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

Category: Shitbags

  • Holmes admits that Caldwell’s PsyOp wasn’t Psy-ish

    LTC Michael Holmes, the fellow who went to Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings and told the story repeated breathlessly across the internet that Brigadier General William Caldwell was bending the minds of visiting politicians, has finally admitted that maybe it wasn’t such a big deal as he first indicated. Spencer Ackerman at Wired.com gives Hastings a feather massage;

    Lt. Col. Michael Holmes, concedes that Lt. Gen. Caldwell’s effort was little more than spinning legislators — something any press flack could have done innocuously. Holmes’ main message to the inquiry will actually be more meta: he’s a whistleblower, subject to retaliation from Caldwell’s staff after he expressed doubt that an info-ops guy like him should be spinning U.S. citizens.

    Caldwell’s command “was all about intimidation and reprisal, making people toe the line,” Holmes tells Danger Room at a Washington D.C. coffee shop.

    Toe the legal line.

    [T]here was no inherent line crossed. Holmes feared that his training as an information operations officer disqualified him from spinning U.S. legislators, since information operations aren’t supposed to target U.S. citizens. But both Holmes and Caldwell’s team have told Danger Room that the training command didn’t actually perform information operations — like attacking enemy computer networks, psychological warfare, or military deception. Indeed, while Holmes’ September 2010 officer evaluation report refers to Holmes as an “Information Operations Supervisor,” it noted, “there is not an operational requirement for Information Operations” in the training command.

    The spin itself, Holmes says, was unproblematic.

    Yeah, unproblematic. It wasn’t made to sound unproblematic last month when Holmes’s dramatic retelling was made to sound, as my friend Blackfive said, like “Men who stare at Senators” Jedi mind tricks.

    So now with Holmes under oath this morning at the Pentagon with Lt. Gen. William Webster, the investigating officer in this newest investigation, Holmes’ story is suddenly more innocuous than it was in the Rolling Stone. Funny how that works.

    And of course, Holmes was claiming that I’m a paid agent of BG Caldwell sent to smear him. Come to think of it, that check is late. Ackerman admits that both Holmes and Hastings are his friends which explains the tongue bath Ackerman gave them today. At this point, I’ll refrain from calling them all three shitbags until my check clears.

  • Burglar’s shower interupted by Homeowner, calls 911

    This is the kind of burglars we need more of – the kind that call the police themselves;

    The suspect, Timothy James Chapek, was in the bathroom taking a shower when the homeowner returned to the house Monday night, Portland police said in a statement.

    Accompanied by two German shepherds, the homeowner asked Chapek what he was doing in the house.

    Chapek locked himself in the bathroom and made an emergency call, police said. He said he had broken into the house, the owner had come home, and that he was concerned the owner might have a gun.

    Yeah, I’m a lazy homeowner, just go ahead and phone it in yourself. It seems to me that if Chapek was worried about the owner’s possession of a weapon, it would have been long before he took a shower in someone else’s house.

    Thanks to Old Trooper for the link.

  • Frank Buckles Controversy Part II

    It seems that Congress is still not going to allow last World War I veteran Frank Buckles to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, according to the Washington Times. Senators and Democrats, both,Rockefeller and Manchin, from West Virginia, Mr. Buckles home state, blame the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner (like I do), but they’re overlooking their own Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Harry Reid who has equal say in the matter;

    Mr. Boehner and Mr. Reid instead said they will ask Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to allow Mr. Buckles‘ family to hold a memorial service at the amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery, where he will be buried.

    But neither leader explained his position not to allow the body of the longtime West Virginia resident to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, an honor reserved — though not exclusively — for presidents.

    “Like everyone else, Sen. Reid honors Mr. Buckles for his service to our country,” said Reid spokesman Jon Summers.

    It seems to me that the two Senators from West Virginia would put pressure on their own party’s senior member in the Senate, where they weild some measure of clout, instead of just plinking across the aisle and across the Capitol Building…that is if their primary intention is to get Buckles in the Rotunda.

    Rosa Parks was awarded the honor, certainly a soldier in the first world war and a prisoner in the second should get some measure of respect in this regard.

    Call Boehner’s office at;

    H-232 The Capitol
    Washington, DC 20515
    Phone: (202) 225-0600
    Fax: (202) 225-5117

    Reid at;

    522 Hart Senate Office Building,
    District of Columbia 20510-2803
    Phone: (202) 224-3542
    Fax: (202) 224-7327

    ADDED: More from Laughing Wolf at Blackfive.

  • Duff: Israel aid to Libya included micro-nukes

    COB6 sends us a link to Gordon Duff’s latest mind-droppings which accuse Israel of secretly delivering “micro-nukes” to Libyan rebels. To support this contention, Duff sources to himself and other Veterans Today lunatics.

    With Israeli security companies openly operating inside Libya, in violation of UN sanctions, reportedly 50,000 “mercenaries” on the way to lead the crackdown on rebel forces, is there a chance that the covert arms relationship between Israel and Libya, alive and well and very “nuclear” in 2003, may be a factor in the recent “mishap?”

    He claims there has always been a “love/hate” relationship between Gaddafi and Israel;

    Libya and Israel have, for decades now, traded arms, WMD technologies, shared intelligence and even spied on America together as part of a consortium of rogue states whose membership has grown and shrunk over the years. Iran, East Germany and Czechoslovakia were overthrown by revolutions.

    Of course, he can’t help but link these nukes to 9-11;

    Khalzov, while serving with the Soviet Army forces tasked with cataloging and overseeing all nuclear weapons use around the world describes briefings about demolition devices, thermonuclear bombs, that were planted under the World Trade Center, information that was shared with the Soviet Union in accordance with their treaty with the United States

    As always, the real comedy lies in the comments.

  • Manning’s comment results in naked measure

    You’ve probably read all last week how guards at the Quantico brig began taking Brad Manning’s clothes every night, forcing him to sleep naked. I knew there was probably a very good reason if it happened at all. This morning Politico reports that his defense lawyer explains why, after nearly a week of whining about it;

    …Manning “was told that there was nothing he could do to downgrade his detainee status and that the Brig simply considered him a risk of self-harm. PFC Manning then remarked that the [Prevention of Injury] restrictions were ‘absurd’ and sarcastically stated that if he wanted to harm himself, he could conceivably do so with the elastic waistband of his underwear or with his flip-flops.”

    Manning’s allegedly sarcastic comment about using his underwear or slippers to hurt himself was apparently taken seriously by jailers, who then ordered him to spend seven hours each night without his underwear or any other garments.

    Note to Manning’s lawyer in case he doesn’t know; You also don’t make sarcastic comments about bombs at the airport.

    …[T]hey could undoubtedly provide him with clothing that would not, in their view, present a risk of self-harm,” Coombs wrote.

    Yeah, like big boy disposable diapers.

  • Harvard brings back ROTC to campus

    Associated Press reports that Harvard University and the Navy Secretary will sign an agreement to formally acknowledge the Navy’s presence on campus.

    As part of the agreement, a director of Naval ROTC at Harvard will be appointed, and the university will resume funding the program. Harvard cadets will still train at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as they have for years

    Harvard and several other prominent schools, including Stanford, Yale and Columbia, had kept the Vietnam-era ban in place following the war because of what they viewed as a discriminatory military policy forbidding gays from serving openly.

    Yeah, big damn deal. For decades Harvard has taken GI Bill money while not “formally” recognizing the presence of an ROTC detachment on campus. So what’s changed besides the University acting magnanimous and the Navy kowtowing.

    And that bullshit about keeping the ban in place because of the military’s (Congress’) policies against gays – I was teaching ROTC when universities decided to use the gay issue as an excuse – 14 years after Saigon fell. Do you seriously think that anyone cared about gays in the military in 1975? No, I remember when that light bulb came on in the late eighties.

    Harvard banned ROTC in 1969, then defunded the program in 1995, saying “don’t ask, don’t tell” violated its non-discrimination policies.

    Yeah, so why had they kept ROTC off-campus between 1975 and 1995?

    Screw Harvard. Who needs them.Arrogant, pompous shitbags. Making the services grovel for them is unforgivable. I’m sure they’ll think up another excuse to blackmail Cadet Command soon enough. However student reaction to this announcement should be priceless.

  • Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious al Qaeda Terrorist; a book review

    I hate writing book reviews, but since this one was written by Tony Camerino (aka Matthew Alexander), I felt a responsibility to keep you updated, since I’m the guy who tracked him down and came up with his real name. So Camerino wrote another book under his alias, Matthew Alexander entitled Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious al Qaeda Terrorist about his two months in Kirkuk tracking a Syrian named Muhammed.

    Of course, the theme of this book follows the theme of his first “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq” – the story of how Zarqawi was located. As I mentioned in my review of his first book, no one was able to verify that Camerino was the guy who broke the guy who gave the interrogators information leading to Zarkawi’s demise. Camerino claims that everyone hated him so he had to interview the detainee off of the books, so there is no record of Camerino getting the information using his techniques (which, by the way, weren’t his techniques because he admits that he learned the techniques at the “schoolhouse” at Fort Huachuca).

    From what I’ve learned, everybody does hate him, so that much is true. But not because he’s some guru of everything OSI (the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations). He’s a dick and when everyone at the OSI convention last year found out who he is (somehow), no one even wanted to talk to him. Especially when they learned he was living on Soros Foundation money.

    Well, as soon as you open his second book, you begin to hate him as he tells us how he shaved his sandy blond hair and hung up his surf board to answer his country’s call. I hate those guys. As near as I can tell from his military records, after several months of training, he spent four months in Iraq and from those four months, came two books on what a special expert he is on interrogating Iraqis and al Qaeda. Four months. There are interrogators who have that much time in the shitter in Iraq.

    But, anyway, let’s get to the story. It’s a simple story, really; The Stryker platoon he’s with captures a guy. The guy claims he doesn’t know anything, but if Camerino let’s him go, the guy will find out stuff for him. So Camerino recommends to his commander that they let him go, so on that recommendation, the commander releases the guy. Then they lose track of him, then they catch another guy who tells them that the first guy was their target Muhammed so they spend the rest of the book trying to recapture the guy that Camerino recommended that they release. So much for Camerino’s new methods of interrogation, huh?

    Throughout the story, he interjects innuendo and hints that Abu Garaib and Guantanamo rumors make his job so difficult. No proof, just blather. At one point, an infantry captain grabs a detainee by throat with one hand and briefly cuts off the detainee’s air in front of Camerino. That’s it – that’s all of the detainee abuse Camerino sees. And he doesn’t report it, so, if it happened, Camerino must not have thought it was very important at the time. He doesn’t even mention the Captain’s name, so how do we check to see if it happened?

    Through out the book, he tries to convince us that his life is harder than an infantryman’s life. That’s just immature and he tries too damn hard. Like that commercial the Air Force did last year claiming AF basic training was tougher than the Marines.

    And, as most of you know, I’m a professional editor and little shit bothered the piss out of me. For example, in one part of the book, he tells us that something “peaked” his interest. It’s “piqued”, damn it! How did an editor not catch that? Well, besides me. And also, throughout the book, in referring to the various branches of the armed services, every service was all lower case letters, like “the army”, “the air force”, “the marines”. I don’t know if it was intentional or not but it bugged the shit out of me.

    One telling feature of the new book is that it wasn’t published by the same publisher as the first. That’s because he never even made his advance back on the first book and the first publisher wasn’t willing to get burned again. The first book wasn’t that bad, but he sold it in televised interviews as an anti-Bush book instead of letting it stand it’s own merit, and everyone knows that the anti-Bush crowd can’t read past the title and have no money. Most of his interviews about the book were on the defunct Olbermann Show, so I don’t see him on a book tour these days. Maybe he is, I didn’t look, really.

    The back of his new book has his testimony to Congress on torture based on his four months of experience in Iraq. And the very last part is an ad for “Open Society”. If you Google the Open Society Foundation, you’ll see it sits on soros.org’s servers. What else do you need to know?

    Hmm.Longest post I’ve written in a while.

  • More issues at MacDill Air Force Base.

    This is stale by a month but it needs to be looked at. It seems that there was a second attempt at getting into the base. Only this time the person got in. Like the previous time, the person was armed.

    The brazen scheme was discovered last year by military investigators only after Scott Allan Bennett, 39, was arrested for drunk driving at an entrance gate to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.

    At the time of his bust, a “dazed and confused” Bennett was carrying a concealed, loaded handgun, and his vehicle contained a second loaded gun, seven knives, a machete, a collapsible baton, mace, a stun gun, ammunition, a sling shot with BBs, and a box of throwing stars,

    It gets better.

    After being booked in late-April on a DUI count, Bennett returned to MacDill, where he was met at the gate by an Air Force Police investigator, who sought to question him about the weapons found in his vehicle (MacDill residents are required to register firearms and ammo with the Base Armory). Bennett invoked his right to remain silent and denied permission to search his apartment.

    However, after a military magistrate signed a search warrant, Bennett’s home was raided. Investigators reported finding “seven loaded firearms; approximately 9389 additional rounds of ammunition; numerous knives; brass knuckles; an electric stun gun; and a collapsible baton, in addition to other weapons and prohibited materials.” None of the material had been registered with the MacDill armory.

    Besides the fact that the pretended to be a vet to get on post, one has to ask how long before someone get through with a weapon? Also what is there to prevent a violent episode there? Will it be another one of those ” No one could have predicted this” or “It just goes to show how much these wars are affecting our Veterans” crap.