Ever More Lovely Treatment Of Vets

There’s no way government bureaucrats would screw up a presidential order and an explicit law passed by Congress right? Not even with this bunch of pathetic Democrats and the Emperor who has no clothes in the White House?

Guess again.

Once again, mediocrity and pettiness triumphs over valor and law.

Read it and weep:

Despite a 2002 promise from President Bush to put citizenship applications for immigrant members of the military on a fast track, some are finding themselves waiting months, or even years, because of bureaucratic backlogs. One, Sgt. Kendell K. Frederick of the Army, who had tried three times to file for citizenship, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq as he returned from submitting fingerprints for his application.

About 7,200 service members or people who have been recently discharged have citizenship applications pending, but neither the Department of Defense nor Citizenship and Immigration Services keeps track of how long they have been waiting. Immigration lawyers and politicians say they have received a significant number of complaints about delays because of background checks, misplaced paperwork, confusion about deployments and other problems.

“I’ve pretty much given up on finding out where my paperwork is, what’s gone wrong, what happened to it,” said Abdool Habibullah, 27, a Guyanese immigrant who first applied for citizenship in 2005 upon returning from a tour in Iraq and was honorably discharged from the Marines as a sergeant. “If what I’ve done for this country isn’t enough for me to be a citizen, then I don’t know what is.”

The bit about not tracking the status of the citizenship applications is GALLING!  On the Kitty Hawk we had a young female sailor straight out of boot camp who energetically in her own time kept track of the more than 220 active citizenship applications we had (being forward deployed and conventional-powered, the ship had more non-citizens than most commands combined) and each year we had a citizenship ceremony in Guam for on average 30-50 sailors.  You’re telling me this 19 year old legalman quite possibly had her ish more together than the big wigs in the Beltway?  I promise you she didn’t have some magical Excel file or organizational capacity she wasn’t sharing…. she just actually gave a damn about her job and took particular pride in being able to share in helping her fellow sailors achieving a lifelong goal.

Our government is not cut out for this. Its not cut out for much of anything these days.

AFRICOM Is DOA? Pt. 1

Amid reports that AFRICOM is for the time being staying in Stuttgart, Germany after a marginal presidential visit from George Bush to several African nations that found him confronted with often contentious discussions from his hosts about AFRICOM bases in their country, it is safe to propose a few questions from a good idea that has rapidly devolved into a fiasco:

1. How could the USG announce something as groundbreaking as AFRICOM and not have anything substantial in mind, let alone ready, beyond vague, conflicting ideas? Does this seem scatterbrained and counterproductive only to me?

2. Where was/is the careful consideration of Africa’s needs and opportunites with AFRICOM? At a time when the US looks less and less like the dispensible nation in Africa (indifference to the Congo, Dar Fur, Zimbabwe and Kenya, for starters), where are the programs to provide an assist on issues like weapons trafficking, insurgencies, endemic tribialism, internally displaced refugees, pandemic diseases and child soldiers, let alone any of the major crisis zones noted above?

3. At a time when the US is still not paying its UN dues (screwing over peacekeeping missions the world over, especially in Africa), is doing next to nothing to assist the far greater and more serious security issues in places like the Congo and Sudan and is far more interested in promoting charity than economic development, did anyone stop to think that a narrow focus on terrorism and Islamist groups would win many friends on the continent?

4. Above all else, what is the damn point? If its a military command, where are the peacekeepers for the ethnic cleansing in Kenya and the Congo (let alone the funding for such missions). If its a hybrid command, where the hell are the resources and the personnel for targeted efforts against some of the problems mentioned above like child soldiering and IDP security?

How is this not another pathetic example of our dysfunctional government, military and leadership?

P.S. Though Germany was not the greatest offender in the colonial crimes waged against Africans (ed.note: wait a minute didn’t the Germans commit a few outright variants on genocide against tribes in their colonies?), does anyone else miss the serious bad juju from basing a command for Africa in Europe?

Could we at least have it in Liberia for now? Or on a ship off the coast?

Tomorrow: What an AFRICOM that meant business would entail.

Deployed Soldiers Losing Custody Of Their Kids

Having personally witnessed the enormous lengths to which some military parents will go to take care of their children and nearly been disciplined myself while in the service for going to bat for someone who went UA (unauthorized absence) to get his son from his hard-partying, alcoholic ex-wife who had custody of him (mainly because he was on a 10 month deployment with the Abraham Lincoln strike group at the time of the custody hearing), I heard this story on NPR this week and my blood boiled.

To add insult to injury, the soldier at the center of this particular story (and there have been quite a few over the last few years about this avoidable tragedy) is damn near penniless because of the legal effort she’s had to mount to try to regain custody of her oldest son.

Towne still works full time for the National Guard. But she says the legal battle over custody of her son has left her penniless.“So it’s been very, very traumatic just trying to sustain day-to-day life while still trying to get my son back,” Towne says.

This should never be the case; the military should pick up the full tab for the best legal effort reasonably possible for military parents in custody battles where their deployment in defense of this country is utilized by the contesting parent as a significant reason for their desire to take custody of the child in question.

Notice how the lawyer for the soldier’s ex-husband denies her most basic rights as a parent because she (Gasp!) joined the National Guard:

Diffin’s attorney, Robert Cohen, goes a step further, arguing that soldiers such as Towne put their rights as parents on the line when they volunteer for military duty.

“She was not drafted. This was a job choice. She went into it with open eyes,” Cohen says.

    This kind of legal argument is not only dishonest in many cases (how many service members have their kids while in the service?) but its a grievous assault on their rights as parents. How is this not an argument for disenfranchisement of their rights as parents because they joined the military? How many courts are buying this nonsense and what is the impact on the family, especially the service member who has just been told they’re not fit for parenting because they serve in the military.

Let’s look at what can be done here.

- DOD needs to coordinate with all 50 governors and attorney generals and discuss, propose and implement legislative solutions immediately. Obviously custody battles are local and state issues, but if necessary federal legislation will have to be considered to protect the rights of military parents.

- DOD and Congress need to find funding to support the legal costs of parents in custody battles (only in cases where a service member’s deployment is at the heart of the reason for challenging custody) so that they don’t further harm their cause by going broke just trying to keep or regain custody.

- More funding for counseling services, marriage support activities and other family-centric aids needs to happen, even giving the occasionally generous increases over the past 7 years.  There is a widely acknowledged crisis among military marriage rates, and inevitably if children involved they suffer even if the custody arrangements are cordial, which in far too many cases they are not.

- Tax credits should be passed for family law firms willing to take military parents as their clients at reduced fees.

There are certainly likely better ideas out there to help address this situation.  I hope active milbloggers and others would consider this issue (if they haven’t already).