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

Category: Iraq Veterans Against the War

  • I challenge you to find a bigger DouChe’ than IVAW’s Chris Arendt [TSO]

    I challenge you to find a bigger douche than Christopher Arendt, 1/119th Field Artillery, Charlotte, Michigan. He had already made my radar last week as I read this P.O.S. book, Winter Soldier, when he had this comment about his service at Gitmo:

    I would like to share with you how one goes about becoming a concentration camp guard without ever having made many decisions.

    Here is Specialist Arendt. He looks like one of the Emo kids from South Park. For Chris, the worst form of torture is having to go a week without a duck-taped gerbil being inserted into his anus by his boyfriend. (Unfair Arendt? Completely baseless? You are G.D. right it is, kind of like accusing your fellow troops of being psychotic.)

     

    SCREEN SHOT:  Video here: go over to the BBC and watch this interview.

    So what is torture to him?

    I’ve heard a lot of speculation as to what torture is. I would like to ask everyone to consider whether living in a cell for five years, away from your family and friends, without ever being given answers as to why you’re there, whether this is torture. Having to ask 19 year old boys who don’t have any idea about the politics of their government why they are detained and the answers that we weren’t able to give- I consider that torture.

    OK, at this point, go over to the BBC and watch this interview with him from last Friday.

    “they [ members of his unit] are genuinely psychotic.”

    The “shaving things into detainees hair” is a new one for him. One has to wonder why a fantastic story like that makes its first appearance in a BBC video and not in his testimony from a year ago. It’s almost as if he forgot it out until now. Or maybe, the harrowing business of running a detention facility caused his mind to block it out. Or maybe, just maybe, the story is sheer bullshit. I’m leaning towards the later of these potential causes of amnesia. According to his testimony in March, the only discussion of shaving heads is this:

    After the detainee is taken forcibly from his cell – that’s probably the first time that he’s left his cell in five, six, seven days – the detainees are beaten, pulled out to the back, shaved, all of their hair, their beard, and then taken to wherever they were supposed to go.

    Wait, so were their patterns shaved into their hair, or was it all shaved off?

    So let’s look at the rest of his testimony. Mind you that Chris was an E4.

    “I served on the blocks for two months as a prison guard. My duties were to feed detainees and dispense toilet paper…A consequence of having detainees is that they are human beings and also have stories. [Ed: No shit?] I talked with them about those stories, which led to my being taken off the blocks. I was sent to work in the Detention Operations Center as the escort control for the last eight months of my tour. I managed the movements of every detainee in Camp Delta. I did this on twelve- to fourteen- hour shifts, and rotated with a very small crew of other specialists.”

    Let me see if I get this straight. With all the officers, interrogators, OGA groups and NCO’s at Gitmo, they entrusted the running of this camp to a 19 year old Specialist who got shit-canned from his job dispensing toilet paper? Is there anyone reading this now that buys into this? Anyone? Is it more likely that Arendt ran Camp Delta, or that a Yeti and Barbra Streisand spawned Amy Winehouse? I would say that each of those stories is equally believable.

    Specialist Chris Arendt, you are the newest member of the Blue Falcons.

    I’ve got some calls into various people who served at Gitmo, including a SGM who may have been there at the same time as Chris. If anyone knows ANYONE in the 1/119th Field Artillery, get them to email us. I want to hammer the BBC on this.

  • Celebrate the last day of BDS

    As we all know, January 19th is President Bush’s last full day in office. It’s also the last day that those poor souls who’ve been suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome since before the President took office to blame him for their ills (well, that’s not true, is it?). So taking full chronological advantage, they organized a “Shoe Bush” (or “Boot Bush“, depending upon which website you land) event that forms about eight blocks from the White House in DuPont Circle (a place TSO knows well) and plans to get near the White House. I doubt that very much, judging from the construction activity I saw there yesterday in preparation for the Inauguration.

    But anyway, the whole idea is to toss shoes at President Bush;

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  • MacBeth: Watched beheadings as a child

    Jesse MacBeth’s continuing saga;

    I guess the Tylenol overdose must’ve damaged his brain. He claims that another reason that he’s so screwed up is he was forced to watch beheadings when he lived in the Middle East for seven years. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything that mentions he ever lived in the Middle East and he doesn’t name the country. The only proof he presents is the fact that he was born Jesse Adam Al-Zaid.

    I finally found a copy of the DD214 he used to gain entry into the IVAW and here it is;

    Anyone who spent a minute in the military would spot this DD214 as a phony. “Purple Heart/shot during active service” isn’t the kind of entry you’d expect, is it? If this what fooled the IVAW, I’ve got a bridge in Alaska I’ll have no problem unloading on them.

    I suspect he’s pretty intoxicated by the attention he got on YouTube over the last few days after I discovered his first two videos, so I’m sure he’s going to give us plenty of updates on his upcoming book (he claims he has 50 pages written) in which he plans to name names in IVAW.

    Before you IVAW guys get all excited, at this point, he’s just for entertainment value. If he implicated Obama in the perpetration of his fraud, I wouldn’t publish it, except to point and laugh at him. I’m pretty sure he’d say anything at this point for a bit of fame. But that doesn’t let you IVAW guys off the hook for thinking we’d fall for this Gomer. If that’s the DD214 he “fooled” you with, you’re as guilty as MacBeth.

  • Book review for the most ridiculous piece of shite ever written [TSO]


    Cpl Jason Washburn, Hero of the Battle of Grocery Bag Knoll

    “I remember one woman walking by,” said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the US Marines who served three tours in Iraq. “She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces.” 

    If I need to even tell you how ridiculous the story is above, you probably shouldn’t be here. Hey Jason, if you blew up the woman, and her groceries, who is the guy who did the post mortem and figured out she was delivering them to you? And if she was bringing it to you, why was she walking “by”? What day did this happen on? Who else was there? AND WHY THE F WOULD YOU USE A MK19 ON AN UNARMED LADY?

    Washburn is full of crap, and so is the rest of this book, WINTER SOLDIER: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations. But, I went through it. I laughed, I cried, and I felt my brain melt that people would believe this crap.
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  • Jesse MacBeth trashes IVAW [Jonn]

    Jesse MacBeth, the poster child of the phony soldier movement, and I find common ground. I’ll admit I know what MacBeth says in this video isn’t completely true, because it’s Jesse MacBeth, for Pete’s sake.

    However, he admits that IVAW had his DD214 and they helped him forge the DD214 he tried to pass off as proof of his combat experience. For those of you who haven’t seen his real DD214, here it is, courtesy of our friends at POW Network;

    I’ve always wondered about the DD214 forgery because MacBeth probably doesn’t have the brains to forge his DD214. But he also calls into question the character of service and the narratives coming from IVAW members.

    He also says “higher ups” helped him perpetrate his fraud on themedia. He doesn’t name the “higher ups”, but at the time he inflicted himself on the stage, that could only mean the Veterans For Peace and VVAW clowns who were running the organization behind the scenes.

    Now, MacBeth also claims that some IVAW members were discussing bombings. I don’t believe that at all – unless he wants to give us names, dates and places of these discussions.

    Well, here’s the video on YouTube he apparently made just last week;

    Like I said, you can’t believe MacBeth completely, he’s an habitual liar. However, he makes some of the same points I have proven on this blog. It’ll probably be quite some time before we get disillusioned IVAW former-members coming out publicly, so this all we’ve got for now.

    Thanks to Skye at Flopping Aces and The Paratrooper of Love, Blackfive for the links.

    ADDED: There’s another video I didn’t think was important the first time, but since MacBeth still draws a crowd here it is;

    And, for extra entertainment, TSO’s comments that MacBeth deleted at the YouTube link;

    He’s starting to monitor comments, but I got a few good ones in there

    jessemacbeth (8 minutes ago) Reply
    i suspect ur another ivaw idiot who dont like being exposed breing all your ivaw buddies here let them see the video and the others i am making exposing what frauds you all are

    e5infantry (12 minutes ago) 0 Reply | Spam
    OMFG, this gets better by the second! You tried to kill yourself with aspirin?

    Same shit with me, only I tried to kill myself with Preparation H and Flintstones vitamins.

    e5infantry (13 minutes ago) 0 Reply | Spam
    Dude, this is the greatest video eveh. You are such a dipshit it is astonishing. You had me at “crusted blood”. You show ’em RoughRider!

    e5infantry (16 minutes ago) 0 Reply | Spam
    I suspect you may be going back to jail, if I am not mistaken, your eyebrows are actually a protected species of caterpiller. Which makes sense since apparently gypsy moths have been feasting on your brains for years.

    He goes on to tell Army Sergeant that he’s got a book deal in the works and that he’s going to spill the beans on IVAW in a big expose`. It reminds me of a nerd slap-fight.

  • Lincoln Brigade; roots of Vets For Peace [Jonn]

    Someone emailed me a job offer from Veterans For Peace. In the listing, the group mentioned that “its membership comprises more than 7,000 members, including veterans from the Spanish Civil War to the Iraq War, who seek to raise public awareness of the true costs and consequences of militarism and war.”

    Well, last year I’d read Hemmingway’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” about an American in the Spanish Republican Army fighting the facists in Spain and I remembered how I had to wade through the Stalinist propaganda in the story which was an excellent read otherwise.

    So I started doing some research on the war and the relationship to the communists. It turns out that the major recruiting efforts for the columns of the Republicans’ foreign fighters was conducted under Stalin’s Communist International (Comintern) Bureau. Most of the funding for the Republicans came from Stalin. OK, well, for a staunch anti-fascist I guess that wouldn’t matter, as long as they had the opportunity to fight Franco who was funded by Hitler and Mussolini. And in 1936-1938 one side was as bad the other, I suppose, if you look at it from an American perspective in the context of it’s own time – not knowing that the Holocaust was coming, or that Katyn Forest massacre and the Great Purge was a few years away.

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  • The shoe toss saga continues (Updated w/videos)

    Videos below the fold

    Today Code Pink took their shoe-toss road show to the Iraqi Consulate on P Street, in Washington DC to “demand” the release of Muntadhar Al-Zeidi, the journalist who threw his shoe at George Bush a few weeks ago. Code Pink has grasped this thing around the throat like grim death and refuses to let it go. The clowns were demanding that Muntadhar Al-Zeidi be compensated. I guess we should buy him some better shoes and pay for lessons so he won’t throw little a little girl any more.

    Needless to say, just like the protest TSO covered the other week, attendance was poor, even by the media;
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  • IVAW/VVAW links: Camil part II [Jonn]

    1stCavRVN11B found some information on Scott Camil, the former VVAW member now advising the IVAW who I wrote about yesterday. He sent me a .pdf of an article from the April 2, 1975 New York Times “US Agents shoot anti-war figure” describing the events. Apparently, Camile was in the business of selling cocaine to DEA agents in 1975, with a side business of resisting arrest;

    I have the whole article and I’ll email it to anyone who wants a copy of it for posterity.  So Scott “The Assassin” Camil is just another in a long line of sociopaths who find their way into the anti-war movement. And another clown influencing the IVAW.