Joshua Casteel; Another IVAW rocket surgeon

Meet Joshua Casteel, just another disingenuous IVAW member. Here’s his profile at IVAW;

He’s also been to the Vatican to convince the Pope to urge soldiers to become conscientious objectors;

In his profile at IVAW, he tries to make you think he’s an officer with this line;

Joshua Casteel first enlisted in the US Army Reserves at the age of 17, received an appointment to the US Military Academy at West Point at 18, but at 25 was honorably discharged from Active Duty as a conscientious objector.

Well that’s all true, but what he doesn’t mention is that he washed out of West Point. He was there from June until September of 1998. I’ve spent more time at West Point. How do I know? Well, I have his Form 2-1;

He went to basic training between his junior and senior years of high school in 1997, then to West Point after high school and he was home in September. The Army then let him go to college for four years at the University of Iowa and Oxford before they called him back after he graduated. He came on active duty as an E-4 then he went to AIT at Fort Huachuca, then to the Defense Language Institute for 17 months of Arab language training, then to his unit at Fort Gordon. Two months later he was at Abu Ghraib, six months later he was in the States after his tour. Four months after that he applied for conscientious objector and then he was back on the block. He calls that eight years in the Army.

He got out of the Army at the same rank he came on active duty – an E-4;

I came across this really strange interview he did with some doofus named Aaron Glantz (apparently Glantz works for Pacifica Radio and writes a lot of really insightful books – like “How America Lost Iraq which you can buy at Amazon for a penny…still overpriced) in which Casteel tells him that 90% of the people that Casteel interrogated at Abu Ghraib were innocent. How did he know? They told him they were innocent;

The main problem, Casteel says, was that over 90 percent of the people he interrogated were innocent – simply caught up in large-scale military raids. Because the U.S. military rarely releases detainees, Casteel says he was forced to interrogate innocent prisoners again and again.

“I was constantly being asked, ‘Why am I being held here? I want answers!'” Casteel said. “But that was my job. We were supposed to be finding answers to our questions, but we kept being put into situations that were incredibly puzzling because talking to people was like trying to get blood from a turnip. They were the ones that had a greater justification for the need to have answers.”

Reminds me of those guys on “Cops” who are yelling “I didn’t do nuthin'”. Why would the US military want to warehouse innocent people in their prisons? What sense does that make?

But then he finally finds a guilty one;

“I had an interrogation with a 22-year-old Saudi Arabian who was very straightforward that he had come to Iraq to conduct jihad,” Casteel said. “We started having a conversation about religion and ethics, and he told me that I was a very strange man who was a Christian but didn’t follow the teachings of Jesus to love my enemy and pray for the persecuted. My nickname in my unit was ‘priest’ because I spent a lot of time in the chapel.”

“So I had this moment with a man who was a jihadi and he was giving me a lesson on the Sermon on the Mount,” Casteel said. “That was about five months into my time in Iraq, and I had already had about 100 interrogations and I was so weary of the whole process. I told him that I thought he was right and that there was a massive contradiction involved with me doing my job and being a Christian.”

“I wanted to have a conversation with him about ethics and the cycle of vengeance and how idiotic it was that his people said it was okay for him to come and kill me and my people told me it was okay to kill him,” Casteel said. “Why is it that we can’t find a different path together?”

Yeah, the Army needed to do a mental eval on this rocket surgeon before putting him in charge of getting life-saving information from terrorists.

In his IVAW profile, Casteel mentions that he’s become a member of the “Catholic pacifist” movement. Some of you may remember I introduced you to the Catholic pacifist movement back around Christmas time – it’s nothing but a recruiting tool for Communists.

Casteel also has a book “Letters from Abu Ghraib”. I almost bought it to add to this post, but then I read the reviews on Amazon;

I got this book hoping to read a new perspective on Abu Ghraib. But all this was is a few emails that this guy sent his dad arguing things like whether the Bible in Romans 13 allows a christian to serve in the army (you’d think he’d have made up his mind before enlisting), and that wasn’t very interesting because his dad’s responses were left out, so i could only see one side of the argument.

this should definitely be in the religious section, because it doesn’t really go into anything about Iraq. also, it shouldn’t really be called a book, i’ve written term papers that are longer.

The narcissistic ramblings of a confused kid who isn’t nearly as insightful as he thinks he is.

This extremely short diatribe contains virtually no information on the workings of Abu Ghraib, or even the daily experiences of life in a combat-zone. It’s basically just some e-mails complaining that he doesn’t like his job, without really going into the specific details of what his job required.

That second resonated with me because I’d read some of his other trash. To see what I mean, go to some of his windy ramblings at IVAW where he tries to impress us with his tortured abuse of the English language. I really didn’t feel like dropping 12 hard earned bucks on a paperback book written by some one who thinks he’s brilliant.

I have to tell you, I always hated those guys who come straight on active duty as E-4s anyway. They usually had useless ass degrees like Casteel who majored in Philosophy and Literature and couldn’t tell their left foot from their right – and they always tried to suck up to NCOs and officers. Most of them ended up getting chaptered because they couldn’t adapt. This one became a conscientious objector. And now he’s a grad student studying more useless crap.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Media, Phony soldiers, Usual Suspects