Tourists and Other People Needing Court Martialling
Now that the Trumpycans are trying to say that there was no riot at the Capitol on January 6th and that it was all just a normal tourist visit, we have breaking news.
Active duty Marine Corps officer Major Christopher Warnagiris, a 40-year-old stationed at Quantico, was arrested today for allegedly assaulting a Capitol Police officer during the Jan. 6th riot.
Look for my colleague @LambeJerry's story soon, @LawCrimeNews. pic.twitter.com/f5iYvEOU15
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) May 13, 2021
Read more here at the Justice Department press release.
In the first 120 days after Jan. 6, approximately 440 individuals have been arrested on charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, including over 125 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement. The investigation remains ongoing.
I wonder how many were arrested today? Or yesterday? Or any day?
You gotta wonder how many other Marines knew about this and kept it quiet.
Court martial
1Originally, I was dismayed that there were no mass arrests on Jan. 6. However, in the past when there were actual mass arrests, the city wound up paying many millions of $$$ because so many were innocent bystanders who were doing nothing wrong besides being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This time, there were no innocent bystanders arrested and the cases against those who have been subsequently arrested and charge seem to be rock solid.
So, I am not as unhappy as I was 4 months ago.
2Normal tourist visits do not include smashing through windows, battering down doors, spraying police officers in the face with bear spray, stealing computers, or beating a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher.
3The Big Lie requires more and more bigger lies to cover up and that won’t change anytime soon. Court martial s (and there were others besides this “officer”), loss of pensions/benefits, right to vote, jail for all of them (civilians, cops, military) must be done. Of course that will set off the cultists, but so be it.
4Oh, and trumpf.
Court martial this scumbag. Any O-4 who participates in sedition and attacks a law officer? Throw the whole damn UCMJ at him. No rank, no medals, dishonorable discharge, no pensions. Break his sword in front of him.
There is no excuse. NO EXCUSE. He dishonored the Corps; he dishonored all of us.
(Yes, I’m a wee tad annoyed with this traitor. If he was involved at all in the planning phase, or encouraged others to take part, get him on conspiracy to commit sedition.)
5Step away from the Kool Aid!
6Antifa has infiltrated the marines!!!!
7I’ve been on Capitol and White House tour – they didn’t end like January 6th! That Marine needs a court martial.
8Elizabeth Moon@4
I have no doubt this soon-to-be-former Marine will defend by saying that he was convinced he was upholding his oath, not violating it. As former active duty yourself, what do you think this guys peers would have to say (or testify perhaps) about him?
9Glad they’re rounding up as many as they can find! I hope they start including the wingnut politicians soon.
We are witnessing the extremist religious right/white supremacist jihad against Democracy unfolding before our very eyes.
“Nancy Pelosi: ‘Appalling’ That Republicans Deny The Jan. 6 Attack Even Happened
10“It was beyond denial,” the House speaker said of the GOP comparing the Capitol insurrection to a normal tourist visit. “It fell into the range of sick.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nancy-pelosi-republicans-january-6-capitol-insurrection_n_609d4957e4b0daf2b59e90ca
charnel house |ˈCHäːrnlhous|
noun – historical
a building or vault in which corpses or bones are piled. obscure: Also recently known as the US Senate.
Don’t count the indictments…
11Count the Public sentiment polls.
Decay takes time and is nature’s way.
“a normal tourist visit…”
Where do these people go on vacation? Do they check the State Department Travel Advisory page and then book places with a warning?
12Why is it that those espousing White Supremacy are so far down on the evolutionary scale?
13Tourists? Is that the QOP version for a typo for terrorist? We live in NV, so we know the revenue tourists bring. So, please QOP, explain to us the $millions of dollars in physical damage to property alone plus those killed and injured done by these ‘peaceful’ terrorists.
As for an officer so stupid to have participated in an insurrection? Ms. Moon @5 was a extremely gracious and kind. But she is correct, he needs to be prosecuted under the UCMJ with full due process.
Ms. Moon, whatever happened to officers sworn to understand what even “the appearance of wrong doing” meant?
14Alan, where there’s one rat, there’s a rat pack, so if there’s one field grade officer, more are there. I hope to goodness the Corps takes a long hard look at this guy’s friends, the other majors and lt. colonels he hangs with.
However among the Marine vets on VoteVets, I don’t think any of them will have any sympathy for “But I believe I was doing my duty…” I sure don’t. There is no way to square attacking the Capitol, attacking Capitol Police officers, holding the door open and waving people in, etc–even if that’s all he did–with upholding and protecting the Constitution. Can’t be done. If he’s too dense to figure that out, it will be explained to him. He assisted in an attack on the *civilian government of the US*…on Congress itself, and on the judicial branch as well, by ignoring/disbelieving the many judgments that the election was not stolen.
DOJ has him now, and some argue that military personnel should be tried in civilian courts where similar charges cover an offense, reserving courts martial for offenses under the UCMJ only. (https://www.justsecurity.org/74165/military-personnel-and-the-putsch-at-the-u-s-capitol/) I’m not yet persuaded by this, but the appeal to strengthening trust in the civilian court system does make sense. I still think he should be tried by court martial for conduct unbecoming, and for sedition if the DOJ doesn’t go that route. I want to see that sword broken over the knee of a JAG prosecutor, but then, as a fiction writer, I want the drama. It’s the gesture that will affect younger, more junior officers and stick in their minds like the other stories of previous times.
But I can do without that. What I can’t do without is a conviction and punishment that means dismissal, no pension, no awards…the equivalent of being dumped at the curb with a very sore butt. I want to know that what the after-story will be is in accord with the honor of the service: that he screwed the pooch royally, that he destroyed his own career, that he broke his oath to the Constitution and to the Corps. And that being part of an insurgent mob, attacking Congress, attacking the Capitol is absolutely, positively, forever and ever Amen, so unacceptable that you might as well quit before you start.
15slipstream @3
The “beaten by fire extinguisher” narrative turned out to be a bit of “fog of war” reporting.
Sicknick died after being sprayed, and had “a stroke and died from natural causes, the medical examiner’s office ruled. Wikipedia summarizes it this way:
“On April 19, 2021, the office of the chief medical examiner of the District of Columbia, Francisco J. Diaz, concluded that the manner of death was natural, arising from “acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis” (two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by an artery clot).[3][36][37] Diaz told the Washington Post that there was no evidence that Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemicals or was otherwise injured, but stated that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”[3][38]
The medical examiner’s determination makes any potential murder charges unlikely.[3][39] Because stress and traumatic events can lead to a stroke, some neurologists and other experts questioned the medical examiner’s classification of the manner of death as natural; for example, Dr. Cyril Wecht, a forensic pathologist, said that Sicknick’s manner of death should have been classified as accidental, a homicide, or “undetermined”.[40] “
16The pubic being killed and arrested for entering PUBLIC Buildings. AIPAC enters whenever they wish and given treats — dinner and drinks and any law they wished passed. WTFU— America has been sold for 30 pieces of silver.
17Jane & PKM;
I’m sure there are still officers who do understand what avoiding even the appearance of wrongdoing means, and diligently avoid same. OTOH, I have concerns (coming, in part, from knowing a few no-longer-active officers who left active duty in the late ’90s, early 2000s) that the politicizing of the military, which was already starting in the early ’70s and strengthened over the decades corroded the older values with regard to political bias.
The liberals, I must say, made some very stupid strategic errors in how they went at protesting an unpopular war…as long as the draft was in force, their direct attacks on service members to get them to desert, and those not yet drafted to avoid the draft, put so much pressure on many service members that–combined with the pressures of ordinay military service, they literally made some of the more liberal service members into staunch conservatives. I saw that happen. It affected me for several years after I was no longer active. (As I finally said to a young man annoying me in San Antonio years later, “I’ve been chewed out by a three-star general, kid–you think you can scare me? Make me cry?” He deflated.) I wasn’t welcome among Dems in those days, and equally not welcome among the growing conservative Republicans, because I wasn’t the kind of soldier they wanted. I came within two ticks of decking an older veteran when he sneered at me as probably being a hippie drug user in college (he didn’t deflate but he did back up a step when I said “No, I went in the Marine Corps. Three years active.” Oh, he said. Sorry. I just assumed. Then I smiled at him. A very precise smile.
But those were my bad years, and once I got through the worst of it, and with considerable help from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio…I was able to focus outward again, not just on my own resentments. Usually.
Dragging my brain back to your questions…I do not know exactly what’s taught in any service’s intake for officers anymore–Academy or Officer Candidate School and Basic. I know what I was taught, but back then–1968, early ’69–things were definitely put very clearly. Chesty Puller’s son went through Basic just before I did; the stories of WWII and Korean War Marines were still “live”. Is that still so? Can it still be so, with all the less spectacular successes and horrible losses of the wars in between? No president’s legal team had yet dismissed the validity of the Nuremburg accords, as G W Bush’s did, declaring that no, the US didn’t have to obey the rules the US had helped create. Those rules were handed to us as the gold standard, never to be broken, and if broken never ignored (because war is war and torture does occur, but if it did, we were told, it must be punished.)
I was by no means a model Woman Marine (despite that my mother once didn’t recognize me at the airport and thought I was a recruiting poster…)…I made mistakes, sometimes quite bad ones. I was prodded into becoming better by very firm seniors and a fiercely capable sergeant in my group and a master gunnery sergeant in the next room, both of which undertook the education of a young woman officer with mingled frustration and determination. “You did WHAT, Lieutenant? With all due respect, ma’am, don’t ever do that again. Now, here’s the situation….” But I did not doubt that there *was* honor, that some held to it, and tried to be one of those who did.
18Elizabeth Moon @5&15, What you say x1000.
19This disgraceful sonuvabitch is pulling down ~$80K/yr of taxpayer dinero at that grade [plus numerous perks], probably has 16-18 years, with a juicy pension waiting.
Remember, the likes of Allen West and Ollie North got to keep their bennies.
Any bastard today participating in a failed coup d’etat, uniformed or not, should be busted into the dirt.
Weirdness in Maj. Warnagiris’s story online. According to most reports he’s 40 years old; according to _Marine Times_ his date of rank is 2003 (in other words when promoted to O4. That gives a birth year of birth (depending on month of birth) of 1980-81. A _Stars and Stripes_ article today gives his date of first commissioning (“commissioned into the USMC”) of 2002. He’d have been 21 or 22 in 2002. If he went to college as a typical 18-19 yo high school graduate, he could’ve finished a degree in 2002 and if he’d been in ROTC in college, he could’ve been direct commissioned…as a second lieutenant. That was my husband’s route. Usually “butter bars” were promoted w/in 2 years to first lieutenant, fairly automatically. Next thing was a promotion board to Captain (O-3), which came for me after I left active duty and was in the inactive reserves, approximately two years later. (So I resigned as a captain, not a lieutenant.) There is basically NFW that a newly commissioned butterbars could become an O-4 in one year…commissioned into the Corps in 2002 and a major…two promotions up…in one year.
So there’s a glitch in the reports. Granted after 9/11 I’m sure they were shoving officer candidates through training as fast as the fastest during ‘Nam, but not that fast. Unless something odd was going on, which can happen. If he’d been older, direct-commissioned from a position of civilian authority pertinent to military command (worked 10 years for a Defense contractor for artillery, for instance) commissioning him as an O-4 might’ve been reasonable, but most of those folks go back to civilian life after a deployment.
Even in wartime, an O-1 commissioned in 2002 as 21-22 years old would not be bumped up to O-4 in less than 7-8 years. Field grade officers need more experience to handle the larger and different responsibilities of the rank. Most majors I ran across were mid-30s to late 30s, early 40s. So being 40 and a major is not proof of anything…being a 22-23 year old major is proof of “something strange.”
I find myself increasingly interested in all the details of Warnigiri’s life and military career.
20I could see made O-4 in 2013, but no way 2003.
2118 years in-grade is near-impossible. Maj has a 7 year promotion window, or iirc, is subject to various status penalties.
[10 U.S. Code § 14501 – Failure of selection for promotion]
I’d guess ‘date of rank’ was misreported. A 40-year-old major with 18 years was going to be invited to retire in 2 years.
* * *
Did you know that in 1941 officers assigned to the Pentagon didn’t even wear uniforms?
By 1987, when I met Chief of Staff Zinni he was wearing jump boots and camouflage to inspect a Reserve public affairs detachment.
The officer corps nowadays, and for a long time, has been like the Romanian army, which had a contract with Max Factor.
All show, no go.
22The other “military officer” story this week was the letter from 124 retired Generals and Admirals blasting the Biden administration. The Bulwark [ https://thebulwark.com/military-officers-should-stay-out-of-politics/ ]has a nice dismissal of the importance:
On Monday, 124 retired generals calling themselves “Flag Officers 4 America” issued an open letter containing a broadside attack against President Joe Biden, the Democratic party, and the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
The most impressive part of the list is how unimpressive the names on it are. They included only one 4-star officer, Adm. Jerome L. Johnson, who retired from the Navy in 1992. Most of the signatories have similarly been retired for decades, and even national security journalists and other recently retired 4-stars admit they can only recognize a few of the names. The average age of this group—consisting entirely of white men—is 80….
The good news is that these retired officers represent only a small fraction—less than two percent—of all retired generals and admirals. The bad news is that more than one hundred men who hold values opposed to those of their profession managed to be promoted at least six times by the U.S. military.
23Erk! this makes me sick! From the halls of Montezuma to the halls of the Capitol???? God help us! If we can’t trust a Marine, who can we trust!
24Sandridge: You’re quite right–2013 is definitely possible, and also makes sense of 2003 as a typo.
25The really bad news is that we have so many thousands of flag officers. If you have never read Northcote Parkinson’s original essay where Parkinson’s Law appeared, you should.
(Short version: while the Royal Navy shrank by over 90%, the number of admirals grew manyfold.)
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