(Editor's note: On the 3rd anniversary of the botched Biden-Harris withdrawal from Afghanistan, WorldTribune.com offers excerpts from an Aug. 29, 2021 article titled "Tale of two Lieutenant Colonels speaking out against their chain of command".)
Two Lieutenant Colonels spoke out against their chain of command.
One was widely-promoted as a hero by the corporate media and protected by the intelligence community.
The other was fired within 24 hours.
Army Lt. Col Alexander Vindman was a star witness in Democrats’ sham impeachment of President Donald Trump.
[Vindman gained national attention in 2019 when he and his brother Eugene Vindman exposed details of a phone call between then-President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a disclosure that led to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump had asked Zelensky about the firing of a prosecutor under Zelensky's predecessor,which then-Vice President Joe Biden publicly boasted he had demanded. That prosecutor was investigating the energy company Burisma which was paying its board member Hunter Biden some $80,000 per month.]
He was quickly hailed as a hero by the Left even as the officer got negative reviews in alternative media accounts citing prominent veterans.
[Meanwhile Ukrainian born Eugene Vindman, who has since taken advantage of publicity from the incident to raise millions for his congressional campaign in Virginia as a Democrat against Republican Derrick Anderson, faces allegations that his campaign violated Federal Election law.]
Marine Corps Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller criticized top military brass and continues to call for “accountability” for Team Biden’s Afghanistan disaster which resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. military personnel.
On Thursday, Scheller posted a four-minute, 45-second video to Facebook in which he appeared in uniform and slammed military leadership following the suicide bombing at Kabul airport which killed 13 U.S. service members and at least 169 Afghans.
The Marine Corps on Friday announced that Scheller was relieved “due to a loss of trust and confidence in his ability to command,” according to Task & Purpose.
Scheller specifically called out Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David H. Berger, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
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“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,’ ” he said.“I’m not saying we’ve got to be in Afghanistan forever,” Scheller added, “but I am saying: Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, ‘Hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic airbase, before we evacuate everyone’? Did anyone do that? And when you didn’t think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say, ‘We completely messed this up?’ ”
Scheller said he personally knew one of the service members who died in Thursday’s attack: “Potentially all those people did die in vain if we don’t have senior leaders that own up and raise their hand and say, ‘We did not do this well, in the end,’ ” he said. “Without that, we just keep repeating the same mistakes.”
Scheller wrote on Facebook that he had been “relieved for cause based on a lack of trust and confidence.”
“I have been fighting for 17 years,” Scheller concluded. “I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders: I demand accountability.”
[Update: Scheller went on to write a bestselling book. He spent some time in the brig and was ordered into mental health counseling. He was court-martialed and received a “general discharge under honorable conditions,” which indicates satisfactory performance, but a failure to meet all expectations of military conduct. He was encouraged to run for political office, but declined to do so.
[Scheller also immersed himself in support of, and service to, military veterans in general, and those having difficulty re-integrating themselves into society as a result of the Global War on Terror in particular.
[Vindman is not only continuing on his "Never Trump" crusade, but has also cheered the arrest of Telegram's CEO in France and warned Elon Musk that he would be next unless he re-institutes censorship on the X social media platform.]
Free Press International
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