The totally cool no stress US election thread

SoldierMan

Active Member
Joined
Jul 18, 2020
Messages
460
Well well well maybe Biden won't be the gun grabber that we all thought (according to his web page anyway).

Now that is if we can take his word for it anyway, as he is a known liar. He says he won't ban "assault weapons" at 5:44.


 

SoldierMan

Active Member
Joined
Jul 18, 2020
Messages
460
Biden is just like any other politician. A POS who uses innocent people for political expediency. What a turd.



Who Are The Biden Four?
Four decorated United States military veterans:
  1. Nicholas (Nick) Slatten (Sparta, TN) – served four years in the U.S. Army (Sergeant); deployed twice to Iraq
  2. Dustin Heard (Maryville, TN) – served four years in U.S. Marine Corps (Corporal); deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Bahrain
  3. Evan Liberty (Rochester, NH) – served four years in the U.S. Marine Corps (Sergeant); U.S. Embassy guard in Egypt and Guatemala
  4. Paul Slough (Sanger, TX) – served four years in the U.S. Army and National Guard (Sergeant); deployed to Bosnia and Iraq

How Did Men Like This Wind Up In Prison?
Experienced veterans, who were no strangers to combat, made split-second decisions in an Iraqi war zone during an emergency.
After being honorably discharged from their respective military branches, all four veterans deployed to Iraq, serving under Blackwater’s contract to protect State Department officials who came under attack. In September 2007, insurgents detonated a car bomb near the venue where a U.S. diplomat was conducting government business. The Blackwater emergency response team (call sign Raven 23) deployed to secure the diplomat’s safe return. After the team created a checkpoint in a traffic circle in Nisur Square, a white Kia drove toward their convoy and refused to stop. Raven 23 disabled the vehicle, but came under fire, which they returned, killing several Iraqis. A team vehicle was disabled by the incoming arms fire and had to be towed back to safety. A U.S. Army Captain and West Point graduate who responded immediately to the scene interviewed Iraqi witnesses who confirmed that the vehicle had driven toward the Raven 23 convoy like a car bomb. Real-time radio logs and photographs of the disabled vehicle confirm that the team came under small arms fire during the attack. There was evidence that people were throwing Iraqi Police uniforms over embankments around the Square, suggesting that insurgents disguised themselves as police and used the embankments as cover to shoot at the convoy.
How Did Self-Defense In A War-Zone Turn Into A Prosecution?
The United States government allowed the Iraqi Police to conduct a corrupt investigation.
The FBI largely outsourced the investigation to the Iraqi Police, an organization infiltrated with anti-American insurgents. According to U.S. intelligence files, which were hidden from the defense for a decade, the man who led the Iraqi investigation, Col. Faris Karim, may have collaborated with Iranian terrorist organizations. The Iraqi Police collected almost all of the physical evidence, most of which disappeared. Advertisements on Iraqi television promised compensation for persons who identified themselves to be victims of the incident. The Iraqi Police identified the witnesses and claimed victims and coordinated their stories so that they would all claim that Raven 23 shot without provocation, contrary to what untainted Iraqi witnesses told the U.S. Army Captain at the scene. FBI investigators did not visit the site until several weeks after the incident.
Left-leaning media and politicians relied on the corrupt investigation to urge prosecution. The New York Times and the Washington Post (along with other left leaning outlets) injected politics into the incident by labeling the men as mercenaries and killers and using it as an indictment of Blackwater generally. Similarly, then-candidate Barack Obama made the incident a campaign issue, creating pressure on the Department of Justice to criminally charge the men here in the United States.
How Did A U.S. Court Not Immediately Dismiss Such A Case?
Actually, it did. The federal district court in Washington, D.C., originally dismissed all charges based on constitutional rights violations by federal prosecutors.
The District Court dismissed the case for what it found to be “egregious” constitutional violations, including improper use of compelled statements and the intentional withholding of exculpatory evidence and testimony from the grand jury.
How Did The Case Keep Going?
Iraq, Hillary Clinton, and then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed further prosecution.
Following heavy political pressure from Hillary Clinton and the Iraqi government, prosecutors appealed the case. Succumbing to that pressure, then-Vice President Joe Biden even inserted himself into the prosecution, announcing the government’s intention to appeal, and to seek “justice” as long as it took, effectively declaring four decorated veterans guilty before the first witness ever took the stand. Biden overstepped his role and jettisoned the presumption of innocence during a press conference in Iraq. And this is how the four veterans of Raven 23 became known as the “Biden Four.”
What Happened To The Biden Four Next?

Prosecutors threatened them with unconscionably long prison sentences.
The government threatened the Biden Four with 30-year mandatory minimum sentences for using machine guns—even though they were required to carry machine guns by the State Department. The veterans refused to plead guilty, even in the face of 30-year prison sentences, because they believed the truth would set them free. Unfortunately, it did not.
A civilian jury in Washington, D.C. convicted three of them of manslaughter. The prosecution manufactured venue in Washington, D.C. by arranging for a cooperating witness to fly there so he could be “arrested” in their preferred venue. As a result, the prosecutors tried the men—who are from Tennessee, Texas, and New Hampshire—in the most liberal, anti-military jurisdiction in the country. A civilian jury with no combat experience convicted Paul Slough, Dustin Heard, and Evan Liberty of manslaughter. They ultimately received sentences of 12 to 15 years, after an appeals court threw out their 30-year mandatory minimum sentences as cruel and unusual punishment under the United States Constitution.
But Isn’t It The Biden FOUR? What Happened To Nick Slatten?
After a federal court dismissed manslaughter charges against Nick (for a second time), prosecutors charged Nick with the first-degree murder of a man he did not kill.
Prosecutors charged Nick with manslaughter, but an appeals court dismissed the manslaughter case against Nick on statute of limitations grounds. The prosecutors vindictively pursued Nick even though they had acknowledged (in seeking to dismiss their own indictment against Nick) that the manslaughter charges against Nick were “weak” in comparison to the manslaughter charges against the other men (and thereafter allowed the statute of limitations to run). Why? After experiencing immense political pressure (like Joe Biden’s Iraqi press conference) and after being chastised by left-leaning press (including The New York Times), prosecutors charged Nick with first-degree murder of the white Kia driver when Nick refused to waive his statute of limitations defense.
And prosecutors did so without regard for the truth. There is overwhelming evidence that Nick did not kill the Kia driver. Here are just a few examples: One of Nick’s teammates (Paul Slough) admitted to shooting the driver in self-defense, the FBI’s former primary polygraph examiner concluded that Nick was truthful when he denied shooting the driver, the driver’s father refused to testify against Nick because the government told him that Nick’s teammate had killed his son, and every single eyewitness said Nick’s teammate was the shooter. The physical evidence (including ballistics and trajectory analysis) also corroborates that Nick’s teammate was the shooter and proves that the shot would have been impossible for Nick to make from his position in the convoy. And the evidence presented at trial accounts for the two shots Nick fired during the incident. Immediately after the incident, Nick told a teammate he had engaged an active shooter. After speaking with members of Raven 23, Department of State investigators went to the scene and recovered enemy shell casings in the precise location Nick had told his teammate he fired at an active shooter (which obviously was not the white Kia driver).
After Nick’s first conviction by a civilian jury was thrown out on appeal and after a second civilian jury hung, a third civilian jury convicted him of first-degree murder. Nick received a mandatory life sentence, without the possibility of parole
How Is This Even Possible?
Government prosecutors repeatedly engaged in egregious misconduct in their vindictive quest for convictions.
It would have been hard enough for these veterans to win their cases before the government’s hand-selected D.C. civilian juries. But they stood no chance against a government that refused to play by the rules. Here are just some of the things government prosecutors did to wrongly convict these decorated veterans:
 

SoldierMan

Active Member
Joined
Jul 18, 2020
Messages
460
  • Hid evidence of insurgent provocation and attack. The prosecutors did not disclose the existence of photographs of AK-47 shell casings (from enemy weapons) found in the precise location from where the men reported taking fire until the middle of trial, leaving the defense no time to investigate.
  • Hid intelligence information. The government hid from the defense for 10 years the intelligence information showing that the head of the Iraqi investigation, Col. Karim, apparently had ties to terrorist organizations.
  • Sided with the corrupt Col. Karim over the U.S. Army Captain. The government accused U.S. Army Captain Decareau of lying about his interviews of Iraqi witnesses who told him that the white Kia had driven towards Raven 23’s convoy like a car bomb, although they had no good faith basis to make such an accusation. (Particularly as it is the U.S. government’s fault that the contemporaneous notes Captain Decareau took during his interviews and turned over to his superiors were destroyed.)
  • Hid exculpatory evidence and lied to the jury. In each of the trials, the prosecution presented the testimony of several key witnesses that conflicted with prior sworn statements that they had given. The government never disclosed these sworn statements to the defense. For example, the prosecutors falsely portrayed Nick as someone who shot without provocation and urged others to do the same. The prosecutors presented testimony from two cooperators (who were key witnesses against all four men) that Nick sparked a mass shooting by both Blackwater and the Army, without any provocation, the week before the Nisur Square incident. However, the government hid from Nick, his lawyers, the court, and the jury contemporaneous statements by the same witnesses that exonerated Nick. The witnesses told investigators under oath that the Army was engaged in a firefight before Nick fired any shots and that the Army identified armed enemy combatants at the scene. The government also hid from Nick, his lawyers, the court, and the jury government documents that included third-party accounts (from Army officials) proving that the narrative presented through these witnesses was entirely false.
  • Lied to the court. The prosecutors violated a court order by failing to instruct their most critical witness against Nick not to offer inflammatory speculation that had been excluded from Nick’s case. After their witness nonetheless gave the inflammatory and excluded testimony, the district court found that the prosecutors had lied to the court about the reasons for their transgression.
 

Dave

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2020
Messages
10,211
Location
the sunlit uplands of Utopia
It's funny how there's always so many differences in accounts when told by different viewpoints of an event.


It seems the Iraqi police fired at the Blackwater group after the Blackwater operators shot and killed an Iraqi police officer (while shooting at the Kia).

It also seems that some of the Blackwater contractors on scene agreed there were some unjustified shootings.

On September 27, 2007, The New York Times reported that during the chaotic incident at Nisour Square, one member of the Blackwater security team continued to fire on civilians, despite urgent cease-fire calls from colleagues. It is unclear whether the team-member mistook the civilians for insurgents. The incident was allegedly resolved only after another Blackwater contractor pointed his weapon at the man still firing and ordered him to stop.[35]

Three Blackwater guards who witnessed the incident said that they believed the shootings were unjustified.[36]
 

SoldierMan

Active Member
Joined
Jul 18, 2020
Messages
460
Isn't it strange that the court dismissed the case:

The District Court dismissed the case for what it found to be “egregious” constitutional violations, including improper use of compelled statements and the intentional withholding of exculpatory evidence and testimony from the grand jury.

And they went after one guy, not once or twice but three times the charm.
 

Dave

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2020
Messages
10,211
Location
the sunlit uplands of Utopia
Isn't it strange that the court dismissed the case:



And they went after one guy, not once or twice but three times the charm.

According to one side of the story, yes.

The Appeal Court found that the dismissal was wrong.

"We find that the district court's findings depend on an erroneous view of the law"

It doesn't help that Blackwater were found to have acted in a bad way on many occasions in Iraq.
 

Dave

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2020
Messages
10,211
Location
the sunlit uplands of Utopia
And they went after one guy, not once or twice but three times the charm.

Reading the timeline that's actually a biased way of describing the events.

District court - dismissal
Dismissal appealed and overturned, went to trial and found guilty.
The accused then appealed the conviction and were partially successful, new trial ordered.
New trial found him guilty again.

So not quite "went after one guy three times".
 

Paul Hjul

Well-Known Member
Joined
Apr 9, 2020
Messages
483
I can't understand why the moron brigade support these thugs. I wonder if they'd apply the same narrative twisting to the efforts of Zuma to evade accountability. Treat each appeal and the like as persecution rather than process...
 

Dave

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2020
Messages
10,211
Location
the sunlit uplands of Utopia
I can't understand why the moron brigade support these thugs. I wonder if they'd apply the same narrative twisting to the efforts of Zuma to evade accountability. Treat each appeal and the like as persecution rather than process...

Well, it is only obvious to the elite Trump supporters that it was obviously only terrorists killed in this shooting. The rest of us don't have the intellectual ability to understand these type of things :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

The shooting took place on September 16, 2007 at the congested Nisour Square intersection, after a convoy of four armoured vehicles manned by Blackwater guards had departed from Baghdad's heavily-fortified Green Zone.

In a span of 15 minutes, heavy gunfire erupted and by the time it was over, more than three dozen Iraqi civilians had been shot, at least 17 fatally. Among the dead was nine-year-old Ali Kinani, who was shot in the head as he rode in a car with his father, Mohammed Kinnani.

The guards maintain that they opened fire in self-defense after being shot at by insurgents.

Witnesses tell a different story – including Mohammed Kinnani, who later sued Blackwater – alleging that the Americans wantonly shot unarmed civilians and were never in any danger. A Blackwater guard who witnessed the shooting later described it as "murder in cold blood".

Over 36 shot with 17 dead is nothing, as they weren't Americans...
 

Dave

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2020
Messages
10,211
Location
the sunlit uplands of Utopia
Top