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

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • More (good) bad news for IVAW

    Aaron Glantz is a Berkely grad who claims to be a journalist. He co-founded Pacifica Radio and he has written two books.

    When the war against terror began, he decided he’d become a propagandist focused on returning veterans. One book was entitled “How America Lost Iraq”. It was wildly popular for about a minute. The last time I looked for the book, it was selling for a penney on Amazon;

    Well, he went on to write “Winter Soldier; Iraq and Afghanistan” about IVAW members and their stories of the war. TSO reviewed some the book back in January. It’s not in Amazon’s bargain bin yet, but it’s headed there.

    One of the reasons it’s such a poor seller, aside from the ridiculous stories in it, is because Glantz excluded many of the stories that were half-way true. The reason he did that was for strictly political reasons. Some of the IVAW members actually think they’re doing the whole IVAW thing for their country – those aren’t the people Glantz included in the book.

    I get to talk to a few IVAW members in the course of my business and they tell me stuff – one told me that he was upset that Glantz left him right of the book after all this particular member had done for IVAW. In fact, he wasn’t allowed to partake in the bounty of speaking tours and book royalties and he was bitter about it. He was also really pissed off that moocher Matthis Chiroux, who isn’t an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran, was draining the coffers of IVAW while people who needed the money and were real Iraq or Afghanistan veterans were hung out to dry – in some cases they were denied help in securing their earned benefits from the VA by their IVAW/VFP/VVAW mentors.

    Glantz had a litmus test for including stories in his book – a political litmus test. He included only IVAW members who were pledged to the International Socialist Organization – like in the email that TSO published yesterday.

    Well, let’s look at how that’s paying off for Glantz;

    Well, no one ever accused socialists and communists of have much business sense, I suppose.

  • If the Civil War don’t get ’em, the financial malfeasance probably will…

    Well, lookee here, the Great Man was reporting to his masters of VFP, and things don’t look good financially for IVAW. It’s almost as if the money went up in smoke. Like, they are so poor them don’t have a pot to piss in. I hate to be blunt, but doesn’t look like it is rolling in the way it used to eh? In every garden, a few weeds will grow, isn’t that right Matthis?

    By the way, as a helpful hint, you may want to look into why none of you filed lobbying reports after you testified before Congress… Ooops, that one could be a problem if someone filed a complaint, no?

  • Leopard shows his spots

    Remember that old yarn about how IVAW loves America, believes in the Constitutional protection of free speech, how they only do this for the soldiers…..

    Well, reconcile that with this email Camilo Mejia sent to our frenemy Army Sergeant if you can.

    What you have before you, Selena, is a typical GI Resistance publication, Vietnam-era style. Many such publications were the work of civilians who were working alongside GIs, which is the case of GI Special. Tom Barton works with members of VFP, IVAW, VVAW, etc and they reprint articles from papers like the Army Times, and from web sites such as our very own.

    Your opinion of this publication is a reflection of just how out of touch you are with the organization you’re in. Have you ever checked out Vets For Freedom? They loooove the constitution, they’re flag waving patriots, and they want troops to reenlist. I bet they would have a similar opinion to yours about GI Special.

    I’m not going to waste too much on this, Selena, but I really think you should explore other organizations that would better meet your desire to be a hard core patriot. IVAW is really not that place.

    Yours truly,

    cm.

    This is the same man who can’t keep his stories straight between one appearance and his book.

    Isn’t it about time for the DoD to classify these guys as subversive?

  • IVAW’s Chiroux apologizes for occupying Afghanistan

    This is some silly shit right here. Mathis Chiroux, the IVAW’s biggest drama queen liar who once stopped at an airbase in Afghanistan for six days apologized to Afghan peace activist Malalai Joya for occupying Afghanistan;

    [I]n 2005, for a brief time, I helped occupy Malalai’s country, and it was wrong. It was my mistake. I should not have been there. I should not have been supporting this oppression of her people. Today I want to look Malalai in the eye, and I want to tell you, Malalai, how sorry I am for the violence that my Army has done to your people, to your country. I want to apologize to you for the role that I played in it. I was wrong, and I will show you that my country and the rest of the world can come to a place where they can admit wrong, apologize, and offer some sort of reconciliation.

    Six days. I once spent six days occupying a table at the Ovalo Bar in Panama on a drunk. Maybe Chiroux would like to show us on his Form 2-1 where his “occupation” was recorded by the Army;

    Or show us his campaign medal for his “occupation” in his records;

    Further down, he plants the seed for his future PTSD claims;

    I was really happy to be in Japan and Germany, but felt the U.S. had no business in either place. I was sent to other places, Italy, the Philippines, and Afghanistan, for example to write an article about how great the U.S. military is to provide medical care to Rumanian NATO soldiers wounded in Afghanistan. On these assignments, I had to carry a weapon: I don’t want to think about how many women and children it may have inadvertently been pointed at. As an Army journalist it was my job to collect and filter service member’s stories. I heard many stomach-churning testimonies of the horrors and crimes taking place in Iraq. For fear of retaliation from the military, I failed to report these crimes. Now I feel I struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in part because of deep feelings of guilt that I used my art to further what I now consider to be a racist, imperialist and ultimately genocidal campaign.

    Yeah, we don’t belong in Japan and Germany – that’s why those two countries are constantly fighting for us to stay there. And now he’s going to claim he got PTSD FROM LISTENING TO STORIES! Yeah, I got PTSD from watching The Longest Day AND reading the book. That’s more ridiculous than the clown, Zach Maddox who got PTSD from pulling guard duty on 8th and Eye Street barracks in DC protecting it from pizza delivery guys who looked like Osama bin Laden.

    In related Chiroux news, he posted a press release on his blog today in the run up to yet another hearing date for his discharge reclassification. As we’ve come to expect from this prima donna, he thinks he’s going to turn an Army Administrative hearing into a three ring circus;

    “I go now to St. Louis to honor my promises and convictions,” said Chiroux. “Obama or No-Bama, the military must cease prosecuting Soldiers of conscience, and we will demonstrate to them why.”

    Soldiers of conscience, indeed. He’s a crybaby sissy who didn’t want to have his lifestyle disrupted despite his commitment to his country. Well, the people who know him say it best;

    Chiroux’s true character emerged after his orders to deploy. Prior to this moment, he had no inclination to rant against his “illegal war.” After all, it is easy to take from the government as long as you’re not serving it. Upon his realization that time was limited, Chiroux took a trip back to Germany to visit an ex-girlfriend. This is were the story gets interesting.. He was heard stating that he would run away to either Europe, essentially Spain, or to Canada as a means of avoiding the war. This was stated by him in tears of fear, not of any sense of illegality of mission at hand.

    If I may paraphrase it, he’s a big smelly pussy who threatens women, drains their checking accounts and casts them aside. And a dork.

  • Hippies; put the troops in harm’s way, dammit!

    Someone sent me this article from the Atlantic Free Press in which a stupid hippie tells us about how he became anti-war in the 60s because the media published pictures of the horrors of war. He laments the fact that media doesn’t continue to feed his perverse need for gory photos.

    A key reason my—and millions of other Americans’ — eyes were opened to what the US was up to in Indochina was that the media at that time, at least by 1967, had begun to show Americans the reality of that war. I didn’t have to look to hard to find the photos of napalm victims, or to read about the true nature of the weapons that our forces were using.

    Today, while the internet makes it possible to find similar information about the conflicts in the world in which the US is participating, either as primary combatant or as the chief provider of arms, as in Gaza, one actually has to make a concerted effort to look for them. The corporate media which provide the information that most Americans simply receive passively on the evening news or at breakfast over coffee carefully avoid showing us most of the graphic horror inflicted by our military machine.

    Oh, goodness, he has to make a “concerted effort” – poor child. How can the media do this to a poor hippie – making him actually do something besides smoke pot and scratch his ample ass. But, see, it’s the media’s fault this war has continued – it couldn’t be because we learned our lesson in the 60s that we have to fight our wars to a successful conclusion, could it? Naw. Couldn’t be.

    We may read about wedding parties that are bombed by American forces—something that has happened with some frequency in both Iraq and Afghanistan — where the death toll is tallied in dozens, but we are, as a rule, not provided with photos that would likely show bodies torn apart by anti-personnel bombs—a favored weapon for such attacks on groups of supposed enemy “fighters.” (A giveaway that such weapons are being used is a typically high death count with only a few wounded.)

    Now, the poor thing is a bomb damage assessment expert – even though he successfully avoided the draft when it was his turn to serve. But, he tells us that we’re all a bunch of morons because we need graphic depictions of deaths before we understand that war kills people.

    We ain’t not smart enough to cipher that from them scribble thingies on that there paper stuff – we needs pitchers. Maybe them hippie fellers could buy us some crayons and them books that we kin color in, too.

    Of course, he’s one of those goofy elitists who claims the scales fell from his pro-war eyes the minute he went to college. Well, anyway, this goofball thinks we send soldiers into the fight instead of using drone aircraft;

    Meanwhile, the killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan is only likely to increase with the expanding use of Predator drone aircraft which kill from the sky, piloted by pilots based in control trailers in remote places like Nevada.

    To bolster his point he quotes John Grant, the stupid hippie Hun that butts heads with our buddy Skye and her Sheepdog friends in West Chseter, PA. Grant is the president of the local Geezers for Peace chapter;

    Is this who we want to be as citizens of the world, essentially hiding away in our comfy homes afraid of engaging with the world except through remotely piloted drones or controlled visits to Disney World? Considering the long history of warfare, why is this kind of warfare not cowardly? Are drones the answer to not wanting our young men and women brought home in aluminum boxes?

    So who do you want to be, John? The guy who is calling for more of our troops to come home in aluminum boxes so you can feel better about yourself?

    ADDED: Some guy named Thus Spake Ortner at some other blog I’ve heard of from time-to-time wrote about Dave Lindorff, the author of this nimroddery, here and here.

  • Weekend Phony Soldier round-up

    Our friend, CJ Grisham, ran into what looks like another phony soldier, Ed Hart from the Alabama Geezers for Peace. He claims to be a Marine aviator from World War II, but I think he looks a little too young to have served in some of the battles he claimed to CJ. What really sets off alarm bells, though, is the way Hart reacts to discussions about CJ’s combat experience as the same reactions I got from Jim Goodnow (a Coast Guard veteran from 1959-1961 who never served in combat) and Ward Reilly (the Army Ranger who fought the Vietnam War from Augsburg, Germany).

    Here’s a sample of the email exchange I had with Ward Reilly last week;

    I would be the FIRST man out on the streets defending my home and my family, and I have more honor in my asshole than you have in your entire being.

    In the same email that he wrote the above statement about his (shiver) asshole, he demonstrates how he’s superior to me;

    The difference between me and you is that I attack policy, and you attack persons, which shows you are soarly [sic] lacking in character.

    See, he doesn’t know me, but he attacks my honor – but only in regards to policy.

    Speaking of email, Jesse MacBeth and I exchanged emails briefly, until he discovered that I was saying the same things about him on this blog that he was saying about himself in his videos. But until he severed our communications, he wrote (and I use the term “wrote” loosely) this explaining how his DD214 got forged and who was involved with it. Again this is Jesse MacBeth in his own “words”.
    (more…)

  • Odierno: we may ignore deadline

    OK, who didn’t see it coming that as we approach the artificial deadline to withdraw combat troops from Iraq, violence increases, al Sadr gets antsy and al Qaeda gets a bit stronger (UK Times link);

    The activities of al-Qaeda in two of Iraq’s most troubled cities could keep US combat troops engaged beyond the June 30 deadline for their withdrawal, the top US commander in the country has warned.

    US troop numbers in Mosul and Baqubah, in the north of the country, could rise rather than fall over the next year if necessary, General Ray Odierno told The Times in his first interview with a British newspaper since taking over from General David Petraeus in September.

    He said that a joint assessment would be conducted with the Iraqi authorities in the coming weeks before a decision is made.

    The US commander was confident that the overall timetable for the US pullout would be met. But he added that US combat troops might have to stay beyond June 30 in Mosul and Baqubah, where al-Qaeda retains an active presence. “The two areas I am concerned with are Mosul and then Baqubah and [other] parts of Diyala province,” he said. “We will conduct assessments and provide our assessments when the time is right.”

    I know the left will be apoplectic and see a conspiracy against Obama by General Odierno. In fact, according to Fox News they’re already upset that Obama is asking for $83.4 billion in new spending for Iraq and Afghanistan;

    “This funding will do two things — it will prolong our occupation of Iraq through at least the end of 2011, and it will deepen and expand our military presence in Afghanistan indefinitely,” said anti-war Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif. “Instead of attempting to find military solutions to the problems we face in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Obama must fundamentally change the mission in both countries to focus on promoting reconciliation, economic development, humanitarian aid, and regional diplomatic efforts.”

    They never learn, do they? The Democrats are more interested in ending the war than in winning the war. Politics before security.

  • al Sadr/AP mark anniversary of the fall of Hussein

    I guess Shi’ite cleric Mooky al Sadr is sad that Sadam Hussein’s government fell six years ago today since he and his acolytes were out in force to protest the event by burning George W. Bush in effigy;

    I wonder if Mooky realizes that if Hussein were still in power, he’d be just another Shi’ite Iraqi with bad teeth trying to keep out of the way of Saddam and his sons. I noticed he makes these declarations from the safety of Iran.

    It looks like AP thinks this is news, but not the nationwide tea parties being held to protest the Obama Administration’s economic policies. I guess it takes a long time to get over BDS.