Right Wing Politics, Trading Deaths of Others for “Free Lunch” Dishonor SEALS
By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
A bit ago it was a book about imaginary leaks and a SEAL team that killed a man dead for a decade. As a Marine combat veteran from the Vietnam War, where we suffered more killed than Marines in World War 2, a casualty rate 400% higher, the 38 SEALS that died in that war have gotten a thousand times more credit than the 45% of Marines who served in combat that died.
OPSEC/SEAL FINANCIER SHELDON ADELSON ASHAMED OF AMERICAN MILITARY SERVICE
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An American uniform was fine for me, though we didn’t have uniforms, as they rotted off and we had no replacements.
Of those I served with few came home, almost none are alive today.
You can’t pick up a paper without hearing about “SEALS” whining about this or that, always right wing, always with a buck in it, ghost written books and now, a final straw, SEALS are complaining that the president sent “form letters” to their families.
What it is they don’t seem to do is keep their noses out of politics, realize that those of us who are real combat vets know special operations troops have easy duty, tons of pay and lots of “down time.”
As a Marine, we liked to razz the Army except when I learned that green units were “choppered” into hotspots no one could survive. The Army never had our casualty rates, they were never given the impossible tasks all of us had to do as the entire Marine Corps is a special operations unit, one with NO down town, little pay and NO publicity.
I would like to think that somewhere, out there, with all those clubs and motorcycle groups that we hear about, someone would consider shutting up the whiners continually moaning about this and that.
Geez. Are SEALS the whining two year olds of the military? Remember the Swift Boaters? Here is the truth about this gang:
Rich Texas bastard T. Boone Pickens boasted that he would give $1 million to anyone who can disprove “even a single charge” leveled by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who he funded to the tune of $3 milion. Kerry offered to meet with Pickens and do so, with the million dollars going to veterans’ charities.
But now Pickens is reneging:
Pickens, who provided $3 million to bankroll the group during Kerry’s race against President Bush, responded by saying he won’t consider giving Kerry the reward unless he surrenders his combat films, additional military records and wartime journal.
In other words, Pickens was full of bravado when he made the offer in a keynote address in front of a bunch of friendly right wingers at an American Spectator dinner, but when Kerry took him up on it, he was a bit too cowardly to back it up:
“While I am prepared to show they lied on allegation after allegation, you have generously offered to pay one million dollars for just one thing that can be proven false,” Kerry wrote to Pickens. “I am prepared to prove the lie beyond any reasonable doubt.”
“Just one thing” has turned into more records than George Bush has willingly surrendered under government subpoena:
In his response, Pickens wrote: “I am certainly open to your challenge,” but he said he would not pay Kerry unless the senator first provided him with copies of his wartime journals, as well as movies he shot while on patrol and his complete military records for 1971 to 1978.
Pickens said such documentation, which the group has previously sought, would be needed to disprove its ads.
“When you have done so, if you can then prove anything in the ads was materially untrue, I will gladly award $1 million. As you know, I have been a long and proud supporter of the American military and veterans’ causes,” Pickens wrote.
“A proud supporter of the American military” — not to the point of actually, you know, enlisting or anything. More of the “yellow elephant” variety one would expect from a big Rudy Giuliani fundraiser.
He then goes for a Rovian jujitsu move: saying that if Kerry “cannot prove anything in the Swift Boat ads to be untrue,” Kerry should agree to give a million dollars to the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation.
I’m assuming Pickens would appoint himself arbiter of such a deal, and show as much integrity with regard to the decision as he did when he made his original offer. Kerry ought to keep his hands on his wallet, but he seems to be aware of that:
In his letter to Pickens, the senator challenged the billionaire’s honor.
“I trust that you are a man of your word, having made a very public challenge at a major Washington dinner, and look forward to taking you up on this challenge,” Kerry wrote.
Yeah, Pickens’ word and a buck twenty-five will get you a bad cup of coffee at the 7-11.
Now its the same thing again with Sheldon Adelson, the man underwriting our “SEALS.” Here, from Huffington Post, is the kind of American, actually SEALS love.
LAS VEGAS — The fired former chief executive of Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s Macau casinos alleges in court documents revealed Thursday that billionaire Sheldon Adelson personally approved of prostitution and knew of other improper activity at his company’s properties in the Chinese enclave.
Jacobs was fired in July 2010 from his role overseeing the Macau properties. He sued the companies and Adelson three months later.
In the lawsuit, he accuses the company and Adelson of breach of contract and of pushing him into illegal activity in Macau, a former Portugese colony near Hong Kong where Sands has established a strong business presence. The company owns the Venetian Macao and Sands Macao casino resorts, the Plaza Macao hotel, restaurant and shopping complex and the newly opened Sands Cotai Central resort with three hotels and two casinos.
In documents revealed Thursday – including a sworn seven-page declaration that Jacobs submitted along with a summary from his attorneys of problems obtaining documents from Sands – Jacobs describes an effort he launched after arriving in Macau in May 2009 to rid the casino floor of “loan sharks and prostitution.”
“This project was met with concern as (company) senior executives informed me that the prior prostitution strategy had been personally approved by Adelson,” Jacobs said in the documents.
With thousands dead and, for those who remember, President Bush was caught claiming he met every casualty plane that came into Dover Air Force Base. When the records had been checked, he had never been there. He had lied.
There are American traditions. When combat vets talk about experience, they don’t brag or ask for special treatment. Why do SEALS think they are better than Marines or Army or anyone else?I believe 5 SEALS died at Abbotabad on a dead end mission looking for nobody at all. Their families have my condolences for sure and the hard questions of why people would go on a mission looking for someone they knew was dead?Abbotabad? What we do know is that who was there lied about a 45 minute firefight, lied about bin Laden hiding behind his wife while carrying an AK 47, lied about bin Laden being there at all, lie after lie after lie and now we are supposed to believe more lies?
The last lie? No firefight, I can believe that and shooting an unarmed old man. This is the claim, I didn’t say it, they did.
Rules of engagement makes that murder and there isn’t an iota of proof behind any of it. There were NO cameras, no photos except….
With bin Laden announced dead in 2001, and, I can also assure, the US and Pakistani governments and military knew of his dead as did the CIA, why do I have to listen to whining based on a pack of total lies.
It isn’t the dead who are whining, it is the living. It is cheap, disrespectful and childish.
If you want attention, get a bullhorn and stand in traffic.
I have seen so many acts of bravery, so many acts of sacrifice and decency and then, when billionaire gangsters begin throwing around money, it is SEALS, real or imaginary, who are trying to cash in the same way the phonies and liars we knew as Swift Boaters took money from T. Boone Pickens.
I have seen the ads and billboards. They cost millions.
Where they is money, there are liars, there is dishonor, where there are politics, we have ghouls and cowards.
“Osama or Elvis…” (Arnaud de Borchgrave, Washington Times/UPI Editor)
I have always found SEALS to be a hard drinking, lazy as hell but charming group. When it is time to play hard, they are almost Marines. The Navy folks I learned to respect were our Corpsmen and the Brown Water guys like Kerry though his POW politics, he and McCain, his “mirror image” had a smell about it.
As for book writing political hacks trying to cash in on Romney’s backing by casino boss Sheldon Adelson, the real source of the money, this is something else.
Adelson is suing everyone to hide his past, a billionaire and hundreds of lawyers hoping to eat up the resources with lawsuits, shutting up anyone who will try to get the truth out.
The truth?
The SEALS are in bed with the MOB and Romney. All of them? Who knows, until I hear differently, they need to re-earn any honor they once had.
As no SEALS have spoken up like men, I will wait. The mouthy profiteers from cheap gangster politics are now the spokesmen for an organization so many have been proud of for so long.
SEALs have a great skill set, swim better than the rest of us, are highly organized, not as smart as Special Forces guys, not the capitol “S” and “F” but don’t seem to really understand the law, the constitution or have real respect for American values.
If you are in the military, you don’t write books lying about your exploits. No SEAL killed Osama bin Laden, end of story.
Geez.
Actually, real special ops people called him “Elvis bin Laden” because anyone “for real” knew about his death, knew he was always CIA and knew he was “one of us” up to his death.
We have a lot of families suffering, the dead, the wounded and most of those who served, none are doing well. What made it worse for so long was Bush and his cuts on veterans spending. Romney promises to do the same, looks on veterans as “useless eaters.”
The answer is simple, you are “with us” or “agin’ us.”
You are an American, a veteran, you love freedom or you are a self aggrandizing profiteer likely to need shoulder surgery later on from slapping yourself on the back too often.
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UPI Report on Bin Laden from 2010
WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) — The “Veterans Today” Network, a one-man show on the Internet created and run by Gordon Duff, a 100 percent disabled Marine Vietnam veteran, states flatly that 9/11 was a CIA/Mossad conspiracy and that Osama bin Laden wasn’t involved and died in 2001.
This can easily be dismissed as yet another example of deliberately disseminated disinformation riddled with intentionally false or inaccurate data designed to confuse the adversary. But some key intelligence officials are taking bin Laden’s reported demise seriously.
CIA Director Leon Panetta said in early July that the intelligence agency hadn’t been able to positively confirm any specific information on the uber-terrorist since “late 2001.” And all those audio and video tapes broadcast by the Qatar-based al-Jazeera global television network? Clever Israeli forgeries, says Duff.
Many other voices in cyberspace claim the bin Laden myth is kept “alive” to justify the Afghan war and the global war on terror.
Angelo Codevilla, who teaches international relations at Boston University, is a former U.S. intelligence officer who studied Soviet disinformation techniques during the Cold War. He says a close examination of all the alleged bin Laden tapes, including the videos, have convinced him that Elvis Presley is more alive than Osama bin Laden.
By all accounts from those who knew him prior to 9/11, bin Laden was a deeply religious man and his early tapes after 9/11 were sprinkled with references to God and the Prophet Muhammad. Not so the later ones, which were subsequently analyzed by some experts who said they were professional forgeries.
The last time credible intercepts of bin Laden’s voice were made by overhead satellites in early December 2001 as he was escaping through the Tora Bora mountain range from Afghanistan to the sanctuary of Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The late Ajmal Khattak, the head of the Khattak tribe, who had half a million followers in the region, advised this reporter and his Pakistani assistant Ammar Turabi, and our multilingual security, to rent horses and proceed to an exit from Tora Bora in the Tirah Valley. We got there Dec. 11. Local villagers told us bin Laden and some 50 fighters had emerged Dec. 9 and were met by a convoy of utility vehicles that sped off in the direction Peshawar.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton evidently had more recent intelligence on her last visit to Pakistan July 21. She said she believes “elements” of the Pakistani government know bin Laden’s whereabouts. Those with the knowledge, she added, are in the “bowels” of the bureaucracy, not the “top levels of government.” She was clearly referring to some members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Former ISI chief Gen. Hamid Gull is a personal friend of both bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and bin Laden’s no. 2, the Egyptian doctor Adman al-Zawahiri. Gul is an advocate of Pakistan’s politico-religious extremists and self-declared enemy of the United States.
There are “retired” ISI officers who still see bin Laden as a hero of the joint campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Gul and his followers are also working to hasten an end to the U.S. presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
For the now growing number who believes bin Laden is dead, there is only one valid message from bin Laden. It was his open letter to the “Pakistani people,” on al-Jazeera, dated Sept. 24, 2001, 13 days after 9/11, in which he said:
— “I have already stated that I was not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.
— “Neither had I any knowledge of these attacks nor do I consider the killing of innocent women and children and other humans, as an appreciable act … Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent … people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.
— “All that is going in Palestine … is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel.”
Those who believe Osama Bin Laden is alive, and guilty of killing almost 3,000, quote his 2004 talk in which he said he thought of attacking U.S. skyscrapers when he saw Israeli aircraft bombing tower blocks in Lebanon in 1982.
“God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the twin towers,” he said then, “but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind.”
While Duff is mostly guff for those whose job is to keep tabs on all the twists and turns since 9/11, there is also the post 9/11 generation that doesn’t read newspapers or weekly magazines and gets its news fix online. The conspiracy theory coupled with disinformation from all sides makes for more interesting reading. It also gives youngsters a leg up on their “naive” elders.
Bin Laden was suffering from a kidney ailment and some experts say he died Dec. 13, four days after his escape from Tora Bora. Videos since then, neutral experts say, show bin Laden writing with his right hand but he is well known as left-handed. They also detected differences in the shape of the nose, skin color and speech.
Duff does commentary on his conspiracy theories for radio and TV news programs; his provocative articles are carried the world over and his Web site gets 22 million page hits a month. Some of his recent “Top 10 Stories of the Week”: “The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should Be Terminated”; “Does Event Honoring Israeli Spy Suggest Another Israeli Operation?”; “Wikipedia Revisionism to Israeli Pressure Groups.”
Duff’s “Corporate Profile” says, “We are a full service Network of 63 Web sites that service the U.S. Military Veterans’ Community,” which claims “over 310,000 plus unique visitors per month” and recently grew 39 percent in one month.
On the World Wide Web, there are no red lines between information, misinformation and disinformation.
Topics:Osama bin Laden
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/de-Borchgrave/2010/07/26/Commentary-Elvis-bin-Laden/UPI-65401280146819/#ixzz258jGogDJ
Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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