Army, Marines give waivers to more felonsWASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Army and Marine Corps are allowing convicted felons to serve in increasing numbers, newly released Department of Defense statistics show.
Recruits were allowed to enlist after having been convicted of crimes including assault, burglary, drug possession and making terrorist threats.
Pentagon statistics show the Army granted 511 felony waivers in 2007, just over twice the 249 it granted the year before. The Army aims to recruit more than 80,000 new soldiers a year.
The Marines -- which recruits fewer new service members each year than the Army -- also reported a rise in waivers for felonies, with 350 granted in 2007, compared with 208 in 2006.
The Army defended its use of waivers as a response to a changing American society, arguing that only three in 10 Americans of military age "meet all our stringent medical, moral, aptitude or administrative requirements."
"Today's young men and women are more overweight, have a greater incidence of asthma, and are being charged for offenses that in earlier years wouldn't have been considered a serious offense, and might not have resulted in charges in the first place," John P. Boyce Jr. of Army Public Affairs said in a statement to CNN.
He said the Army never issues waivers for some types of offenses, including sexual violence, alcoholism and drug trafficking.
But the Pentagon statistics showed the Army allowed 106 convicted burglars to enlist in 2007, up from 36 the year before. It also granted waivers to 43 recruits convicted of aggravated assault that year, up from 33 a year before; and to 130 people convicted of possession of drugs other than marijuana, a rise from 71 in 2006.
It also allowed two people convicted of making terrorist or bomb threats to enlist in 2007, up from one the year before. - CNN
Does the military understand what "making a terrorist threat" is, or does the so-called Patriot Act outlaw things it shouldn't? It has to be one or the other. Either making terrorist threat is a serious crime or it isn't, and the PA should be about only serious crimes. We've already seen how the government took a group of, shall we say, less-than-normal-intelligence men (who told their neighborors that they were terrorists and claimed the black uniforms they wore were "terrorist uniforms") and charged them with various violations of the PA. (The guys were going to take a building in Chicago....using bows and arrows. Of course, the "terrorists" were in Florida, and probably couldn't have found Chicago on a map, let alone been able to read a bus schedule.)
But now, we are being told by the Army that aggravated assault and making terrorist threats isn't so bad. What is worse is that the military wants to
train these guys in how to fight and use weapons.
Claiming that only three in 10 Americans of military age "meet all our stringent medical, moral, aptitude or administrative requirements" is really unnecessary, since the requirements are obviously things that can be changed. Their logic leads to the solution of drafting gangs members; at least many of them already have some weapons experience.
If the demands of bush's war are too much for the military, maybe we ought to re-assess things.
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Aggravated Assault: An unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury. This type of assault usually is accompanied by the use of a weapon or by means likely to produce death or great bodily harm. - (The offense definitions in the UCR Program are based on the common-law definitions found in the Black's Law Dictionary, the Program's 1932 Standard Classification of Offenses, and the National Crime Information Center's Uniform Offense Classifications.) -
University of California Police Department
