KABUL,
Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley
Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
Friday, July 8, 2016
22a #22kills
An 'evil' woman, named Kimberly Long, challenged me to expose the fact that, on average, 22 U.S. Veterans commit suicide each day.
"22 Kill Challenge", which is designed to bring awareness to the unacceptable fact that 22 veterans a day are lost to suicide. Several have noted that this number seems very high, and it is. The 22 comes from a 2013 VA study on suicide rates among veterans- ranging in age from 22 to 60.
The Veterans Crisis Line is a great resource to help prevent suicides of our military people, 1-800-273-8255, press 1! If and when you choose to accept this challenge, post a video of 22 push-ups a day and nominate someone each day for 22 days. #22Kill
When someone good, who also happens to be the wife of my football buddy, Brett "Viking" Ullman, throws down such a challenge, knowing full well the risks and the consequences, I must accept, even if it kills me.
I therefore nominate my first "KILL" to be JP Gonzales. Because I know he's against all government violence, may he rest in peaces.
This video was uploaded from an Android phone.
Friday, March 4, 2016
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Sunday, January 10, 2016
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Bernie Sanders for President
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has taken the progressive world by storm with his populist message calling wealth and income inequality “the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time.” Part of Sanders’s program to reduce wealth inequality is obliging megarich oligarchs and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, but as Sanders said last night at a campaign event in Iowa, a reflective look at government waste is needed to make truly meaningful gains:
“when we talk about making government more cost effective, it doesn’t simply mean cutting Medicaid and food stamps…What it does mean is taking a hard look at an agency, which receives $600 billion per year where there is an immense amount of waste and fraud…”
Politicians have railed for decades about the bloated budget and absolute waste in the Department of Defense (DoD) – infamous for $500 hammers and $600 toilets seats. While the U.S. Military is unquestionably great at fighting wars, it seems to be wildly incompetent at managing money. AsOccupyDemocrats reported earlier this year, “partly because of its convoluted bookkeeping systems, $8.5 trillion—yes, trillion—taxpayer dollars doled out by Congress since 1996 has never been accounted for” – enough money to cut our national debt in half.
Sanders notes that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (for whom Sanders has little appreciation) said that “there are trillions of dollars in the Dept. of Defense that we can’t account for.” The speech in which Rumsfeld delivered this outrageous news was given the day before 9/11 and received scant attention. Part of the excuse for the MIA funds has been “an overreliance on private contractors with a lack of oversight.” As Sanders said: “Well, they really don’t know. It’s so complicated… .” In fact, Congress tried to exert pressure on the Department in 2009 by passing a law “requiring the DoD to be audit-ready by 2017. After spending—no wasting—billions on failed accounting software, the department is likely to miss that deadline…”
The “fiscally restrained” – in name only – Republicans in Congress impose projects on the military that the military itself spurns. It is clear that at this point they cry “overspending” at any program they disagree with – but had no problem putting Bush’s wars on the national credit card. Take, for instance, the omnibus spending bill that went to Congress a couple of weeks ago included $640 million for a Coast Guard ship the Coast Guard doesn’t even want.
Sanders recognizes something is gravely out of whack and needs to be fixed when military families must rely on food stamps to survive. It cannot go unmentioned that at the very same time, Republicans have proposed budgets that would kick millions out of the program in the name of waste: The bottom line, as Sanders said:
“And while we have massive cost overruns with defense contractors, we’ve got deployment after deployment for our soldiers, and we’ve got military families on food stamps. So maybe we want to change that.”
Sanders’s belief that wealth and income inequality are the great moral and social issues of our time is on spot-on. He is also right that unequitable laws applied to wealthy oligarchs and corporations(which move tens of billions of dollars off-shore each year to avoid taxes) need to be changed so they can’t escape paying their fair share. And he is also right that government needs to be accountable to its citizens and generous to the men and women in uniform who risk life and limb in defense of our nation, and require a governmental agency that receives $6oo billion a year with an enormous amount of waste and fraud – needs to be reined in and held accountable.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
You're not Luke Skywalker
"You grew up wanting so bad to be Luke Skywalker, but you realize that
you were basically a Stormtrooper, a faceless, nameless rifleman,
carrying a spear for empire, and you start to accept the startlingly
obvious truth that these are people like you."
When a Reddit user posted an open question to U.S soldiers asking them how they justify their actions against innocent civilians abroad, he probably didn’t expect this candid response…
‘You kill. Watch friends die. It’s usually quick, almost never quiet, but for the rest of your life, when you remember sitting at the bar with them, they’re blown open. You picture the nights you spent downtown at Scruffy Murphy’s, but instead of the stupid hookah shell necklace, your boy’s jaw is blown off, and his left eye is ruined, and he’s screaming. You fight, you kill, you watch friends die, and you notice a distinct lack of change. You kick in doors and tell terrified women to sit on the floor while you and your friends ransack their home, tearing the place apart, because they might be hiding weapons. There is no reason to believe this house in particular is enemy, same for the next one, and the one after that, or the seven before; they just happened to be there, and maybe they had weapons. Probably not, they almost never did.’
The moving testimony is just a snippet from the refreshingly honest reply given by U.S soldier Daniel Crimmins when asked how military servicemen can be so “blasé” about drone strikes and other civilian deaths due to the ‘War On Terror’.
Someone with the username VisualEffects originally posted:
‘9/11. The day Americans feel so strongly about that they say “Never forget”. A tragedy for sure. But you’ve retaliated and killed over 50 fold as many innocent civilians abroad as retribution for this event. How do you as a people walk around head held high, knowing that every few months you are committing a 9/11 event to other people? Imagine if the 9/11 terror attacks were happening in America every few months. Again and again, innocent people dying all around you. And yet you just go around the rest of the world doing it on a weekly basis to other people and don’t think twice about it. It brings me to tears knowing how absolutely blasé you guys are about it.’
Crimmins, from U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division, left a surprising reply to the post. He explained to the Redditor that like many others, he had been brainwashed into believing the ‘good vs evil narrative’, even comparing it to the legacy that Star Wars left him with as a child. Crimmins is clearly full of regret over his decision to sign up, resentment towards the government, grief at having lost his friends, anger at the mainstream media, and compassion for those innocent people he was sent to kill.
Crimmins’s response is heartbreaking and powerful, showing us that there are NO winners in War: everyone is a pawn, everyone
is a victim, and the only ones who stand to gain from this destruction
are the rich old white men who send these young, naive patriots into
battle against their fellow human beings.
Now, it seems stupid, but in the 72 hours after 9/11, some Americans, maybe suffering from depression, certainly with a mind shaped by comic books and action movies, ate up the “us vs. them” good vs. evil rhetoric spouted by the cowboy in chief. After all, he was the president, and no matter how bright you might think yourself, you can still be swayed by passion and emotion, led to terrible decisions.
Some of us, therefore, left our dorm rooms, and walked down Main Street to the recruiter’s office. Some of us were genuinely surprised the office wasn’t full to bursting of young men eager to avenge their fallen countrymen. Some of us were genuinely surprised when we had to push the recruiter to stop trying to sell desk jobs and just let us join the damn Infantry.
Some of us got enlisted, then, and went down to Georgia, head high to mask the anxiety and fear they might have helped. Perhaps some number of Americans in this situation discovered that maybe it hadn’t been the best idea, but would be goddamned if they were going to admit it, and let everyone back home smugly remark on how right they were. So they persevere. They learn to work as a unit, to look past personality issues, to see each other as Soldiers rather than as a race, or economic status, or any of the other things people hate about each other. They learn to kill.
Then some of these people, perhaps while sitting hungover in the platoon area in the Republic of Korea hear that we have invaded Iraq. They have “Big Scary Bombs”, and Saddam Hussein, the secular Arab dictator had somehow colluded with the devoutly religious OBL to attack the US. They hated our freedom, you see.
Then some of these young American men might transfer back to Georgia and be assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, and end up in Iraq in January of 2005. And maybe these kids, still drunk on Fox News and fantasies of glory and renown being enough to win their ex-girlfriends back, are excited to go to Iraq. Sure, we hadn’t found any WMDs yet, and we had Hussein in custody, but they were still somehow a threat and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into Jeffersonian democracy. Inside every dirka is a good American, yearning to be free.
So you fight. You kill. Watch friends die. Its usually quick, almost never quiet, but for the rest of your life, when you remember sitting at the bar with them, they’re blown open. You picture the nights you spent downtown at Scruffy Murphy’s, but instead of the stupid hookah shell necklace, your boy’s jaw is blown off, and his left eye is ruined, and he’s screaming.
You fight, you kill, you watch friends die, and you notice a distinct lack of change. You kick in doors and tell terrified women to sit on the floor while you and your friends ransack their home, tearing the place apart, because they might be hiding weapons. There is no reason to believe this house in particular is enemy, same for the next one, and the one after that, or the seven before; they just happened to be there, and maybe they had weapons. Probably not, they almost never did. There were a few times when we had deliberate raids based on solid intel and we’d turn up some stuff, but generally we were just tossing houses because we could.
Then maybe your FISTer forgets to carry the remainder, and drops a mess of mortars on the village your supposed to protect. Maybe
the big Iraqi running at you screaming was just mentally ill. Of
course, you won’t know this until after you’ve but seven rounds through
his ribcage, and his wailing, ancient mother is cradling his body,
spitting at you.
Maybe when you get back to the FOB, the Platoon Sergeant tells you you did the right thing; next time, it might be a suicide bomber. They tell you it was an honest mistake, it wasn’t your fault. They tell you to go get some chow, take a shower if the water works, and sleep it off. You did good work that day, apparently. During chow, the TV is on AFN, and they are rebroadcasting some Fox News show, and you’re hearing about drone strikes, and all the great things we’re doing, and you can’t help but see that poor dumb assholes face, looking past his mother as he bleeds to death. He’s in pain, obviously, but he has the most perfectly confused look on his face. He doesn’t comprehend what’s happening. Little more hot sauce on your eggs doesn’t really help.
Then you realize you haven’t seen anything to support the idea that these poor fuckers are a threat to your home. You look around and you see all he contractors making six figure salaries to fix your shit, train Iraqis, maintain the ridiculous SUVs the KBR dicks ride around in. You consider the fact that every 25mm shell costs about forty bucks, and your company has been handing those fuckers out like shrapnel flavored parade candies. You think about all the fuel you’re going through, all the ammo and missiles and grenades. You think about every time you lose a vehicle, the Army buys a new one. Maybe you start to see a lot of people making a lot of money on huge amounts of human suffering.
Then you go on leave, and realize that Ayn Rand has no idea what the fuck she’s talking about. You realize that Fox News and Limbaugh and John McCain don’t respect you or your buddies. They don’t give a fuck if you get a parade or a box when you get home, you’re nothing to them but a prop. Then you get out, and you hate the news. You hate the apathy, and you hate the murder being carried out in your name. You grew up wanting so bad to be Luke Skywalker, but you realize that you were basically a Stormtrooper, a faceless, nameless rifleman, carrying a spear for empire, and you start to accept the startlingly obvious truth that these are people like you.
Maybe your heart breaks a little every time some asshole brags about a “successful” drone strike. Your statement is correct enough; if all of America was one dude, that dude would not give a shit about the little brown people we’re burning and crushing and choking to death. We aren’t all like that, but it makes me incredibly, profoundly sad to see what my country actually is. Some of us care, and I think there are more every day.’
Crimmins’s reply was originally reported by AnonHQ and Upriser, based on a Reddit thread posted last year.
This article (Heartbreaking: Here’s What A U.S Soldier Said When Asked To Justify The War On Terror) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com
When a Reddit user posted an open question to U.S soldiers asking them how they justify their actions against innocent civilians abroad, he probably didn’t expect this candid response…
‘You kill. Watch friends die. It’s usually quick, almost never quiet, but for the rest of your life, when you remember sitting at the bar with them, they’re blown open. You picture the nights you spent downtown at Scruffy Murphy’s, but instead of the stupid hookah shell necklace, your boy’s jaw is blown off, and his left eye is ruined, and he’s screaming. You fight, you kill, you watch friends die, and you notice a distinct lack of change. You kick in doors and tell terrified women to sit on the floor while you and your friends ransack their home, tearing the place apart, because they might be hiding weapons. There is no reason to believe this house in particular is enemy, same for the next one, and the one after that, or the seven before; they just happened to be there, and maybe they had weapons. Probably not, they almost never did.’
The moving testimony is just a snippet from the refreshingly honest reply given by U.S soldier Daniel Crimmins when asked how military servicemen can be so “blasé” about drone strikes and other civilian deaths due to the ‘War On Terror’.
Someone with the username VisualEffects originally posted:
‘9/11. The day Americans feel so strongly about that they say “Never forget”. A tragedy for sure. But you’ve retaliated and killed over 50 fold as many innocent civilians abroad as retribution for this event. How do you as a people walk around head held high, knowing that every few months you are committing a 9/11 event to other people? Imagine if the 9/11 terror attacks were happening in America every few months. Again and again, innocent people dying all around you. And yet you just go around the rest of the world doing it on a weekly basis to other people and don’t think twice about it. It brings me to tears knowing how absolutely blasé you guys are about it.’
Crimmins, from U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division, left a surprising reply to the post. He explained to the Redditor that like many others, he had been brainwashed into believing the ‘good vs evil narrative’, even comparing it to the legacy that Star Wars left him with as a child. Crimmins is clearly full of regret over his decision to sign up, resentment towards the government, grief at having lost his friends, anger at the mainstream media, and compassion for those innocent people he was sent to kill.
Here is his moving reply in full:
‘Many of us are unable. Many of us watched 9/11, and accepted the government and media’s definition of the attack as a act of war rather than a criminal action. A smaller portion, drifting along passively thought a major war was coming, that people we knew were going to fight and die. Some of us maybe worried about our younger brother being drafted, despite being in college.Now, it seems stupid, but in the 72 hours after 9/11, some Americans, maybe suffering from depression, certainly with a mind shaped by comic books and action movies, ate up the “us vs. them” good vs. evil rhetoric spouted by the cowboy in chief. After all, he was the president, and no matter how bright you might think yourself, you can still be swayed by passion and emotion, led to terrible decisions.
Some of us, therefore, left our dorm rooms, and walked down Main Street to the recruiter’s office. Some of us were genuinely surprised the office wasn’t full to bursting of young men eager to avenge their fallen countrymen. Some of us were genuinely surprised when we had to push the recruiter to stop trying to sell desk jobs and just let us join the damn Infantry.
Some of us got enlisted, then, and went down to Georgia, head high to mask the anxiety and fear they might have helped. Perhaps some number of Americans in this situation discovered that maybe it hadn’t been the best idea, but would be goddamned if they were going to admit it, and let everyone back home smugly remark on how right they were. So they persevere. They learn to work as a unit, to look past personality issues, to see each other as Soldiers rather than as a race, or economic status, or any of the other things people hate about each other. They learn to kill.
Then some of these people, perhaps while sitting hungover in the platoon area in the Republic of Korea hear that we have invaded Iraq. They have “Big Scary Bombs”, and Saddam Hussein, the secular Arab dictator had somehow colluded with the devoutly religious OBL to attack the US. They hated our freedom, you see.
Then some of these young American men might transfer back to Georgia and be assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, and end up in Iraq in January of 2005. And maybe these kids, still drunk on Fox News and fantasies of glory and renown being enough to win their ex-girlfriends back, are excited to go to Iraq. Sure, we hadn’t found any WMDs yet, and we had Hussein in custody, but they were still somehow a threat and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into Jeffersonian democracy. Inside every dirka is a good American, yearning to be free.
So you fight. You kill. Watch friends die. Its usually quick, almost never quiet, but for the rest of your life, when you remember sitting at the bar with them, they’re blown open. You picture the nights you spent downtown at Scruffy Murphy’s, but instead of the stupid hookah shell necklace, your boy’s jaw is blown off, and his left eye is ruined, and he’s screaming.
You fight, you kill, you watch friends die, and you notice a distinct lack of change. You kick in doors and tell terrified women to sit on the floor while you and your friends ransack their home, tearing the place apart, because they might be hiding weapons. There is no reason to believe this house in particular is enemy, same for the next one, and the one after that, or the seven before; they just happened to be there, and maybe they had weapons. Probably not, they almost never did. There were a few times when we had deliberate raids based on solid intel and we’d turn up some stuff, but generally we were just tossing houses because we could.
US Army, Flickr, CC. A soldier receives a medal of honor
Maybe when you get back to the FOB, the Platoon Sergeant tells you you did the right thing; next time, it might be a suicide bomber. They tell you it was an honest mistake, it wasn’t your fault. They tell you to go get some chow, take a shower if the water works, and sleep it off. You did good work that day, apparently. During chow, the TV is on AFN, and they are rebroadcasting some Fox News show, and you’re hearing about drone strikes, and all the great things we’re doing, and you can’t help but see that poor dumb assholes face, looking past his mother as he bleeds to death. He’s in pain, obviously, but he has the most perfectly confused look on his face. He doesn’t comprehend what’s happening. Little more hot sauce on your eggs doesn’t really help.
Then you realize you haven’t seen anything to support the idea that these poor fuckers are a threat to your home. You look around and you see all he contractors making six figure salaries to fix your shit, train Iraqis, maintain the ridiculous SUVs the KBR dicks ride around in. You consider the fact that every 25mm shell costs about forty bucks, and your company has been handing those fuckers out like shrapnel flavored parade candies. You think about all the fuel you’re going through, all the ammo and missiles and grenades. You think about every time you lose a vehicle, the Army buys a new one. Maybe you start to see a lot of people making a lot of money on huge amounts of human suffering.
Then you go on leave, and realize that Ayn Rand has no idea what the fuck she’s talking about. You realize that Fox News and Limbaugh and John McCain don’t respect you or your buddies. They don’t give a fuck if you get a parade or a box when you get home, you’re nothing to them but a prop. Then you get out, and you hate the news. You hate the apathy, and you hate the murder being carried out in your name. You grew up wanting so bad to be Luke Skywalker, but you realize that you were basically a Stormtrooper, a faceless, nameless rifleman, carrying a spear for empire, and you start to accept the startlingly obvious truth that these are people like you.
Maybe your heart breaks a little every time some asshole brags about a “successful” drone strike. Your statement is correct enough; if all of America was one dude, that dude would not give a shit about the little brown people we’re burning and crushing and choking to death. We aren’t all like that, but it makes me incredibly, profoundly sad to see what my country actually is. Some of us care, and I think there are more every day.’
Crimmins’s reply was originally reported by AnonHQ and Upriser, based on a Reddit thread posted last year.
This article (Heartbreaking: Here’s What A U.S Soldier Said When Asked To Justify The War On Terror) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com
Sunday, September 20, 2015
"U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Afghan Allies’ Abuse of Boys"
NY Times Article
More -->
“At
night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything
about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son
telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged
his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him
to look the other way because it’s their culture.”
More -->
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Never Forget
I've been alerted to your San Diego 911 Truth screening of my film this Sunday and just
wanted to say THANK YOU for showing it and GOOD LUCK. I hope you get a decent
crowd and they respond well.
Please make them aware that they can watch the film for free here, OR purchase
the standard definition DVD or Blu Ray screening edition at this same website.
http://www.incontrovertible911evidence.co.uk/
Anyway, thanks for using the film as it was meant to be used and I hope you get some
cops and firefighters in the back row!Emoji THEY are the ones who need to see this movie!
All the very best and a Happy New Year to you all.
Peace!
Tony Rooke