#356: John Sheehan

General John J. “Jack” Sheehan is a retired United States Marine Corps general. His final active duty commands, culminating 35 years of service in the Marine Corps, were as the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic for NATO and as Commander-in-Chief for the U.S. Atlantic Command.

In 2010 Sheehan testified to the US Congress that according to the chief of staff of the Dutch army at the time of the incident, the fall of Srebrenica was caused by lack of readiness related to the Dutch being more concerned with internal “socialization” of the military than fighting capacity (the Dutch chief of staff at the time of Srebrenica, Henk van den Breemen, denied ever saying this, though, claiming that Sheehan’s comments were “total nonsense”). Sheehan added that this was in part due to gays serving in the military. He also stated that gays weakened the army, while attraction between men and women in gender-integrated units would not, and also that gays were responsible for the Srebrenica massacre.

The allegations drew some criticisms, to put it nicely. The responses from the Dutch Minister of Defense and the Dutch Prime Minister were … terse.

Barry Farber at the WorldNetDaily defended him, of course, and even took the whole thing a couple of steps further. Sheehan himself didn’t come across as particularly prone to repentance, and has later appeared with garbledly insane rightwing fundamentalist monsters such as Tony Perkins, Bryan Fischer and James Inhofe.

Diagnosis: Failing to distinguish fact and fiction generated by deepset bigotry (“absolute nonsense” according to the Dutch Defense Ministry), Sheehan entertains “the ridiculous convulsion of a loner” (The Dutch SHK). His views are “the bizarre private opinion of someone without an official function” (Dutch foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen), however one wonders how widespread his delusions are in the organizations that formerly employed him.