The story is a little long, so I will pull out a few of the details for those of you who don't have time to read it all.
A yearlong examination of military and civilian records by The Sacramento Bee involving hundreds of troops who entered the services since the Iraq war began identified 120 cases of people whose backgrounds should have raised the suspicions of military recruiters, including felony convitions and serious drug, alcohol or mental health problems.
Of those, 70 later were involved in controversial or criminal incidents in Iraq.
This should be another nail in the coffin of the Bush administration's claims to care about the military and the general defense of the United States. In order to fill the ranks after mass defections and multiple tours of duty in the hell of Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has significantly reduced their standards of admission, including increasing dramatically the number of waivers to applicants for a wide variety of criminal activity.
In other words, they are taking people who could not legally possess a regular firearm in our country, giving them automatic weapons, and dropping them off in a war zone. Who could possibly foresee any problems with that?
"How in the hell can they legally possess a gun?" asked Montgomery County, Ala., Sheriff D.T. Marshall, when questioned about a soldier from his county.
That soldier, Eli C. Gregory, was convicted in an attempted home invasion and of felony theft in Alabama, making him ineligible to legally possess a firearm there. Yet the military gave him a rifle and sent him to Iraq, where he was convicted by the Army of assault and battery on a fellow soldier and discharged.
Gregory, who returned to Alabama after his court-martial, said during an interview that he still cannot legally possess a firearm in the United States.
But wait, it gets better (actually worse, but we can be sarcastic at this point, right?) Does anyone remember Nicola Calipari?
In another well-publicized incident, Army Spc. Mario L. Lozano Jr. fueled anti-war protest across Italy when he mistakenly shot and wounded an Italian journalist and killed her bodyguard at a checkpoint in Iraq. The shooting of Nicola Calipari, an Italian intelligence agent, and journalist Giuliana Sgrena, whose freedom Calipari had help secure, bolstered anti-war sentiment in Italy credited with helping elect a new government, which pulled its troops from Iraq in late 2006.
Though the shooting was the subject of hundreds of news accounts, including a "60 Minutes" segment, and described in two books, The Bee uncovered criminal records on Lozano not previously made public.
Gee, what's that called again...Oh yeah, investigative journalism. I didn't think anyone did that anymore!
In 1994, for instance, a man who repossessed Lozano’s car told Hollywood, Fla., police that Lozano threatened him.
"My Rottweiler was barking," Lozano explained in an interview. "I look out my window, and there’s a guy rolling the car back. So I came out. I grabbed a bat."
Lozano joined the Army in 1998. Two years later, his wife dialed 911 and told Hollywood police that Lozano had hit her in the face with his open hand because she had been seeing another man.
So he hits his wife, then doubletimes it back to the base in Alaska to avoid getting arrested. Time to lie low, right?
In Alaska, Fairbanks police twice sought Lozano regarding threats to a man there, he was accused of writing bad checks, and eventually owed child support of more than $5,500, prompting a Florida court to take legal action.
Lozano left the active duty Army in 2001 but joined the National Guard in July 2003. Less than two years later, he was sitting atop a Humvee parked near a road leading to the Baghdad airport, manning an M-240B belt-fed machine gun that can fire 10 large-caliber rounds per second.
and I can't think of a better place to put a person of such outstanding moral character, can you?
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