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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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October 1st, 2006 - U.S. is
Recruiting Misfits for Army |
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U.S. is Recruiting Misfits
for Army Felons, Racists, Gang Members Fill in the Ranks By Nick Turse San Fransisco Chronicle Sunday, October 1, 2006 After falling short of its
goals last year, military recruiting in 2006 has been marked by upbeat
pronouncements from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, claims of success by
the White House, and a spate of recent press reports touting the military's
achievement of its woman- and manpower goals. But the armed forces have
met with success only through a fundamental transformation, and not the transformation
of the military - that "co-evolution of concepts, processes,
organizations and technology" that Rumsfeld is always talking about
either. While the secretary of
defense's longstanding goal of transforming the planet's most powerful
military into its highest-tech, most agile, most futuristic fighting force
has, in the words of the Washington Post's David VonDrehle, "melted
away," the very makeup of the armed forces has been mutating before our
collective eyes under the pressure of the war in Iraq. This actual
transformation has been reported, but only in scattered articles on the new
recruitment landscape in America. Last year, despite NASCAR,
professional bull-riding and Arena Football sponsorships, popular video games
that doubled as recruiting tools, TV commercials dripping with seductive
scenes of military glory, a "joint marketing communications and market
research and studies" program designed to attract, among others,
dropouts and those with criminal records for military service, and at least
$16,000 in promotional costs for each soldier it managed to sign up, the U.S.
military failed to meet its recruiting goals. This year, those methods
have been pumped up and taken over the top in several critical areas that
make the old Army ad tagline, "Be All You Can Be," into material
for late-night TV punch lines of the future. In 2004, the Pentagon
published a "Moral Waiver Study," whose seemingly benign goal was
"to better define relationships between pre-Service behaviors and
subsequent Service success." That turned out to mean opening more
recruitment doors to potential enlistees with criminal records. In February, the Baltimore
Sun wrote that there was "a significant increase in the number of
recruits with what the Army terms 'serious criminal misconduct' in their
background" - a category that included "aggravated assault,
robbery, vehicular manslaughter, receiving stolen property and making
terrorist threats." From 2004 to 2005, the number of those recruits rose
by more than 54 percent, while alcohol and illegal drug waivers, reversing a
four-year decline, increased by more than 13 percent. In June, the Chicago Sun-Times
reported that, under pressure to fill the ranks, the Army had been allowing
into its ranks increasing numbers of "recruits convicted of misdemeanor
crimes, according to experts and military records." In fact, as the
military's own data indicated, "the percentage of recruits entering the
Army with waivers for misdemeanors and medical problems has more than doubled
since 2001." One beneficiary of the
Army's new moral-waiver policies gained a certain prominence this summer.
After Steven Green, who served in the 101st Airborne Division, was charged in
a rape and quadruple murder in Mahmudiyah, Iraq, it was disclosed that he had
been "a high-school dropout from a broken home who enlisted to get some
direction in his life, yet was sent home early because of an anti-social
personality disorder." Recently, Eli Flyer, a
former Pentagon senior military analyst and specialist on the relationship
between military recruiting and military misconduct, told Harper's magazine
that Green had "enlisted with a moral waiver for at least two drug- or
alcohol-related offenses. He committed a third alcohol-related offense just
before enlistment, which led to jail time, although this offense may not have
been known to the Army when he enlisted." With Green in jail awaiting
trial, the Houston Chronicle reported in August that Army recruiters were
trolling around the outskirts of a Dallas-area job fair for ex-convicts. "We're looking for high
school graduates with no more than one felony on their record," one
recruiter said. The Army has even looked
behind prison bars for fill-in recruits - in one reported case, they went to
a "youth prison" in Ogden, Utah. Although Steven Price had asked to
see a recruiter while still incarcerated, he was "barely 17 when he
enlisted last January" and his divorced parents say "recruiters
used false promises and forged documents to enlist him." While confusion exists about
whether the boy's mother actually signed a parental consent form allowing her
son to enlist, his "father apparently wasn't even at the signing, but
his name is on the form too." Law enforcement officials
report that the military is now "allowing more applicants with gang
tattoos," the Chicago Sun-Times reports, "because they are under
the gun to keep enlistment up." They also note that "gang activity
maybe rising among soldiers." The paper was provided with "photos
of military buildings and equipment in Iraq that were vandalized with
graffiti of gangs based in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities." Last month, the Sun-Times reported
that a gang member facing federal charges of murder and robbery enlisted in
the Marine Corps "while he was free on bond - and was preparing to ship
out to boot camp when Marine officials recently discovered he was under
indictment." While this recruit was eventually booted from the Corps, a
Milwaukee police detective and Army veteran, who serves on the federal drug
and gang task force that arrested the would-be Marine, noted that other
"gang-bangers are going over to Iraq and sending weapons back ... gang
members are getting access to military training and weapons." Earlier this year, it was
reported that an expected transfer of 10,000 to 20,000 troops to Fort Bliss,
Texas, caused FBI and local law enforcement to fear a turf war between
"members of the FolkNation gang ... (and) a criminal group that is
already well-established in the area, Barrio Azteca." The New York Sun
wrote that, according to one FBI agent, "FolkNation, which was founded
in Chicago and includes several branches using the name Gangster Disciples,
has gained a foothold in the Army." Another type of gang member
has also begun to proliferate within the military, evidently thanks to
lowered recruitment standards and an increasing tendency of recruiters to
look the other way. In July, a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center,
which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, found that because of
pressing manpower concerns, "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead
extremists" are now serving in the military. "Recruiters are
knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces,
and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively
identify them as extremists or gang members," said Scott Barfield, a
Defense Department investigator quoted in the report. The New York Times noted
that the neo-Nazi magazine Resistance is actually recruiting for the U.S.
military, urging "skinheads to join the Army and insist on being
assigned to light infantry units." As the magazine explained, "The
coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an
infantryman's war. ... It will be house-to-house ... until your town or city
is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can
be hunted down and 'cleansed.' " Apparently, the recruiting
push has worked. Barfield reported that he and other investigators have
identified a network of neo-Nazi active-duty Army and Marine personnel spread
across five military installations in five states. "They're communicating
with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their
identities secret, about organizing within the military," he said. Little wonder that Aryan
Nation graffiti is now apparently competing for space with American
inner-city gang graffiti in Iraq. In the latter half of the
Vietnam War, the U.S. military started to crumble from within and American
troops began scrawling "UUUU" on their helmet liners - an
abbreviation that stood for "the unwilling, led by the unqualified,
doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful." With a growing majority of
Americans opposed to the war in Iraq and even ardent hawks refusing to enlist
in droves, new policies creating a lower-quality officer corps and the
Pentagon pulling out ever more stops and sinking to new lows to recruit and
train troops, a new all-volunteer generation of UUUU's may emerge - the
underachieving, unable, unexceptional, unintelligent, unsound, unhinged,
unacceptable, unhealthy, undesirable, unloved and uncivil - all led by the
unqualified, doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful. Current practices suggest
this may well be the force of the future. It certainly isn't the new military
Rumsfeld's been promising all these years, but there's no denying the depth
of the transformation. Nick Turse works in the
department of epidemiology at Columbia University. External link:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/10/01/ING42LCIGK1.DTL |