IAVA’s leadership is not nonpartisan [Jonn]

You may have noticed that we’ve had a hard-on for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association in the past few weeks. I guess I started it this time when I emailed the Executive Director, Paul Reickhoff and asked him where I could find a written copy of his criticism of the Obama Administration’s and Congress’s plan to begin cutting health care benefits for veterans.

Of course, I was being facetious because I knew that no such published criticism existed. See, Reickhoff wrote criticism of the Bush administration bi-weekly for the Huffington Post during those years, I was asking for proof that Reickhoff was nonpartisan as he claimed. That endeavor was in vain, however.

In his usual characteristic condescending and smarmy tone, Reickhoff wrote back that I should check the IAVA FAQ page for their position on veteran health care and that future communications should be sent to his civilian media relations chick.

Since our email exchange, Reickhoff did an interview with the Virginian Pilot in which he claims that IAVA’s current position on the Post-9-11 GI Bill for veterans is that they support spending caps. What kind of veteran organization would support spending caps? Well, since that’s the way that the Obama Administration is going with their policy towards veterans, I can only guess that a partisan veteran organization would support caps on veteran benefits. Especially since IAVA put such a high value on the new GI Bill that their Senate scorecard relied heavily on how Senators supported that GI Bill. Suddenly, gob smacked by reality, they support spending caps on it.

The story has disappeared from the V-P, but it remains on Military.com for the time being.

By the way, the article says that the American Legion also supports spending caps, but that’s not true. No other veteran organization supports spending caps on ANY veterans benefit except IAVA.

Here’s a screen capture of the part that refers to Reickhoff’s interview in case Military.com disappears that one, too;

So I decided that I’d have to prove that Reickhoff is partisan all by my lonesome.

While he was in Iraq as a young El-Tee, Reickhoff was supportive of the US mission there, evidenced by this interview he did with 60 Minutes;

Upon his return to the US, Reickhoff gauged the political climate in the US and determined that his fortunes could best be served by being anti-Bush. Within months, he approached the Kerry campaign and offered them a unique opportunity to have an Iraq veteran criticize the president on the airwaves in the form of a rebuttal following Bush’s weekly presidential radio address. Here’s a partial copy of it from a cached copy of Reickhoff’s old website OpTruth.org;

Reickhoff then established his first organization, OpTruth.org. he assembled a board of directors and here are their names from Source Watch;

Notice two prominent names; Ann Wright and Paul Bucha. Regular readers here know that Ann Wright was the former colonel who resigned her position at the State Department in protest of the Iraq invasion and is currently a regular figurehead for IVAW and Code Pink. Paul Bucha may be less known. He’s a Medal of Honor recipient from the Vietnam War, a member of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. He’s also a big supporter of President Obama;

Now, because Reickhoff cavorts with Obama supporters, that doesn’t make him a Democrat or partisan, does it?

However, anti-war crack pot Stan Goff of Counterpunch.org claims that Reickhoff and OpTruth were just shills for the Democrat Party seeking cover and concealment under their non-profit status;

Before he founded IAVA, Reickhoff was a Democrat which he admitted in this New York Times article where they had to run a correction (how often does the NYT run a correction on such a small point) that Reickhoff WAS a Democrat, but that now he’s an independent – when he has to present an image of non-partisanship.

Fellow IAVA founder Phil Carter parlayed his nonpartisanship into a White House job. Here’s a page that strangely enough has disappeared from the IAVA website, but one which we saved here several months ago when the IAVA Congressional scorecard was an issue here;

Phil Carter was a Washington Post columnist before getting called up to the Obama campaign as the candidate’s veteran adviser;

If you read our posts last Fall about Carter and his connections to both the campaign and the IAVA, you already know that IAVA and Phil Carter colluded to split veterans and active duty service members from the McCain campaign by ginning up a phony “scorecard” that made it appear that politicians like Duncan Hunter had a worse record of support than Baghdad Jim McDermott. Well, that worked well for Carter, because he’s now the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs.

From an ambulance-chaser and WaPo stringer to a position in the Defense Department in just a few years. Pretty good gamble, I’d say. I’ll add that I have no problem with someone becoming successful, what I have a problem with is lying and covering up and being generally underhanded while neglecting veterans isn’t the way to be successful.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Usual Suspects