"...do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..."
"For the good of the Air Force, for the good of the armed services and for the good of our country, I urge you to reject convention and careerism..." - Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Maxwell AFB, April 21, 2008 "You will need to challenge conventional wisdom and call things like you see them to subordinates and superiors alike." - Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, United States Air Force Academy, March 4, 2011
It still amazes me that, after the oral argument before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the provable facts and the written and clear law, two of the three judges bent over backward to find against me in my lawsuit against the Border Patrol. The video above still leaves me shocked that two judges could so purposefully get the law wrong in the face of clear text and clear video proof of facts. Yet they did.
Soon the Supreme Court of the United States will determine the fate of this long public service. Fortunately my job as a military officer is simply to support and defend the Constitution without mental reservation or purpose of evasion. A purpose of evasion, for example, might include the incredible cost of litigation.
I am a public servant so I serve, as I swore to Americans I would do.
But beyond supporting and offering a defense of the constitutional rights of my countrymen who pay me, I am unable to secure victory. I can only fight. I won't comment on the odds of fighting for freedom in our nation here at home versus fighting the enemy overseas, except to say that one is far more difficult than the other. And I'll say that fighting Al Qaida is a hell of a lot easier than fighting corrupted so-called public servants like Agent Lands and Agent Perez and robed-politicians who care little to nothing about the rule of law.
So having paid my incredibly expensive cover charge, with the glow in the dark bracelet around my wrist, I've now entered the most expensive bar in our nation. There is no alcohol, and sadly they are down one phenomenal bartender. But regardless, our nation needs them to do the right thing and it's almost closing time.
Whatever happens, and the statistics make it clear just what that will be, I hope the government's fictional narrative is set aside and the clear video proof of the encounter is consulted along with our nation's law before a decision is made.
Again, all I can do is fight for Americans. I can't magically assure victory. I'm confident when fighting the enemy overseas. But I have no such confidence here at home, I'm sorry to say. I wish it were different.
ETA: My response to the government, the final filing before the court, can be viewed here.
Just a standard issue retirement ceremony for a standard issue career.
July 14th at 1500 in the Spooky Auditorium -- Hurlburt Field, Florida.
Ghostriders obviously don't need an invite. All others, send me a message if you want to attend. I'm waiting patiently and eagerly for Tony Carr to ask to attend.
The booze will be plentiful, so there is a chance of a court martial at the very last moment.
It feels strange posting this after the massive loss at our high court, but here it is. The government did not respond to my cert petition initially, but the SCOTUS called for the government to respond. This is the government's response.
I will reply to the government's response shortly, and then the eight justices of the Supreme Court will decide if my suit about a thirty-four minute suspicionless interior Border Patrol checkpoint is worth hearing or not.
It really does feel weird bringing up something like a cert petition at this particular moment in time.
Those wishing to read my cert petition, which the government has responded to above, can do so here.
The amicus brief from the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild and the Texas Civil Rights Project, in support of my cert petition, can be read here.
Those wishing to watch the thirty-four minute video of the suspiconless seizure that prompted this lawsuit can do so here.
Somebody just called the wife and me to tell us that Justice Antonin Scalia has passed away. We're both shocked at our nation's loss. We are very sad. We are remembering his great legacy and our intersections with his great mind.
The earliest memory is when my wife interviewed to clerk for Justice Scalia years ago and I remember her trepidation at the prospect of being examined by somebody of Scalia's intellect. I was stationed at Laughlin AFB and I remember her preparing for her interview in my low rent apartment. She had stacks and stacks of legal opinions and she was cramming them down, trying to educate herself. She was nervous. Justice Scalia's intellect and razor sharp mind was extremely intimidating, even to a new lawyer who had graduated number one from a top law school. A conversation with Justice Scalia was an entirely new level of intellectual rigor.
She tells me some funny things about their conversation during her interview. Justice Scalia asked her what she thought was the most unworkable constitutional doctrine. She answered the establishment clause. He said, okay, how would you change it? She said clearer rules, based on a neutrality principle (i.e., government neutrality between religion and non-religion and among religions), knowing that Scalia disagreed with the neutrality principle but believing it to be on sound logical ground. He then threw out all sorts of examples that are understood to be constitutional but conflict with a neutrality principle, taken to its logical conclusion. She kept repeating that there could be an exception for this or that. To which he finally responded "well don't you think the exceptions should inform the rule?" She then thought "I'm probably not getting this job..."
Justice Scalia then offered to talk about something she must know more about than the First Amendment, which was separation of powers. After engaging in a more extensive discussion about the scope of commander-in-chief powers, which my wife was arguing were more limited, Justice Scalia asked "but what about Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates?" To which she had no choice but to respond "I don't know about Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates" (thinking for sure she was not getting the job now...). As she describes it, Justice Scalia's expression betrayed a sense of despair at the state of American education. He was gracious. She did not get the job. But she does now know all about Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates...
That meeting turned out to be the highest quality interview prep possible, and weeks later my wife did interview with, and get to clerk for, another justice of our nation's high court. As such, she was able to grow more familiar with Justice Scalia as she worked with his clerks over the course of a year.
Because of her, I have spent some time at our nation's highest court and I have been fortunate enough to see Justice Scalia question counsel during argument. I specifically remember an exchange between Justice Scalia and a lawyer from the ACLU and I chatted with that lawyer right after the argument about their very lively interaction. While I won't relay the lawyer's comments, it was apparent that Justice Scalia made the biggest impression on him during his argument.
I have also been beyond lucky to have had a friend introduce me to Justice Scalia and we had a nice conversation and talked mostly about one of his nine children who is, like myself, a military officer. The picture above was taken with the justice just behind the person taking the photo.
Justice Scalia had a great sense of humor and despite how he is often depicted by those who would caricature him, he was polite and gracious. I remember once watching a reenactment of Texas v. White at the Supreme Court, where Justice Scalia alone sat behind the bench to hear the "case." The first counsel to speak was a distinguished female lawyer and Justice Scalia responded, staying in character from 1869, "What's this? A lady lawyer?" Everybody in the court laughed.
Justice Scalia was a polarizing figure. And Justice Scalia has been wrong many times, and infuriatingly so in some cases. But he has also been incredibly right and not infrequently. He sought not to come to any particular outcome in his legal reasoning, but to follow the law faithfully. He sought to be true to the law as it was written and not as he wished it to be, whether he liked or agreed with the outcome that the law would demand. That does not mean he succeeded at all times in such purity. For the majority of Americans interested in outcomes rather than legal reasoning, that can cause us to either love or hate his rulings from the bench. But Justice Scalia cared about being faithful to his duties as a judge, leaving outcomes to politicians who write laws for that purpose, whether good or bad laws depending on personal preference. To him, not being faithful to the law in order to achieve an outcome was to rob the American people of their democracy.
Recently, Justice Scalia denied my extension request in my lawsuit currently before the Supreme Court, as he does for all parties in his fair manner. I suspect he would not have voted to grant cert in my lawsuit currently before the Supreme Court. He did not have the best track record, in my opinion, on the Fourth Amendment or limits to police powers. Some of his rulings truly anger me.
Still, Justice Scalia was a great American. Yes, he got it wrong as do all of the justices of our highest court. But when he got it right, he got it incredibly right. His dissent with Justice John Paul Stevens in Hamdi was pure American beauty as this short video below demonstrates.
And he was absolutely right about his originalist approach, at least in as much as it held that our law itself is the source that must command outcomes, rather than desired outcomes and desired "interpretation" driving what we pretend that our written law states or means. Justice Scalia's approach was one of integrity and it is absolutely crucial in a system of law. The text must be respected and law still carries the force of law even when wearing a robe. Or as one of his former "clerkorati" wrote about her old boss:
He forced us all to acknowledge that words cannot mean anything we want
them to mean; that we have to impose a degree of discipline on our
thinking. A discipline I value to this day.
Justice Scalia was a brilliant mind and a great American. Our nation is weaker today than it was before his passing. Americans, regardless of politics, should join me in my sadness at Justice Scalia's departure.
RIP Nino. My heart goes out to your family and our nation.
Just did a TAP class talking about the benefits. Wow. Staggeringly generous of the American people and it has only gotten better over time. I recommend that all veterans who have this benefit ensure they use it at the soonest.
Today is Dr. King's birthday. What an amazing American who personified public service, without ever being paid by taxpayer money. Malcolm X doesn't get the same praise, but he is the Yin to Dr. King's Yang and the two were a team despite disagreements on methodology.
Both cared deeply about our flawed nation. Both sacrificed everything for it. Not just their lives, but also their lives. Martin and Malcolm were two of the very finest Americans to ever live.
Both were murdered by Americans. And both were treated as the enemy by the American government's intelligence/surveillance industry despite the wishes of political figures like John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. And as often happens when great men who challenge power and corruption are no more, lesser men in government service pervert and distort and attempt to destroy their message.
Dr. King and Malcolm X, and their families, deserve an incredible debt of gratitude from the American people for their service to our nation.
And we have the responsibility to not piss all their sacrifices and gains away. Particularly those of us paid to be public servants.
Outright lies, and the lies that come from stealing the words of another and pawning them off as your own. When it comes to dishonesty, Brandon Bryant has it all. He plagiarizes comic books as part of his lofty, and contradictory, proclamations to the public.
To see the depth of his self described "imagination" take a look at this lie he told about the FBI first calling him. See if you can spot the lie about who, he claims, the FBI told him was targeting him.
He will say anything for five minutes of fame. It seems Tonje Hessen Schei has helped Brandon Bryant, the former Predator sensor operator, find his calling... saying anything the script tells him to say regardless of truth.
This is the final year, the final few months actually, of this eight year blog. Soon I will leave public service and this avenue of discussion will accordingly be decommissioned.
I am very much looking forward to gardening and raising honeybees and enjoying the nation rather than battling to protect it from threatening ideas and un-American values.
The four minute video above shows a clear lie told by Brandon Bryant, as he changed his story for a foreign audience.
And here is a guest post I wrote for the blog, This Ain't Hell, about Brandon the Drone Deceiver.
It sure would be nice if media, and journalists like Jeremy Scahill, and lawyers like Jesslyn Radack were to refuse to ally themselves with liars just to push a narrative. I can't believe they think that is a good idea.
I made the video above after many hours of watching eye-gouging videos of Brandon Bryant running his mouth. Using his own words, "Brandon Bryant - Say Anything" shows that the Senior Airman who left the drone program is willing to say anything for a bit of daddy love and some praise. He reads his lines like a champ, but his director is obviously an idiot since his claims are a case study in contradiction.
I have had an interest in Brandon's role in the very important drone discussion, for quite some time now since I met him online. I'm sure I saw him at work back in the day, but I had no reason to interact with him so we do not know each other personally, although we know many mutual people. I have blogged about his media appearances several times over the years and, until today, we were Facebook friends. I had to cut him off. After many online conversations over the years and after reading his public professions, I have come to the conclusion that several others offered me about him years ago. He's dishonest and not to be trusted. He's a con man and a fraud.
The video above doesn't get into the most embarrassing chunks that flow from Brandon's sewer. I didn't post clips that show that Brandon is more than willing to pretend that he's an economist, a political philosopher, a psychologist, and of course, an expert on warfare despite leaving the drone program after only five years and despite his public profession that drones can't be shot down (except by China). Oops. It is truly amazing what this guy will say.
But to be fair, he did a great deal in the drone program other than simply violate his oath to defend the Constitution. He flew more than 6000 hours in less than five years. That is a STAGGERING amount of time and I feel bad for him going through that. Nobody should have to live like that. When he says he spent time watching others live their lives, while he had no life of his own, he was telling the truth. He was used and abused and it's unfortunate.
But I have a feeling he's being used and abused right now by those who are able to spot a guy with flexible morals and a willingness to say anything. I'm talking about foreign activists and film makers like Tonje Hessen Schei, the creator of the new documentary, Drone, which stars Brandon Bryant. I am sure a person in her position is grateful to have an actor who gladly takes lines and spits them out to improve the script. It's too bad, though, that after working with Brandon for more than a year, and creating the Drone documentary, she still refers to Brandon as a pilot. She has to know he was not a pilot, so continuously labeling him one must be a conscious decision. Better for selling tickets I suppose, but it undercuts the credibility of her film. As does, of course, Brandon's participation in it.
Homeless despite having a generous GI Bill and a state school in your hometown where your mother lives? Sure why not. Suffering from PTSD from the moral injury sustained by violating your oath? Yes, please. Did nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever and only started an ever evolving need to speak "truth" once out of the military? CUT! That's not going to sell, let's take that one from the top. AND ACTION!
As to "my case" -- my so-called case is simply one of doing my job professionally, as I swore to do and as Brandon admits he did not. That's hardly the stuff for headlines or movies.
But one of the many unfortunate things about over-classification and the shadows that come from secret dealings, is that journalists and media and "whistle blower" lawyers in the accountability field don't have a lot to work with. It's supply and demand. That's unfortunate for credibility, as Ms. Jessica Radack is no doubt figuring out with her motley group (consisting of a charlatan that no lawyer would ever want to take the stand, and an admitted bath-salt-consuming coke head, along with a fuckin' computer guy who apparently pisses himself because somebody handed him a headset while deployed, in a military that he voluntarily joined, and who now claims PTSD and nightmares from hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del one too many times). That's the gaggle being trotted out to the public in this discussion? It's too bad Ms. Radack hasn't at least pointed out to Brandon that the part of the Constitution he claims that he was told he was violating while he was doing it, was Article Three, Section Three. Not Section Two as he has been rehearsing for his performances.
It saddens me to see Jessica Radack falling for this nonsense and undercutting her track record by doing so. As political scientist, C. Fred Alford, said of whistleblowers in an article written about her courageous service:
The great relief is that whistleblowers aren't like the
vast majority of us, says Alford, the political scientist. For him, Radack's story is less about
a world turned upside down by 9/11 than about what strange creatures whistleblowers necessarily
are.
"STRANGE DOESN'T have to mean wearing funny shoes," Alford says.
"It can just mean being a true believer. A real cynic isn't going to blow the whistle. A real conformist
isn't going to blow the whistle. And a real radical probably won't be in a position to do it. It takes
someone who believes in the system far more than the system ever believes in itself."
It should be obvious. But apparently any disgruntled employee with an axe to grind can seek the spotlight and be dubbed a whistle blower these days. I suppose that's why Ms. Radack now finds herself offering up fraud-and-pony shows when she used to represent public servants serving the American people (and still does, so long as she represents Edward Snowden). But to represent Brandon Bryant and his megalomaniacal crusade to falsely present himself in the same light? It's really sad.
What an embarrassment. Frauds, charlatans, and bath-salt-bathers pass as whistle blowers these days and greatly damage the credibility of those like Ms. Radack in the process.
Brandon Bryant is not in this discussion for truth or for principle. He is a wannabe celebrity and aspiring super hero. He loves comic books. He loves acting. As the video above shows, he thirsts for it. But if Brandon were to be a super hero, he would be Malleable Man. A person with a super power allowing him to bend and shift and distort and be shaped by any person, with the exception of his super villain and arch-nemesis that goes by the name of Truth. Truth, apparently, can't touch Malleable Man.
It's all fun and games until Malleable Man, twisted and shaped by foreign interests, starts releasing secrets to other countries to give them critical information about an American military technology that Malleable Man himself says is not good or bad but depends on how it is used (when he's not calling that same technology cowardly and bad like all distance warfare). When it comes to degrading the security of America, it ceases to be a comic book and becomes something quite different. His narrative has shifted and it's not hard to figure out why. In the beginning he positioned himself as "speaking out" because leadership abused his community of drone operators and he wanted people to understand they were human beings. When he didn't get the response he had hoped for, his message shifted to win a different audience. Enter all the many contradictions he spouts interspersed with Sun Tzu and other quotes he doesn't understand.
It's funny to see a mostly foreign collection praise and dote on a guy that claims he knowingly violated the law, and it was interesting to see Tonje back up her little star with the dubious excuse of "just following orders." What is the point of her documentary again? Too bad she wasn't around in the 1940s to make a documentary about the German SS. So let this documentary be a lesson to all you drone operators out there! Do your job poorly, violate whatever laws you want, violate your oath of office that you swore to uphold before God, and then when your commitment is conveniently over, simply say you did so and be welcomed with open arms by those from foreign countries! Well, of course, if you agree to help them with a narrative. Yeah, that should help with accountability. Nice going, Tonje.
There is a discussion that should be had on the topic. But the dishonest, unprincipled, and opportunistic do not further that discussion.
You are an embarrassment to your nation, Brandon Bryant, and don't think your new friends are stupid. Once they are done with you, which should be just about any day now, they will lose interest. And where will you be then? Not only did you violate the Constitution while you were in, you have degraded an important conversation on the outside for a bit of praise.
At any rate, just remember your comic book alter ego is called Malleable Man, not "SrA America." You have a hat in your hand, not a shield. You don't have an "A" on your chest, you have a "T" and that stands for treason. Not treason for speaking out, no not at all. Treason because you violated your oath and flew a mission to make war on America, and now you seek to lie on the outside to capitalize on it. But I know, I know. I'm not being compassionate. I should realize that it's tough when you're a "homeless" "disabled veteran" with a GI Bill who can travel the world on a speaking tour and do back flips on command.
My name is Rick Rynearson. I was an Air Force command pilot & field grade officer and am now retired. I grew up an Air Force dependent (my father retired a CMSgt). I have eight deployments to OEF/OIF as a close air support attack pilot, more than one thousand combat flight hours, seven Air Medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross for valor. At 15 years into my career I resigned my commission & refused an order to assassinate an American citizen without charge or trial -- an order issued by the Obama/Biden administration; my resignation was not accepted & I was ultimately vindicated by the Air Force. I have a B.A. in religion from the Florida State University. My wife is a Harvard educated former Air Force intelligence officer turned civilian lawyer, former clerk for a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Air Force Reserve JAG.
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