Monday, June 3, 2019

Driving G.I. Pete - Lloyd Billingsley


by Lloyd Billingsley

Mayor Pete Buttigieg appoints himself a military judge.





As Memorial Day approached, President Trump considered cases of American soldiers accused of war crimes. “There’s two or three of them right now,” Trump told reporters, “It’s a little bit controversial. It’s very possible that I’ll let the trials go on, and I’ll make my decision after the trial.” As the president noted, “You know, we teach them how to be great fighters, and then when they fight, sometimes they get really treated very unfairly.” As NBC News reported, that disturbed presidential contender Pete Buttigieg.

“For a president, especially a president who never served,” the Democrat said, “to say he’s going to come in and overrule that system of military justice undermines the very foundations, legal and moral, of this country.” For those curious about Buttigieg’s own military service, a CNN report provides some helpful background.

“His six years as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserves, along with a six-month deployment to Afghanistan, makes a gold-plated resume not only shine brighter, but with an air of validation.” This service, Buttigieg explained, “helps me demonstrate the difference between how I’m oriented and how the current president is.”

Buttigieg told CNN that as a volunteer for Barack Obama’s campaign in Iowa, he felt guilty that so many young people in rural communities were signing up for the Army or National Guard. Buttigieg spent five years as a part-time intelligence officer, stationed near Chicago, and was called to Afghanistan in 2014. There his unit was assigned to disrupt terrorist finance, “a desk job at Bagram Air Base.”

Buttigieg also served as a driver and “It often fell to me to make sure that the vehicle was either being driven or was being guarded properly.” Driver Pete joked with CNN that “It’s not like I killed Bin Laden,” but by all indications he never fired a shot in combat against the Taliban, and was never assigned to guard prisoners.

Even so, Buttigieg is critical of his fellow American soldiers who did take enemy lives in what the military calls “asymmetrical” warfare. Likewise, he shows no appreciation for the difficulty of judging soldiers who operate in those conditions. Consider the Breaker Morant scene in which Maj. J.F Thomas, defends members of the Australian Bushveld Carbineers, charged with killing prisoners during the Boer war, a guerrilla conflict similar to the war in Afghanistan.

“Those Boers fighting in northern Transvaal in commando groups,” Thomas said, “are outlaws, renegades, often without any recognized form of control, addicted to the wrecking of trains, the looting of farms.” Kitchener recognized the unorthodox nature of this warfare and established the Bushveldt Carbineers to deal with it.

“When the rules and customs of war are departed from by one side,” Thomas said, “one must expect the same sort of behavior from the other.” The tragedy of war “is that these horrors are committed by normal men in abnormal situations. Situations in which the ebb and flow of everyday life have departed and been replaced by a constant round of fear and anger and blood and death.”

Soldiers at war, Thomas said, “are not to be judged by civilian rules, as the prosecution is attempting to do.” Therefore, “we cannot hope to judge such matters unless we ourselves have been submitted to the same pressures, the same pressures, the same provocations as these men, whose actions are on trial.”

Mayor Pete Buttigieg has never been submitted to those same pressures and provocations yet the presidential hopeful does not hesitate to judge such men. And the president hopeful is eager to attack the president who has the power to pardon, even before he takes any action. True combat veterans might consider the candidate’s attitude toward the previous president, who never served in the U.S. military.

On November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood, Texas, American soldiers were preparing to depart for Afghanistan. Maj. Nidal Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers, yelling “Allahu akbar” as he killed. The victims include private Francheska Velez, who was pregnant. The self-described “soldier of Allah” wounded more than 30 but the president of the United States did not call this terrorism or even gun violence.

The president called it “workplace violence,” making it difficult for the victims to get the medals they deserved and the medical treatment they needed. Pete Buttigieg is not on record with what he thinks about this atrocity, and how it affected his opinion of the president for whom he campaigned. On the other hand, nobody in the establishment media seems eager to ask Pete Buttigieg about it.

Mass murderer Maj. Nidal Hasan was sentenced to death a full six years ago, in 2013, but the soldier of Allah remains in prison, an active supporter of Islamic terrorist causes. November 5 will mark 10 years since the Muslim’s killing spree. On that day, or any time before, President Trump should give the order to execute this convicted terrorist murderer. See if mayor Pete Buttigieg and his fellow Democrats believe that justice delayed is justice denied. 


Lloyd Billingsley is the author of  Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation and, most recently, Sexual Terrorist, about the Golden State Killer.  Lloyd’s work has appeared in City Journal, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, California Globe, and many other publications. Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefield is a collection of his journalism. His crime books include A Shut and Open Case, about a double murder in Davis, California.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273891/driving-gi-pete-lloyd-billingsley

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