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

Category: Iraq Veterans Against the War

  • Remembering old IVAW friends

    Since TSO is getting threatening phone calls from one of our old friends from IVAW, I thought I’d bring back memories by telling you what Adam Kokesh has been up to lately. I know I’ve mentioned that he was contemplating running for a Congressional seat in New Mexico next year, so for some reason he won’t be writing on his “Revolutionary Patriot” blog anymore and he’s focusing on the run. Here’s his new website;

    kokesh-for-congress-6-09

    He seems to be toning down his image a bit. Probably a good idea. But I went through his “About Adam” page and I can’t seem to find anything about the IVAW. He’s not ashamed is he?

    He also mentions that he was promoted to sergeant – but he doesn’t mention that he was busted for smuggling an Iraqi pistol back from the war. He was a corporal when his term of service ended. We’ve already settled that.

    He mentions some activism;

    In addition to addressing the kind of suffering he experienced first-hand in Fallujah, he has organized to help veterans struggling with PTSD, railed against 4th Amendment violations, and stood up against the Federal Reserve.

    Yes, he organized veterans to hang out in the IVAW clubhouse on Princeton Place, take xanax and gin, store their urine in a refrigerator, and engage in paranoid rants at the police. But I don’t think any of that is usually accepted as treatment for PTSD. But here’s a screenshot of the xanax and gin rant for posterity;

    kokesh-xanax1

    He doesn’t mention that he dropped hate literature all over the GWU campus trying to frame a conservative student group. Of course, he skated on that charge. Just like he’s skated on all of his antics. Probably because of Daddy’s money.

    I don’t see any mention of Karaoke night with Code Pink, either. Or his arrest in DC for putting up posters after he was ordered not to put up posters by a DC cop.

    He does mention his discharge though – except that he says his discharge was “Honorable”, when actually it was “General under honorable conditions”.

    I’m beginning to think that Kokesh is embarrassed by the truth about his past.

  • Carl Webb; the IVAW deserter who didn’t desert

    As most of my regular readers know, there’s turmoil churning around the ranks in the Iraq Veterans Against the War. Although it’s a result of many things, the most contentious point of the turmoil is between the regular patriotic members who merely oppose the war and the members who want the IVAW to become a tool of the International Socialist Organization – just a facade of veterans to lend some legitimacy to the entire socialist movement. The most vile and despicable member of IVAW, Carl Webb, belongs to that second group.

    Earlier this month, TSO wrote about Webb when Casey Porter resigned from IVAW and brought our attention to Webb. Since then, Kris Goldsmith resigned and this stirred Webb up again. He bragged on his own Facebook page that he forced another resignation of a “conservative” from IVAW;
    (more…)

  • Information on Doug Zachary needed

    While we’re all waiting for the newest Carl Webb post to publish tomorrow morning (it’s all about the traffic, folks), I thought I’d put out a call for some information on our next target who will be Doug Zachary, the president of the Austin Chapter of the Geezers for Sitting On Our Hands (Vets For Peace to some).

    Here’s a picture I found that I had of ol’ Doug when he was at the VFP’s National Archives camp out last year;

    I’d just discovered who he was yesterday after watching a video on Austin public access channel that he did with a Code Pink crone (please don’t watch the video unless you have trouble sleeping). Then this morning, one of our new readers, Debbie, verified it for me.

    I’d talked on the phone for an hour yesterday with another recent IVAW refugee who told me some things about Zachary that made me think of Ward Reilly. Here’s what I know so far;

    Zachary was in the Marine Corps from 1968 – 1970 and somehow avoided Vietnam Those of you were in the service at the time know how hard that would have been to pull off.

    Publicly, Zachary says that he was a conscientious objector, but privately he brags that he was just a derelict that the Marines finally booted out because they were tired of his antics. Several former members of IVAW have told me that they suspect he steals from every cause he touches. He doesn’t seem interested in many of IVAW and VFP’s projects until he smells a fund-raising opportunity that he can loot.

    A few of the folks at the “Under the Hood” cafe in Killeen, TX tell me that he has insinuated himself into their projects without invitation as soon as they became successful and Zachary smelled money. It sounds like Ward Reilly cloned. Remember Reilly looted the VFP’s funds meant for Katrina victims. Well, it seems that Zachary is similarly motivated.

    Another IVAW refugee told me that they think that Zachary is violent and that’s why no one in VFP, VVAW or IVAW will confront him on his malfeasance. I’ve found evidence of his violence, actually, which I’ll save for the final edit of the story.

    So, since Zachary doesn’t have the large presence on the internet that others we’ve investigated here, anyone that has more information, preferably something that can be corroborated, or if you want to corroborate what I’ve I’ve already discovered, drop me a note. Apparently, Zachary has no friends in IVAW, or VFP, for that matter and we’ll probably be doing a favor for the troops by rolling up this clown – who, by the way, seems to be a Carl Webb acolyte – well, until tomorrow when he learns the truth about Webb.

  • IVAW’s Jacob Flom

    Chris Raissi sent me an email yesterday that accompanied the link he posted on his Facebook page when he resigned from IVAW;

    Jonn,

    Kristopher Goldsmith send me your info and suggested that I let you in on why I left IVAW. Here it is: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=83837947235

    I name names. Jacob Flom is a chapter president, and told me at the IVAW national convention last year that he’s a communist using IVAW to recruit veterans to his radical communist ideology. Oh yeah, he was in the air force for a little while after 9/11 and never left CONUS. He’s not even an Iraq vet. Fucking pathetic.

    Put it out there, add it to your blog, I don’t give a shit.

    By the way, I actually served in Iraq. I got an award for meritorious service out there. I served in the Horn of Africa before that, where I got a previous award for meritorious service. I completed my first enlistment honorably, reenlisted as a Sgt and went into recruiting.

    I ended up getting adsep’ed from the Marines for misconduct. I’m not down on getting hazed by fleet dodging loser career recruiters who’ve been sitting out the war on recruiting duty and then telling folks with combat tours that their previous accomplishments are old business and that they’re worthless unless they feed three bodies every month into the meat grinder. Sales is sales, but the Marine Corps doesn’t see it that way. I had to violate the UCMJ to get out of that hell, so I did.

    Bottom line is that I didn’t take to a fleet dodging MSgt with four ribbons and no combat tours telling me what a Marine is supposed to be any more than I take to Alex Bacon telling me what an Iraq vet is supposed to be.

    I figure I’d put my dirt out there before you have fun with it after some FOIA requests. We have some disagreements, but we’re more alike that unalike.

    Christopher

    I’m not going to judge Chris based on a recruiting assignment -but this Jacob Flom clown attracted my attention. Here’s his profile at IVAW – he never left the US, like Raissi wrote;

    But Flom is qualified to be Chapter President in Milwaukee. Probably because he has interests outside of IVAW that would be attractive to the ISO clowns of IVAW;

    Yeah, that seems to be the MO of the ISO dorks – they like wearing the “Iraq Veterans” banner on their shirts without having to actually serve in Iraq. Here’s Flom criticizing the troops using his tenuous veteran status, although he never really was one of the troops.

    The further they are from the war the more absurd their stories. But Flom has the same experienceas IVAW co-founder Tim Goodrich who also never got closer to Iraq than an airconditioned control center on a Turkish Airbase.

  • The crazy comes full circle

    Someone sent me a link that warned me Mom’s basement-dwellers across the country received their marching orders this weekend from their central command center in the basement of Ron Paul;

    U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, a Texas Republican and a former presidential candidate, sent an e-mail to his supporters today urging them to help Adam Kokesh, who has formed an exploratory committee as he considers running against Luján.

    “Adam Kokesh has been a tremendous supporter — of both me AND you! As a leader of Iraqi Veterans Against the War, Adam has spent years traveling the country to spread our message of peace, a strong national defense and limited government,” Paul wrote in the e-mail. “Adam has tremendous credibility because of his service in the United States Marine Corps and I have deep respect for his commitment to principle.”

    Paul wrote that sending Kokesh to Congress “would be a tremendous victory for the Freedom Movement, and if we come together and stand behind him, he has a real chance to win.”

    So the crazy comes full circle. Two inflated egos come together to shake the nickels and dimes out of the pockets of people who think they’re serious. The presidential candidate without a foreign policy meets the IVAW candidate who runs for public office just because he can’t find a job.

  • Army Sergeant on Duncan/Strandlof

    In case anyone is still interested in the Duncan/Strandlof saga, Army Sergeant, the IVAW member who TSO refers to as our “Frenemy” (I don’t refer to her as such, though), has published the IVAW’s unofficial excuse for their association with the complete fraud. By complete fraud, I refer to the fact that Jesse MacBeth at least spent 43 days in the Army, which is 44 days more than Duncan/Strandlof spent in the Marines.

    Army Sergeant tells us that she isn’t the official source for any excuse the IVAW might decide to publish, mostly because Alex Bacon, the IVAW’s Executive Director, is engaged in a private matter. The official excuse has to have the approval of a guy who went went AWOL from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration or some other Department of Transportation agency. So we’ll be waiting on pins and needles from that expert.

    In the interim, let’s look at Army Sergeant’s excuse. It typically avoids all of the issues that are involved. “Oh, I met him once, but it was so insignificant that I don’t remember the meeting.” So? When TSO and I went to Winter Soldier, we had to prove we were veterans by sending copies of our DD214. Duncan/Strandlof went to Winter Soldier, too. If TSO and I could figure out the technology to send our’s, why couldn’t IVAW force the same restrictions on their membership?

    AS glosses over the fact that Duncan/Strandlof also attended IVAW Warrior Writer workshops and on at least two separate occasions attended Tower Guard events in Colorado. So we don’t get in a pissing contest over minutiae (as a discussion of facts usually becomes with Army Sergeant), here’s a screenshot of one of the few remaining Rick Duncan videos left on YouTube since IVAW started scrubbing the internet the other day to create a some deniability. This is a Warrior Writer video;

    The end of the video has credits;

    The videos are the YouTube channel of CSaction, following the links you end up at a webpage with this banner;

    Here’s a picture from CSaction of Duncan and Garret Reppenhagen, former IVAW board member. The caption of the picture is “Mark shares a laugh with Joe and Garrett, while Hank keeps guard”.

    So now that we’ve avoided the discussion that Duncan/Standlof wasn’t just some IVAW straphanger groupie off of the street as Army Sergeant tried to make him appear in her post, let’s look at some of AS’ other excuses, for example “We also did not have the amount of staffers perhaps necessary to handle the influx of members last year.” Yeah, Duncan joined in 2007 not “last year”, as the pictures and videos above prove. Nice try, though.

    Some have charged, mainly in the milblogosphere, that we should have known that “Duncan” was a liar because of his claims. It’s something that’s really easy to say after the fact, but I’ll examine them.

    Then she go on to dispute the “shot off finger” and the “openly gay battalion commander” stories with some stories about her mother’s reattached finger and some gay soldiers she’s known. Big whoop. My point about the gay BATTALION commander was that there probably hasn’t been a captain battalion commander in the Marines since World War Two. Did I really have to say that? Her mother’s finger was cut off with a power saw, not blown off by a bullet – why did I have to type that, too?

    Now, I see in the comments of her post (comments were closed last night when I read it), TSO asked her some of the questions I presented here. Her response was to give an Infantry Salute (shrugging her shoulders while reciting “Ah dunno”.) The answer to Battalion Commander thing was;

    As for 03 Battalion commanders in the Marine Corps, I really have no idea. I know that it wouldn’t happen in the Army, but the Marines are smaller. It wouldn’t occur to me to say I knew one way or another. I’m just speaking for self here.

    Army Sergeant sounds like an abused spouse making excuses for her tormentor.

    The “Bacon is incommunicado” is weak, too. How long does it take to tell a subordinate to write a piss-poor excuse for their incompetence? Staying true to form, I expect Bacon, if he releases a statement at all, will blame Kelly Dougherty, the previous ED, for Duncan.

    I don’t really care what their statement says, however. The fact remains that fakes get into IVAW because their mentors, VFP and VVAW, are generally fakes, too. Their board is tied by purse strings to organizations that wouldn’t know a phony veteran if they were bit by one. The whole anti-war Left is more concerned about WHAT is being said than WHO is saying it since the whole ideology is based on emotions and not facts.

    IVAW, nor their handlers, are willing to scrutinize their membership because scrutiny will run some off. I’m pretty sure we’ll see more of these phonies – and I’m doing my best to embarrass IVAW – you’d think they would want to get ahead of me.

  • 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.

  • Scrubbing Duncan off of the internet

    Some of you may have noticed that the YouTube videos we linked in the below post about Rick DUncan, the escaped mental patient who found solace among his brother crazies at IVAW, have been rendered void. They included clips of Duncan talking about the plate in his noggin and reading crappy lunatic poetry – we should probably be grateful that we’re not subjected to that. As we pointed out with our screen shots, they started scrubbing their websites last night when we announced to IVAW through various channels how we had decided to proceed on the story. Of course we screen shot enough stuff before we contacted IVAW.

    The party line from them is that there was a tiny window when anyone could register online without proving their service, so one slipped through. That really can’t be true. Here’s a set of photos of former board member, Garret Repenhagen at a Tower Guard event in Colorado a few years back when Duncan attended.

    Do you mean to tell me that Reppenhagen didn’t spot this guy as a phony with all of his attendant lies? Like getting his pinkie shot off, yet having ten visible? An overtly gay captain commanding a battalion didn’t set off bells and whistles?

    Or maybe it didn’t matter because, like Jesse MacBeth, Duncan said everything they wanted to hear.

    Oh, VoteVets is busy scrubbing Duncan from their boards, too. His screen name over there was USMCinCO;

    They can scrub the internet, but they can’t scrub their souls.