Winter Soldier II Off To A Lying Start

From the get-go, the BS is flying at the Iraq Veterans Against the War’s Winter Soldier II.

IVAW had promised an open hearing, so all bloggers could be present in the room, take photos, or maybe ask questions. Instead, those bloggers not aligned with IVAW have been segregated in another room and forbidden from taking photos. This blogger “Had to go potty, which necessitates escort.”

The IVAW.org website has been miraculously cleansed of much of its former material, making the job for reporters more difficult to trace what they say now and what they said before.

One indication is the IVAW Chairman, Camilio Mejia. Denis Keohane points out his escalating, wobbly “war story.” Incidentally, Mejia is the son of Sandinista supporters, in Mejia’s own words:

My father is from Nicaragua. My mother is from Costa Rica. Both were really involved in the resistance to overthrow the US-backed dictatorship of Samosa. And that is a background that I have with me…

Mejia was an Army reservist, called up for the initial 2003 operations into Iraq. There, he for 6-hours says he supervised some detainees, who were deprived of sleep (a war crime!), but now Mejia claims he ran a POW camp. Mejia filed for conscientious objector status, was denied, and deserted, being convicted and serving 9 of a 12-month sentence in the brig. Mejia joined IVAW, and wrote a book, of which Publishers Weekly said,

His memoir is a blend of compelling war narrative and dubious soapboxing. Mejía's claim to conscientious objector status, after eight years in the U.S. military, months of combat and a long campaign for a discharge, rings rather hollow. The son of prominent Nicaraguan Sandinistas, he takes a view of the insurgents' "fight for self-determination" that seems naïve ("[t]here seemed to be a unity that spread through the differences among Iraqis") and his prose is laced with clunky rhetoric about "the imperial dragon that devours its own soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike for the sake of profit."

Gerald Nicosia, known for the mysterious robbery of the records he’d obtained from the FBI just before they could be seen to document John Kerry’s mendacity, is a supporter of IVAW, and says that he,

thought that this WSII was different from WS, but after listening to the testimony of the war crimes committed, it "Was the same"

Thomas Lipscomb exposed that John Kerry hid his presence at a VVAW meeting where Scott Camile proposed assassinations of pro-Vietnam politicians. (More investigation by Lipscomb on the plot and cover-up here and here.) Also see here for more, and about Nicosia’s claim that more than 14 boxes of FBI files disappeared from his house which would have shed more light on Camile and Kerry.

The main Leftist alternative media providing coverage of Winter Soldier II calls itself “Democracy Now!” It’s not a minor operation.

Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the U.S., Democracy Now! is broadcast on Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio stations; on public access, PBS, satellite television (DISH network: Free Speech TV ch. 9415 and Link TV ch. 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV ch. 375); and on the internet. DN!’s podcast is one of the most popular on the web.

Democracy Now’s coverage of WSII leads off with clips from the 1971 VVAWers John Kerry, Joe Bangert (a VVAW supporter of Kerry, who in 1971, traveling with Kerry to Paris to meet with the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, proudly sang the Ballad Of Ho Chi Minh for the guests), and Scott Camile.

Though these VVAWers 1971 testimony has been unproven or disproven, and caused a generation of Vietnam veterans to suffer from unfairly tarnished reputations, the IVAW’s Mejia proudly admits that the IVAW’s Winter Soldier II is “borrowing from the first Winter Soldier hearings held in ’71 by Vietnam Veterans Against the War about their eyewitness experiences in that war.” This blogger at WSII sees more old VVAWers there than contemporary vets.

Another blogger is providing constant coverage of the BS. Wild charges, with no evidence, as with its 1971 model.

Many international reporters, according to AFP, are attending WSII, broadcasting its BS about America in Iraq to the world. Bloggers today see the Associated Press and Washington Post in the audience. Let’s see whether the American press has learned anything since 1971.

Michelle Malkin provides more coverage, along with about the Move America Forward and Gathering Of Eagles counterdemonstrations.