Posted on 10/06/2007 6:45:59 AM PDT by SkyPilot
The way he told it, David McClanahan, of Fort Worth, Texas, had been wounded in combat three times in Iraq, awarded three Silver Stars and even nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Today, McClanahan, a nursing student at West Texas A&M, appeared in federal court in Amarillo, Texas, on charges he made up his hero's tale. McClanahan did not enter a plea and was released on bond after being advised of the charges against him. The arraignment is now scheduled for June 13.
His lawyer, Brooks Barfield, says McClanahan will enter a plea of not guilty.
A federal grand jury indicted McClanahan last week under the newly passed Stolen Valor Act, which makes any misrepresentation of military service awards a federal crime, punishable with up to a year in prison.
"This is quite an egregious offense that he held himself out as a war hero," Assistant United States Attorney Christy Drake told the Blotter on ABCNews.com.
Photos: Medals of Dishonor
The grand jury indictment grew out of the work of amateur Web sleuths Chuck and Mary Schantag, who run the Web site POWNetwork.org.
They were asked by a Texas veterans group to do a service record check on McClanahan before he was named guest speaker at the group's yearly banquet.
According to Jack Barnes, who heads up America Supports You in Amarillo, Texas, McClanahan told him he had been awarded three Silver Stars, three Purple Hearts, the Legion of Merit and a nomination for the Congressional Medal of Honor for combat bravery in Iraq.
"We just embraced this young man. His story was so real," recalled Barnes.
But the Web site sleuths, the Schantags, found McClanahan had served two years in the Navy and four years in the Army, from which he was discharged as a private with no medals of valor.
"His claims were too good to be true and turned out to be 100 percent false," said Mary Schantag. "Instead of his record being filled with heroism, there was no record of any of the accomplishments he had claimed."
She quickly passed along the findings to the FBI.
"We were shocked" by the Schantags' discovery, said Barnes. "We can't believe the young man would present himself as a war hero to our group when our nation is at war and we have men and women making the ultimate sacrifice for our country," Barnes, himself a Navy veteran, told ABCNews.com.
"He's gotten himself in a hell of a mess, and I'm disappointed by it," said Dan Adams, president and CEO of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch of Amarillo, Texas, where McClanahan attended.
Just last year, McClanahan was awarded a college scholarship worth $3,500 a semester by Cal Farley's, which is a home and school for troubled youth.
"He did pad himself as a war hero here and appeared before the scholarship committee in uniform and wearing medals," Adams told ABCNews.com. He added that McClanahan also showed off a letter he claimed was signed by President Bush, nominating McClanahan for the Congressional Medal of Honor.
In its indictment, the federal grand jury charged Richard "David" McClanahan with two misdemeanor counts of knowingly and intentionally falsely representing himself as having been awarded decorations or medals authorized by Congress, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. The grand jury also charged McClanahan with making a false financial statement in connection with the indictment, a felony.
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Phony Military Heroes: Medals of Dishonor Michael Weilbacher: Weilbacher pleaded guilty this past February to a federal charge of wearing military medals that were not awarded to him. He was sentenced to two years of probation, 120 hours of community service at a military organization and fined $3,000.00. (HomeOfHeroes.com)
Phony Military Heroes: Medals of Dishonor Michael Bramlett: In December 2006, Bramlett pleaded guilty to a federal charge of wearing a Marine Corps uniform as well as decorations, medals, badges and ribbons without authorization. He was sentenced to six months in federal prison without parole. (P.O.W. Network)
Phony Military Heroes: Medals of Dishonor Theodore Bantis: Bantis pleaded guilty in September 2006 to a federal charge of wearing military awards without authorization. He was sentenced to 30 days in federal prison and fined $5,000. (HomeOfHeroes.com)
Phony Military Heroes: Medals of Dishonor Louis Lowell McGuinn: Arrested in April of this year, McGuinn was federally charged with wearing unauthorized service medals and badges, including those for distinguished service: the Purple Heart and the Silver Star. (HomeOfHeroes.com)
Phony Military Heroes: Medals of Dishonor Raymond John Gauthier: After wearing medals to which he was not entitled, Gauthier pleaded guilty in April 2007. He was sentenced to five years of probation and had to issue a public apology. From now through the year 2011, Gauthier must report to work at a jail on every Memorial Day and Veterans Day. (Florida State Attroney's Office)
Phony Military Heroes: Medals of Dishonor David McClanahan: Wounded in Iraq three times, awarded three Silver Stars and nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor was the story McClanahan liked to tell of his military service. But in reality, he had served two years in the Navy and four years in the Army, from which he was discharged as a private with no medals of valor. McClanahan was indicted in May on two federal misdemeanor counts of knowingly and intentionally falsely representing himself as having been awarded medals authorized by Congress and on a felony count of making a false financial statement in connection with the misdemeanor charges. (ABC News)
Vets refuse to forgive Kerry for antiwar acts
Excerpt:
As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, "our most significant success."
The KGB organized a vitriolic conference in Stockholm to condemn America's aggression, on March 8, 1965, as the first American troops arrived in south Vietnam. On Andropov's orders, one of the KGB's paid agents, Romesh Chandra, the chairman of the KGB-financed World Peace Council, created the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war. It was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and received about $15 million annually from the Communist Party's international department — on top of the WPC's $50 million a year, all delivered in laundered cash dollars. Both groups had Soviet-style secretariats to manage their general activities, Soviet-style working committees to conduct their day-to-day operations, and Soviet-style bureaucratic paperwork. The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from this period. I believe it is very like a direct quote from one of these organizations' propaganda sheets.
The KGB campaign to assault the U.S. and Europe by means of disinformation was more than just a few Cold War dirty tricks. The whole foreign policy of the Soviet-bloc states, indeed its whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger Soviet objective of destroying America from within through the use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation as a vital tool in the dialectical advance of world Communism.
The Stockholm conference held annual international meetings up to 1972. In its five years of existence it created thousands of "documentary" materials printed in all the major Western languages describing the "abominable crimes" committed by American soldiers against civilians in Vietnam, along with counterfeited pictures. All these materials were manufactured by the KGB's disinformation department. I would print up these materials in hundreds of thousands of copies each.
The Romanian DIE (Ceausescu's secret police) was tasked to distribute these KGB-concocted "incriminating documents" all over Western Europe. And ordinary people often bought it hook, line, and sinker. "Even Attila the Hun looks like an angel when compared to these Americans," a West German businessman reprovingly told me after reading one such report.
The Italian, Greek, and Spanish Communist parties serviced by Bucharest were much affected by this material and their activists regularly distributed translations. They also handed them out to the participants at anti-American demonstrations around the world.
Many "Ban-the-Bomb" and anti-nuclear movements were KGB-funded operations, too. I can no longer look at a petition for world peace or other supposedly noble cause, particularly of the anti-American variety, without thinking to myself, "KGB."
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And now here, compare:
In October and again in November 1969 Clinton organized and led anti-war demonstrations in London, England with the support of the British Peace Council, which was backed by the World Peace Council who was a front for the KGB.
Coining the Burma Shave ad tickler is absolutely brillian! LOL! BUMP!
IANAL ... but wouldn't he have to do something new, some new act of misrepresenting his service record, to be prosecuted?
Last time I read the Constitution, there was that pesky little clause about "ex-post-fact" laws ...
>>>>but wouldn’t he have to do something new, some new act of misrepresenting his service record, to be prosecuted?
Have you noticed how quiet Kerry has been since 2006?
Hmmmmmmm .... well now ...
Now that you mention it ...
ROFL!!!!!
Shutting him up isn't quite as good as putting him in jail, but it'll do. It'll also stop him from running for president again. Questions would be asked. Difficult questions. Questions beyond even his ability to spin and weasel out of.
>>>It’ll also stop him from running for president again.
I’m betting he won’t run for his senate seat again either.
I still have faith he will end up in jail. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be so quiet now.
Actually, I take my assumptions back. His senatorial site might be increminating.
http://www.johnkerry.com/about
they detonate upon contact after 16 revolutions (lands/grooves in the barrel starts the spin) of the projectile as it travels downrange.......BIG raindrops are enough to cause detonation, as well as big insects, brush and whatever.....the round is armed at approx 50-60 feet, IIRC......I doubt if he had any training with this weapon, and the guy in the skiff? with him at the time (later a Captain or Adm) said there was no enemy at all when kerry did this. No PH should have been issued for that reason alone, nevermind his stupidity.
As he was graduating from Yale, John Kerry volunteered to serve in Vietnam, because, as he later said, "it was the right thing to do." He believed that "to whom much is given, much is required." And he felt he had an obligation to give something back to his country. John Kerry served two tours of duty. On his second tour, he volunteered to serve on a Swift Boat in the river deltas, one of the most dangerous assignments of the war. He was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat V, and three Purple Hearts.
Prove it, Senator!
I had to go back and look...It was Adm. Bill Schachte that was in the boston whaler at the time. ( course, Kerry said Schacte wasn’t in the skimmer that night)
Schachte’s explanation falls into your explanation - Kerry fired too close to the boat.
(Though he doesn't mention any rain and he doesn’t mention how close to the river bank they were - he says they were close enough to hear water lapping on the shore..)
The army field manual for the M79, indicates a round can arm from 14-28 meters, they say 31 meters is a safe operating distance for combat.
Which means you’re probably right - Kerry didn’t have a clue how to use it.
thanks again
here’s one.....
Purple Heart No. 2, February 20, 1969
Conclusion: The detail accounts and records of this incident just never added up from the get go. Only conclusion that can be drawn from this incident is Kerry somehow injured himself and Thorson (perhaps pre-detonation of M-79 round in the rain while horsing around in the wide open SONG CUA LON) in the last minutes of his patrol as he was exiting the SONG CUA LON river. What ever the true nature of the cause of his alleged shrapnel wound, we can be confident it was not from any enemy fire as Kerry claims and that Kerry provided false accounts to support his falsehood. This Purple Heart should be rescinded by the Department of Defense on the grounds that Kerry provided falsified testimony to the Navy for an award he would not have qualified for.
http://idexer.com/articles/kerry_medals.htm
I've posted this before, but I saw Fonda speak at Penn State circa 1972. My impression at the time was negative: How dare she come to my campus and lecture me like we were a bunch of dumb peasants and she was the Commissar, coming to enlighten us to the truth about Vietnam? I remember her screaming at the students, trying to get them all riled up with her rhetoric. It didn't work with me, it disgusted me.
Fonda’s bs didn’t work with me either.
I am still amazed at how it did work with the help of Rat $inators and the MSM with Chronkite.
I remember...bandit did a hell of job on the swifties site, sortin all this out.(along with NavyChief)
thanks again
Thank you! Please feel free to circulate it - anything for the cause!
There are a few others at http://www.seadogbytes.com/RecentSeadog.htm
(...just do a browser search on the page for ‘burma’ to find them.)
They don't even know there is an order for these things. Hang them all!
Me too... unless you count John Thune...grin. ...which I counted as money well spent.
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