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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Here's where they're getting the soldiers for the surge
Posted by Jill | 7:47 AM
Because the Administration is determined to have its "surge" in Iraq without instituting the draft, it's willing to allow people who have no business being anywhere near a gun into the military:

The number of waivers granted to Army recruits with criminal backgrounds has grown about 65 percent in the last three years, increasing to 8,129 in 2006 from 4,918 in 2003, Department of Defense records show.

During that time, the Army has employed a variety of tactics to expand its diminishing pool of recruits. It has offered larger enlistment cash bonuses, allowed more high school dropouts and applicants with low scores on its aptitude test to join, and loosened weight and age restrictions.

It has also increased the number of so-called “moral waivers” to recruits with criminal pasts, even as the total number of recruits dropped slightly. The sharpest increase was in waivers for serious misdemeanors, which make up the bulk of all the Army’s moral waivers. These include aggravated assault, burglary, robbery and vehicular homicide.


Wonderful. We're taking violent criminals into the military, and then we wonder how atrocities like that perpetrated by Steven Green happen.

It's clear Bush really doesn't care what the troops in Iraq do in our name. It's clear that he doesn't care whether the Iraqi civilians he professes to be liberating and upon whom he's benevolently bestowning democracy are treated like this. And a guy who used to stick firecrackers into frogs and blow them up undoubtedly thinks this is hilarious.

Given his dehumanization of the population in the country he ordered invaded, how can anyone believe this "surge" is about making Iraq safer for the population that lives there any more than anyone can believe that pissing off the entire Middle East somehow makes the U.S. any safer?

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