Jake Diliberto; the Matthis of Rethink Afghanistan

Someone, who wants to remain anonymous, contacted me last night on Facebook. The gentleman told me that he was Jake Diliberto’s unit when the unit deployed to Afghanistan. Jake Diliberto is one of the founders of the organization “Rethink Afghanistan” which opposes the war against terror in Afghanistan.

Jake has been on Larry King, al Jazeera and Russia TV using his supposed service in Afghanistan as his “moral authority” on speaking to that issue. We’ve written about him in the past. Most recently, he was quoted by Adam Weinstein in Mother Jones, as Jake is also a Ron Paul supporter – another one of those combat veterans for Ron Paul. And Diliberto is a pal of Adam Kokesh. Anyway, here’s Diliberto on Larry King. King tells his audience that Diliberto is an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran at about 1:45 into the video;

Anyway, this person on Facebook told me last night that their Marine Corps unit did deploy to Afghanistan, but that Diliberto only got as far as Pakistan, when he fell asleep on guard duty and his leadership lost confidence in him and sent him back to the ship to pull kitchen duty while they continued on to Afghanistan.

I contacted Diliberto this morning to verify this information, he deleted my post to his wall saying that he didn’t want “hate mail” on his FB page. Of course, it wasn’t “hate mail”, I just asked Jake if it was true.

So we had a PM discussion on FB and all he would tell me is that the story is inaccurate. He wouldn’t explain how it was inaccurate. I asked him if he had been to Iraq, he responded that he had, but that his records showed that he was in Kuwait and not Iraq and that he was a “security augment” and not involved in combat operations. I told him he should show me his DD214 and he wanted me to make the trip to DC to see it. When I said he could email it to me, he dropped the subject abruptly.

Diliberto claimed that he had tried to be honest about his military service, but if you watched the video of the Larry King Show, did anyone notice whether or not Jake corrected Larry when he said Jake was an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran? And where would Larry get the idea that Jake had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan if Jake hadn’t told one of the producers that before the show?

When I made the point that Jake is no better than Matthis, he got huffy. But at least Matthis was inside Afghanistan, no matter how briefly. Jake never made it that far and still calls himself an Afghanistan veteran.

So sorry, I don’t have paperwork, but I could publish the Facebook discussion I had with Jake and you can judge for yourself how much of this is true or not. Like I said, he only told me that the story was inaccurate, but he wouldn’t tell me how it was inaccurate. He didn’t deny that he wasn’t deployed to Afghanistan, so this guy who came to me last night says he can assemble several others who served with Diliberto to verify his account. Diliberto won’t even send me his DD214 to prove them wrong. Yep, it’s all circumstantial, but the circumstances aren’t Diliberto’s friends.

Category: Phony soldiers