26 January 2005

Military recruiters are free to prey on your kids

In the January 24 edition of NPR's All Things Considered, it was reported that a provision of the "No Child Left Behind" act forces high schools to provide names, addresses, and telephone numbers of every high school junior and seniors to military recruiters.

Military recruiters are using lies, trickery, and bribery in an attempt to fill the ranks with new blood. You would have to live in a vacuum to have avoided seeing the TV ad campaigns run during sports events that are likely to have a high viewership of young males. In a spot for the USMC, a soldier runs through obstacles in a video game environment and slays a giant monster with a sword. The Army had spots glorifying the "Army of One". The ad campaigns are glitzy, slick, glamorous and expensive and are designed to appeal to the macho instincts of youth with the implication that this is how you should serve your country. According to a GAO study , the advertising costs per recruit have tripled since 1990 from $640 to $1900.

The Veterans for Peace report that recruiters typically lie to potential candidates about the GI Bill, Veterans' Benefits, and job assignments.

According to military lawyers and recruiters, the "lies" involve serious deception. "The system is structured using lies to get people in," explained J. E. McNeil, director of the Washington-based Center of Conscience and War.

"Recruiters don't just lie about the money for college, their Military Occupational Specialty or tell them they won't go to combat. They tell the recruits to lie about their medical and drug histories and their criminal records. There's widespread deception and dishonesty," said military lawyer Luke Hiken.

When recruiters think they have a "fish" on the line, they won't give up. This from Soldiers for the Truth :

“Recruiters have called my son a minimum of 20 times in the two years since he finished high school,” a dad reports. “The phone calls usually come in clusters. I answered five calls in a two- or three-week span. Each time a recruiter calls, he receives the same polite, respectful response from me or my son ... no interest, and please take the name off the list. When asked why the name hasn’t been removed, excuses are made. While recruiters are brief with me, when my son is on the phone, the sales tactics are clever, prolonged and very high-pressure.”

The lies from the White House have fostered a culture of "them or us" and misled our children (as well as our adults) into believing that the Iraq War is protecting us from the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. In the famous Washington Post poll of September 2003, over 2/3 of respondents believed that Saddam was personally involved in 9/11. In fact, many people I speak with still believe this fallacy even though the 9/11 Commission debunked it and even Bush himself has said there is no connection. How did this happen? It was a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign of misinformation and outright lies from "White House spokesmen speaking on the condition of anonymity". In other words, lie balloons floated to an eager press wanting the latest "scoop" on Saddam in the run-up to the war.

The truth about this war is being suppressed. The only way that Bush could goad the public into supporting it was to lie. The only way to gain recruits to fight it is to lie. The Bush Administration operates in an environment steeped in untruths, cherry-picked intelligence, spin, and fantasy. There is no glamour to be had in the killing business, which is exactly what the military is designed to do.