PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) -Three years before retiring from the U.S. Army in 2017, Donald Trump-backed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano posed in Confederate uniform for a faculty photo at the Army War College, according to a copy of the photo obtained by Reuters.
The previously unreported photo, released by the War College to Reuters after a request under the Freedom of Information Act, showed Mastriano in a 2013-14 portrait for the Department of Military Strategy, Plans, and Operations, where he worked.
Faculty at the time had been given the option of dressing as a historical figure, people familiar with the photo said. At least 15 of the 21 faculty in the photo opted to appear in regular attire. Although one man wears a trench coat and sunglasses and another carries an aviator's helmet, Mastriano is the only one wearing a Confederate uniform.
Mastriano did not immediately respond to requests for comment made by email and phone. A Reuters reporter attended a Mastriano event on Wednesday to seek comment, but the candidate did not make himself available for questions.
Displays of Confederate symbols can be seen as insensitive to those who view them as painful reminders of racial oppression and the Civil War that saw 11 rebelling Confederate states fight to keep Black people enslaved.
The U.S. military issued a de facto ban on displaying the Confederate flag and has sought to remove segregationist symbols from bases and academic institutions following the murder in May 2020 of George Floyd, a Black man whose killing by a white police officer in Minneapolis triggered protests worldwide.
After Reuters made its formal request for the photo, it was removed from the War College wall where it had hung alongside other annual portraits of faculty groups.
The Army War College (AWC), a premier military higher education institution in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, told Reuters a team had reviewed all art, text, and other images displayed at Carlisle Barracks in 2020, but missed the faculty photo.
"The faculty photo did not get the team's attention; the photo has since been removed because it does not meet AWC values," the college said in a statement.
Asked about the War College photo, a spokesperson at U.S. Army headquarters said: "The Army supports commanders who remove symbols or images that do not comport with Army values."
Confederate symbols and dress have been embraced by white supremacists in the United States, and monuments and flags honoring the Confederacy have been removed from many public areas in recent years.
Pennsylvania plays an outsized role in U.S. politics as a so-called swing state in presidential elections, and Republican Mastriano, who has embraced Trump's stolen election lies, is trailing his Democratic opponent in the governor's race ahead of the November ballot.
It is unclear how the photo might be viewed in Pennsylvania, which played a critical role in the Civil War. More than 33,000 soldiers from Pennsylvania died fighting for the Union, and the state was the site of the Battle of Gettysburg, the conflict's bloodiest battle, which ended with a Union victory and inspired President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Mastriano's district, Pennsylvania's 33rd, includes Gettysburg.
Many Americans continue to participate in Civil War battle re-enactments, wearing uniforms from both sides in an effort to preserve U.S. history.
Jenna Ellis, a senior adviser to Mastriano's campaign and former Trump lawyer, said the media was having a "melt down" because Mastriano once posed as a civil war historical figure for a photo.
"And? He has a Ph.D in HISTORY," Ellis wrote on Twitter. "The left wants to erase history. @dougmastriano wants us to learn from it. I invite @Reuters to go on a Gettysburg tour with Doug. You'll learn a lot!"
(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Jarrett Renshaw; editing by Heather Timmons and Daniel Wallis)
DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) – A man known to police for several run-ins with the law, most recently for waving a Confederate flag at a football game, was arrested as a suspect in the ambush killings of two Iowa officers shot in their patrol cars early on Wednesday, authorities said.
The suspect, Scott Michael Greene, 46, essentially turned himself in to authorities hours after the killings.
Police said he flagged down a state Department of Natural Resources employee on a rural roadway, presented his identification and asked the employee to call emergency-911. Greene was taken into custody without incident by sheriff’s deputies and Iowa state troopers responding to the call.
Police offered no possible motive for what precipitated the attacks, which unfolded shortly after 1 a.m. (0600 GMT) in Iowa’s capital, Des Moines, and its affluent Urbandale suburb.
The body of the first slain officer was found near a stadium where Greene, who is white, was expelled by police last month after waving a Confederate battle flag in front of black spectators while the national anthem was being played at the start of a high school football game.
The two slain policemen were both white, each shot while sitting in his cruiser. Urbandale officer Justin Martin, 24, was found dead first, and the body of Sergeant Anthony Bemino, 38, of the Des Moines department, was discovered 20 minutes later.
Three bullet holes were visible in Bemino’s patrol car in Des Moines, about 2 miles (3 km) from the Urbandale shooting scene.
“These officers were ambushed,” Des Moines police spokesman Paul Parizek told a news conference.
Urbandale Police Chief Ross McCarty said Greene, who has not been formally charged in the crimes, was well known to local police from previous encounters with law enforcement, including the flag-waving incident.
In 2014, he pleaded guilty to interference with official acts in an incident involving police. The same year, he also pleaded guilty to harassment and was placed on probation for a year. Court records did not specify the nature of those underlying offenses.
Greene was charged in 2001 with assault and criminal mischief for allegedly hurling a soda can from the window of a vehicle, but those charges were dismissed.
The Des Moines Register, citing neighbors and court records, reported Green had been living with his mother, who moved out of the house after a recent fight with her son that led to her being charged with misdemeanor domestic abuse.
Wednesday’s shootings marked the latest in a string of attacks on police across the country during the past several months, at a time of intense public debate over racial bias and the use of lethal force in the U.S. criminal justice system.
Some 52 police officers have been fatally shot while on duty in the United States so far this year, up 33 from the same point in 2015, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.
Greene was being held under guard at a hospital where he was taken after telling officers who arrested him that he was suffering from “some kind of flare-up related to an existing medical condition,” Parizek told reporters.
He did not elaborate on the nature of Greene’s medical condition.
Parizek said charges against Greene could come after police interview him and finish gathering evidence from the scenes. An arraignment was possible as early as Thursday morning, he said.
Details of the flag-waving incident emerged from a 10-minute video clip posted on YouTube last month by a user identifying himself as Scott Greene appearing to document the episode.
In it, a voice, apparently Greene’s, is heard complaining to police that “African-American people” took the flag from him in the stands and “assaulted” him,” adding that he wanted to press charges.
“There were people in the crowd who felt that was offensive, and that he should be removed from the stadium,” McCarty said of the incident.
Police officers shown in the video said he was removed from the stadium because he caused a disturbance.
“You have to understand, in the current social climate that we’re in, when you fly the Confederate flag standing in front of several African-American people, that’s going to cause a disturbance, OK, whether you intended to or not,” a female officer is heard telling the man in the video.
McCarty said high school officials banned Greene from the property following that incident but had been trying to determine how to enforce the ban given that Greene has a daughter attending the school.
“Most of the officers that have been in the city have some understanding of Mr. Greene,” McCarty said. “They’ve taken trips to his house, or delivered service to him. Never to anything of this extent though.”
In a 2007 bankruptcy filing, Greene said he was single with three children.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee, Julia Harte in Washington, Gina Cherelus, Dave Ingram and Michael Flaherty in New York and Rory Carroll in San Francisco; Writing by Scott Malone and Steve Gorman; Editing by Will Dunham and Lisa Shumaker)
IMAGE: Scott Michael Greene, 46, in photo distributed by Urbandale Police Departments investigators as investigators sought him in murders of two Iowa police officers in separate “ambush-style” killings as they sat in their patrol cars. Courtesy Urbandale Police Department/Handout via REUTERS
As this vexed year draws to a close, we would like to offer profound thanks to our readers for subscribing toThe National Memo — and to revisit a few favorite examples of our unique reporting and commentary in 2015.
In a year that saw tens of thousands of deaths by gun violance and still more needless massacres, we questioned the National Rifle Association’s declared commitment to gun safety, showing in Concealed-Carry Crazy: What Gun Lobbyists Mean When They Tout ‘Gun Safety’that the NRA could scarcely care about anything less. Although the Charleston shooting failed to prompt needed changes in the nation’s gun laws, that tragedy stimulated a long-overdue conversation about public displays of the Confederacy’s symbols, which we joined in Never Patriotic: The Real Meaning Of The Confederate Flag.
There’s nothing wrong with Planned Parenthood that a Christian conquistador couldn’t fix. Did you know Obama’s the son of Satan? We’re just getting started here. It’s “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Rachel Campos-Duffy
Unless you’re strapped to a chair, lids splayed open, Clockwork Orange-style, and forced to watch Fox News day in and day out, you can be forgiven for missing Outnumbered, the network’s daily exercise is well-dressed, roundtable trolling.
I know for myself — and I know in the Greek Orthodox Church it’s the same idea of sanctification, that marriage is a sacrament, it’s a holy thing. And my job being married is to get my husband and my kids to heaven with me. And I think that changes the whole perspective.
For someone who passed the bar in 1998, one would think Sullivan would know better than to wade into this Todd Akin-esque morass of redefining rape, which never ends well for conservatives.
In another strange description that appeared to blur the clear line between consensual sex and rape, Sullivan said, “Many women have what’s known as ‘regret sex.’ They feel dirty afterward; they feel guilty.”
In the New Hampshire case, Sullivan said it was “a possibility” that the alleged 15-year-old victim just regretted having sex, and that perhaps being young made her feel guilty.
The boy (now 19) accused of the rape is innocent until proven guilty, of course. That said, Fox News, why should you give legal authorities a platform to accuse women and question their credibility — in this case, that of a 15-year-old girl —by suggesting that, rather than being sexually assaulted, they merely regretted having sex?
Bryan Fischer is a… how can we put this politely? A human toxic waste dump; Deepwater Horizon in corporeal form; a bigoted thug with a Bible and a blog, whose rhetoric is so hateful his own hate group had to temporarily disown him.
In a post published on the American Family Association’s blog Thursday, Fischer argues that the “hideous barbarism of Planned Parenthood” is a sign that “the pagan rituals of the Aztecs have returned from the bowels of Hades with a vengeance.” (Culture conflation is the least of this witless cesspit’s sins.)
Cutting brains and hearts out of living babies is as ghoulish, demonic, and horrific as anything done by the benighted pagan tribes of the 16th century. If there ever was a contemporary organization birthed in the nether regions of hell itself, Planned Parenthood is it.
For human cruelty, barbarity, savagery and utter inhumanity, the Aztecs had nothing on the modern priests of paganism who engage in human sacrifice 327,000 times a year in Planned Parenthood clinics, each one a virtual pagan temple.
It is long past time to immediately and completely defund Planned Parenthood, and then investigate it, prosecute it, and put it out of our nation’s misery.
The careless use of Grand Guignol imagery that Fischer splatters on the page doesn’t make his attacks on women’s health any more compelling; it does somehow make him even more repulsive. We didn’t think that was possible.
Well, they’ve gotten right to the bottom of this whole Barack Hussein Obama travesty playing out in the Oval Office. Conservatives who believe the president is a secret Muslim, gun-snatching, race-baiting, Kenyan-Sharia-fascist-hippie-peacenik-Nazi, are really missing the point.
The fact is the Commander-in-Chief is really just the Antichrist in disguise.
Obama’s deplorable responses to the atrocities against Christians isn’t just pathetic – it is evidence of a much more insidious evil. Obama, in my estimation is, if nothing else, an anti-Christian bigot who is motivated above anything else with the irradiation of the American Christian zeitgeist.
[…] What disappoints me is the pathetic criticism and mealy-mouthed manner of conservative critics. I can’t count how many conservative pundits trip over themselves to moderate their words against Obama, calling him “naive”, “wrong-headed,” “misinformed,” and (this one is the best) “out of touch.”
Really!?!?!
No… he’s totally in touch. He’s not naive. He is thoughtfully evil. He is the modern day Nero (minus the perversion). And like Nero he blames Christians for the uprisings. He obfuscates the obvious evil of his parental religion – Islam. He knows exactly what he’s doing. And what he is doing is systematically destroying the Christian heritage and zeitgeist of America. And if he has his druthers – across the globe.
“You think me extreme?” Emmanuel says, before going on to claim that “Obama embodies all the characteristics of the legendary nemesis.” (Yes, we do think he’s extreme. Most of these fruitcakes are not polite enough to ask us what we think, so kudos to Emmanuel.)
“And frankly,” he concludes, “I wouldn’t surprise me [sic] if he goes down as history’s Anti-Christ of Revelation.”
This must be the densest concentration of right-wing crazy ever packed into a single story. (This week, anyway.)
So Zimmerman and the gun store owner, Andy Hallinan, created a mini-documentary (embedded below) and submitted to an interview on Florida radio (samples of which are available below for your listening displeasure, courtesy of Right Wing Watch). It’s best to hear this stuff from the horse’s mouth, however noxious that equine breath may be.
It’s as if every addled, extreme far-right position mated and birthed a conservative Chimera — a fire-breathing freak of nature that lives perennially 50 years in the past, with 10 arms carrying 20 guns, and five pairs of paranoid eyes, each looking over a separate shoulder for someone new to shoot.
