nation’s largest veterans service organization, I have had the honor to present Blue Star Banners to military families, with the Blue Star signifying the deployment of a service member. It is always a moving experience. But it is the Gold Star Banner, the star that signifies the death of a service member in war, that I never hope to present. I fear that there will be many Gold Stars as a result of this misbegotten policy.

    Next month, I proudly join the ranks of Blue Star families as my only son gets deployed to Afghanistan and it’s reassuring to know that the folks at the American Legion are checking his six.

  • CIA: Pelosi knew about EITs

    Last month, I got an email from Code Pink calling on Nancy Pelosi to press forward with the investigations of the Bush Administration’s use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs) against terrorists;

    The Washington Times and the Washington Post both announced this morning that Speaker Pelosi knew about Enhanced Interrogation Techniques according to records of the briefings to Pelosi and Porter Goss on September 4, 2002. The Times;

    The report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, indicates that a classified CIA briefing of Mrs. Pelosi included specific details of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or EITs, on terrorism suspect Abu Zubaydah.

    “Briefing on EITs included use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed,” the report said of the Sept. 4, 2002, briefing.

    The U.S. government acknowledged in the “torture memos” that President Obama declassified last month that the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah included waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning and is widely denounced as torture, 83 times in August 2002, a month before the Pelosi briefing.

    The Post reports that Pelosi is still clinging to her previous lie despite the evidence against her;

    In a carefully worded statement, Pelosi’s office said today that she had never been briefed about the use of waterboarding, only that it had been approved by Bush administration lawyers as a legal technique to use in interrogations.

    “As this document shows, the Speaker was briefed only once, in September 2002. The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used,” said Brendan Daly, Pelosi’s spokesman.

    Pelosi’s statement did not address whether she was informed that other harsh techniques were already in use during the Zubaydah interrogations.

    So will Code Pink now demand an investigation into Pelosi’s involvement? Not holding my breath.