Iraq Veterans Against the War’s Major Assault Begins Thursday

For an organization that claims 800 members, the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) are mounting a major assault, beginning Thursday, on America and its veterans. In a well-organized replay of their mentors’ Vietnam Veterans Against the War fraud-filled Winter Soldier hearings of 1971, the IVAW’s Winter Soldier II will seek to paint America and its servicepeople as the latest incarnation of Genghis Khan.

Out of the millions of servicemen and women who have served since September 11, 2001, membership in IVAW is open to any, regardless of whatever their role, in war theater or not, or type of discharge. And, still IVAW has just managed to recruit about 800 malcontents to air highly-painted and exaggerated charges.

Last week, a Reporters Guide to Winter Soldier II began distribution, to help prevent press credence to unsubstantiated accusations.

The scope of IVAW’s propaganda effort is emerging. Although they’ve pleaded, with yet unknown results, for allies in Congress to give them the widespread publicity that Senator Fulbright gave to John Kerry in April 1971, IVAW’s campaign is still on a scale that their elder VVAW teachers would envy. Thanks to today’s available communications technology and the Left’s alternative media, IVAW is not just dependent upon the mainstream media to spread its line.

Video and photographic evidence will also be presented, and the Winter Soldier testimony and panels will be broadcast live on nationally Pacifica Radio and satellite television station Free Speech TV Channel 9415. Streaming video on ivaw.org, as well as audio at KPFA.org and warcomeshome.org will enable people to tune in across the world.

The War Comes Home site, which I edit and is associated with the San Francisco Pacifica radio station KPFA, will also feature bios, photos, and videos of the speakers. Online audio clips of the testimonials will be posted as the hearing progresses.

Space at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland, the Washington, DC suburb where the hearings will occur, is limited. Antiwar activists are not being encouraged to show up, but are instead being asked to have listening or viewing parties in their own communities.

Independent journalist Aaron Glantz, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, has reported extensively from Iraq throughout the U.S. occupation. He is author of How America Lost Iraq (Penguin). He will co-host the Pacifica radio broadcast of the Winter Soldier hearings, along with veteran Aimee Allison and both of them will blog from the hearing at www.warcomeshome.org , where listeners will be able to leave their comments.

Denis Keohane has been doing yeoman’s work dissecting and documenting the IVAW’s march to Winter Soldier II. Today, in a lengthy column, Keohane exposes the deep involvement of freelance propaganda journalist Dahr Jamail lending his large English and Arabic audience to spreading the lies of Jesse MacBeth. Macbeth, before being exposed, lied about his service and that he’d committed atrocities against innocent Iraqis, and the IVAW supported MacBeth. The tracing of Jamail’s large international influence in spreading lies against America and its servicepeople is painstakingly described and linked by Keohane. Read it all, if you can keep your bile down long enough.

The Jamail story is just one of many links in the chain of international propagandists who aid and benefit from the IVAW.

Hopefully, at least some in the mainstream media, with all its resources, will dig deeper this time around, rather than repeat their parroting of 1971’s Winter Soldier lies, that damned a generation of veterans to damaged reputations.