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Friday, March 19, 2010

Liars

Seems at least one retired Marine who testified against DADT was lying through his teeth. Via Towleroad:

At today's hearings regarding "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", Retired General John Sheehan argued that the allowance of gay soldiers in the Dutch military was responsible for the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995.

SHEEHAN: The case in point that I’m referring to was when the Dutch were required to defend Sbrenecia against the Serbs, the battalion was understrength, poorly led. And the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone polls, marched the Muslims off and executed them. That was the largest massacre in Europe since World War II.

LEVIN: And did the Dutch leaders tell you it was because there were gay soldiers there?

SHEEHAN: It was a combination –

LEVIN: Did they tell you that?

SHEEHAN: Yes.

LEVIN: That’s my question.

SHEEHAN: They included that as part of the problem.

LEVIN: That there were gay soldiers among the Dutch force.

SHEEHAN: The combination was the liberalization of the military, the net effect of basically social engineering.


The problem is, he was way off in his own private reality: The Dutch say he's full of it, including the officer who seems to the one he's citing.

Gen. Henk van den Breemen, Dutch chief of staff at the time of the Srebrenica genocide, called Sheehan's comments "total nonsense" and denied ever having suggested gays in the army might have played a role in the Srebrenica massacre.

Idiot couldn't even get the name right.

Here's the NYT comment on the fallout, with some additional information on Sheehan, who seems to have been a loose canon for most of his career.

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