Introducing ‘What We Brought Home’ - our new podcast where military veterans anonymously share the stories they hide from the world

2021-07-14T15:01:39-04:00

As combat veterans of the war in Iraq, we’ve spent the last 13+ years reflecting on our time in service. Each of us experienced events that we often thought about but never talked about…with anyone...ever. These were moments when we weren’t sure we did everything we could or whether we did the exact ‘right thing’ or not. The life-or-death stakes of military service added so much gravity to the split second decisions many of us made in often ambiguous situations.

We know how common it can be for veterans to feel anger, confusion, guilt or shame as they reflect on their time in uniform. Many veterans bury these thoughts and feelings out of fear that they will burden their friends or family or that they will not be accepted by fellow vets. We believe these dynamics are likely a significant factor contributing to the disturbing rates of veteran isolation and suicide.

Over the years, we’ve each felt increasingly connected to the veteran community (through technology and social media) yet increasingly isolated. We’ve never found a space where we could comfortably talk with other veterans about the true realities of military service or explain these dynamics to non-veterans.

In light of all of this, we decided to create a space to have these much needed conversations - our new podcast, titled: What We Brought Home.

What We Brought Home is the podcast where veterans share the stories that they hide from the world. We provide a judgement-free forum to discuss the many varied emotions most veterans feel in the wake of their service. Because these topics can be extremely sensitive, the identities of each guest are concealed. Each episode features a different veteran anonymously sharing a story from their time in service.

For veterans who have ever felt alone, like no one could possibly understand the things they’ve experienced, they might find some company. For civilians who were always curious about what it’s like to be an everyday service-member, or if they simply enjoy listening to true stories of the human experience, they’ll find that here.

Listen now and follow wherever you get your podcasts and please share with anyone who you think might be interested.

Learn more at: whatwebroughthome.com

Also, we are always looking for more veteran storytellers. If you have a story, or know anyone who you think might have something to share, please contact us through our website.

Response by SGT Private RallyPoint Member made Jul 14 at 2021 4:36 PM

2021-07-14T16:36:33-04:00

CPT Patrick McGinty sounds like a good program... hopefully they will tune in & at some point feel comfortable to participate.

Response by Cpl Vic Burk made Jul 14 at 2021 8:28 PM

2021-07-14T20:28:18-04:00

It is very difficult to talk about some things. It dredges up memories I would rather not remember but every so often we see something, smell something, hear something and the memories stir and fester like a boiling pot. It takes time for it to cool down and go away.

Response by CW3 Dick McManus made Jul 25 at 2021 2:00 PM

2021-07-25T14:00:58-04:00

DOJ Refuses To Prosecute Trump Officials for Lying To Congress

July 20, 2021: The Biden Department of Justice has decided that they will NOT be pursuing charges against former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, even after the inspector general confirmed that Ross provided false testimony to Congress. The testimony in question was about the citizenship question that the Trump administration wanted to include in the census. Not going after Ross is a gross abuse of justice. Citizenship question on the census questionnaire.

President Barack Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists and those who carried out the torture.

Sen. Claire McCaskill said, "I don't think we want to look in the rearview mirror." But McCaskill, a Democrat who is also on the Armed Services Committee, said there probably was a need to ask more questions.

The decision not to seek charges against the interrogators has been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union and called a violation of international law by the U.N.'s top torture investigator. Journalist and Human Rights Watch researcher John Sifton similarly documented that "approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death." The suppressed fact: Deaths by U.S. torture

Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and Obams’ press secretary, Robert Gibbs; their problem is that if they can prosecute Republican officeholders for authorizing torture, then the next Republican president can prosecute Obama and his subordinates for the many questionable legal actions of the Obama administration —say, the drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki and three other American citizens. Sen. Ted Cruz cites the drone strike as one of 76 alleged illegal actions by the Obama administration.

Obama failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for causing the collapse of the housing market ushered. “The Democrats have very few differences from the Republicans now,” Eisinger said. “They’re both drawing from the same elite legal culture, they’re all essentially clerking from the same judges or the same courts. … They’re all drawing from the same well with just little gradations in difference on ideology, mainly around social issues.”

“In the wake of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, when banks that U.S. attorney in Manhattan Preet Bharara was supposed to police made egregious mistakes and acted recklessly and committed crimes up and down, the fact that he didn’t prosecute is a scandal.”

(Source: The Chickenshit Club by Jesse Eisinger) The book traces Department of Justice impotence on corporate crime back two decades.

Resolution regarding the behavior of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr.

Whereas we believe members of the Democratic Party have a duty to insure the law is faithfully executed,

Whereas on March 12, 2013, after telling under oath US Senator Ron Wyden that the National Security Agency (NSA) (did, not) does not collect data on millions of Americans, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper Jr., …answered the question about classified information in the “least untruthful” manner possible,”

Whereas Clapper replied, “No.” “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly,” yet without a warrant, NSA did in fact violate the US Constitution,

Whereas Clapper told Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein that his statement was "clearly erroneous,"

Whereas Sen. Wyden, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said, “One of the most important responsibilities a Senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if Senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions,”

Whereas US Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-CA) did not call for the removal of and/or persecution of then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr. for lying under oath to Congress and they only declined to comment,

Whereas as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said, “This (Obama) administration views Edward]Snowden as the problem, not Gen. Clapper, and and the president’s pursuit of Snowden rather than the defense of the Bill of Rights, is perhaps part of the reason Clapper will get off scot-free”,

Whereas US Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) wrote in an op-ed, “If the Constitution is to continue to apply, citizens must maintain their close watch on the eyes of government whose sleight of hand is making our rights no more than an illusion… there is no reason that Americans should sit idly by while their federal representatives let Clapper skate.,”

Whereas Clapper said, “We were shocked. … The trucks we had identified as “mobile production facilities for biological agents” were in fact used to pasteurize and transport milk,”

Whereas Clapper was in charge of the Directorate of CIA’s National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) which is responsible for analyzing imagery collected by satellites and hid the truth about the Iraqi threat in order not to impede the planned attack on Iraq,

Whereas Clapper wrote in his book, …“the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that, we found what wasn’t really there!”

Therefore Be It Resolved, I am troubled that Congress and the Obama administration did not hold James Clapper accountable.

Resolution regarding US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

WHEREAS US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan) were briefed from 2002 to 2003 in about 30 private secret and classified briefings, about the planned use of cruel, unusual and inhuman treatment, per orders of former President George W. Bush and his subordinates and they did not go public to try to prevent this with war crimes,

WHEREAS a memo describing techniques which interrogators wanted to use: facial slap, solitary confinement, forced standing until your muscles hurt or give out (also noted as self-torture aka stress positions), sleep deprivation and sleep disruption, insects placed in a confinement, fear of dogs or other phobias, cramped confinement, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, restricting food or water, lighting on all the time or no views of the outside sunlight, sounds of people being tortured, loud sounds or music, 20-hour interrogations, and water-boarding them,

WHEREAS these Congress people had a Constitutional and legal duty to go public about the planned or on-going use of torture, ghost prisoners, secret jails, and kidnapping and rendition to proxy nations that torture, (all war crimes), notwithstanding that these activities were classified and criminal behavior cannot be classified for national security reasons,

WHEREAS not speaking up about the President planning to do torture, made these Congress people accessories to the war crime to torture, ghost prisoners, secret jails, and kidnapping and rendition to proxy nations that torture,

WHEREAS a crime against peace, in international law, refers to "planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing" It is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,

WHEREAS however Speaker Nancy Pelosi has accused intelligence officials of failing to brief her about the CIA’s enhanced interrogation methods that included water-boarding and that is not believable,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED we are very troubled that US Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is now again the Speaker of the House of Representatives and has been so for years since her failure to speak up.

Repeal Sections of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act

WHEREAS the National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA) subsections 1021–1022 of Title X, Subtitle D, entitled "Counter-Terrorism,"

"Section 1021.... Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force ... includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war,

Section 1022. …. Except as provided in paragraph (4), the Armed Forces of the United States shall hold a person described in paragraph (2) who is captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force ... in military custody pending disposition under the law of war,"

WHEREAS this law authorizes the President to send US military personnel to arrest of a covered person (one subject to detention) as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces,”

WHEREAS the US military is not authorized to detain or arrest US persons outside a theater of war,

WHEREAS this does not define the terms “substantially supported,” “directly supported” or “associated forces,” and the detainee is not granted habeas corpus, due process after arrest, and not right to a speedy trail,

WHEREAS the ACLU also maintains that "the breadth of the NDAA's detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war and the statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision, without temporal or geographic limitations,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED we demand that these sections of the NDAA ( that are still the law), be repealed.

The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote:

‘There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word “fascist” …his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government…is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end other than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and ‘success.’… The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history.’

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich published a blog post titled “The American Fascist.” Reich argued that Trump had already reached a point where “parallels between his presidential campaign and…lurid figures such as Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, and Francisco Franco – are too evident to overlook.” Reich based this conclusion on Trump’s: determination to direct white American against Mexican immigrants and Muslims; embrace of violence; readiness to violate international laws against torture; designation of the media as “the enemy of the people;” efforts to create a cult taking on “the trappings of strength, confidence, and invulnerability around himself” and reaching his white heartland volk “without political parties or other intermediaries standing between him and his supporters.” Reich noted that Trump had recently quoted Mussolini and began “inviting followers at his rallies to raise their right hands in a manner chillingly similar to the Nazi ‘Heil’ salute…Viewing Trumpster in light of the fascists of the first half of the twentieth century – who used economic stresses to scapegoat others, created cults of personality, intimidated opponents, incited violence, glorified their nations and disregarded international law, and connected directly with the masses – helps explain what Trump is doing and how he is succeeding,” Reich wrote.

The early descriptions of Trump and Trumpism as fascist were richly borne out by the Trump years. Some highlights: advocating the electrification of the southern U.S. border; the sadistic family separation policy; repeated dehumanizing references to political enemies, immigrants, and nonwhites as “animals,” “scum,” “infestations” and the like; vicious racist-sexist attacks on progressive female Congresswomen; pardons granted to the fascist Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the sadistic Navy SEALS war criminal Eddie Gallagher.

Have You Heard That Trumpism is “Becoming Fascist”? - CounterPunch.org