Fox News military propagandist is now a 'three-star birther'

Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, an Army doctor who is facing a court martial for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan on the grounds that he does not believe President Obama was born in the United States, has gained a prominent supporter.

According to a statement issued by the American Patriot Foundation, a sworn affidavit from Lt. Gen. (ret.) Thomas McInerney has been "filed in Court-Martial in support of Lakin’s motions for subpoenas for all of the president’s school records, and for a deposition of the custodian of Obama’s birth records in the possession of the State of Hawaii."

"I recall commanding forces that were equipped with nuclear weapons," McInerney argues in the affidavit. "In my command capacity I was responsible that personnel with access to these weapons had an unwavering and absolute confidence in the unified chain of command, because such confidence was absolutely essential-- vital-- in the event the use of those weapons was authorized. ... Today, because of the widespread and legitimate concerns that the President is constitutionally ineligible to hold office, I fear what would happen should such a crisis occur today."

Dave Weigel at Slate calls Mcinerney's support "a good get for the birthers." He describes McInerney as "a serious person," who often appears on Fox News as a military analyst and is "not some kook."

Despite Weigel's opinion, however, the general whom MSNBC's Rachel Maddow described in a Wednesday segment as a "three star birther" has a long history of extreme statements and questionable associations.

Last winter, for example, following the failed Christmas Day airline bombing, he called for "harsh" racial profiling of Muslims. "If you are an 18 to 28-year-old Muslim man then you should be strip searched," McInerney stated during an appearance on Fox. "And if we don’t do that, there’s a very high probability we’re going to lose an airliner."

In 2008, McInerney told the Washington Times that he and other retired senior officers were "very concerned" about then-candidate Barack Obama's "apparent lack of understanding on the threat of radical Islam to the United States."

During a 2006 appearance on Fox News he put forward a theory that Saddam Hussein really did have WMDs which were never found because the Russians "sent a team in, a Spetsnaz [Russian Special Forces] team in, and they moved those weapons into three locations in Syria and one into Bekaa Valley. And they did it very thoroughly. ... They knew exactly where all the material was, because they were preventing the inspectors from finding it."

Also in 2006, McInerney called for Senator John Kerry's resignation on the grounds that he had insulted the military by telling a group of students that if you don't get a good education "you get stuck in Iraq."

And following the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London, he asserted that al Qaeda could easily carry out a similar bombing in the United States but added, "Why attack here, when you have leftists in America who have aided and abetted the enemy more than Tokyo Rose did in World War II? They don’t need to set off bombs. If they set off bombs, they would silence the shrill of leftists in the United States."

In 2008, McInerney was exposed as one of the so-called "Pentagon pundits," who had used his position as a Fox analyst to promote Bush administration talking points.

One email from McInerney to a Pentagon press secretary, analyzed by the Center for Media and Democracy, shows him working closely with Melanie Morgan, the head of Move America Forward. Morgan became notorious in 2006 for saying that New York Times editor Bill Keller should be executed in a "gas chamber" for exposing government surveillance of Americans, and her group is currently closely associated with the Tea Parties.

McInerney has also served on the advisory council of the Intelligence Summit, among whose participants extreme anti-Muslim theories -- like the notion that Saddam's WMDs were smuggled into Syria -- are commonplace.

According to RightWeb, "Members of the summit's advisory council appear to be a mishmash of former intelligence/military officers and other intelligence experts, many of whom are linked to neoconservative and other right-wing institutes and pressure groups that call for a more aggressive war on terrorism and for closer intelligence and military links with Israel. Several, including Lt. Col. Bill Cowan, Clare Lopez, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, and Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, are principals of the Iran Policy Committee, a hardline group in Washington that calls for regime change in Iran through support of the Iraq-based People's Freedom Fighters (MEK)."