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Obama was right after all
As a conservative bordering on a libertarian, I hate to admit it President Obama was right about anything, but the fact is that he was right when, in 2020, he voiced his concerns about Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy and warned allies not to underestimate Biden’s ability to “f**k things up.” Yes, President Obama even though I vehemently disagreed with your politics, as a judge of character you were spot on—we should have listened.
If anything, the two days of Congressional hearings by the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs have proven that there is either extreme cognitive dissonance between our nation’s most senior military leadership and the Executive branch or one or the other is misrepresenting the facts.
As we know, President Biden in a recent television interview, when asked about military advice to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, insisted “No one said that to me that I can recall.” Yet during this week’s testimony, both the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Commander U.S. Central Command stated that at least 2,500 hundred troops were required to guard against a rapid collapse of the Kabul government and a return to a cruel Taliban rule.
I suspect somewhere in between lies the truth but, ultimately, the Commander-in-Chief bears the responsibility for our “strategic failure” in Afghanistan. He alone should be held accountable.
Not only have we lost face among some of our closest allies, such as Great Britain, but we have also essentially returned Afghanistan into a staging base for further, and perhaps more sophisticated, terrorist attacks on our homeland. The Taliban are stronger now than they were pre 9/11 thanks to our leaving behind millions of dollars of state-of-the-art technology and weaponry that will ultimately be used against us.
As a member of the armed forces for over thirty years, I can assure you that the Administration’s strategy of conducting “over the horizon” counter-terrorism strikes is doomed to failure. We saw the results of such a strategy gone bad when we incorrectly targeted a car loaded with children believing it had members of ISIS-K. Let’s not kid ourselves about our capabilities to do targeted anti-terrorism strikes: Afghanistan is a land-locked country where overflight rights must be obtained first by her neighbors in order to launch airstrikes or reinsert boots on the ground.
Under Obama, in a similar strategic situation, then-Vice-President Biden advocated our early withdrawal from Iraq, a move that gave rise to the ISIS Caliphate and the needless expenditure of human life and capital. Do I see a pattern here? In both instances, the date of our withdrawal was clearly “telegraphed” to our respective adversary which goes against the grain of all principles of war.
A safe, timely Non-Combatant Evacuation or “NEO” of American Citizens in-country could have been conducted—this is one of the primary missions of the 82nd Airborne Division and our afloat Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs). Evidently, though, the State Department did not want to raise undue concern.
Yes, President Obama, though I doubted you while in office, we should have listened to you. In the past few weeks, we have witnessed a preventable debacle in which we squandered the lives of young American service members and set the stage for our eventual return to right a bad yet preventable wrong. I suspect your advice will continue to be prescient. Perhaps we should now take heed and do what we can to insulate ourselves from Joe’s ability to “f*** things up.”
Image: Joe Biden (modified in BeFunky). Rumble screen grab.
The Scheller Case is America’s Dreyfus Affair
A US Marine officer, Lt. Colonel Stuart Scheller, publicly criticized the Biden Administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan which left 13 servicemen and women dead at Kabul Airport.
He particularly targeted the top brass of the military, a military to which he devoted his energy and his life to serve, for their abysmal performance in the closing days of the Afghan withdrawal.
Scheller was relieved of his command shortly after he posted a video on Facebook demanding senior officers be held to account for their actions. In the video, Scheller said that he intended to resign his commission.
Facebook video screengrab
In the video, he is heard saying, “I have been fighting for 17 years. I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders: I demand accountability.”
On September 27, Lt. Colonel Sheller was suddenly arrested and placed in solitary confinement in the military jail at Camp Lejeune, N.C., according to Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Sam Stephenson.
He is held incommunicado, under a gag order, unable even to speak with his parents.
Throwing people into solitary confinement has become, it seems, a repeatable tactic to the current Democrat enforcers.
Under a previous Administration, and under the close, informed, and watchful eye of the current president, political opponents were arrested in the middle of the night, or had false charges brought against them and their reputations tarnished. People like Roger Stone, General Michael Flynn, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos.
The Democrats arrested hundreds of citizens who participated in protests at the Capitol Building and placed them in solitary confinement. Hundreds are still held in solitary confinement nine months later. The government demanded that some must plead guilty to charges beyond trespassing even if they had not committed violence or property damage. Released footage, which House Democrats deliberately removed from the evidence presented, shows several of the charged January 6 protesters doing nothing more serious than taking selfies and videos as they toured the Rotunda and hallways. Yet they remain jailed for three-quarters of a year without trial. They have become fodder for a Democrat political fallacy looking for scapegoats in a politically charged prosecution.
Such behavior, whether conducted in military or in political spheres, is deeply corrosive to a democracy, particularly to the one that once promoted itself as a shining city on a hill.
The fate imposed on Scheller is eerily similar to the fate of Colonel Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French officer who was scapegoated for the crimes of their military establishment and elite officer class.
Dreyfus, despite his rank, was an outsider, as is Scheller.
Dreyfus’s case was built around a traitor who was covertly feeding intelligence to the German enemy. The French military refused to believe that one of their favored officers, one with close access to the elites, would do such a thing. So, they went in search of a sacrificial goat. They found it in Dreyfus.
In America’s case, the hullabaloo about Scheller distracts attention away from General Milley who, without authority, contacted the Chinese enemy to assure them that he would give them prior notice should his Commander in Chief, the President of the United States, give an order to attack them.
In Dreyfus’s case, the guilty party was a treasonous officer named Esterhazy and it took an incoming head of the French military intelligence, a diligent officer named Georges Piquart, to reveal the real culprit as Esterhazy.
By that time, the Jew Dreyfus has been publicly demoted, shamed, and shipped off to Devil’s Island, a penal colony off the shores of distant French Guiana in South America.
When the military ruling class was given overwhelming evidence of the guilt of Esterhazy, and their incompetence and cover up, they shipped Piquart off to a North African battle front in the hope that he would be killed. When he wasn’t, he was imprisoned.
When Marine Colonel Scheller spoke out publicly to demand accountability, after thirteen American military personnel had been murdered in Kabul, the top Pentagon officials did what the French did: they relieved him of his duty and confined him to solitary confinement as the French did with Georges Piquart 123 years ago.
When rumors began to circle implicating Esterhazy in the treasonous incident, the French military court hastily held a show trial that acquitted Esterhazy of all wrongdoing.
Despite the banishment of both Dreyfus and Piquart, news circulated about a miscarriage of justice and the evidence of a national cover-up in the top ranks of the French military establishment.
I took a courageous journalist, Emile Zola, to write an article in a leading French newspaper titled “J-Accuse!” in which he defended Dreyfus and accused the hierarchy of a cover up.
As a result, Zola was accused and convicted of libel, but he escaped to Britain to continue his righteous campaign for justice for Dreyfus and Piquart.
Dreyfus was shipped back to France to face yet another trial by the same establishment. In 1899, he was again court-martialed and found guilty.
By this time the mood had changed in France and, days after the trial, Dreyfus was pardoned by the French president on all charges. However, it took another seven years before Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated into the French army, fully twelve years since he was publicly shamed.
It took individual men of courage to face down the political and military establishment in France to change the public mood and restore justice for both Dreyfus and Piquart.
How many courageous individuals, how many years will it take, to bring justice to Lt. Colonel Stuart Scheller and expose the rotten hypocrisy in the top ranks of the Pentagon and the White House?
Let us hope that Scheller will not have to wait for a future president to pardon him.
Barry Shaw publishes The View from Israel.
Republicans Call on Marine Corps to Release Lt. Col. Stu Scheller, Jailed after Criticizing Afghanistan Withdrawal
Republicans in the House and Senate are calling on the Marine Corps to release Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who was thrown in a military jail this week after he criticized military leadership for the botched Afghanistan withdrawal on social media and continued posting about his disposition.
According to a Marine Corps spokesperson, Scheller is currently in pre-trial confinement in the Regional Brig for Marine Corps Installations East aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune pending an Article 32 preliminary hearing. The time, date, and location of the proceedings have not been determined.
The Marine Corps notes that he has not been charged with anything but the “general nature” of offenses being considered at the hearing are:
- Article 88 (contempt toward officials)
- Article 90 (willfully disobeying superior commissioned officer)
- Article 92 (failure to obey lawful general orders)
- Article 133 (conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman)
Scheller first caught the nation’s attention after he posted a short video of himself on Facebook criticizing his leadership on August 26, the day that 11 Marines, one Navy corpsman, and one Army soldier were killed during the Biden administration’s hastily-planned non-combatant evacuation operation in Kabul.
A Taliban fighter stands guard at the site of the August 26 twin suicide bombs, which killed scores of people including 13 US troops, at Kabul airport on August 27, 2021. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)
Scheller, a battalion commander with 17 years of active duty, said he knew he was risking his career by speaking but demanded accountability for the disastrous withdrawal that saw thousands of desperate Afghans rush to the airport, some falling from C-17s as they tried to cling to the aircraft, and the deaths and woundings of American service members and nearly 200 Afghan civilians.
The reason people are so upset on social media right now is not because the Marine on the battlefield let someone down. … People are upset because their senior leaders let them down, and none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up.’ If an O-5 battalion commander has the simplest live-fire, EO complaint — boom, fired.
He called out his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley, and others. His video went viral. As of September 30, it has been shared about 66,000 times and has 77,000 likes and 10,000 comments.
Stuart Scheller / FacebookScheller was fired the very next day, becoming the only military officer to be punished in relation to the Afghanistan withdrawal. He then submitted his resignation letter, but according to his parents, the Marine Corps rejected his resignation letter.
On Monday, his parents wrote in an update:
It is with a heavy heart that we, his parents, are informing you that our son, Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, has been incarcerated by the USMC this morning, September 27, 2021. He was issued a Gag order which he broke this weekend by posting on social media.
…
Recently, Stu asked to resign; The USMC told us, his parents, that our son serves at the pleasure of the President. They have not accepted his resignation.
Army veteran Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) asked Austin about Scheller during a Senate hearing on the withdrawal on Tuesday:
Obviously, this is an issue on which many of our troops and our veterans feel very passionately…One of those service members, Marine Colonel Stuart Scheller posted a very critical video on social media last month and he was relieved of his command for that posting. Media reports today indicate that he is being held in pretrial confinement. Why is that?
Austin referred Cotton to the Marine Corps, saying, “I don’t have any specifics of what caused him to be held in pretrial confinement, and I would certainly ask the Marines to provide that insight.”
Lloyd Austin (C), Mark Milley (L), and Commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie (R) testify during a hearing before Senate Armed Services Committee at Dirksen Senate Office Building September 28, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The next day, more than 30 House Republicans issued a letter to the Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger asking that Scheller be released from confinement. Led by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), they wrote:
The purpose of this letter is to request an expedited review and removal of LTC Scheller from pretrial confinement.
As you know, Rule for Court Martial (R.C.M.) 305 (h) (2) (B), outlines that within 24, 48, and 72 hours of confinement, the service member’s commander must make a determination or show just cause that it is reasonably foreseeable that the service member: will not appear at trial, pretrial hearing, or investigation, or will engage in serious criminal misconduct, and that lesser forms of restraint are inadequate.
In fact, this confinement appears to be simply for messaging, retribution, and convenience in flagrant violation of R.C.M. 305(h)(2)(B) “a person should not be confined as a mere matter of convenience.” Furthermore, R.C.M. 305(h)(2)(B) also states that LTC Scheller should be accommodated in the “less serious forms of restraint.” For the above reasons, we urge you to use your considerable authority to correct this misapplication of law and immediately remove LTC Scheller from his confinement.
Given his excellent record and more than 15 years of dedicated service, we do not believe and have seen no evidence that LTC Sheller poses a grave risk of criminal misconduct. It is our understanding that some member offices have emailed the governments counsel Mr. Troy Campbell troy.h.campbell@usmc.mil with no response or feedback on the upcoming reevaluation hearing. It is imperative that Members of Congress be afforded an opportunity to conduct their oversight duties with respect to military justice. For the aforementioned reasons we request that LTC Scheller be released from pretrial confinement and be housed in the least restrictive form of housing.
The letter was also signed by GOP Reps. Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, Jeff Duncan, Buddy Carter, Ben Cline, Andy Biggs, Bob Good, Diana Harshbarger, Paul Gosar, Thomas Massie, Bill Posey, Barry Moore, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Daniel Webster, David Rouzer, Dan Bishop, Mary Miller, Andrew Clyde, Randy Weber, Matt Gaetz, Glenn Grothman, Debbie Lesko, Ralph Norman, Andy Harris, Doug LaMalfa, Barry Loudermilk, Billy Long, John Carter, Matthew Rosendale, James Comer, Warren Davidson, and August Pfluger.
Many of the members made their own statements on Twitter:
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