Member of the House Armed Services Committee
grill The U.S. Army's vice chief of staff for operations, plans and training issued a statement this week in response to recent revelations that approximately 10,000 soldiers at Fort Liberty in North Carolina (formerly known as Fort Bragg before the Biden-Harris administration) had been trained to believe pro-life groups were “terrorist groups.”
Lt. Gen. Patrick Matlock suggested at Thursday's hearing that corrective action had been taken but offered no details and refused to say whether anyone had actually been fired, suspended or demoted for likening advocates for the unborn to genocidal jihadists.
Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), chairman of the Military Affairs Subcommittee, and lawmakers from both parties don't seem to buy Matlock's claims, particularly those about accountability.
“I think the reason this question cannot be answered is because you and we both know that no one has ever been held accountable for this training, which began in 2017 and continued until just a few months ago,” Banks said. “I think this is a great embarrassment for the U.S. military.”
“This is dangerous. This is a bad pattern,” Banks added, beginning with her argument that the Biden-Harris administration's Department of Defense and military are undermining the First Amendment and “targeting conservative speech and values.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) suggested that leaving the case unattended for nearly seven years and remaining silent about what the consequences would be if charges were eventually filed would only “increase the recurrence of this type of behavior.”
“He's literally saying he doesn't know if this is happening anywhere else in the Army,” said Rep. Corey Mills, R-Fla. “He doesn't know if this has been going on for more than seven years.”
“Peaceful pro-life Americans are being called 'terrorists'.”
The Blaze News previously reported that slides from an anti-terrorism awareness training session at Fort Liberty were posted to social media on July 10 by Pentagon whistleblower Samuel Shumate.
Shumate received the image from a U.S. Army soldier attending a training conference.
The same soldier told The Blaze News: “The briefing was simply a class on how to be a gatekeeper and what to look out for while on duty.”
“Guarding the gates is something we all have to do from time to time. This task was carried out by civilians from the Department of Defense, not by counterterrorism officers,” the soldier added.
The slide in question appeared immediately after a section about ISIS, the militant Islamic group responsible for mass rape and murder, and was labeled a “terrorist group” and featured the logos of the National Right to Life Movement and Operation Rescue.
It also features an image of customized “Choose Life” license plates that are being sold in at least 33 states and the District of Columbia to raise funds for crisis pregnancy centers.
In the slide, the opposing group, “Row [sic] In the “Wade Case,” these terrorist groups are alleged to have engaged in picketing, demonstrations, protests, and mass counseling sessions on the sidewalks.
“Only under a Biden administration could peaceful law-abiding citizens and their peaceful activities be labelled as 'terrorism,'” NRL chairman Carol Tobias responded at the time. “The Biden administration encourages the death of unborn children and advocates unlimited abortions, while peaceful, pro-life Americans are labelled 'terrorists.'”
“This slide is devastating,” said Steve Baker of Blaze News, an investigative journalist who first spoke to the soldiers who first exposed the misleading portrayal of pro-life groups in Army briefings.
“Can you imagine a soldier's wife with a pro-life bumper sticker, of which there are millions across the country, pulling up to the security gates of Fort Liberty or Fort Whale and a security guard attending a training session where that slide was shown immediately deciding that the soldier's wife and her two children in the back seat are ISIS-level terrorists?” Baker said.
The Army seems to have a problem with Americans being pro-life, but Matlock
Alleged He insisted Thursday that the Army is impartial, there is “no political motivation behind the training” and that the issue is localized.
“It's bullshit. This is systematic.”
Baker cast doubt on Matlock's claims.
The Army initially suggested in July that the slide was an anomaly, saying “the slide published on social media has not been vetted by the appropriate approving agencies” and “does not reflect the views of XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Liberty, the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense.”
But Baker noted that military whistleblower Lt. Col. Samuel Shumate, the terminal's top commander, was soon inundated with calls and messages from around the country “basically saying, 'This is bullshit. This is systematic. We've seen it on our own bases and in our own briefings.'”
Baker stressed that while systematic antipathy toward pro-life Americans in the Pentagon permeates all the way to the lowest levels, this ideological dominance has been building up over years.
“The removal and replacement of military leadership began in earnest during the Obama administration,” Baker said, noting that most of the military's top brass “was removed and replaced for philosophical and political reasons alone.”
Currently, the senior leadership is made up primarily of political activists, Baker said.
Baker's recent exclusive reporting on how the Pentagon mishandled the January 6, 2021, insurrection highlighted the impact that prioritizing politics over strategy and effectiveness has had on the military.
Baker and Joseph M. Hanneman detailed a range of evidence showing that career bureaucrats at the Department of Defense blocked the deployment of the National Guard on January 6th out of fear of “looking bad.”
“Only the next commander in chief can solve this problem,” Baker said. “Only he can solve this problem. Only he has the authority to replace the politically-active generals and admirals and other leadership, enlisted and civilian, in the Department of Defense.”
It's clear which commander in chief Baker has in mind.
“A Harris-Waltz administration would not improve the situation because these activities are consistent with their ideals, their values and their desire to use the military as a playground for social engineering,” the investigative journalist said.
“The Army uses overly broad policies to police the speech of conservative service members, silence dissent, and require service members who espouse conservative ideals to conceal their identities for fear of retaliation from higher up,” Banks, the subcommittee chairman, said in prepared remarks.
“Once again, the Army has been found to have engaged in clear viewpoint discrimination by implying in training slides that certain views and religious practices deserve punishment,” Daniel Runyan, senior counsel at the law firm First Liberty Institute, which is representing the whistleblowers, said in a statement Thursday.
“I appreciate the determination of the 88 members who wrote to the House Armed Services Committee and the Army to get even tougher. Our military's glaring lack of political neutrality must be corrected immediately,” Runyan added.
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