SwiftVets.com

[Me#1You#10]

[streetsweeper95B]

AHMEN.
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"Proud Member of the Freak Show"

[Denis]

[Me#1You#10]

Tell ya what Denis...let's strike "credibility" and insert "legitimacy".

[Denis]

I like your “What we will see at "Son of WS I" will be Beauchampism on steroids...”

I think that is exactly correct. STB put out stories that were kinda detail-lite about where, when, who and the like. They were meant to simply leave an impression.

As soon as the milbloggers were directed to the stories by Weekly Standard, and read them, even without what others might have thought was “detail”, they traced STB and the stories as having to have come from FOB Falcon, and were right. Within days, they were in contact with the post information officer, and milbloggers like Matt Sanchez dropped in at the base and one of the folks at BLACKFIVE actually had a sit down chat with STB, while the New Republic was saying he was unreachable.

There may be some attempt to garner ‘legitimacy’ or ‘credibilty’ by saying “See, we let these milbloggers in...”, but those milbloggers aren’t silent props. That they are milbloggers means they have a platform and a voice - their blogs. They also have, many of them, highly developed bovine excrement sensors and the know how to verfiy if incidents happened as described.

I think I know what you mean by “intimidation”, and in a sense that can be right.

IVAW is concerned about “credibility”. That’s why they are collecting testimony behind the scenes and beforehand, and are also publicly asking combat veterans to assist them in vetting the stories. That a pretty good admission that IVAW itself might be a tad light on actual combat vets on hand to do that. A few “phony soldiers’ and they’re toast, and they know it. A few stories rapidly debunked, and they are likewise toast. The more attention they think they’ll get from say, the opposition, the more careful they have to be.

That will whittle down the number of testifiers and stories. The usual leftist route to get by that problem is the smokescreen. Back in the eighties, a radical feminist group came out with a study purporting that an astronomical percentage, something like eighty plus percent, of married women suffered from spousal abuse! They “highlighted” (and “highlights” is what IVAW says they will distribute) a few genuine stories of women who were badly beaten and even killed by spouses. However, when others insisted on seeing the methodology, and did so, they found out how that high percentage was reached. One of the questions asked in the survey was if the woman’s spouse had ever raised his voice at her in anger! If the woman asnswered yes, that put her in the same “abused” category as the woman who was killed and voila, we have eighty plus percent!

IVAW will try something similar. Remember, they are not out to show that crimes and even atrocities happened. No one argues that they didn’t. Their intent, as it was with Kerry in 1971, is to establish that these war crimes and atrocities are the routine and commonplace occurance among the 1.6 millions Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and that such is a result of policy.

To show this as routine, they need a lot of people. The more people they have testifying, the more vulnerable they are. The more people who are both watching closely and have expertise in the matter, the riskier it is for them.

The left is already getting a tad concerned, and I don’t mind at all turning up the heat. The Veterans for Peace is IVAW’s umbrella group for thier tax status. From one of their discussion sites:

>I am truly perplexed. Now, let me acknowledge I've been out of the loop
>for a month and a half, and the idea had just emerged before my departure
>in late Oct. for an IVAW-inspired Winter Soldier event - which I take to
>be, in its naming, an homage to the Winter Soldier Investigation held in
>Detroit in early 1971 at which scores of Vietnam veterans gave testimony
>about the US war crimes they witnessed or participated in while in Vietnam
>(or other parts of Indochina), testimony which covered virtually all
>periods and sectors of that decade long war. I also take this upcoming
>event to be one in which Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will give their
>eye-witness accounts of war crimes they themselves have participated in or
>witnessed while serving in the current war zones. All this makes sense,
>less a slight anxiety no doubt related to my lack of detailed information
>about Winter Soldier II that makes me wonder why this event is so closely
>modeled on what > was, in its own time, as anyone can verify in the
>literature, a media failure... a virtual blackout (in part related to the
>negative reputation in the press of one of its key architects, Mark Lane;
>that, at least, is one theory.)

...and the infighting...

It saddens me to see this rift between IVAW and many other peace groups. Here in Portland, Or we are planning a large rally/march on March 15th. Last year we had about 15,000 in the streets. This year we expect more.

United for Peace and Justice is working with IVAW to try to get live video feeds around the country so we can all witness winter soldier and hopefully we can get this feed incorporated as part of the events in Portland.

Hopefully, IVAW, VFP and peace and anti-war groups can resolve their differences and present a united front this March.

http://veteransforpeace.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=105&sid=9ee58d5ce6fcacee4e2837f827f73d9f

The first WSI was a media failure, in large part because Mark Lane’s phony soldier atrocity book that came out just before it was blown by a reporter for the NYTimes. Lane was working with IVAW on WSI. WSI wasn’t a success: It was the Fulbright Committee letting Kerry testify (without being under oath) and Mark Hatfield having the WSI testimony entered into the Congressional Record months later that made its name.

This one gets scrutinized and blown apart before and as it happens, no politician will do today what Fulbright and Hatfiled did then, not even Kerry. And if the methods of this one are exposed and the fraud made clear, it will reflect back on 1971.

They can't withstand light and questions. The more of both, the better.

Denis