So what we are left with is an opinion by Sheehan which he initially supported solely with a second hand account of a remark made to him 15 years ago, which he now admits he misremembered. I hope Sen. Levin makes the record reflect that this is the quality of evidence adduced in support of the policy.

Everyone should contact Senator Levin’s office and demand that the General be recalled to clarify his testimony.

This is shaping up to be better than the Elaine Donnerly testimony, for OUR side.

I’ve been on countless other sites railing about their misleading and inaccurate reporting on this issue. Many of them have headlines that say that the general apologized for blaming the massacre on gay soldiers when he didn’t really do that at all. He apologized for “giving the impression” that he was blaming INDIVIDUAL soldiers but he didn’t say that he didn’t think that the Dutch policy and gay soldiers as a whole were the problems. He also apologized for misstating the OTHER generals opinion. He never said, knowing now that what he believed to be the opinion of the Dutch general was false that he had changed his OWN mind about the cause of the tragedy.

Really? So you think the media’s on your side? Huh. Ya don’t say.

I’d been watching the media coverage of this issue, and I hadn’t noticed the slightest bit of media bias on this issue.

Note: Media Outlets and DADT repeal advocates are synonomous. Mentioning them both in the same sentence is redundant.

Of course as Senator Levin pointed out, the Dutch military suffered from a failure of training (peacekeeping/policing versus war fighting) that has absolutely nothing to do with gays in the military.

It was Sheehan’s failure (and others) at NATO to assign the Dutch, with full knowledge of their competencies, with confusing rules of engagement, to such a task.

Simply speaking, you don’t give the responsibility to a nurse to rebuild a jet engine any more than you’d tell a jet mechanic to handle someone’e medical care. Sheehan and the rest of NATO never should have sent a bunch of cops to fight an insurgency.

Sheehan is trying to rewrite history on the backs of gay people to save his legacy. That’s pretty warped, and his perspective should be viewed through that lens.

However, the conclusion of the Dutch inquiries into the fall and the massacre of Srebrenica and what NATO and the Dutch did wrong was indeed attributed to ‘the rules of engagement [...] with conflicting priorities and an ambivalent understanding of how to use the military’.

The problem was that the politicians in NATO countries believed they would only need peace keeping forces to protect and police the safe areas in Bosnia. That’s why the Dutch were allowed to bring only light artillery to the area, not heavy artillery. If things would go wrong, there would be air support, but in the case of Srebrenica, that never came, despite repeated calls from the Dutch.

There were other errors made, both on the ground, in the chain of command, and with relation to NATO.
But the basic error was the believe that peacekeepers would be enough, instead of peace enforcers.

What about an apology to Congress? and to the American People??

This was blatanly misleading and he needs to set the the record straight Over Here, in America!

They cannot win with the truth.