The Sacramento Bee asks the headlined question and answers, unsurprisingly, “Yes.” Other news outlets have reported the increasing use of criminal history waivers by the Army and the Army National Guard as recruiting became one of the casualties of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, but the Bee is the first to connect the criminal histories of soldiers with concrete consequences ranging from petty theft to war crimes.
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 convictions and serious drug, alcohol or mental health problems.
Of those, 70 later were involved in controversial or criminal incidents in Iraq.
The story goes on to relate some of the “incidents,” which include assaults on other US soldiers, the murder of an Iraqi soldier, several instances of murdering Iraqi civilians, a few Abu Ghraib indiscretions and, perhaps most famously at the time, the shootings of an Italian intelligence agent escorting a kidnapped and recovered Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, by Mario Lozano, Jr., who is quoted as saying that “[i]f it wasn’t for [Sgrena], it wouldn’t have happened. It was her idea to go over there and mingle with terrorists.” Lozano has a history of domestic violence and floating bad checks, and is accused of being a deadbeat dad.
Another of the soldiers in the story, whose record included an arrest for trading a joint for oral sex from a 13-year-old girl, “enlisted weeks after his release from a federal prison in Oregon.”
In February of this year, the Associated Press reported on a Pentagon study showing that the number of waivers for recruits with misdeameanor and felony convictions had doubled between 2003, the year of the invasion, and 2006. In the Army, the percentage of recruits who needed waivers rose from about 13% in 2003—roughly 9,600—to about 20% in 2006—roughly 16,000. The total number of recruits needing waivers throughout all branches of the military for the three years was more than 100,000, with the Marines recruiting the highest percentage.
Oohrah.
Of course with only boy scouts being recruited, the criminals issuing the orders would still be responsible for most of the awfulness the orders required.
Thanks to your new blogroll, I found some of the most awful evidence of our war crimes- of any war crimes – I’ve ever seen outside of the Holocaust. Avedon Carol (wow, is she pink or what?) led me to Sadly, No!, and this.
I don’t even want to be American anymore.