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

Category: Winter Soldier II Live blogging

  • So how do you know, Jose?

    Yes, the IVAW is trying to get back in the news. The World Socialist Website does an interview with Jose Vasquez, the executive director of the Iraq Veterans Against the War in regards to the final Marine to be tried in regards to the Haditha incident six years ago;

    “Obviously this was a tragic event. But given the multiple deployments of a lot of the troops and what they faced in Iraq, it is not surprising that some of these folks snapped.”

    Really? Jose? And how would you know, since you avoided your own deployment after ten years in the military. And, oh, the Haditha incident happened in 2005…how many times had those Marines been deployed to Iraq in the less than two years of that war?

    He pointed out that “Winter Soldier” hearings held by the IVAW in 2008 had heard testimony of US troops’ involvement in similar atrocities throughout the war and rules of engagement set by the military command that made them inevitable.

    Funny, TSO and I sat through the Winter Soldiers hearings and heard not one word of “similar atrocities throughout the war”. We heard stories about clowns who ALMOST shot people, or buildings being shot up, we saw pictures of living quarters which were in disarray, and backed up toilets but we didn’t hear about any atrocities. Not. One. Word.

    The IVAW leader expressed little confidence in that the military justice system would hold anyone accountable for the crimes at Haditha.

    Well. you know it could be that there were no crimes at Haditha, that it was all hype from the anti-Bush crowd, hype pumped up by a dead congressman for his own political purposes, and now glommed on to by asswipes who still want to make everything about Bush.

    But, you know, IVAW, you might have a small measure of credibility in the discussion if you had an actual Iraq War veteran speaking for you instead of someone who served in the military for more than 10 years and then chickened out at the moment he was supposed to deploy for the first time.

  • Jason Lemieux: then and now

    I was in the committee meeting room when Jason Lemieux testified to Congress at the Winter Soldier hearings. It was almost word-for-word what he said at the original WSII hearings in Silver Spring, MD. At the time I wrote;

    Jason Lemieux followed Kelly. He was discharged in 2006 – before General Petraeus took command. He began with the standard illegal war blather and testified to the destruction of property. His Rules of Engagement (ROE) were that he should shoot Iraqis that made him uncomfortable and he claimed that excessive force was routine.

    Lemieux recounted one incident, and began the story with the standard “I don’t remember the date”. His unit returned fire with thousands of rounds and Lemieux called it indiscriminate (even though he was in the headquarters and only heard the rounds being fired and didn’t witness the actual fire fight). IVAW seems to be fixated on destroyed buildings. Probably because most were so far from the action, all they got to see was destroyed buildings. He went on to say that troops aren’t fighting for democracy, or the flag, or the country…just for their own safety and that somehow makes them dangerous to Iraqis. We can only hope the Iraqis realize that.

    Three years later, almost to the day, Lemieux is again in the news, this time it’s Fox News;

    “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t have joined the Marine Corps,” Jason Lemieux, a veteran and soon-to-be graduate, said. “It just wouldn’t have happened.”

    And you repay the Corps by testifying to the “Out of Iraq Caucus” that the Marine Corps was running around Iraq firing indiscriminately at buildings and people? Nice.

    I mean I’m glad for Jason that he went on with his life and has done something besides be another Bill Perry or Ward Reilly, but, why did he have to shit all over the people who he now credits for his success?

  • Another crock of shit from Matthis, IVAW and Veterans Today

    Yeah, M’kay.

  • How hungry do you have to be to pay to eat a meal with Michael Moore?

    Ya know there are hundreds of ways to give money that would help the troops, whether you want to help them live in a house made to the specifications which allow them to live a normal life in their own home, or buy laptops that keep them connected to the world despite their injuries. Now, how much money would you figure that Michael Moore spends on Ho-Hos in a week? Which organization would you figure is the last organization on Earth you’d give money if you really wanted to help injured troops?

    I’ll give you a clue – it’s an organization that is light on Iraq veterans, but the first two words in it’s name is Iraq Veterans. But guess which organization reaps the benefit of a raffled meal with Michael Moore;

    Would you like to have dinner with me? It would be just us — and up to three of your friends, if you want — and we can talk about anything…movies, politics, or whether LeBron, Bosh and Wade are going to live up to the hype. (I’m betting yes.)

    If you’re interested, just go here and make a bid. The money from the winner will go to Operation Recovery, a project of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

    I’m participating in this auction because the IVAW is, quite simply, one of the most important organizations in our country.

    Of course, we don’t expect Michael Moore to give his own money to any organization that benefits the troops, Hollywood just doesn’t work like that. But of all of the organizations that actually benefit troops, Moore picks the least likely to do anything for anybody except them-stupid-selves.

    IVAW also participates in the nationwide Truth in Recruiting campaign, so that young people can make informed decisions about joining the military. And they organized the 2008 Winter Soldier conference, at which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan told the unvarnished truth about what we’re doing in our wars — and what our wars are doing to our vets.

    We all owe every member of IVAW a debt of thanks. And there’s no better way to help pay that debt than to support Operation Recovery, which is a new campaign to stop the military from sending already-traumatized veterans back into combat zones.

    They’d benefit the country more if IVAW had a “Truth in Michael Moore’s documentaries” campaign so that people can make informed decisions about entering theaters. Of course, as TSO and I proved when we attended the 2008 Winter Soldier hearings, IVAW would have trouble recognizing much truth in…well, anything.

    Some dimwit has bid the meal up to $7250 (the next bid will be $7750) at this writing. It’s gone up a bid in the half hour it took me to write this.

    I had a few jokes to toss in this about the fear of sitting at a dining table with Michael Moore and the potential for choosing fork stabbings or starvation, but I’ll leave those for you guys. The jokes almost write themselves.

  • Dahr Jamail: I said it first!

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    This picture is of Dahr Jamail (center of the picture in black glasses and dark hair), eminent journalist for Truthout.org. He seems to be leading some IVAW protesters in their march on the National Archives in March, 2008, doesn’t he? Well, this photo probably represents that truth better than any Jamail himself could pen.

    Jamail has made it his life’s work to besmirch the reputation of the American soldier. We’ve compiled a fairly large number of posts about Jamail, a search on his name will demonstrate how he’s attached himself to James Branum, the IVAW and Under the Hood Cafe. Apparently, he took volumes of notes during the Winter Soldier hearing in March 2008, because he drags them out at every opportunity and repeats quotes from them like a trained bird.
    (more…)

  • Did I strike a nerve?

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    Jason Hurd was at Winter Soldier II in Silver Spring, MD and testified that he ALMOST shot an Iraqi who wouldn’t stop when she approached his checkpoint. He ALMOST shot her, but then he didn’t – that was reason enough for him to sling snot all over the assembled hippies as he wept. TSO and I were barely able to contain our laughter.

    Now two years later, he wishes an incurable disease upon me for my little tirade last night;

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    Nice. I guess I deserve the disease because I spoke my mind and my words struck a nerve. I wonder how Jason comes down on the flag burning issue? I wish Jason a long and fruitful life and I hope ALMOST shooting an 80-year-old woman is the worst thing that ever happens to him…after he grows up.

    According to my mole in IVAW, this is how the voting went among the board on the issue; Since Millard brought the complaint to the board and the complaint was against Matthis, they didn’t have a vote. Cameron White voted to censure Matthis and Wes Davies hasn’t voted yet. Bryan Reinholdt, the public school teacher, claims he may change his vote later…I guess depending on which way the wind blows…but right now, he supports flag burning. Seth Manzell, who counts Noam Chomsky as one of his influences, Adrianne Kinne and Victor Agosto are solid supporters of Matthis.

    I guess Jose Vasquez punted the issue again.

  • VVAW/IVAW links: Bill Perry [Jonn]

    This is Bill Perry of the old VVAW. Here’s a picture I took of him with Elvis Kokesh at the Ron Paul march last August carrying an upside down flag – that’s him, the sea cow-shaped guy, in the Black Vets For Peace T-shirt on your left;

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    Here’s a picture of him in the VVAW T-shirt horning in on a photo of me and Army Sergeant shaking hands at the Winter Soldiers Congressional hearing back in April(I didn’t find out who he was until after I wrote the post and posted the picture);

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    Here he is planting a wet one on Elvis Kokesh last month in Nassau County when the charges against the IVAW arrestees were dropped.

    Here’s Bill Perry with VoteVets co-founder and chairman Jon Soltz along with some IVAW members:

    So who is Bill Perry, you might be asking. Well, he’s one of the original VVAW members and he testified at the first Winter Soldier hearings in 1971 (you know, with such luminaries as phony soldier Al Hubbard and John Kerry). He testified to his own misconduct which, if it happened, cost the lives of his own platoon as well as some innocent Vietnamese villagers;

    Bill Perry, 23, Pfc. (E-3), “A” Co., 1/506, 101st Airborne Division (November 1966 to August 1968)

    PERRY: I served in Vietnam from ’67 to ’68. I wouldn’t like to go too far into the horror stories you’ve been hearing about the last few days, but I would like to relate a few incidents. On March 5, 1968, in the province of Phuc Long, village of Song Be, a platoon of us, twenty-nine of us, were on a search and destroy mission. A few of us, who were considered expendable, were told to walk point.

    As we came up out of a bamboo thicket into a clearing, a woman with whom I and one of the other two people had previously had what you might call business transactions with concerning marijuana, informed us of an imminent ambush on the part of the local forces. Myself and two others ran into her home with her. We weren’t sure whether she was _____ us or what, but we were scared so we ran into her home. The rest of the platoon came up out of the valley into the clearing and was ambushed. We were isolated pretty well from the rest of the platoon while they were getting shot up. And when an NCO came up to look into the house where we were kind of looking out the door with the woman, the NCO automatically figured that we must be VC prisoners and he shot her up. She had a very young child inside her bomb shelter. Every Vietnamese home has to have a bomb shelter. The ambush actually lasted about two or three minutes, and the platoon got pretty well shot up. For about five hours they called in artillery and air strikes and pretty well demolished the town of Song Be. Finally when enough reinforcements came, they went out to sweep the area. They decided to throw fragmentation, or white phosphorus grenades, inside of each bunker regardless of what was going down in any bunker. We tried to stop them from fragging other bunkers where we could hear screams or moans or whatever, but they were really into it.

    There was another incident in mid-July 1968 in the vicinity of Nui Ba Den where we had been in about two days of steady combat. We had found a lot of bodies, some killed by air strikes and some killed by small arms fire. And the military fear, you know, came through once again in their mutilation of bodies. They were very much into cutting patches and numbers on dead bodies in this particular incident. I could go on with more horror stories, but like we all know what happens. You can hear it from the other GIs and when the rest of the people on the panel finish, I’d like to go into a little of what causes people to act this way, why people act this way, and what we can do to combat people acting this way. Thank you.

    Being a chickenshit coward, Perry hid in a mamasan’s hut without warning his platoon about the ambush (kind of the job of the point team). If he had done his job and warned the platoon, maybe the wanton killing of everything that moved in the area wouldn’t have happened. Then Perry went on to tell the tale of infiltrating Cambodia, apparently just for the sake of infiltrating Cambodia.

    MODERATOR: Perry, before we go on to the next one, you mentioned something before about an order received by the higher up and crossing across the national borders. Could you mention something on that?

    PERRY: It was very well known that we were within two klicks of Cambodia which is about a mile and two-tenths. Very often we went on search and destroy missions directly west as far as 8-10 klicks and back. We were definitely going into Cambodia.

    MODERATOR: Did you ever make contact in Cambodia? Did you ever make contact when you crossed the border?

    PERRY: No, I didn’t.

    So what was the point of that? There were no incidents in Cambodia so there’d be no reports of operations in Cambodia. Remember this was 1972 – one of the popular charges to make against the Nixon Administration that year was that they’d illegally extended military operations in to Cambodia. According to Perry’s service claims, he was out of the Army before Nixon was even elected.

    The end result of all the Winter Soldier in 1971 testimony according to Scott Swett;

    The Army’s Criminal Investigative Division (CID) had opened cases for 43 WSI “witnesses” whose claims, if true, would qualify as crimes. An additional 25 Army WSI participants had criticized the military in general terms, without sufficient substance to warrant any investigation.

    The 43 WSI CID cases were eventually resolved as follows: 25 WSI participants refused to cooperate, 13 provided information but failed to support the allegations, and five could not be located. No criminal charges were filed as a result of any of the investigations.

    So Perry’s story was pretty much bullshit. Again, these are the people behind IVAW.

  • Geoff Millard; the latest IVAW phony soldier (Updated)

    The anti-war movement loves the Iraq Veterans Against the War. In an interview, Head Hag of Code Pink bragged that IVAW gives the anti-war movement credibility;

    “The vet groups are our street cred,” a California-based anti-war activist tells me at the group’s barbecue. Medea Benjamin, co-founder of feminist anti-war group Code Pink, says the veterans’ group appeals to the American glorification of the military, even within the anti-war movement. “People who have been part of a war that I consider immoral and illegal still have more legitimacy than people who were against the war from the very beginning and refused to fight in it,” she explains, sitting in the vets’ living room while her college-age cohorts chat with the veterans and eat hamburgers and sausages. “They command more of a sense of authority and more of a sense of understanding of what’s actually happening on the ground.”

    Let’s take a look at the credibility that Medea values so much, shall we?

    The president of the Washington, DC Chapter, Geoff Millard, for example, is a real gadfly on the Washington, DC Leftist scene. I saw him going into the William Ayers book signing last month. Here’s a picture of him sitting behind then-candidate Barack Obama at a speech leading up to the election in Pennsylvania;

    This is his profile on the IVAW website;

    In his profile, Millard brags “Along with a peace delegation Geoff became the first Iraq war veteran to meet with members of the Iraqi parliament about their 26-point peace plan. Also Geoff has traveled Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iran meeting with Iraqi refugees at every chance.”

    But he’s being modest. He’s also addressed the Socialist World Forum in Venezuela and fawned over such luminaries as Hugo Chavez and Cindy Sheehan. Here’s a picture of him marching with Medea Benjamin and Cindy Sheehan a few years back exercising his “street cred” for the anti-war movement;

    My buddy/alter ego Robin at Chickenhawk Express did some extensive research on Millard a few years back when he first started making the IVAW scene while he was AWOL. Robin includes his history as a malingerer complaining constantly about his bouts of pain from a old wrestling injury  – he claimed an Iraqi doctor said he should go back to the States, but Army doctors disagreed.

    After he finished his tour of Iraq and the Army wouldn’t give him a medical discharge, he became a conscientious objector and went AWOL for nine months. Familiar story, isn’t it? It’s always some sort malfeasance on the part of IVAW members that preceeded their “conscientious objectors” or “resisters” status.

    Notice, like most of the other folks in IVAW, he lists himself as a Sergeant. In addition, he claims he served in Germany, Qatar, Kuwait and Iraq. It sounds more like a flight path than a career path.

    I got a hold of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on Geoffrey a few weeks back and it was a little light on information;

    It said that he is a specialist and not a sergeant as he claimed, and his awards were only two medals and ribbon – quite a bit different than what he sports in public;

    That’s a lot more than what’s in records, no? Need a closer look?

    That’s three awards of the Meritorious Service Medal (MSM) on top – but none of them are in the FOIA.

    Well, see, I’m a fair guy, so I decided before I posted anything, I wanted to give Geoffrey a chance to respond – actually, TSO and Uncle Jimbo advised me to proceed cautiously.

    Thanks to some prodding from  Army Sergeant, I’m sure, he responded the same day, and sent me one of his three DD214s – of course, he sent the best one of the three, the one that says he earned all of those medals and that he’s a sergeant. The only thing I’ve altered is his Social Security Number, his mother’s name and address and his home address;

    Now that would seem to settle it, right? Well, not quite. I sent the DD214 to my new friends at POW Net and, eagle eyes that they are, they noticed right off that even though he has awards for foreign service in block 13, there’s no foreign service time in block 12f.

    The folks at POW NET sent the FOIA request back through St Louis with the DD214 Millard sent me.

    Guess what? The Army sent the same FOIA information back even though they had his DD214. His form 2-1 doesn’t mention any service in Iraq.

    The folks at POW NET are forwarding the FOIA and the DD214 Millard sent me to the FBI for further investigation.

    1stCAVRVN11B emailed this picture of Millard wearing a CIB, which also isn’t in the DD214 or the FOIA report;

    He explained in his email to me;

    [The DD214] will not show a CIB that is a longer story of my being pined [sic] in Iraq but not having it on paper back home because of Army FUBAR.  I was unsure about wearing it and I admit I did once but never felt comfortable with it on.

    Well, the real reason he should have felt uncomfortable about wearing a CIB is because he never earned one no matter who “pinned” him – it wasn’t an Army FUBAR. To earn a CIB, a soldier has to be a qualified infantryman in the 11 or 18 series MOS and be serving in an infantry unit lower than brigade level. Millard was a 12B combat engineer not an 11 or 18 series, and he worked for a general – there are no generals below brigade level. I told him all of that in an email, but he didn’t see fit to respond.

    Millard wants the honors accorded an infantryman who served in combat without having to put up with the shit of actually being an infantryman. Stolen valor.

    So let’s recap the “street cred” of the anti-war movement; Millard claims to be a sergeant, the Army says he’s a specialist. He claims to have a chest full of medals, the Army says he has two and a ribbon. Millard claims to have been awarded the Combat Infantry Badge, even though he was never a combat infantryman and the Army disagrees with him. Millard claims to have served on the Mexican border, Germany, Qatar, Kuwait and in Iraq and the Army has no record of him ever leaving New York State except for basic training and advanced individual training.

    Oh, and the FBI will be investigating him for falsifying his military records.

    At least he’s got experience doing a perp walk – he may need that skill.

    Now, I’ll admit that I have a hard-on for Millard since he tried to intimidate TSO and me at Winter Soldier by asking us for our blog URLs so they could monitor what we were writing about them from the inside. I’m pretty sure he didn’t ask any of the friendlier bloggers for that same consideration.

    Later, he threatened to throw TSO, Rurik and me out of Winter Soldier because TSO talked to a Washington Post reporter. Oh, and he made one of his minions remove me from the Congressional hearing room for Winter Soldier after I filmed him playing general’s aide before the hearings checking mikes and shuffling paper.

    So this post is my pay back – and that’s why it’s languished for three weeks in my draft folder waiting to get the facts just right. It’s been rewritten countless times and a number of people have contributed to it and they’re all credited.

    I’ve got several other records requests being processed, so you may see a spate of “phony soldier” posts in the next few months. Ya’all phony soldiers had better adjust your narratives.

    UPDATED: For all of you sharpshooters, someone sent me a clearer picture of his medals;