Anti-War Sniper

Originally published Here:
by Carl Gibson
January 27, 2015
(ReaderSupportedNews) One American sniper called Iraqi natives “savages,” compared them to American welfare recipients, and bragged about looting their homes after killing them. Another American sniper became so disgusted by what he had done that he started the first-ever antiwar blog, and is actively encouraging his fellow soldiers to use their First Amendment rights to speak out against what he calls an “illegal occupation” in Iraq. Guess which one had a blockbuster movie made about him, and which one got ignored?
Between February 2004 and February 2005, Garett Reppenhagen was a sniper in Iraq’s Diyala province, serving as a cavalry scout with the U.S. Army. It was his job to conceal himself near roadsides and kill anyone he saw planting IEDs. He was also ordered to wait in fields and target Iraqi insurgents pulling up in pickup trucks to launch mortars on American bases. While Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who killed over 160 people during his time in Iraq, relished in pulling the trigger and wrote “I only wish I had killed more” in his memoir, Reppenhagen became increasingly more remorseful after each kill.

“Every time I pulled the trigger, I had to really convince myself that I was saving a buddy of mine. And it got increasingly difficult,” Reppenhagen told an audience at Colorado College in May of 2011.
Reppenhagen came from a military family – his father was a Vietnam veteran, and his grandfather served in World War II. He enlisted in 2001 and was stationed in Vilseck, Germany, with the 2-63 Armored Battalion, 1st Infantry Division. Between 2002 and 2003, his division was stationed in Kosovo on a peacekeeping mission. After completing international interdiction training at the NATO Special Forces School in Steton, Germany, he was deployed to Iraq in 2004. During that time, Reppenhagen learned that most of the men in his division were serving simply because a recruiter had bullied them into joining to get out of a bad economic situation. One of his fellow soldiers from Los Angeles had joined the military to get away from the gangs in his neighborhood. Another man from Ohio joined because the factory in his rust belt town had shut down and jobs were scarce.
“It was just 2 months of basic training for a cavalry scout, and out we come,” Reppenhagen said. “They’re just like you. They were given a bad haircut and an M-16 in their hands and they’re scared shitless.”

As Zaid Jilani recently wrote, the film “American Sniper” uses clever editing to suggest that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11: In one scene, Chris Kyle is watching the 9/11 attacks unfold on TV. In the next scene, Kyle is seen deploying to Iraq. But unlike Kyle, Reppenhagen became aware that he and his division were risking their lives in Iraq for fabricated causes, and actively started speaking out against the war.

“It was the conduct of the war that really started turning me, and the fraudulent causes that sent me there that really put me over the edge,” Reppenhagen said. “There were no ties to 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction.”

Reppenhagen later started the first-ever antiwar blog, which was called “Fight to Survive.” It became a place where he and his fellow soldiers could share combat experiences with the world that would shape their view of the war and make the case for their outspoken opposition.
In one blog entry from November 13, 2006, a soldier who identifies only as “Hellblazer” wrote a detailed post about a skirmish that erupted in the city of Ba’Quba in 2004. After an hour of receiving gunfire from all sides and getting orders to “shoot anything the [sic] moved,” Hellblazer noticed an insurgent with an AK-47 run out from a corner across a nearby street. Despite Hellblazer’s chasing him with machinegun fire, the Iraqi made it to another corner and out of sight. But one of the targets in the gun’s wake was a trailer that had been riddled with Hellblazer’s bullets.

“Now falling out from behind this trailer was the body of a teenage boy. The void in his chest replaced what was once his heart and his body convulsed slightly as his nerve endings fired their last. His body lay there in the filthy dirty street, muddy water surrounding him from the drainage of the nearby houses … Nausea filled my stomach and a cold feeling overtook my flesh. How long had he been behind that trailer? Had he been there through the whole mess? Not to [sic] long afterwards, an older man emerged from around a corner, immediately collapsing nest [sic] to the young man’s body.”
– Excerpt from The Day That Haunts Me, by “Hellblazer”

During his 2011 lecture at Colorado College, Reppenhagen noted that 18 veterans commit suicide every day (now 22 veteran suicides per day), and that more veterans have committed suicide after returning from combat than have been killed while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined. He theorizes that atrocities like the Haditha massacre of 2005 and the slaughter of Iraqis at a canal in 2007 are perpetrated by veterans who have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury re-deploying again and again, making them less stable in battle.
Reppenhagen’s theory was sadly and ironically proved by the death of famed “American Sniper” Chris Kyle. It wasn’t an insurgent in a foreign battlefield who ended Kyle’s life in February of 2013, but a traumatized veteran named Eddie Ray Routh, at a shooting range in Texas. In the June 2013 issue of The New Yorker, Routh was profiled as a troubled young man who succumbed to his inner demons after a tour of duty. His father recalled one telephone call from Iraq in which Routh hinted that he had killed a child.

“More veterans are killing themselves than are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Reppenhagen said in 2011. “You think they’re coming home because they’re proud of what they did? 3rd Brigade just came back to Fort Carson two weeks ago, and six of them killed themselves already.”

After his honorable discharge in 2005, Reppenhagen became the first active duty member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). Since then, IVAW has simultaneously become a vast antiwar movement and a support community for returning veterans who are proud of serving their country, but want to express their opposition to the acts carried out around the world in their name.
“There are ways to resist this war within army regulations. You still obtain your rights as a citizen,” Reppenhagen said at a lecture in March of 2008. “You’re able to use those rights, and you should, since you’re the one sacrificing to protect those rights. It’ll be a shame if the actual use of your First Amendment right becomes unpatriotic.”

Today, IVAW is in 48 states, Washington D.C., Canada, and military bases around the world, including Iraq. Its members advocate for full funding of the office of Veterans Affairs, full quality healthcare (including mental healthcare) and full benefits for veterans when they return from duty. While IVAW reaches out to returning veterans, Reppenhagen is quick to separate their methods of engagement from military recruiters.

“We’re not gonna come out and recruit soldiers and veterans. We’re not going to try to trick you into joining us. But we will ask you,” Reppenhagen said.

“There’s a lot of pride in joining our army, our corps,” he continued. “We can fight for a cause that will change America and the world for the better and stop these occupations.”

Fact or Fiction?

FBI Whistleblower: Pentagon, CIA, NATO and MI6 Were Masterminds Behind 9/11

Posted on September 11, 2014

Washington’s Blog

“As Far As People Who Ran The Show, It Was The Highest Levels of NATO, the U.S., MI6, CIA And The Pentagon”

Sibel Edmonds has just released her fantastic spy thriller,  The Lone Gladio.     Here’s our review, comparing it to the best of Clancy or Ludlum … but with a twist.
In the real world, Edmonds is a former FBI translator who translated terror-related communications for the FBI right after 9/11. In that capacity, she read communications between terrorists and other radicals.
Edmonds has been deemed credible by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, several senators (free subscription required), and a coalition of prominent conservative and liberal groups.
The ACLU described Edmonds as:

The most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.

Famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says that Edmonds possesses information “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers”. He also says that the White House has ordered the press not to cover Edmonds:

I am confident that there is conversation inside the Government as to ‘How do we deal with Sibel [Edmonds]?
The first line of defense is to ensure that she doesn’t get into the media. I think any outlet that thought of using her materials would go to to the government and they would be told “don’t touch this . . . .”

Even Paul Newman praises Edmonds, saying:

Sibel Edmonds would not let an intimidating FBI shut her mouth, and as a result, suffered grievous consequences, but she has persevered and we are better off for her sacrifices.

Edmonds is the founder and president of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, a group of high-level national intelligence and security officials.
To understand why Edmonds’ information is so explosive, we need a little background on “Operation Gladio.”

Background: “Operation Gladio”

The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.
As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred).
This was codenamed “Operation Gladio”. And watch this BBC special. And see this for the big picture background.

Operation Gladio Continues to this Day

Edmonds told Washington’s Blog that she wrote The Lone Gladio because the FBI classified 100% of her previous book, Classified Woman. When she found out that she doesn’t need to get pre-publication approval for “novels”, she decided to write a novel.
So Edmonds decided to write a work of fiction based on the real-life operation- ‘Operation Gladio B’ – as the context, and with fictional events and characters in the novel The Lone Gladio.
[WASHINGTON’S BLOG]: You’ve previously claimed that Gladio was not terminated with the fall of the Soviet Union, but has continued up until today … the so-called “Gladio B”.
[SIBEL EDMONDS]: Yes. The title “Gladio B” was given by the FBI, because we don’t know what they really call it.
NATO, MI6, MIT (the Turkish military and intelligence service), and the Pentagon, also some outside rogue elements connected with Gladio.
[WASHINGTON’S BLOG]: Did you see – when you were still with the FBI – source documents about this so-called “Gladio B”? In The Lone Gladio, you have a “fictitious” set of memos that have players from NATO, the U.S. State Department and high-level terrorists meeting together. Did you see documents like that when you were at FBI?
[SIBEL EDMONDS]: Yes. I reviewed over 5,000 documents. Not only from FBI’s Washington office. A lot of documents came from FBI’s Chicago office. The document were from the period 1996 through February 2002. There were written documents, and audio translated by FBI translators.
[WASHINGTON’S BLOG]: Were NATO personnel actually mentioned in some of the documents or transcripts you saw as being part of these Gladio B meetings?
[SIBEL EDMONDS]: A number of generals were involved. Both U.S. generals and British generals and other generals involved with NATO. And many recognizable, public names with the U.S. State Department.
Most of this involved people from and State Department and the CIA. These are at the top levels … you’re not going to get operative-level involved with this.

Edmonds explained that the State Department doesn’t just deploy “soft power”, but is involved in many “hard power” operations, often coordinating through well-known “Non-Governmental Organizations” (NGOs).
Specifically, Edmonds explained that numerous well-known NGOs – which claim to focus on development, birth control, women’s rights, fighting oppression and other “magnificent sounding” purposes or seemingly benign issues – act as covers for State Department operations. [Background.] She said that the State Department directly places operatives inside the NGOs.
As one example, Edmonds said that – during the late 90s and early 2000s – perhaps 30-40% of the people working for NGOs operated by George Soros were actually working for the U.S. State Department.
Edmonds also said that Osama Bin Laden – and several other members of his family – were working with U.S. agencies as part of Gladio B right up until 9/11. Edmonds notes that Bin Laden and his family members were helping the West set up terrorist groups in Chechnya up until 9/11.
Edmonds also said that the FBI failed to prosecute any of the criminal activities occurring in the United States as revealed by these documents.

9/11 Was Part of Gladio

Back to our interview …
[WASHINGTON’S BLOG]: In terms of 9/11, what’s your opinion about whether there were countries involved, or whether it was rogue Gladio personnel?
[SIBEL EDMONDS]: You have to separate the pawns from the main players. There might have been elements involved within countries: for example Prince Bandar in Saudi Arabia, or Turkish people at the MIT.
But the people who ran the show at the top were NATO and Gladio. And Gladio was under the U.S. It was – and is – an operation under the U.S., for U.S. empire.
As far as people who ran the show, it was the highest levels of NATO, the U.S., MI6, CIA and the Pentagon.

The Goal: Control of Eurasia, Oil and Other Resources

Edmonds says that the entire focus of the U.S. and these related groups is to control the world’s resources, such as oil and gas pipelines in Eurasia.
She explained that many of the people in Eurasian region speak Turkic languages. For that reason, Turkey and its intelligence service – MIT – has been a major conduit for Gladio operations. And since a lot of the resources are in former Soviet countries, a lot of Gladio’s focus has been in those countries.
Postscript:  Edmonds has previously stated that Bin Laden – and his number 2 Al Qaeda lieutenant – Ayman al-Zawahiri – worked with the U.S. government for 3 months AFTER 9/11 to coordinate destablization in the Caucus region.
And she previously told Washington’s Blog:

For the past 11 years I have been emphasizing that my State Secrets Privilege & Gag Orders had to do with the FBI files (covering period 1996-2002 February) on covert-terrorist operations in Caucasus and Central Asia backed, managed and armed by US actors. These US-NATO directed operations in the region involved Bin-Laden and mainly Zawahiri …..
The FBI documents contained damning evidence (audio and written) collected between 1996-2002 tying these terror operations directly to the U.S. persons in the State Department/CIA and Pentagon. Also, how the State Department got Congress to grant huge amounts of funds to “front’ NGOs and businesses (mainly Turkish companies in US-listed/members of ATC) to funnel money to the terrorist cells in this region.

If you want to hear Edmonds name some names, watch part 1 and part 2 of her interview with James Corbett.
Washington’s Blog

This entry was posted in 9/11 Truth, False Flag Operations, September 11, US News, War & Peace and tagged 9/11 truth, false flag operation, Operation Gladio, September 11.

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