This is Comforting

Manifesto

We all know that the U.S. military lowered its recruiting standards, allowing high school drop-outs, the overweight, and the stupid, in order to meet its recruiting goals. But did anyone really expect this:

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.
[...]
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.

The number of waivers for felony convictions also increased, to 11 percent of the 8,129 moral waivers granted in 2006, from 8 percent.

So let me get this straight, the policy of the American government is to give weapons training to people with violent criminal histories, sending them to a war zone where their job is to police a violent sectarian conflict, and, if they are lucky enough to survive without injury, return home to the U.S. With President Bush's recent cut in VA funding and stories like this:

VA system ill-equipped to treat mental anguish of war[...]
The Department of Veterans Affairs is facing a wave of returning veterans like Bowman who are struggling with memories of a war where it's hard to distinguish innocent civilians from enemy fighters and where the threat of suicide attacks and roadside bombs haunts the most routine mission. Since 2001, about 1.4 million Americans have served in Iraq, Afghanistan or other locations in the global war on terror.
[...]
Despite a decade-long effort to treat veterans at all VA locations, nearly 100 local VA clinics provided virtually no mental health care in 2005. Beyond that, the intensity of treatment has worsened. Today, the average veteran with psychiatric troubles gets about one-third fewer visits with specialists than he would have received a decade ago.

I'm guessing we can look forward to a lot more stories like this last month from Britain:

Gulf war veteran who slid into despair and self-loathing after leaving the army admitted yesterday that he had cold-bloodedly shot dead four members of his family after finally "flipping".

and this from a little closer to home: John Allen Muhammad.