THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Appreciate your understanding, georgeob.

This doesn't bode well for those now serving.
For ican and McG, If you disagree with this post, please contact NYT; it's their article.
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For Recruiters, a Hard Toll From a Hard Sell
By DAMIEN CAVE

Published: March 27, 2005


The Army's recruiters are being challenged with one of the hardest selling jobs the military has asked of them in the nation's history, and many say the demands are taking a toll.

A recruiter in New York said pressure from the Army to meet his recruiting goals during a time of war has given him stomach problems and searing back pain. Suffering from bouts of depression, he said he has considered suicide.

Another, in Texas, said he had volunteered many times to go to Iraq rather than face ridicule, rejection and the Army's wrath.

An Army chaplain said he had counseled nearly a dozen recruiters in the past 18 months to help them cope with marital troubles and job-related stress.

"There were a couple of recruiters that felt they were having nervous breakdowns, literally," said Maj. Stephen Nagler, a chaplain who retired in March after serving at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where the New York City recruiting battalion is based.

Some two dozen recruiters nationwide were interviewed about their experiences over four months. Ten spoke with The New York Times even after an Army official sent an e-mail message advising all recruiters not to speak to a reporter, who was named. Most asked to remain anonymous to avoid being disciplined.

A handful who spoke said they were satisfied with their jobs. They said they took pride in seeing awkward, unfocused teenagers transform into confident soldiers and relished an opportunity to contribute to the Army effort.

But most told similar tales: of loving the military, of working hard to complete a task that seemed out of reach, of struggling to carry the nation's burden at a time of anxiety and stress.

The careers and self-esteem of recruiters rise and fall on their ability to fulfill a mission, said current and former Army officials and military experts who were also interviewed. Recruiters said falling short often generates a barrage of angry correspondence, formal reprimands, threats or even demotion.

"The recruiter is stuck in the situation where you're not going to make mission, it just won't happen," the New York recruiter said. "And you're getting chewed out every day for it. It's horrible." He said the assignment was more strenuous than the time he was shot at while deployed in Africa.

At least 37 members of the Army Recruiting Command, which oversees enlistment, have gone AWOL since October 2002, Army figures show. And, in what recruiters consider another sign of stress, the number of improprieties committed - signing up unqualified people to meet quotas or giving bonuses or other enlistment benefits to recruits not eligible for them - has increased, Army documents show.

"They don't necessarily have real bullets flying at them," said Major Nagler. "But there are different kind of bullets they need to contend with - the bullets of not producing numbers, of having a station commander shoot them down."

The Army is seeking 101,200 new active-duty Army and Reserve soldiers this year alone to replenish the ranks in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world and at home. That means each of the Army's 7,500 recruiters faces the grind of an unyielding human math at a time of extended war without a draft: a quota of two new recruits a month.

The mission puts them in a different kind of cross-fire: On one side, the military's requirement that new soldiers be found. On the other, resistance by many parents to Army careers for their children in wartime.

Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, commander of the Army Recruiting Command, acknowledged it is a stressful time for recruiters, who face "the toughest challenge to the all-volunteer Army" since it began in 1973.

"I do not deny being demanding," said General Rochelle, leader of the command since 2002. "We have a vitally important mission in terms of providing volunteers for an army that is at war and that is growing."

He said the Army has already added recruiters and taken measures to expand the pool of potential recruits, by accepting older recruits and more people without high school diplomas. More changes are being considered, he said.

But many recruiters said the Army continues to minimize how difficult it has become to find qualified volunteers during a war and in a growing economy.

Cicerone - for many years you've known me as a friend on this and other forums, so I'm taking the liberty of saying to you the following:

Do you print greenbacks in your basement? If you do, and can convince all takers (foreign and domestic) to accept them at face value, then you've solved our problems with foreign debt, social security, medicare, medicaid, trade and capital imbalances. If you don't, please be kind enough to guide the rest of us on where, and when, expenses should be cut, and on which - perfectly worthwhile - items, if we're to avoid national bankruptcy.

The above said with all due deference to all involved, as I hardly need add, since you know me!

I don't want those benefits reduced any more than I infer you do. I consider such benefits part of the just compensation paid to veterans for their life and health risking service to us for securing our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

You expressed an opinion that Bush reduced (and not merely advocated reducing) the health benefits paid by the federal government to veterans.

I posted to you that I had encountered zero evidence of that, and requested that you provide some.

You did not do that, but instead provided evidence that Bush was advocating such reduction. A link provided in some of that evidence you provided, provided me clear evidence that Bush was not advocating reductions now. I posted that evidence here above. That evidence clearly shows that Bush is now advocating increasing veteran health benefits. That was a pleasant big surprise.

Your above mischaracterizations of my actions are stunning in their blatancy as such.

Why did you do that?

Ms HofT, How to solve our national debt is the responsibility of the Congress, but it's obvious to many that their priorities are wrong. Here's one point that I will make for the sake of discussion. We are spending enormous amount of our assets in Iraq while our own citizens go without and are sacrificing more and more every year. I don't think our citizens intended for our Administration and Congress to transfer the financial and human sacrifice of Americans to Iraq without any end in sight. There is nothing I can do as one citizen of this country, but I am free to express my disappointment and criticise our government - at all levels, including state and local which I have done on many forums on a2k. I often do not agree with Greenspan, but it's a freedom we have in this country that allows us to criticise those that have influence on our lives. Lastly, Ms HofT, you are free to question my posts on a2k, because this is a forum which allows the free expression of everybody's ideas. The difference between you and I is the fact that we go back a long ways, and we usually understand and repect each other as individuals without the necessity to ad hominems and strawman arguments.

ican, Intent is just as important as action. It is also important that one's rhetoric is consistent with one's actions. You are too blind to realize the import of this.

When government prints greenbacks in its basement in order to pay for its increasingly expensive programs, the public is taxed via inflation. It's sort of like a consumption tax. Those who consume the most pay the most. However, those with smaller incomes generally pay a greater percentage of their income for consumption than do those with larger incomes.

On the otherhand, directly taxing a greater percentage of the incomes of those with the larger incomes causes them to invest less, thereby reducing the opportunities for those with the smaller incomes to continue receiving their incomes.

So we are in desperate need of CI's ideas on how to reduce the greenback tax and/or the direct income tax so as to minimize their effects on the poor and middle class.

Is CI audacious enough to propose reducing federal spending of any kind? If yes, that would also be stunning!

Quick note to all: CI is indeed a longtime friend as our posts indicate. ICann, as a fellow pilot I ask no more piling on CI - he's not the enemy.

I'm at the office on Saturday before Easter and have to vanish soon before vacation starting next week, so pls accept my sincere good wishes, all.

Some of us, certaintly not all of us think we were and continue to be stuck with a vicious tradeoff:

On the one hand, we sacrifice an enormous amount of our assets in Iraq in order to preserve the lives and health of an enormous number of our citizens.

On the other hand, we sacrifice an enormous amount of our citizens' lives and health in order to preserve for those of us who survive our enormous amount of assets.

We have established that all this is the fault of Cicerone's wife.

I think Cicrerone's arguments would prevail if there was a reason to believe that the government programs listed were the only or the best way to accomplish the objectives behind them. The sad fact is that government money tends to corrupt the values and efficiency of almost everything it touches.

As HofT has noted we do need to cut government expenditures, Cicerone is correct that it is possible to waste great sums on unnecessary or foolish wars. Where we disagree is in the merits of the war we are fighting now.

Is that allegation of yours, an ad hominem or a straw man?

To say what one does, and do what one says, is good only if what one does is good.

I don't agree. I think his wife is getting a bumwrap. I think the producer of that bagel he ate is to blame.

And ... don't forget. It happened on Bush's watch!

georgeob, We really don't disagree on the current war in Iraq; I have expressed my opinion that leaving Iraq will only give terrorists more amunition to attack other countries, because they'll know that we will cut and run when things got too hot for us. If you would go back on this forum, I am pretty much consistent on my views.

That's not to say I have not criticised the military or Congress for much waste of our resources or the way they have mismanaged this war.

That's it - I'm going to Cicerone's bagel shop!

Isn't this ass backwards?
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U.S. Is Examining Plan to Bolster Detainee Rights
By TIM GOLDEN

Published: March 27, 2005


The Defense Department is considering substantial changes to the military tribunals that the Bush administration established to prosecute foreign terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, military and administration officials say.

The proposed changes, many of which are detailed in a 232-page draft manual for the tribunals that has been circulating among Pentagon lawyers, come after widespread criticism from the federal courts, foreign governments and human rights groups.


Those changes include strengthening the rights of defendants, establishing more independent judges to lead the panels and barring confessions obtained by torture, the officials said.

The draft manual has renewed a sharp debate within the Bush administration between military and civilian lawyers who are pushing to overhaul the tribunals and other officials who have long insisted that suspected terrorists held at Guantánamo are not entitled to many of the basic rights granted defendants in United States courts.

Military officials said the draft, which is modeled after the Manual for Courts-Martial, was written under the auspices of the Pentagon official in charge of the tribunals, Maj. Gen. John D. Altenburg Jr., who is now retired. The proposals gained momentum after high-level discussions late last year that included officials at the Pentagon, the office of the White House Counsel and the National Security Council.

The proposals would generally move the tribunals - formally known as military commissions - more into line with the judicial standards applied to members of the American military in traditional courts-martial, officials said. Many military lawyers have privately urged such a shift since President Bush first authorized the commissions after Sept. 11.

The administration's willingness to restructure the commissions, which have been a central part of its strategy for fighting terrorism, is uncertain. Some officials said they considered the proposals premature because a lawsuit challenging the legality of the commissions is now in a federal appeals court.

In addition, some of the White House aides who supported changes to the commissions have recently moved to new jobs, leaving behind a small but powerful group of officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff, who have opposed changing to the commission rules unless forced to do so by the courts, officials said.

"There are a number of folks who would like to make changes," one Pentagon official said of the rules governing the military commissions. But, the official added, "Cheney is still driving a lot of this."

At an interagency meeting earlier this month on detainee policy, officials said, the State Department's designated legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, who was formerly the legal adviser on the National Security Council staff, raised the question of possible modifications to the commission procedures and was quickly rebuffed by Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington.

"We don't need any changes in the commissions," the officials quoted Mr. Addington as saying.

A spokesman for Mr. Bellinger, who was traveling, declined to comment. A spokesman for the vice president's office did not respond to requests for comment on Mr. Addington's views.

A spokeswoman for General Altenburg, Lt. Susan McGarvey, said, "We are always considering ways to improve the commissions process," but she declined to discuss the draft manual.

The plan to use military commissions to try terrorism suspects emerged in the weeks following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, from a small group of White House and Justice Department lawyers who consulted closely with Mr. Cheney, current and former administration officials have said.

By their own accounts, those officials sought to use the presidency's war powers to allow the military to detain, interrogate and prosecute terrorism suspects who might be harder to question or convict in the federal justice system.

It matters about what the leader of our country wants to do just as much as it matters what he actually gets done. What he wants to do is what he what will push to get done. If all he wants is things that only serve a certain bracket of the citizens he supposed to be serving then it matters. Hopefully next time an election comes around people will more from their president than one who gives rebates with extra money instead of saving it for a rainy day.

I don't know what it is about this examination of the subject plan that you think is ass backwards.

But I can tell you what I think is wrong about it.

First, I would grant to prisoner combatants from whatever source derived only those rights the combatants themselves grant to their prisoners. For example if the combatants are compliers with the Geneva Accords, I would require that prisoner combatants we hold be treated in compliance with the Geneva Accords. Otherwise, I would hold such prisoners without trial until all combat operations have ceased. After such operations have ceased, I would try only those prisoner combatants for which we have reasonable cause to believe committed crimes against civilians. I would release the rest ,and after trial release those found innocent.

Second, interrogation of prisoner combatants should never cause death, dismemberment, disability, or illness, regardless of how combatants interrogate their prisoners.

ican's comments are in blue


By the way, Bush clearly has stopped pushing for reduction of Veteran Health benefits. That is, he stopped pushing for that if he ever previously did push for that.