Wampum

Greg Newbold went public with his regrets over the weekend. He urged active-duty officers to speak out now if they had doubts about the war.

That's pretty damn lame.

Lame to the tune of 2.5k US KIA, and 25K US WIA, and 125K US PSTD, and 10^^6 Iraqi military and civilian KIA/WIA and 2.6x10^^8 Iraqis PSTD'd and left in civil war, Haliburton and friends picking up the GNP of Brazil, and BushCo stealing the '04 election using "war" to get political advantage, and continuing to use "war powers" to run the Republic deeper and deeper into coup country.

We agree on a fundamental: "Enlisted members of the armed forces swear their oath to those appointed over them; an officer swears an oath not to a person but to the Constitution. The distinction is important." Unfortunately, Greg didn't come to his senses while in uniform. I did. It cost a career, but cost is a fixed star in the calculus of consequence when one enters service, and that's fairly small potatos compared with bagging guys who didn't know better, or doing nothing, knowing.

Paul Eaton did his post-tour-semantic-dispum last month, followed by Tony Zinni. Its not enough. Its not enough to ring and run. Officers and enlisted have a duty to disobey illegal orders.

On the up side, twenty years from now we won't have to worry about some buzzed-up Swift Boat Veterans for Truth doing a media hit on some not-visibly-insane candidate running on some not-quite-with-the-program platform, because there aren't any officers or enlisted men and women throwing their RNC-thank-you-for-playing decorations photogenically over fences.

I don't know if more Mainiacs will go to the polls for Chris Miller than for John Baldacci, but I know that Chris is on board with opening the torture kimono and ordering the Maine Guard units who did tours at Abu Garib to testify concerning their knowledge of actions carried out there by uniformed and non-uniformed personnel, as well as by civilian or "other agency" personnel.

The father of one of Grace's classmates' friends was activated out of his Cumberland County corrections job and did a year in the cages at Gitmo. He came back looking haunted, and wanting out, out of being a parent, out of being a spouse, out of his house, out of his neighborhood, out of Cumberland County. He put in for a corrections job in Bangor, over three hours away from everything he was so attached to 13 months earlier, at a children's birthday party. I don't know how things worked out for him, but the difference between the man I talked with while a dozen happy kids romped around at Oliver and Celia's house, weeks from Gitmo and the sick looking guy I met doing doors, at a door I knew, with a kid I knew, just back from Gitmo, who just wanted out, is not something I'll forget any time soon. I didn't know the guy from down the road who got shredded into rags along with the rest of a detail lead by an idiot on a WMD snipe hunt in downtown Baghdad. I didn't know his kid, or his spouse, but I knew this guy, and I knew his daughter Sabrina, and his war made him wicked sick. He was a corrections officer, not a sadist, sent to a place where torture and illegal detention are the order of the day. That harmed him as certain as a through-and-through to the torso.

Winter Soldier II has to start somewhere. It may as well start in Maine.

I can't imagine Dems running competitive primaries in the future on a platform of uncritical promotion of the amoral, disloyal, careerist drones who executed the Bush / Cheney / Rumsfeld criminal and criminally negligent scheme without protest. I just don't see "we don't need to bother with oversight" being a competitive message. I just don't see "I will reward Bush's generals for their loyalty to Bush" being something that will play in the primaries. Of course, I also think John Murtha's recent enlightenment is several decades delayed.