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

Category: Phony soldiers

  • SV wife-murderer to get Arlington plot

    According to Associated Press, 83-year-old Raymond Sawyer, who at some point in his life claimed to have been awarded the Navy Cross and also murdered his wife in Arizona in 1983, died in prison and is now looking at being interred at the Arlington National Cemetery.

    In order to build goodwill with the veteran community, Sawyer’s daughter released this statement to build bridges;

    His daughter, Mary Sawyer, told KUSA-TV in Denver that the choice of her father’s gravesite was a family matter.

    “It’s not the public’s decision,” Sawyer said. “Other people should mind their own business.”

    I’d submit to Mary that it’s the public’s decision, since it’s our cemetery and we’ll be paying for it.

    But, AP writes that there’s nothing to prevent Sawyer from being planted there since public law only prevents perpetrators of capital crimes from being buried at Arlington and Sawyer was convicted of second-degree murder.

  • More Base Gate Crashers

    I know that this is older news since it happened in June and already reported, but I found it on POW.network with the most info so far.

    PERSON 1 & 2 attempted to gain access to MacDill AFB, FL by presenting fraudulent military ID cards and fraudulent military orders (assigning them to US SOCOM and sending them to Kandahar, Afghanistan; orders were dated 14 Jun 10) to U.S. Air Force Security Forces at the entrance gate. When Person 1 was instructed to exit the vehicle he was observed wearing an empty gun holster. A Magistrate authorized search the vehicle resulted in the discovery of 3 rifles, 3 handguns, and ammunition. An K9 alerted on the vehicle prompting the use of an EOD robot to conduct a further search of the vehicle meeting with negative results.

    These two appear to have acted alone and their detention mitigates additional risk to DoD interests. Law Enforcement checks on Person 1 revealed potential criminal acts pertaining to unlawful procurement of documents from a DMV office. His DoD affiliation can be characterized as brief with “other than honorable” discharges from 2 branches of the Armed Forces.

    It seems that one of them was AWOL at the time.

    But overall I am glad that these posers did not get past the gate and put people lives in danger.

    UPDATED:

    One of them has been IDed as Christopher Kilburn.

    In 2005, Kilburn was arrested in Culpepper County, Va., and charged with forging a public record, unlawfully obtaining state motor vehicle documents and uttering a public record, according to court records. Kilburn had gotten a phony driver’s license in his older brother’s name in 2003, according to court records.

    Court records show Kilburn pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of obstruction of justice without violence and served a one-year suspended sentence and two years of unsupervised probation.


    Updated x2:
    Even though this is late , I had to put this in.

    The AWOL soldier accused of trying to enter MacDill Air Force Base with weapons and ammunition in his car is not a terrorist and was merely “trying to impress” his girlfriend during the incident, his father said in an exclusive interview with FoxNews.com.

    “This is all just about a girl,” said Ray Kilburn, whose son, Spc. Christopher Paul Kilburn, has been charged with desertion. “There’s really nothing nefarious here about him trying to get on the base.”

  • Under the Hood; SSDD

    In case you’re interested in the Deviants or Disobedients or Defoliants or whatever they are at Under the Hood and their protest at Fort Hood today, there are some really boring “livestreaming” at UStream. Casey Porter Casey J Porter says their internet connection was shut down (probably because their audience had a bout of narcolepsy), Casey wrote on his Facebook page that the event was underwhelming. I think he was being generous.

    They claim they’re going to take direct action by blocking the buses with their bodies in about an hour…good for them. I’m sure that will stop an armor regiment. The latest word on their little chat room is that the Army changed it’s schedule because they’re frightened of a bunch of anarchist pussies hopped up on free coffee.

    Mostly the videos are of Matthis making out with the sound of his own voice. I put a link to the videos below the jump because it starts by itself;
    (more…)

  • More lies from Blumenthal

    You no doubt remember the Senate candidate for Connecticut’s seat, Richard Blumenthal who falsely claimed for years that he had served in Vietnam when in fact he didn’t. Well, it seems he’s in trouble for more games with the language.

    He claimed in January that he had never taken political action committee money.

    Federal records show that he has accepted $480,000 in political action committee money since he made that claim in January. Moreover, his Republican opponent, former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, points to nearly $17,000 Blumenthal received as a state legislative candidate in the 1980s — a figure Blumenthal’s campaign does not dispute.

    Blumenthal’s campaign insists he did not lie — as McMahon says — when he said in an interview on MSNBC the day after he announced he was running for the seat of retiring Sen. Chris Dodd that he had never taken PAC money. His campaign says he was referring only to his 20 years as attorney general.

    Quantifying “never”. If they lie about their military service, they’ll lie about anything. So do those veterans who stood on stage with Blumenthal want to continue blowing smoke up the collective ass of Connecticut voters?

  • AZ phony pleads guilty

    The Arizona Republic reports that phony soldier Kurt Bishop pleaded guilty in an Arizona court to two counts of falsifying documents to escape charges for 34 violations of the Stolen Valor Act.

    Kurt A. Bishop, 42, of Queen Creek, was indicted in April on 34 counts related to fraudulent claims that he was decorated in the Army with a Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Army Ranger Tab and numerous other honors.

    Dude did 20 years in the Army, yet still had to create a story to get free pie or something.

    “It was never done for pecuniary gain,” the attorney said. “Kurt is a man of God who selflessly served his country for more than 20 years. He’s certainly not some seasoned criminal. . . . He was simply looking for acceptance and, unfortunately, it snowballed out of control.”

    Yeah, it doesn’t matter why he did it, it only matters that he lied.

  • Xavier Alvarez; the reason the Stolen Valor Act was written (Updated)

    Back in 2007, Xavier Alvarez told a crowd while he was campaigning for the post of water commissioner, that he was a Marine and that he’d been awarded the Medal of Honor, neither of which was true. Melissa Campbell, a former active duty Marine herself, questioned the veracity of the statement. She was suspended from her job two weeks later for unprofessional behavior and fired two weeks after that.

    Now three years later, a bunch of clowns impersonating the judges of the Ninth Circuit appellate court, tell us that lying is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution (Fox News link).

    A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with him in a 2-1 decision Tuesday, agreeing that the law was a violation of his free-speech rights. The majority said there’s no evidence that such lies harm anybody, and there’s no compelling reason for the government to ban such lies.

    The dissenting justice insisted that the majority refused to follow clear Supreme Court precedent that false statements of fact are not entitled to First Amendment protection.

    McQ from Blackfive writes;

    …I’d love to hear the argument or see anything in writing from them which claimed the 1st Amendment was designed to protect liars in general.

    If i lied in court, they’d toss my ass in the hoosegow for what they call perjury. If I lied to a police officer, again, I’d get tossed in the Grey Bar Hotel for obstructing an investigation. Certainly speech that applies to the justice system is not protected by the 1st Amendment, so it follows that somewhere there’s some unprotected speech outside of the legal community.

    The truth is important in legal proceedings, so those judges have an obligation to “unprotect” speech that the rest of us have to deal with every day. But apparently, they’re just too lazy to protect the people they’re sworn to protect.

    I still think that anyone who defends the behavior of jackasses like Alvarez as protected by the Constitution are just contrary for the sake of being contrary. And, oh, what is the 9th Circuit going to say about Melissa Campbells right to free speech while she paid an actual price for questioning Alvarez’ lies?

    Jerry920 among others sent me the links, even though I’d written about Alvarez last night (thanks for reading, guys :eyeroll:)

    UPDATE: Some guy named Mark Seavey who is moving up in the world, has an excellent article on this subject in The Hill’s Congress Blog.

  • Stolen Valor GA County commissioner resigns

    Earlier this month, I mentioned Cherokee County Commissioner Derek Good who thought he’d inflate his lifestory by becoming a Ranger and a college graduate. Just A Grunt tells us that he finally resigned;

    [Good’s letter of resignation]said simply that he did not want the controversy to distract the county from its business and that he was resigning immediately.

    During his campaign for office, Good said he had been an Army Ranger and had a degree from the University of Maryland. He did serve in the Army, but not as a Ranger. He did not earn a college degree. A group of residents have been seeking his resignation, demanding it in emails, through petitions and at a previous county meeting.

    Good had been a partarooper in the 82d Airborne Division, but apparently that wasn’t good enough for him.

  • A bad day for the law

    Well, it was a bad day for the law as I see it, anyway;

    A judge threw out the charge of piracy against the 6 Somalis the US Navy fished out of the sea and shipped back to Virginia for trial;

    “The court finds that the government has failed to establish that any unauthorized acts of violence or aggression committed on the high seas constitutes piracy as defined by the law of nations,” Jackson wrote in granting the defense motion to dismiss.

    There are seven more charges of stuff, but piracy brought a mandatory life sentence which would have been nice.

    A link from MEW tells us that a Missouri judge legislated from the bench and nullified a 2006 Missouri law meant to keep the Westboro Baptist Church crowd away from funerals.

    Missouri legislators passed two laws in 2006 in response to protests at servicemembers’ funerals by members of Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. The church contends the deaths are God’s punishment for the U.S. tolerating homosexuality.

    U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan ruled the laws violate the right of free speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

    Of course the bereaved have no right to express themselves all over the heads and shoulders of the Westboro fucks.

    From the Ninth Circus, (yes, I know it’s Circuit…jeez) we discover yet again that lying about your military service is free speech. Gabriel Malor of Ace of Spades quotes from the decision;

    The Act therefore concerns us because of its potential for setting a precedent whereby the government may proscribe speech solely because it is a lie. … The sad fact is, most people lie about some aspects of their lives from time to time. Perhaps, in context, many of these lies are within the government’s legitimate reach. But the government cannot decide that some lies may not be told without a reviewing court’s undertaking a thoughtful analysis of the constitutional concerns raised by such government interference with speech.

    I wrote about Xavier Alvarez more than two years ago. He claimed he was in the Marines and was awarded a Medal of Honor while campaigning for the office of water commissioner. He was not a Marine, so it follows that he wasn’t awarded any medals.