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Reply to "GWB and Catch 22"

CATCH-22 IN ACTION --

"MORALS WAIVERS" granted to new army recruits...
SOCIOPATHS rendered fit for duty...

As per Catch-22.... If you can be declared insane, you are thereupon deemed unfit for duty. But then you're sent back to fly another mission... Why?

.... So Yossarian refuses to wear his uniform anymore. He appears at roll call stark naked.
He is asked why, and he replies that after one his airmen was shot up in the plane, and his
uniform bloodied, he never wanted to wear a US Air Force uniform ever again.
Declared insane, he is immediately sent back on flight duty.
Why?
... BECAUSE ONLY AN INSANE MAN IS FIT TO FIGHT THIS WAR.



from

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/14/us/14private.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin


"On the last day of January 2005, Steven D. Green, the former Army private accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her family, sat in a Texas jail on alcohol-possession charges, an unemployed 19-year-old high school dropout who had just racked up his third misdemeanor conviction.

"Days later, Mr. Green enlisted in a soldier-strapped Army, and was later assigned to a star-crossed unit to serve on an especially murderous patch of earth.

"He arrived at the very moment that the Army was increasing by nearly half the rate at which it granted what it calls "moral waivers" to potential recruits. The change opened the ranks to more people like Mr. Green, those with minor criminal records and weak educational backgrounds. In Mr. Green's case, his problems were emerging by junior high school, say people who knew him then.

"Steven Green lasted only another four months in the Army, but it was a grim, violent and chaotic stretch. Seventeen battalion members were killed, two of them mutilated after being kidnapped; of those killed, eight belonged to Mr. Green's Bravo Company of about 110 soldiers. Even the modest quarters taken over the Bravo Company, an abandoned potato warehouse, burned to the ground in an accidental fire, destroying letters, video players, and the small personal tokens the soldiers had slipped into their war gear.

.... "The share of Army recruits who received "moral waivers" for criminal records increased last year and through the first half of 2006 by 15 percent from 10 percent or 11 percent before the war, according to statistics released this week. (According to the Pentagon, the number of waivers in 2001 totaled 7,640. The figure increased to 11,018 in 2005, and for the first six months of this fiscal year totaled 5,636.)

.... "A year later almost to the day, a federal criminal complaint says, Mr. Green and the four other soldiers charged in the case drank alcohol, changed into black clothes and then raided the home of a husband and wife and their two daughters.

"Mr. Green, the complaint charges, went into a room and killed the parents and the younger daughter. Then, it says, he and a second soldier sexually assaulted the 14-year-old, shot her and tried to burn her body."
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