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

Category: Media

  • CNN charges US troops used chemicals in Fallujah

    Undaunted by the fact that they had been burned in their last attempt to charge the US with using chemical weapons in a war, namely the “Operation Tailwind” story, CNN is charging that US troops used chemical weapons in their Fallujah operations in 2004;

    Of course, there is no proof, just Fallujah residents complaining of the number of birth defects. Huffington Post claims the lack of evidence is proof that it happened;

    Lawyers representing the families have sued the British government for complicity in the alleged war crimes. But Iraq’s deputy minister of health tells CNN there isn’t enough evidence to prove causality, and in any case, the U.S. boycott of the International Criminal Court makes direct prosecution of the case unlikely, as do the nation’s federal immunity laws.

    Of course, no disgruntled soldiers or Marines have come forward to mention their involvement – the chemical weapons aren’t fired by generals or DoD civilians. KBR doesn’t have a chemical weapon capability last time I checked. Of course, any rational thoughts might disturb the gentle balance of the whole story.

  • Georgia Legislature Passes Bill to Put PTSD Diagnoses On Drivers Licenses

    From Bellavia via Fox News:

    Veterans groups are blasting Georgia lawmakers for passing legislation that would allow a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder to appear on driver’s licenses.

    The legislation, which awaits Gov. Sonny Purdue’s signature, would permit servicemembers and veterans to request a PTSD denotation, which would appear on their driver’s licenses as a specific health problem, much like poor eyesight.

    Here is another article from a local Georgia news site on the bill.

    State Senator John Douglas (R), one of the bill’s cosponsors, has nothing but good intentions:

    “I thought it was something that could help sick veterans and police officers. It would be beneficial to both sides,” Douglas said. “If a law enforcement officer saw a certain move or something like that he may could attribute it to something along the lines of PTSD. Many police officers and deputies are former military themselves and it would help garner some understanding and recognition of something they themselves might well be familiar with.”

    Riiiigggghhhhttttt. Douglas apparently served in the Army as an officer for 17 years but was forced out because “of the Gulf War drawdown” according to his website. He never served in combat. Even better, this is a bipartisan assault on veterans’ rights. The bill’s other cosponsor, Sen. Ron Ramsey(D), says it is “completely voluntary”. Here is his genius logic on this:

    “For example if a veteran suffering from PTSD was pulled over for a simple traffic violation, a designation on the license explaining the circumstances could inform an officer that the situation should be handled cautiously,” the statement read. “If a veteran does not feel it is necessary to designate this on their license, then they do not have to. Again, it is entirely voluntary.”

    Let me say that any veteran that voluntary puts this on his drivers would be akin to a Jew “voluntarily” putting a gold star on their clothing in Nazi Germany. There is a negative stigma attached to PTSD  and when most people hear those four letters they usually think of Rambo or Travis Bickle thanks to our enlightened Hollywood friends. I can also see many vets being tricked or “voluntold” into putting this on their license. Want to get a veteran or purple heart license plate? Oh just check this box right here sir and they will put a special sticker on your new license. Might be a stretch, but still this is a DMV we are talking about it. Marvin Myers, president of the Georgia Vietnam Veterans Alliance Inc, brings up some other issues as well:

    “What happens if Jerry Smith has PTSD on his driver’s license and he goes into a gun store? The clerk is going to say, ‘Oh no, I’m not selling you that gun,’” Myers said. “I just think you open up Pandora’s box. You’re disclosing too much of yourself.”

    Not to mention applying for a job, credit card, home loan, or even buying beer (for us young bucks), all of which require a drivers license these days….

    A shitty idea and a shitty bill. The bill is currenting awaiting a signature from Gov. Perdue. Here is his office’s contact info.

    Please kindly let him know that this is offensive to veterans.

  • Seymour Hersh making crap up…again

    Zedechek sends us a link to a HuffPo article about Seymour Hersh in which Hersh tells us that our troops are executing prisoners in Afghanistan. His proof? Well, someone told him.

    “One of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan,” Hersh said during a discussion at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference last month in Geneva, where he was also the keynote speaker. “They’re being executed on the battlefield.”

    Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story in 2004, says that five or six people had told him about the battlefield executions of prisoners.

    Here’s the video;

    Of course, he doesn’t bring us any proof, just these anecdotal stories he heard from “five or six people” Was it five or was it six? He can’t even count them on his fingers? Who were these people? Were they actual US soldiers or was people at one of his cocktail parties in his New York apartment who’d never set foot in Afghanistan and simply have a feeling about this thing?

    Yeah, Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib, months after the military had completed their investigation and were preparing charges. And remember the “assassination squads” he’d warned us about – COB6 wrote about them last year. It turned out that these assassination squads never got past the committee meeting which mentioned them briefly.

    So now, Hersh is going to start charging the troops with murder based on the word of either five or six people who we don’t know. And, it’s funny how he makes Obama a victim of the military. Obama doesn’t make the decisions, but he has to look away. His Justice Department bends over backwards for terrorists we have in custody, but somehow he can’t stop battlefield executions. Crackpot.

  • Reading is Fundamental

    The letter that many Milbloggers signed on to today and we posted below has hit the internet and it’s been immediately characterized by the illiterate press as a call from Milbloggers to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Although some of the signatories may hold that opinion, that’s not what the letter says.

    It urges Congress to wait on repealing the law until the service chiefs finish their study of the impact changing the law will have on the force. It’s right there in the letter in the third paragraph, for Pete’s sake.

    We ask Congress to withhold action until this is finished, but no longer. We urge Congress to listen to the service chiefs and act in accordance with the recommendations of that study.

    But that doesn’t stop Huffington Post and Politico from pushing whatever intellectually vacant agenda they’re engaged in.

    huffpodadt-letter

    politicodadt-letter

    Illiterate fucks.

  • Stolen Valor or Lazy Reporting?

    In the past couple of years, many veterans have gotten involved in professional mixed martial arts (MMA). Former Marine Staff Sergeant Kenneth Alexander is one of those veterans who has been able to find some success and publicity as a professional fighter. Part of the attention that he gotten has been based on the belief that he is a former “Recon Sniper”. Here is an excerpt from an article about Alexander (who is fighting at Camp Pendleton tonight) from an ABC News affiliate in California:

    Alexander served as a recon sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps until 2004, spending time in the Middle East and Africa on missions he says are still classified almost a decade later.

    “You don’t send special forces in for peacekeeping missions,” said Alexander. “Basically, my job was to go in, and go undetected and if we got the ‘green light,’ we were pulling triggers.”

    Yeah, like we haven’t heard that before. Of course thats all a bunch of BS and the Marine Corps Times confronted him about it:

    Reached by phone two days before the fight, Alexander acknowledged that he never put boots on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia, though he had done one deployment each to Kuwait and Kyrgyzstan before the left the Corps in 2004.

    According to the Marine Corps Times article, he was an intelligence specialist who appears to have spent most of his career attached to Marine Corps Air Wing units and was never a sniper or Recon Marine. However, despite the fact these claims have appeared more than once in the media, Alexander pleads ignorance:

    He claimed not to know how the information about Special Forces and his stint as a sniper made it into the articles, though he surmised his brief attachment to a division headquarters intelligence section may have led to some confusion.

    To be perfectly honest, if this were a one time thing, I would have given Alexander the benefit of the doubt. We all know the media likes to exaggerate stuff like this and when it comes to reporting on the military and war, the media is extremely lazy in many regards. Regardless, Alexander quite clearly made no effort to correct these lies in multiple printed articles (including a 2008 write-up in the Marine Corps Times) and appears to have gone along with the lies in the above ABC article. Maybe as a result of being knocked around so much, this intelligence specialist doesn’t seem to have a lot of intelligence left (yeah that last bit is corny but I couldn’t resist…)

    Like Jonn says all the time, they never claim to be pogues.

  • Bozell; Shahzad didn’t have a bad hair day

    In a Fox News interview, Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell compares the media’s coverage of the life of the Times Square bomber to Timothy McVeigh;

    Basically, it boils down to the fact that the media did their level best to connect McVeigh to the conservative movement and talk radio while they seem to be trying to distance Shahzad from al Qaeda.

  • Open Borders Porn

    Robert Rodriguez usually directs over-the-top action and horror films which usually turn out pretty good (Sin City) or sometimes extremely cheesy (Grindhouse). However his new film Machete, which appears to similar to Grindhouse in style, can be classified as nothing more than violent open borders pornography.

    Here is a brief summary from a Fox News article:

    In the trailer for the film, the title character is hired to assassinate an anti-immigration U.S. senator played by Robert De Niro. Protesters are seen waving nationalist signs as the senator speaks to a charged-up rally: “We are at war,” he booms. “Every time an illegal dances across our border, it is an act of aggression against this sovereign state — an overt act of terrorism.”

    More below the fold…

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  • Zombie McVeigh to appear on MSNBC tonight

    Rachel Maddow has succeeded in re-animating the rotting corpse of Timothy McVeigh and she’ll present an hour-long special of interviews from 45 hours of jail house interviews. To what purpose?

    Rachel Maddow, who has been having 1990s flashbacks with the anti-government vitriol that most recently accompanied the health-care reform debate.

    “Nine years after his execution, we are left worrying that Timothy McVeigh’s voice from the grave echoes in the new rising tide of American anti-government extremism,” Maddow says at the outset of her MSNBC special Monday night called “The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist.”

    She’s talking, of course, about the latest news about militias, weapons stockpiling, “tea party” anger and the perception of rising unrest in those who seek to reclaim an America supposedly lost to federal control: “On this date, which holds great meaning for the anti-government movement,” Maddow says, “the McVeigh tapes are a can’t-turn-away, riveting reminder.”

    Yes, it’s to scare the straights into thinking that millions of self-identified Tea Party activists are on a hair-trigger. That any moment, one of us could go off the deep end and bomb some building with a fertilizer bomb. How easy is it to create another McVeigh? Simple;

    “The McVeigh Tapes” is especially interested in McVeigh’s victimization by bullies in school; his love of firearms (without calling him a gun nut); and his disillusionment with the government after his Army service in the Persian Gulf War. Things really fell apart on April 19, 1993, when McVeigh watched on television as the David Koresh compound in Waco, Tex., burned to the ground after a long standoff with feds. “I’m watching flames lick out windows, and I’m watching tanks ram walls. My eyes just welled up in tears,” McVeigh said.

    Actually, McVeigh, a Bradley gunner in the Persian Gulf War, saw Bradley Fighting Vehicles ramming walls – not tanks. Funny how he’d forget that small point, isn’t it? Unless of course, he never saw the videos and he was just making excuses for his sociopathic behavior, garnering sympathy from the interviewer.

    Funny, how in the decade since MSNBC made these tapes that they’d wait until now to broadcast them, isn’t it? Luckily, even on a good night, the only people watching Maddow are her immediate family. And Jon Soltz.