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

Category: Shitbags

  • IVAW intersects with Chris Hayes

    Earlier today, I wrote about Chris Hayes who couldn’t bring himself to call any service members “heroes” because he was afraid it would cause more wars. Always in the market for a good anti-America meme and a way to bash the troops, Geoff “Stolen Valor” Millard of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, steps up to offer his services to Chris Hayes for the next time he wants to bash selfless military service;

    “Yup”, how did Chris not think of IVAW when he was preparing to slam the troops and he might need someone on the panel to back him up. Because Geoff Millard has no problem just making shit up and wearing his uniform like a mannequin for the MSNBC crowd, after all he wears shit he didn’t earn for “the cause”.

    Millard still thinks he has some sort moral authority in the discussion of a war in which he’s never served, wearing a rank he lost when he went AWOL, wearing a CIB he didn’t earn for shuffling a general’s power point slides, and three, count ’em, three Meritorious Service Medals. Did I forget to mention the forged DD214?

    “Yup”. Go ahead and put Millard on your show, Hayes, and you’ll be an even bigger target.

    Thanks to JP for finding that Twitter exchange.

    ADDED: By the way, Chris Hayes apologized for using the right to speak freely about the people who who protect that right for him. Of course those are my words, not his. i think it was Bush’s fault, though;

    But in seeking to discuss the civilian-military divide and the social distance between those who fight and those who don’t, I ended up reinforcing it, conforming to a stereotype of a removed pundit whose views are not anchored in the very real and very wrenching experience of this long decade of war. And for that I am truly sorry.

  • Abdo’s dastardly plot revealed in court

    In U.S. District Court in Waco, TX, the prosecutors revealed the plot which PFC Naser Jason Abdo had planned for residents of Killeen, Texas last July. Associated Press reports;

    [FBI special agent C. Michael Owens] testified that Abdo told investigators he planned to put a bomb in what looked like a gift box, leave it a Chinese buffet frequented by Fort Hood soldiers, wait outside and shoot any survivors.

    “He said he wanted to give faith to brother [Maj. Nidal Hasan] … and said `People think he’s crazy, but he’s not crazy and I came here to remind the people,’” Owens testified.

    Owens testified earlier that Abdo said he had planned to offer a Fort Campbell soldier a ride, kill him and videotape it while reciting the names of people he felt had been wronged by the U.S. military – including Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was raped before she and her family were killed in 2006.

    His defense attorney rests his whole case on the fact that Abdo hadn’t built his bomb yet…if it hadn’t been for those meddling cops….

    I guess they should have let him go ahead with it and then arrest him among all of those dead bodies. They said that he survived on cash and gift cards. I wonder where those came from, well, I’m not really wondering because he’d been a cause célèbre of the antiwar left.

  • OWS/Black Bloc Hippies Show “Courage”

    Coming to us yesterday from the the Chicago Sun-Times is a story about our brave intrepid hippie warriors who decided they’d blow off a little steam between throwing “I was there” medals, plotting to blow up shit, and generally being worthless malodorous dickheads to attack some unarmed, innocent diners:

    Police call the melee at the restaurant a targeted assault by a mob that Winston said wielded metal batons and hammers. Ten diners were hurt in the attack, and three of those were hospitalized.

    Tinley Park police had five suspected assailants in custody, and Winston said 18 young men, all wearing hooded jackets and obscuring their faces with scarves and other coverings, stormed into the restaurant.

    “They came running in the door single file,” said Winston, who owns Ashford House, 7959 W. 159th St., and the adjacent Winston’s Market.

    Winston, and police, said the men knew who their targets were, and that the attack wasn’t a random act of violence. Winston said the mob “targeted” a group of 20 diners, all of whom were from out of state.

    Now I’m just gonna go out on a limb here and make a little observation. As of a few months ago when WI went from no-issue to shall-issue, this leaves Illinois as the only state in the nation which does not allow concealed carry.

    Anyone here want to guess as to whether or not they’d pull this shit in a place where CCW was 1–allowed, 2–likely?

    Those little hooded shitbags might have come into the restaurant single-file, but even with their hoodies, masks, hammers, and police batons, as soon as they found themselves facing some pissed off patrons willing to dump a couple of hundred grains of P+ .45 hollowpoint into their sorry meatsack carcasses, they sure as hell would be piling over each other in a mad rush to GTFO before they were carted out in rubber bags.

    YMMV.

  • Lockerbie Bomber Dies

    Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the conviced convicted bomber of Pan Am Flight 103, has died. The flight blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing a total of 270 individuals. Most were US citizens.

    al-Megrahi was released by the government of Scotland on “humanitarian grounds” in 2009 because he was believed to be near death from cancer. Yeah, right. Believe that, and I’ll make you a great deal on a unicorn farm containing a toll bridge across the Hudson River and a Skittles orchard.

    It’s too bad that the government of Scotland had no balls when it came to al-Megrahi, and apparently put Euros above justice.  It’s also too bad we didn’t find a way to send him to meet his Maker earlier.  But at least he’s gone – even if he did get to spend his last 2+ years among family and friends vice dying by degrees, alone, and behind bars as he so richly deserved.

    May al-Megrahi burn in hell while serving as Shaytan’s personal sex-slave for all eternity.

  • Stealing from the troops

    We got this link last night on our Facebook Fan Page which recounts the arrest of Terrence Ralph, a recent immigrant from Guyana and a Kennedy Airport employee who had been doing his shopping in packages intended for US troops in Germany according to the NY Daily News;

    Postal inspectors had Ralph under surveillance for a week after reports of missing property surfaced from Germany, said Donna Harris of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

    Packages that arrived in Germany with signs of tampering were traced to a sorting facility at the Queens airport, Harris said.

    Ralph was caught red-handed when he was seen on surveillance tape “rifling through the parcels” that were bound for Germany, according to Harris.

    Way to be grateful that we let you emigrate here, Terrence. Send him back to his craphole country – that should be punishment enough.

  • Detention law blocked

    According to Bloomberg, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest blocked a law that the government passed on Dec. 31st, this last, which authorized the government to use the military to detain US citizens for their subversive activity. The group who took the case to court was led by New york Times reporter, Chris Hedges, who barely a year ago was preaching to the American people that we should follow the example of the Greeks and burn our country down. From a TSO link at the time;

    Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.

    At Bloomberg, Hedges complains that he had to change his relationships with terrorists because of the new law contained in last year’s Defense Authorization Act;

    The complaint was filed Jan. 13 by a group including former New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges. The plaintiffs contend a section of the law allows for detention of citizens and permanent residents taken into custody in the U.S. on “suspicion of providing substantial support” to people engaged in hostilities against the U.S., such as al-Qaeda.

    Hedges, who testified he has been a foreign news correspondent for 20 years, said he has reported on 17 groups that are on a State Department list of terrorist groups. Hedges testified that after the law was passed, he changed his dealings with groups he had reported on, Forrest said.

    Oh, you mean a guy who, last year was advocating for a violent upheaval in the US and had 20 years of relationships with 17 groups on the terrorist list is worried he might be detained by the folks who are fighting against his friends? I wonder why.

    While I don’t necessarily agree with the law, I also don’t want my interests represented by this particular bag of steaming feces. Thanks to TSO for the link.

  • Aaron Hughes to toss his medal at NATO in Chicago

    We talked about Aaron Hughes the other day. He was a truck driver stationed in Kuwait and drove supplies into Iraq in the early months of the war and now he’s the head spokesperson for IVAW in Chicago based on his unique view of the war in Afghanistan.

    Tom sends us this video from Democracy Now! in which Aaron is interviewed by Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh because he’s threatening to throw his GWOT Medal and his Army Commendation Medal at NATO this weekend in Chicago. If you’re having trouble sleeping tonight, this is the video you need. It’ll put you right out.

    He starts out spewing out the little speech with all of the same talking points of his previous video and he doesn’t stray from those talking points through the whole interview. When ever the interviewers ask him to stray from his points, he says he doesn’t know.

    He complains that as a truck driver he was only trained to kill, not to build democracies;

    There’s a real moral disconnect between the idea that our military can build a democracy and the idea that our military is trained and designed to control, dominate and kill people. … Occupations don’t build democracies, don’t extend individuals’ freedoms.

    Yeah, Aaron, I know you weren’t in Afghanistan, so you wouldn’t be able to ask those Afghan school girls if the Americans haven’t helped them any, what with girls just recently being allowed to go to school, in the school houses that we built. But I’m sure if look far and wide through the ranks of IVAW, you might find someone who has been there and can explain it to you.

    Aaron also explains that the only people who are qualified to bring democracy to Afghanistan have studied the problem for years. Yet here is Aaron, with his degree in Art Theory telling us how to run our foreign and defense policies. I guess in Art Theory they don’t teach the word “irony” to their students.

    PS: Aaron loves birds!

  • So Wikileaks Was “No Big Deal” . . . .

    You may have heard that yesterday, Iran hanged an alleged “Mossad spy”, Majid Jamali Fashi.

    Today, published reports indicate that Wikileaks may have been responsible for exposing this individual to Iranian authorities – and thus for his demise.  From the linked article:

    The Times of London reported Wednesday that a document from the US Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, seemingly drew attention to Fashi. The September 2009 US diplomatic document — identified by the code 09BAKU687 — quotes an Iranian source who was a licensed martial arts coach and trainer as describing to his American contacts pressure from the Iranian regime to train soldiers and militiamen in martial arts.

    Fashi was reportedly in Baku for an international martial arts competition only days before the US Embassy document was written.

    The suggestion is that the Iranian authorities identified Fashi as someone who was in illicit contact with the West on the basis of the document. He was arrested days after the publication of the document by WikiLeaks in December of 2010 and charged with carrying out the January 2010 assassination of nuclear scientist Masoud Ali-Mohammadi on behalf of the Mossad.

    I don’t have any idea whether or not Fashi was working for the Mossad, or what exposed him if he was indeed a Mossad agent.  But the above theory is plausible.  Whether it’s the truth or not, I don’t know.

    But it damn sure could be true.

    Congratulations, PFC Manning.  You may now literally have blood on your hands.

    And the next time anyone asserts that Manning giving those quarter-million classified documents to Wikileaks was “no big deal”, refer them to Fashi’s family.  I’m sure his parents and siblings will agree wholeheartedly that Wikileaks was “no big deal.”