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

Category: Usual Suspects

  • Army Sergeant on Duncan/Strandlof

    In case anyone is still interested in the Duncan/Strandlof saga, Army Sergeant, the IVAW member who TSO refers to as our “Frenemy” (I don’t refer to her as such, though), has published the IVAW’s unofficial excuse for their association with the complete fraud. By complete fraud, I refer to the fact that Jesse MacBeth at least spent 43 days in the Army, which is 44 days more than Duncan/Strandlof spent in the Marines.

    Army Sergeant tells us that she isn’t the official source for any excuse the IVAW might decide to publish, mostly because Alex Bacon, the IVAW’s Executive Director, is engaged in a private matter. The official excuse has to have the approval of a guy who went went AWOL from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration or some other Department of Transportation agency. So we’ll be waiting on pins and needles from that expert.

    In the interim, let’s look at Army Sergeant’s excuse. It typically avoids all of the issues that are involved. “Oh, I met him once, but it was so insignificant that I don’t remember the meeting.” So? When TSO and I went to Winter Soldier, we had to prove we were veterans by sending copies of our DD214. Duncan/Strandlof went to Winter Soldier, too. If TSO and I could figure out the technology to send our’s, why couldn’t IVAW force the same restrictions on their membership?

    AS glosses over the fact that Duncan/Strandlof also attended IVAW Warrior Writer workshops and on at least two separate occasions attended Tower Guard events in Colorado. So we don’t get in a pissing contest over minutiae (as a discussion of facts usually becomes with Army Sergeant), here’s a screenshot of one of the few remaining Rick Duncan videos left on YouTube since IVAW started scrubbing the internet the other day to create a some deniability. This is a Warrior Writer video;

    The end of the video has credits;

    The videos are the YouTube channel of CSaction, following the links you end up at a webpage with this banner;

    Here’s a picture from CSaction of Duncan and Garret Reppenhagen, former IVAW board member. The caption of the picture is “Mark shares a laugh with Joe and Garrett, while Hank keeps guard”.

    So now that we’ve avoided the discussion that Duncan/Standlof wasn’t just some IVAW straphanger groupie off of the street as Army Sergeant tried to make him appear in her post, let’s look at some of AS’ other excuses, for example “We also did not have the amount of staffers perhaps necessary to handle the influx of members last year.” Yeah, Duncan joined in 2007 not “last year”, as the pictures and videos above prove. Nice try, though.

    Some have charged, mainly in the milblogosphere, that we should have known that “Duncan” was a liar because of his claims. It’s something that’s really easy to say after the fact, but I’ll examine them.

    Then she go on to dispute the “shot off finger” and the “openly gay battalion commander” stories with some stories about her mother’s reattached finger and some gay soldiers she’s known. Big whoop. My point about the gay BATTALION commander was that there probably hasn’t been a captain battalion commander in the Marines since World War Two. Did I really have to say that? Her mother’s finger was cut off with a power saw, not blown off by a bullet – why did I have to type that, too?

    Now, I see in the comments of her post (comments were closed last night when I read it), TSO asked her some of the questions I presented here. Her response was to give an Infantry Salute (shrugging her shoulders while reciting “Ah dunno”.) The answer to Battalion Commander thing was;

    As for 03 Battalion commanders in the Marine Corps, I really have no idea. I know that it wouldn’t happen in the Army, but the Marines are smaller. It wouldn’t occur to me to say I knew one way or another. I’m just speaking for self here.

    Army Sergeant sounds like an abused spouse making excuses for her tormentor.

    The “Bacon is incommunicado” is weak, too. How long does it take to tell a subordinate to write a piss-poor excuse for their incompetence? Staying true to form, I expect Bacon, if he releases a statement at all, will blame Kelly Dougherty, the previous ED, for Duncan.

    I don’t really care what their statement says, however. The fact remains that fakes get into IVAW because their mentors, VFP and VVAW, are generally fakes, too. Their board is tied by purse strings to organizations that wouldn’t know a phony veteran if they were bit by one. The whole anti-war Left is more concerned about WHAT is being said than WHO is saying it since the whole ideology is based on emotions and not facts.

    IVAW, nor their handlers, are willing to scrutinize their membership because scrutiny will run some off. I’m pretty sure we’ll see more of these phonies – and I’m doing my best to embarrass IVAW – you’d think they would want to get ahead of me.

  • An Armed Forces Day message from the Left

    On this day, the day during which we set aside a moment or two to thank our Armed Forces for keeping us free and prosperous, at least one anti-war blogger published this message on his blog;

    Saying no to war is the most important way to bring it to a halt. If troops had the guts they think they have they would get up and walk away from the most blatant display of American arrogance in this Century.

    So I suppose that, since they can’t really blame Obama for the continuing wars without calling him a lying hypocrite, they can blame the troops instead. But that blogger isn’t the only one. On Alternet, some gumball named Jeremy Scahille starts another rumor about our troops in Guantanamo;

    …an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

    His source? Human rights lawyers and former prisoners. Lord knows they never lie. Like this hilarious story;

    In April, Mohammad al-Qurani, a 21-year-old Guantánamo prisoner from Chad managed to call Al-Jazeera and described a recent beating: “This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I’ve been subjected to it almost every day,” he said. “Since Obama took charge, he has not shown us that anything will change.”

    Um, did anyone notice that the guy is supposed to be in the most secure prison in the world, isolated even from the people on the same island – yet he supposedly called Al Jazeera? If he was being treated that badly, how was he able to get a call out, for Pete’s sake?

    Regardless, do these nutballs realize that they’re talking about the same kids they went to school with? The same guys they grew up with in their neighborhoods? The same folks who were on their Little League teams and at their summer camps? Why are they so eager to believe this about the people with whom they have more in common than they are to disbelieve the folks who have a stake in lying about their behavior?

  • Pelosi: It’s not my fault the CIA lied to me

    I just watched the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, third in line of succession to leading this country resort to the defense a six-year-old caught stealing cookies might employ. Someone lied to her to about waterboarding. The CIA didn’t tell her that there were legal opponents to the practice at the justice Department, they didn’t tell her that they had already begun waterboarding, and that it wasn’t her place to oppose waterboarding.

    She was sputtering and spitting every time someone asked her a question. I guess when you’ve given four stories for the same event, it’s hard to keep them straight.

    The press actually appeared to be indignant over her lack of real answers, let’s see if they follow through. Well, maybe a little;

    “To the contrary … we were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used,” she told reporters, referring to a formal CIA briefing she received in the fall of 2002.

    Pelosi said she subsequently learned that other lawmakers were told several months later by the CIA about the use of waterboarding.

    “I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.

    Somebody else – like her aide? Why didn’t she attend since she was the chair of the committee?

  • DHS pulls extremist report

    The Washington Times confronted DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on her department’s report IDing veterans as dangerous extremists with terrorist potential;

    “The wheels came off the wagon because the vetting process was not followed,” Ms. Napolitano told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.

    “The report is no longer out there,” she said. “An employee sent it out without authorization.”

    There ya go – it’s not her fault. Someone sabotaged her. The American Legion national commander weighs in;

    David K. Rehbein, commander of the American Legion, said the withdrawal of the report “validates our objections.”

    “It did not contain any evidence,” Mr. Rehbein said. “It was an unfair and unsubstantiated stereotype based on Timothy McVeigh.”

    The report also said “rightwing extremism” may include groups opposed to abortion and immigration, among several other threat assessments.

    Some have called it a strictly partisan attack on the Obama Administration, but that’s not exactly true;

    Rep. Christopher Carney, Pennsylvania Democrat, said that as a veteran he “took offense personally,” and his constituents were offended by the report as well.

    “It really hit home hard to me and in our district,” Mr. Carney said. “It’s not a good start when I go to town hall meetings and I hear people calling for your resignation.”

    Of course some low-level GS employee is going to take the heat;

    Asked whether the person who wrote the report is still employed, Ms. Napolitano said, “Appropriate personnel action is being taken.”

    Is there room under that bus for every general schedule federal employee in DC?

  • Kris Goldsmith leaves IVAW


    Another of the big guns,one of the real veterans of the Iraq War has resigned from the Iraq Veterans Against the War citing many of the same reasons as others who have resigned before. Below is his resignation letter (Any emphasis is mine);
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  • What Fragging? Where?

    When the media and the Left learn a term, they apply it to everything. Today’s word is “fragging”. The first place I saw in relation to the incident at Camp Liberty was on a VFP blog of sorts called “Imagine” (recalling the John Lennon song) in which the author, James Starowicz, one of the chief crackpots of the Geezers For Peace writes;

    Yeah, just like Vietnam – well, not really. There were 230 deaths from the practice we now call fragging (some Leftist sites say 730 – but that’s including attempts) over the 10 years we were in Vietnam. Since the 2003 invasion of Hussein’s Iraq, there have been three, this one being the third. The second one is unsolved and the motives are unclear. That doesn’t stop the Associated Press from falsely claiming;

    There have been several previous fragging incidents in the Iraq war.

    Yeah, um, three, including this one doesn’t make “several” unless you call one incident “many”.

    During and after the Vietnam War, the Left used the fragging incidents as evidence that soldiers were unhappy with their leadership in particular and the war in general. I disagree, but for the sake of argument, I’ll continue.

    Since this one seems to have been targeted towards a counseling clinic and the staff and SGT John Russell actually left his unit with the firearm and went to the counseling center kind of disproves that he was unhappy with his leadership and more unhappy with the medical treatment he was getting.

    That doesn’t stop the media from mischaracterizing this one, too;

    An American Army sergeant shot and killed five fellow soldiers following an altercation at a military counseling center in Iraq Monday, officials said. The attack drew attention to the issues of combat stress and morale among soldiers serving multiple combat tours over six years of war.

    Um, Russell was an electronics technician who was transitioning out of the service after 21 years – not someone who was being ordered to do something that would get him injured or killed. So frustration with the war kind of gets tossed out as an indicator, too. He was leaving the war and the Army for the last time.

    He was just one guy who snapped and did terrible things. Are all of those guys going to do what Russell did? Not any more than all Georgia professors are going to do similar things.

  • Code Pink assaults military’s display


    As I wrote last week, Code Pink had a vigil at the White House this weekend since most of the barren old hags don’t have children with whom they can spend Mothers’ Day. Among them was Uncle Jimbo’s heart throb, The Peace Fairy;
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  • VoteVets is not a veterans’ organization

    Yeah, I’m pissed at VoteVets. Is it because I’m partisan? Nope it’s because I’m a veteran. I hate to see the troops and veterans get screwed by people who claim to want to help them. My feelings go back so far, that I remember running off Hari Krishnas in Atlanta airport in the 70s when they targeted GIs for “donations” to their cult.

    Today, the charlatans are veterans themselves. Veterans like those at VoteVets. Besides having a stupid name, they’re run by stupid people. They claim to protect veterans’ interests, but remember what happened when SGT David Aguina spoke up at the Yearly Kos two years back? Twink Jon Soltz charged him from the stage and got in the young sergeant’s face like so many other punk-ass LTs I’ve seen in my time. And what does VoteVets vice-chairman Brandon Friedman (also known previously as Angry Rakkasan) do? He writes a comment in the Daily Kos accusing SGT Aguina of being mentally ill;
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