Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Veteran Murders Continue Under MSM Radar

There's been another surge of veteran shootings, as usual, mostly against other veterans or their own family members. Either that, or this is typical; but a little more attention has been drawn to some of them. It's hard to tell, since the media rarely ever tries to report on just how common this is. There were at least eight suspicious deaths, out of twenty-three this year investigated at Fort Hood in Kileen Texas this year, at least four of them were murders, at least one allegedly by another veteran. There were also well over a dozen relatively high profile veteran murders since the beginning of this year, and probably much more. There were also at least four "Boogaloo Bois" arrested in recent months for trying to incite riots during protests, including one that was charged with murdering two police officers. There have been numerous claims, mostly by right wingers, that the Black Lives Matter movement or Antifa are terrorists, but there's no evidence to back this up; in fact the ones killing cops, near the protests, are either unidentified or they're right wing extremists.

This does not, of course mean that most veterans are damaged, racist or violent; however, a lot of them are; and when they do kill the good veterans are the ones most at risk. One of the highest profile, and perhaps most controversial, veteran murders appears to be of Spc. Vanessa Guillen who was apparently killed in the armory on base. The family doesn't appear convinced the whole story is coming out, and the news stories seems to be changing as details come out, possibly indicating a cover-up, as partly indicated in the following story, shortly after her body was found:

Missing Fort Hood soldier was killed in armory, then hacked to pieces, family’s attorney says 07/02/2020

Spc. Vanessa Guillen was allegedly killed on April 22, the day of her disappearance, by Spc. Aaron David Robinson while she was on duty in an armory room on Fort Hood, Texas, an attorney for the Guillen family said.

Natalie Khawam, the attorney, said the information was provided to her during a four-hour meeting with officials from Army Criminal Investigation Command. Fort Hood officials declined to comment on this narrative of events inside the armory when asked during a press conference Thursday and by Army Times over the telephone.

Robinson, 20, allegedly attacked Guillen, also 20, with a hammer, Khawam told Army Times.

“This heinous act caused her blood to be splashed all over the armory room,” Khawam said in the statement to Army Times.

After Guillen was dead, Robinson allegedly contacted his married girlfriend “to help him bury her bloody body,” Khawam added. “At first they tried to set her on fire, but she wouldn’t burn. Then they dismembered this beautiful U.S. soldier’s body with a machete.” .......

Guillen’s unit, the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, has also opened an investigation into allegations brought forth by her family that she suffered from sexual harassment by a supervisor.

“She was afraid to [report it] because the sexual harassment was coming from her superiors, so her concern was the retaliation, being blackballed,” Khawam explained during the press conference. “We believe the person that killed her is that person that sexually harassed her.”

Phelps said Army CID has found no evidence of those allegations. He called Robinson a “coworker” and not a supervisor to Guillen. Complete article

This article should raise major questions, which the media doesn't seem to be mentioning. For starters, how long have they known “This heinous act caused her blood to be splashed all over the armory room?” I checked the earlier stories, and there was nothing about blood all over the armory after she disappeared. Could Robinson have cleaned it up? How much time could he have had to clean it up and remove the body? How did he get the body past security? This is an armory; there must have been tight security to make sure that no one could leave with a large number of weapons, and this also should have prevented him from leaving with a body as well.

Are there security cameras in the armory or the entrances and exits? According to Army suspects foul play in Texas soldier Vanessa Guillen's disappearance, official says 06/24/2020 the lawyer for the Guillen family said:

"There's something extremely troubling about this case. A military base is probably one of the most secure places you can be. You have ID check-ins. There are security cameras everywhere," Khawam told KHOU-TV on Monday.

Soldier Vanessa Guillen Was Beaten to Death in Fort Hood Armory, Then Dismembered, Family Attorney Says 07/02/2020, "There were no security cameras in the area where Guillen worked, they said;" however, it's unclear whether that's a reference to the armory, where she was allegedly killed. They just installed a new security system that covers their entire airfield a few months before this happened; it's hard to imagine they wouldn't have security cameras covering the armory long before this. A Killeen restaurant released surveillance video of her a week before, which is more disclosure than the military is providing and in the same article claiming there was no video where she worked Vanessa's younger sister said:

"They lied to our faces every single day," Lupe Guillen said. "How can this happen on a military base while she was on duty?" My sister's no joke! My sister was a human being!" she shouted.

Comparing news reports from a week before they discovered her body supports Lupe's claim that they haven't been honest or consistent as the following article shows:

Missing Fort Hood soldier case rises to the Army secretary’s level as family pushes for more transparency 06/24/2020

The Army suspects “foul play” in the disappearance of 20-year-old Pfc. Vanessa Guillen from Fort Hood, Texas, according to an attorney and congresswoman assisting the missing soldier’s family in locating her.

The announcement came as Natalie Khawam, the family’s attorney, said she wanted to see Guillen’s cell phone records that Army CID agents subpoenaed from Sprint. Army officials told her she has to file a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of those documents, the latest in a series of roadblocks the family has hit while seeking answers, she said. .......

"I will say that the colonel and the general were probably as forthcoming as they could be because it still is a criminal investigation,” said Rep. Sylvia García, D-Texas, during a Tuesday press conference. “They have now used the words foul play. They are convinced now that foul play was involved.”

The family has still not received a “tick-tock” of everything that happened on the day Guillen disappeared, said representatives for the family. One lingering question was why Guillen was brought in to work, according to Khawam. The young soldier wasn’t supposed to work that day due to COVID-19 mitigation measures.

“Why was she called in and who was the person who called her in?” Khawam asked. “They didn’t want to say who the person was.”

Guillen’s chain of command had also been conducting check-ins on soldiers as part of the COVID-19 precautions.

"They had to check in four times a day. We didn’t see the third and fourth check-in,” said Khawam. “Then they admitted that they accounted for her, but she wasn’t really there on the 3 p.m. and the 4 p.m. check-in.”

Guillen was last seen sometime around 1 p.m. in the parking lot of her squadron headquarters on post. But the witnesses who allegedly spotted her didn’t interact with her, and there were no cameras that captured her movement, according to Khawam.

Guillen’s mother has said that her daughter experienced sexual harassment from a sergeant who was her supervisor prior to her disappearance. The 3rd Cavalry Regiment opened a separate investigation into those allegations last week.

Khawam said the supervisor who allegedly harassed Guillen was working with her in the armory on the day of her disappearance. But “we are not disclosing [the name] right now,” she added. Complete article

It's hard to imagine why it would take the investigators two months to admit that they suspected “foul play,” even though the family obviously suspected it much sooner. Did it take them two months to find a trace of the blood that was "splashed all over the armory room?” At this point they don't seemed to have suspected Spc. Aaron David Robinson who wasn't her supervisor, yet they still weren't denying that hey might be investigating a possible supervisor. It wasn't until after the body was found and Robinson became a suspect that they claimed they "found no evidence of those allegations," of a supervisor sexually harassing her; however, many female veterans clearly weren't convinced.

Erin Kirk-Cuomo indicated that she doesn't doubt that Vanessa was harassed by a supervisor, possibly in addition to Robinson as she explained in I Am Vanessa Guillen 06/30/2020, which cites at least five stories from Facebook, including one from a man, and two that were apparently retracted after the fact, possibly as a result of intimidation, to show how common sexual harassment is in the military; but there are many more under the hashtag #IAmVanessaGuillen She writes:

We survivors of sexual harassment and assault in the military know that one of the key leads to Guillen’s disappearance is that she was sexually harassed and/or assaulted by a superior non-commissioned officer. We also know that military investigators too often do not take these claims seriously, just as they did not in her case.

This is, of course, an open secret which has been known for years; however, they keep sweeping it under the rug and doing little or nothing to stop it over and over again. If you keep track of sexual harassment scandals in the military you'll find one time after another where there are massive disclosures exposing it followed by reforms that are allegedly fixing the problem, only to see it happen again.

Occasionally some of the women that help intimidate others into silence stick their foot in their mouths and admit it accidentally as reported in Petition started to fire UWM lecturer, Wisconsin Air Guard Colonel Betsy Schoeller for saying 'sexual harassment is the price of admission' to military 07/03/2020, which says:

According to multiple screenshots from a private Facebook group called Veteran Humor, Schoeller responded to an article about Guillen's killing with a comment saying: "You guys are kidding, right? Sexual harassment is the price of admission for women into the good ole boy club. If you're gonna cry like a snowflake about it, you're gonna pay the price."

She quickly rephrased in a manner that would have sounded much better if not for the first comment reported in, Former Wisconsin Air National Guard officer under fire for Vanessa Guillen comments says they were taken out of context 07/04/2020, saying:

"I did not mean to imply that this is how I feel," she said. "I was giving voice to the messaging that women hear in the culture of sexual harassment: The message we receive from the culture is not only will you suffer from sexual harassment, if you squawk about it, you will suffer even more. Because it isn’t just the sexual harassment. That’s just the beginning."

"Then comes the agonizing decision about reporting. Or not reporting. The pressure applied by friends who know about it and only want to help. Having to ultimately stand up to that culture of sexual harassment on your own. Adding suffering on top of suffering."

This is a reasonable description of the position that many women are in, even if she got off to a bad start; and it's unfortunate if many people might be so enraged by her first comments that they might overlook this. Not that I want to excuse her first comment, but it shows that like many other people, of both sexes, she's given in to peer pressure and adopted a common attitude in the military. This woman rose through the ranks, by going along with the program, not by challenging authority. After a career in the military supporting the establishment she was rewarded with a position as a lecturer at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

When she put her foot in her mouth her advisors helped write a statement to repair her reputation, perhaps making her sound like a reformer. If past is prologue, they'll come up with more alleged efforts to reform the system and solve the problem. However, if the grassroots lets the same people who looked the other way previously like Betsy Schoeller or other high ranking officials that were smart enough not to get caught putting their foot in their mouth, then there's little or no chance that the next round of reforms will be more effective than the last.

This is just one of many examples where the military leadership has demonstrated they're far more concerned with control than with protecting the citizens, or their own soldiers. The only rational way to argue that there isn't a cover-up here seems to admit that here's an incredible amount of incompetence, which is quite common in the military, but even that seems unlikely. There simply should have been no way for Robinson to remove that body from the armory and remained undetected for over two months! There's about as much chance that Robinson committed this murder alone and covered it up for two months before being caught as there is that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman acting on his own!

That doesn't mean there was much if any chance that this was a premeditated first degree murder, which is virtually out of the question. It's hard to imagine Robinson, or anyone else would have planned it in the armory. But there's a strong possibility that a higher ranking supervisor really was sexually harassing her, possibly in addition to Robinson. The fact that she was called into duty when she wasn't scheduled to work supports this, since it's more likely if not guaranteed that a supervisor of a higher rank called her in, yet they still haven't revealed who called her. Before her body was found the family lawyer said she knew who the supervisor that allegedly harassed her was, it's hard to imagine why she hasn't disclosed it since then.

Edit 07/30/2020: Since Posting this I was informed, on Facebook, that military bases have no security checks for people leaving the base, only when they enter, which allegedly means that it would be easy to remove weapons or a body, part of which was confirmed with news stories, the rest could be either confirmed or refuted by other military personal, preferably from Fort Hood. The fallowing are excerpts from the conversation and the links he provided to back up his claims:

Oatem Noltoc
To be fair there is no security to leave base. Not saying this isn't alarming but anyone with any sense could take whatever they want off a base.

Zachery Taylor
This happened in the armory; you're saying that they could take anything that isn't locked down from there. What about weapons?

Oatem Noltoc
Zachery Taylor yep. Weapons get taken all the time and they don't go noticed until there is an inventory done at which time they lock down the base and say no one goes home until the weapon is recovered. Inventory is done at various times of each day. I've seen a base locked down for a week or more with people unable to even call their families or go home at all until the weapon is found. But with a person the assumption is that they just went AWOL. In Vanessa's case, in my limited opinion, her death and disappearance aren't what is so shocking, it's that they knew fairly well who did it and why and refused to investigate or take action for so long after. Anyone on a military base can take a body out of any place they want and right off base, there are few check points beyond weapons lockers and gear caches. People walk out with equipment all the time and have to turn around and return it. My ex was in the army and a number of times he'd get recalled back to base because someone brought an automatic weapon home with them and everyone had to go back until they found it. Likely they forgot they had it, or wanted to show it to a friend or who knows why but they play it off, it gets returned and 30 mins later they're all released to go home. Complete discussion

Hawaii Army base lockdown ends but missing item not found 02/17/2015

Local soldiers kept from families as search continues for 'sensitive item' 02/13/2014

As bad as this case is, though, it's a minuscule fraction for the problem they have training people to kill, only to find that they do just that, often not the people they were told to kill. Between 2008 and 2010 there were a couple high profile news articles by the New York Times and the Colorado Gazette, which was partly reported in the Washington Post as well, exploring how common veterans go on shootings sprees, which stirred up a lot of controversy and was refuted with appeals to emotion and self righteous indignation, but not a rational review of the facts. There was also a study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, claiming there were fewer veterans in prisons than non-veterans, which seemed scientific, but a closer look shows they only reviewed selective facts, and they even admit to some of this in the report.

I went into this more in a previous article about six years ago that covered many more details, Teach a soldier to kill and he just might; This was accompanied by some additional statistics in States with high murder rates have larger veteran populations and a List of Veteran murders often of other veterans and other crimes. This includes links to the studies I mentioned. It's important to look at the details, since partisans from both sides are routinely misrepresenting them; but I have no doubt that after a close look it should be clear that, even though most veterans aren't violent or a threat to the public, as a few claim these reports imply, that there's a significant amount of blow back, including a large number of mass shootings by veterans.

David Swanson, who I've cited in past articles, has been keeping track of how many mass shooters are veterans and his latest update on the subject, Yet Another Mass Shooter Was a Military Veteran 03/04/2020, says, "Among males aged 18-59 in the United States, 15% are veterans. Among male mass-shooters aged 18-59 in the United States, 36% are veterans." He provided additional details in a 2017 review of a list of mass shootings from Mother Jones, and an update in 2019. He has repeatedly said that his estimate is a minimum, since he couldn't get complete data from many other mass shooters, and more of them could be veterans that he isn't aware or, which is true; however, I've done similar searches, and concluded that it's unlikely that many, if any more are veterans. In many cases, by reviewing the history of those not listed as veterans I've found details about them during their prime years for potential military service, that indicates it's virtually guaranteed that most aren't veterans.

Another article showing that 300 Veterans, Some With PTSD, Are on Death Row: Report 11/10/2015 also indicates that veterans may be more likely to be sentenced to death for murder, possibly because of PTSD related to their service. This comes to about one out of eight and a half prisoners on death row, or about 12%. This is slightly higher than the percentage of veterans, so it's not a dramatic difference. However, when reviewing many veteran murders previously, even though they didn't accept PTSD as mitigating circumstances for these three hundred, they did for many others, so this figure might be far higher, if not for that. I also found many cases for lesser crimes where their military service was taken into consideration, which is a major part of the reason why many other veterans are allegedly less likely to go to jail than non-veterans.

Swanson's statistics, and the review from those on death row, are pretty straightforward and hard to refute; however, it's reasonably safe to say the statistics for murders from veterans isn't as bad as mass shooters, even if it's not nearly as good as some of the establishment studies seem to imply or the distortions from propagandists, which are even worse. The headline for Bureau of Justice Statistics study said that veterans were much less likely to be in prison than non-veterans, based on the population in 2004; however, once you read the report, it's clear that veterans are more likely to be there for violent offenses, and have longer prison terms. Furthermore, it doesn't fully cover why the prison population has expanded so much in the first place, which is primarily a massive expansion of non-violent drug offenses, mostly of minorities.

One of the most important details that were not mentioned in the headlines, and only briefly mentioned in the study, was the fact that about 4% of the veterans in prison in 2004, only one year after the invasion of Iraq and three years after the invasion of Afghanistan, served in those wars. Since the war in Afghanistan was mostly aerial bombing there weren't many veterans on the ground so this should be considered an exceptionally high percent, since they must have committed their alleged crimes, either while still serving in the military, or almost immediately after being discharged. The clear implication was that even though most veterans were less likely to be in jail, those just getting back from combat were significantly more likely to be in jail. This assumption was also supported by David Phillips report "Lethal Warriors" which showed that many more veterans in the Colorado Springs area were being charged with violent crimes, including murders of other veterans, which was much worse than the local murder rates. My review of many other veteran murders also found that there was a large number of them at, or near Fort Hood, as well. By the time I did my review, they had two of the biggest mass shootings right on their base; so the current surge in murders in that area isn't unprecedented. Fort Hood and Colorado Springs are a couple of the biggest hot spot for veteran violence, but there's much more all across the country.

Another important conclusion that I came to when I did this review is that, even though I couldn't find reliable enough data to determine for sure whether or not the murder rates were better or worse for veterans, it was clear that if it was lower, it certainly wasn't much lower. But more importantly, the reason our murder rates are so high compared to other wealthy developed countries in Europe who usually have less than half the murder rates, sometimes less than one fifth, is because we have sky high murder rates in abandoned inner cities, often well over twice our murder rates, and sometimes six to ten times our murder rates, yet the recruiting rates are much lower from these abandoned inner cities, so most of veterans are recruited from rural areas with much lower rates of violence or murder. This means that even though the murder rates for veterans isn't nearly as bad as the worst abandoned inner cities and I can't be certain that it's higher than the national rate, it's certainly much higher than the lower rates in most rural or suburban towns where most veterans are recruited from.

There's little reason to believe that this has gotten any better or worse sine these reviews were done six to twelve years ago, and additional reports claimed they had similar problems after the Vietnam War. My past articles on the subject and David Philips articles and accompanying book, "Lethal Warriors" go into some of the reasons for this including abusive boot camp training encouraging prejudicial beliefs, and overly aggressive behavior that's necessary when fighting one war after another based on lies, and earlier child abuse leading to escalating violence later in life, among other causes.

I didn't do nearly as thorough a search for veteran murders as I did in my 2014 review, but still quickly found quite a few high profile veteran murders, often, once again, of other veterans or family members, which is typical, including a home invasion where 'Someone (a 23 year old marine) just shot grandpa, (another veteran),' home invasions are much rarer than domestic murders but they get more attention; A Marine, wanted for killing mother in Fresno who died in shootout with police in Pomona; Ex-Marine Wanted On Murder Charge In Richard’s Bar Stabbing; Former Marine arrested in murder of 16-year-old; A Marine who strangled wife after learning she was pregnant; A Murdered veteran ‘fingered’ two other veterans for a ‘drug incident’ and many more, a few listed below, but they continue happening without much if any effort to find out how common it is, even though some studies have shown there's a major problem that should be looked at closer.

In fact all there problems seem to be swept under the rug when they can get away with it, including looking the other way at domestic violence, racism, and other right wing extremism. When I reviewed them before they had exposed at least a couple militia movements that were mostly veterans, including many active duty ones. One of them based in Georgia, I think, had planned a militia that was going to attack the government, and the leader financed it with life insurance money from his wife, who he had killed without getting caught, they didn't expose this as a murder until he was caught killing one of his own militia members because they thought he was going to report them. This problem is still going on, now with a veterans joining the "Boogaloo Bois" including the following one that allegedly killed two cops:

Alleged 'Boogaloo' extremist charged in killing of federal officer during George Floyd protest 06/16/2020

Steven Carrillo and his alleged accomplice "came to Oakland to kill cops," said John Bennett, special agent in charge of the San Francisco division of the FBI.

An Air Force sergeant who was arrested in the fatal ambush of a Santa Cruz County deputy was charged Tuesday in connection with the killing of a federal security officer during George Floyd protests in Oakland last month, authorities said.

Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo, 32, was charged with murder and attempted murder in the killing of federal officer Dave Patrick Underwood, 53.

Underwood was one of two officers who were shot May 29 while guarding the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building. The other officer was critically wounded in the drive-by attack. Both were members of Homeland Security's Federal Protective Service.

Authorities said Carrillo and a second man traveled to Oakland with the intent to kill police and believed the large demonstrations spurred by the death of Floyd in Minneapolis — which they were not a part of — would help them get away it.

"They came to Oakland to kill cops," said John Bennett, special agent in charge of the San Francisco division of the FBI. Complete article

According to most sources the Boogaloo bois are a lose organization, including a large percentage of military veterans, often still active duty, like Carrillo, where most of them are hoping for a violent overthrow of the government; and most people on social media also seem to think they're associated with white supremacists groups; however, some of them have claimed they're opposed to racism and support the Black Lives Matter movement. This includes Steven Carrillo who reposted a meme that said, "I'll never let racist white people make me forget about the dope white people I know exist. I love y'all." Carrillo was also an active duty military police officer and had worked as a recruiter.

Whether or not the Boogaloo bois are mostly, if not entirely racists, according to at least a couple somewhat recent articles, The Radical Case Against White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis in the US Military 07/14/2020 by Lindsay Gabow and Ranks of Notorious Hate Group Include Active-Duty Military 05/03/2018, by A.C. Thompson etal. not only are there many more white supremacists in the military but they're not even trying to get them out. According to Lindsay Gabow, an active duty Captain, "just months ago, defense officials testified to the House Armed Services Committee that membership in white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups does not constitute grounds for separation from the military."

A.C. Thompson reported that several "members of Atomwaffen, an extremist group preparing for a race war" are currently serving in the military, and several more previously served, and are training other neo-Nazis for a potential race war; including one former member of Atomwaffen, who left to join another White Supremacist organization that participated in the violent protests at Charlottesville several years ago and bragged about it on line; when that article was published, he was still an active duty soldier, and the military knew, or should have known that he had participated in violent protests.

Not only was Steven Carrillo able to be hired as a military police officer and recruiter, but according to an FBI report fourteen years ago there's also a major problem with white supremacists in police forces around the country, and several articles including FBI warned of white supremacists in law enforcement 10 years ago. Has anything changed? 10/21/2016 have indicated that this hasn't changed. Police departments around the country often recruit military veterans as well, many of them use a point system and give extra points for people with police relatives or from the military. They often also use the same authoritarian boot camp training to teach blind obedience to authority as the military.

CJ Werleman warns that Special Forces Operatives are 'High Functioning Psychopaths' What Happens When they are Deployed to 'Democratic Cities'? 07/23/2020 with a significant amount of justification. He quotes Timothy Snyder, saying, “The people who are getting used to committing violence on the border are then brought in to commit violence against people in the interior.” and reports on more violence and racism from both American and Australian forces with more stories similar to the ones told by David Philips of a culture of impunity. And many of these veterans might be recruited by ICE, CBP, Homeland Security, private contractors, or officers being sent by the federal government to put down the protests against police brutality.

Trump and other right wing extremists often claim that Antifa, which is just an abbreviation for Anti-Fascism, are acting violent, but there's no evidence of that; instead there's one news story after another, often supported by video, showing that it's the police that are acting violently, or occasionally White supremacists or other right wing fanatics, many of whom seem to support the crack down on progressive protesters against police brutality. This is ironic, since these right wing organizations often oppose the government and police, except with they're clamping down on progressives or minorities. Furthermore I can't help but wonder, why anyone would oppose Antifa, unless they supported Fascism?