Yesterday I did a blog on Alan West, who is a black conservative candidate running in Florida’s 22nd District for the US Congress. West has raised a lot of money – most of it from donors out side the district as the only viable black Republican candidate for the past 10 years for a seat in the US Congress or Senate.
West was trash talking about demanding that Pelosi give up the gavel if he is elected.
According to an emerging series of stories, Alan West is very tough on folks who can’t fight back – in his fantasy case a woman, Speaker Pelosi.
So tough in fact, his Military career ended when he was offered the “broken sword” choice – retirement…
Or a Court Martial for torturing an Iraqi prisoner. Like everything dealing with “conservative heroes” there are two stories – the first from a conservative site -
Failure of Command – The case of Lt. Col. Allen B. West.
…around August 8, another member of the Fourth I.D. — an artillery officer and a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War — was assigned as a civil military-affairs officer in a hot zone in the Sunni Triangle. His job placed him in daily contact with local leaders, and his responsibility was to help them help the army, to run local elections, and stamp out the insurgents. The officer was told by the intel people that they had solid information, from three sources, about a plot to assassinate him. He wasn’t very concerned, his attention focused on a scheduled local election only a few weeks away. His boss told him to stay off the streets for a few days, and he did. Readying to go back out on patrol on August 16, the lieutenant colonel was stopped at the gate by some locals who wanted to talk to him. The patrol went on without him, and was ambushed. No Americans were hurt, but the officer was convinced of the plot.
Between August 16 and 20, intelligence identified an Iraqi policeman who was allegedly involved in the assassination plot, and the man was arrested on Aug. 20. According to the officer’s defense attorney, this is what happened.
Lt. Col. Allen B. West was told the policeman was uncooperative, so he took a few of his men to the interrogation area to see for himself, where he found the prisoner being questioned by two female officers. They told him the man was belligerent, and wasn’t giving them any information. (Surprise, surprise. The idiocy of having women question male Arab prisoners is apparent to everyone except the army commanders.) West entered the room, sat across from the man, drew his pistol, and placed it in his lap. West told him he had come to either get information, or to kill him. The prisoner responded by smiling and saying, “I love you.” The interrogation continued, and one of West’s troops lost his temper and started slapping the man. West then had his men take the prisoner outside, where he again threatened the man, telling him that he would kill him on the count of five if he didn’t tell what he knew. The prisoner refused, and West fired his pistol into the air.
The interrogation continued, but not the beating. After about 20 more minutes of useless questioning, West grabbed the man, held him down near a box full of sand used to discharge jammed weapons, and said something like, “This is it. I’m going to count to five again, and if you don’t give me what I want, I’m going to kill you.” West held the man down, counted to five, and then fired his pistol into the discharging box about a foot from the Iraqi’s head. He began talking. Over the next few minutes, the prisoner gave very specific information about the plot. He named the conspirators, gave times and dates of the assassination plan, and even described how attacks would be made.
“If you’re a bad guy, don’t ever get between me and the safety and the lives of the American people,” West says of the incident. “As a commander, your moral responsibility is to take care of your troops.”
And this far different story which is why Col West was Court Martialed -
In August 2003, Colonel Allen West – commanding a US unit in Baghdad – heard a rumour that one of the Iraqi policeman he was working with was a secret insurgent. He ordered his officers to go and seize Yehiya Hamoodi, a thin, bespectacled 31-year-old, from his home. They dragged him into a Humvee, beat him, and then handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded him. In a dank interrogation room, they told him he had better start talking.
Perplexed and terrified, Yehiya explained he didn’t know what they were talking about: why was he here? So West was called in. He told Yehiya he was going to be killed. While his men beat him again, he explained he had one last chance to save his life – by talking.
Yehiya protested: I am innocent! What are you talking about? So West took him outside, had him pinned down, and began to shoot. First he fired into the air. Then he ordered his men to ram Yehiya’s head into a barrel used for cleaning weapons – and fired right next to his head. Then he began to count down from five. Finally Yehiya began to scream out names – any name he could think of, just to make it stop.
The men he named were seized and roughed up in turn. No evidence was found of any plot, and after another 45 days of terror, Yehiya was released. Today, he is severely traumatised, and collapses when he sees a Humvee approaching. The story only came to light after one of West’s soldiers began to protest against these practices, and the Pentagon launched an investigation. At a pre-trial hearing, West was fined $5,000, and now concedes grudgingly: “It’s possible I was wrong about Mr Hamoodi.” But he says he would do it again, and again, and again.
West has even taken to joking about it, gaining applause for telling Republican audiences: “It wasn’t torture. Seeing Rosie O’Donnell naked would be torture.” But the 1994 Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, is explicit: “Threat of imminent death” is the third form of torture it outlaws. There are reams of studies showing it can traumatise a person for life.
Two months later, however, the Army told West he had a choice: Retire or face a court-martial. West retired and moved to Florida, where he spent the next year teaching high school in Broward County.
At the time, even some Republicans had heartburn with the hue and cry by platic patriots over Col West. Former Congressman Bob Barr had this to say -
“It may be an interrogation technique that worked in this instance, but that’s not an heroic act,” Barr told WorldNetDaily. “This man apparently has a very distinguished military career and much of what he’s done may be heroic, but I don’t think this is an heroic act.”
In most states, felons can’t vote or hold political office…
Filed under: Stupid Tea Bagger Tricks Tagged: | Alan West, black conservative, candidate, court marshal, criminal, felon, iraq, Tea Bagger, tea party, torture, torturer, Uncle Tom
And these mofo’s want to dis Obama look at this:
4/20/2010
Argentina ex-dictator Gen Bignone jailed for 25 years
Gen Bignone, 82, ordered abductions and torture while second in command of the country’s largest torture centre between 1978 and 1979.
“Justice was slow in coming but it has finally arrived,” said Estela de Carlotto, head of the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
Human rights groups say some 30,000 people died or “disappeared” during the period, which saw the military target left-wing opponents.
The trial comes after amnesty laws, which had shielded perpetrators from charges, were overturned in 2005 by the country’s Supreme Court.
With the braking news this morning of investigations into financial improprieties by the Republican NY Senate Head and Marco Rubio in Florida, Tea Party darling who is running for a Senate Seat…
I think looking the other way at Republican criminality is over.
I’ve known this about West for sometime; this never comes up on right wing blogs though.
Think it is going to come up before election time!
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[...] Thinks he’s the real Jack Bauer (and got drummed out of the service for it) … [...]
Read more about it here including the military investigation http://nowestfl22.blogspot.com
nanakwame,I’m not sure whay you were trying to say. What I am sure of is that you have nerver served your country,let alone been in a fire fight and seen your brothers in arms shot down. Comparing a dictator to a soldier trying to keep his men safe is absurd! Maybe you should enlist and serve in a war zone for a yesr to gain a new perspective on life.In fact,this goes pretty much to all that have written before m,e on this article.
I will let Nanakwame speak for himself.
After WWII we held trials in Nuremberg of German Wehrmacht officers who did many of the same things Alan West did. We didn’t just try the Nazis.
For the leaders, a special punishment – The condemned were hanged on October 16, 1946. Their bodies were taken to Dachau, where the ovens that had consumed so many were fed for the last time with the bodies of the men that had built them. The ashes were scattered over the Isar River.
Several thousand of those officers were sentenced to prison terms, and some were executed for their crimes.
We did the same thing with the Japanese involved in war crimes, where over 20,000 civilian and military personnel were tried and convicted, and 900 were executed.
Why exactly do you believe we should hold our Military officer to a lower standard than we hold everyone else?
Col West stopped an attack on his troops when it was imminent. He did this by rising above the stultified normal Army interrogation process when not doing so would have meant the deaths of his troops. He is a hero and all attempts to say otherwise are are either uninformed, pure politics or misguided. Ask yourself this: whose interest did West have at heart when he took the actions he did, the enemies or his troopers? In whose interest have his detractors placed more value? It is easy to be an arm chair quarterback when you are not faced with having to make that choice. West is a genuine hero and a real honest-to-goodness leader someone we do not see in Congress or the Democrat party all that often. Socialism and Marxism will die but not with a huge fight first. West is a man who can lead in that battle.
West is a torturer, and a disgrace to everything the US Military stands for.
He fits perfectly in as a Tea Bagger…
For those who think the Constitution is in fact a suicide pact, and that there is reason for one man’s rights to supersede another’s life, the Obama administration is your kind of government. But for the rest of the country your Marxist thinking means you are the enemy. You are the enemy within that every Federal oath taker is promising to protect us against. So, is it any wonder that the battle lines have been drawn to spectacularly? Evil has always fought against good. In this case, the Democrat party has embraced evil with both hands and open arms.
Have to disagree with you , JL – Spent some time in a couple of communist countries before the Wall fell, even visited a former Nazi concentration camp…
So I got to see up close and personal, what you Tea Bagger types are all about.
Get it though your little goose-stepping head…
We ain’t gong there.
[...] It’s not just Chris Ingram. Two veterans organizations, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, just say no to Allen West, who was drummed out of the Army under rather unpleasant circumstances… [...]