The Rag Blog

Judging from Al-Hayat’s news from Washington, there appears to be an important difference between two sides of new Iraq security plan, as far as the Americans are concerned, one focused directly on Baghdad security, and the other having to do with tracking down and publicizing anything that could be described as part of a arms-network traceable to Iran.

Al-Hayat quotes an impeccable source for a description of the second part, namely Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute. The reporter describes Donnelly as well-connected and as having given a lot of advice to Bush in preparation of the current plan. The reporter says:

[Donnelly said] the Bush administration [in the recent Iran-arms show] wanted to send a message to two parties, namely to Iran, and also to Iran’s allies in Iraq. … [Washington] is getting ready to carry out more arrests and pursuits of Iranian agents in Iraq [adding that] this is not something that will end in a month or two months, but will be long enough to make all the parties understand that the US is serious about this fight.

In its lead-in to this story, the Al-Hayat reporter refers to “present advisers and and former officials” who said the recent Iran-weapons show was “in the context of an implied warning” to Iran

[And] they expect that more escalating measures will follow, in the form of arrests and the pursuit of arms networks, or the targeting of leaders of militias allied with Iran. A high American official stressed that Washington already has a lot of other evidence, which will be disclosed at the appropriate time. [The official said this is all part of] “a complete file that includes clear proof of the negative role of Iran in Iraq”.

And the official repeated that information will be disclosed at appropriate times (suggesting a preoccupation with the PR aspects of this).

Interestingly, the Al-Hayat reporter adds:

Washington is bearing down on the preparation of evidence, but it is taking all the time needed to coordinate between the different agencies in the Pentagon and the CIA, so as to avoid the intelligence lapses that preceded the war. Media reports talk about hesitations and divisions within the administration, specifically between the White House and the CIA on the subject of the recent [Iran weapons show]. The Agency opposed it, and finally there was agreement to go ahead on condition that the identity of the officials not be disclosed.

Getting back to Donnelly, the reporter says he emphasized that the pursuit of Iran-connections is going to stay within Iraq, adding the US isn’t about to attack Iran. But the reporter adds: Wayne White of the Middle East Institute and a former US intelligence official, said such operations are going to be necessarily focused on border areas, because the Iranians prefer to minimize their actual presence inside Iraq, and that explains, White said, the relative infrequency of searches relating to this inside Iraq. White’s other point was that the US has to take a targeted, arrest-related approach to this, because the troop level, even after the additional 20,000, isn’t enough to confront the militias head-on.

It would appear from the above comments that what you could call the “Iran-connections operation” is distinct from the “Baghdad-security operation”, and that is exactly what senior cleric and SCIRI politician Jalaladdin al-Saghir said after his mosque-office in Baghdad was raided by US forces yesterday. Saghir told the Al-Hayat reporter:

The forces that raided the mosque yesterday were from US intelligence, and they were looking for personal correspondence…This wasn’t part of the [Baghdad] security plan, and they weren’t looking for weapons. Rather it was part of the hidden agenda [literally, the implicitly-directed agenda] relating to Tehran”.

The bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra is the cornerstone of Bush’s psychological operations (psy-ops) in Iraq. That’s why it is critical to have an independent investigation and discover who is really responsible. The bombing has been used as a “Pearl Harbor-type” event which has deflected responsibility for the 650,000 Iraqi casualties and more than 3 million refugees. These are the victims of American occupation not civil war.

The bombing was concocted by men who believe that they can control the public through perception management. In practical terms, this means that they create events which can be used to support their far-right doctrine. In this case, the destruction of the mosque has been used to confuse the public about the real origins of the rising sectarian tensions and hostilities. The fighting between Sunni and Shiite is the predictable upshot of random bombings and violence which bears the signature of covert operations carried out by intelligence organizations. Most of the pandemonium in Iraq is the result of counterinsurgency operations (black-ops) on a massive scale not civil war.

The Pentagon’s bold new approach to psychological operations (psy-ops) appears to have derived from the theories of former State Dept official, Philip Zelikow (who also served on the 9-11 Commission). Zelikow is an expert on “the creation and maintenance of ‘public myths’ or ‘public presumptions’. His theory analyzes how consciousness is shaped by “searing events” which take on “transcendent importance” and, therefore, move the public in the direction chosen by the policymakers.

“In the Nov-Dec 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs he (Zelikow) co-authored an article called ‘Catastrophic Terrorism’ in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade center had succeeded ‘the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. ‘It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet bomb test in 1949. The US might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or US counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.”

Zelikow’s article presumes that if one creates their own “searing event” (such as 9-11 or the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque) they can steer the public in whatever direction they choose. His theory depends entirely on a “state-media nexus” which can be depended on to disseminate propaganda uniformly. There is no more reliable propaganda-system in the world today than the western media.

New Clues in the Bombing

New clues have surfaced in the case of the bombing of the Golden Mosque which suggests that the claims of the Bush administration are false. An article by Marc Santora, (“One Year Later, Golden Mosque is still in Ruins”, New York Times) provides eyewitness testimony of what really took place one year ago:

“A caretaker at the shrine described what happened on the day of the attack, insisting on anonymity because he was afraid that talking to an American could get him killed. The general outline of his account was confirmed by American and Iraqi officials. The night before the explosion, he said, just before the 8 p.m. curfew on Feb. 21, 2006, on the Western calendar, men dressed in commando uniforms like those issued by the Interior Ministry entered the shrine. The caretaker said he had been beaten, tied up and locked in a room. Throughout the night, he said, he could hear the sound of drilling as the attackers positioned the explosives, apparently in such a way as to inflict maximum damage on the dome”.(NY Times)

Clearly, if the men were men dressed in “commando uniforms like those issued by the Interior Ministry”, then the logical place to begin an investigation would be the Interior Ministry. But there’s never been an investigation and the caretaker has never been asked to testify about what he saw on the night of the bombing. However, if he is telling the truth, we cannot exclude the possibility that paramilitary contractors (mercenaries) or special-ops (intelligence) agents working out of the Interior Ministry may have destroyed the mosque to create the appearance of a nascent civil war.

On both sides of the Atlantic, a process of spinning science is preventing a serious discussion about the state of affairs in Iraq.

The government in Iraq claimed last month that since the 2003 invasion between 40,000 and 50,000 violent deaths have occurred. Few have pointed out the absurdity of this statement.

There are three ways we know it is a gross underestimate. First, if it were true, including suicides, South Africa, Colombia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia have experienced higher violent death rates than Iraq over the past four years. If true, many North and South American cities and Sub-Saharan Africa have had a similar murder rate to that claimed in Iraq. For those of us who have been in Iraq, the suggestion that New Orleans is more violent seems simply ridiculous.

Secondly, there have to be at least 120,000 and probably 140,000 deaths per year from natural causes in a country with the population of Iraq. The numerous stories we hear about overflowing morgues, the need for new cemeteries and new body collection brigades are not consistent with a 10 per cent rise in death rate above the baseline.

And finally, there was a study, peer-reviewed and published in The Lancet, Europe’s most prestigious medical journal, which put the death toll at 650,000 as of last July. The study, which I co-authored, was done by the standard cluster approach used by the UN to estimate mortality in dozens of countries each year. While the findings are imprecise, the lower range of possibilities suggested that the Iraq government was at least downplaying the number of dead by a factor of 10.

There are several reasons why the governments involved in this conflict have been able to confuse the issue of Iraqi deaths. Our Lancet report involved sampling and statistical analysis, which is rather dry reading. Media reports always miss most deaths in times of war, so the estimate by the media-based monitoring system, Iraqbodycount.org (IBC) roughly corresponds with the Iraq government’s figures. Repeated evaluations of deaths identified from sources independent of the press and the Ministry of Health show the IBC listing to be less than 10 per cent complete, but because it matches the reports of the governments involved, it is easily referenced.

Several other estimates have placed the death toll far higher than the Iraqi government estimates, but those have received less press attention. When in 2005, a UN survey reported that 90 per cent of violent attacks in Scotland were not recorded by the police, no one, not even the police, disputed this finding. Representative surveys are the next best thing to a census for counting deaths, and nowhere but Iraq have partial tallies from morgues and hospitals been given such credence when representative survey results are available.

Linda J. Bilmes, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University, calls her latest paper “pretty dry.” That hasn’t prevented it from riling high-ranking Pentagon officials — who called her and her dean to complain about her work. When they questioned her sources of material, they ran into a bit of a problem: She did most of her research with data on federal Web sites. So what did the Pentagon do? It changed the Web sites, and now continues to trash her research.

Bilmes has become a leading expert on economic questions related to the war in Iraq, and her experience the last few weeks demonstrates how social scientists can end up in the line of political fire when their findings — however dry — offend government officials.

The story begins with a paper Bilmes wrote last year with Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor and Nobel laureate in economics. In their study, they found that the Bush administration has seriously underestimated the economic costs of the war in Iraq. After the study was publicized, Bilmes was approached by some experts on veterans’ benefits who said that one cost of the war hadn’t received enough attention in their work (or from the government): the costs of caring for veterans injured in the conflict.

And that’s the question that led Bilmes to prepare a 21-page study that she presented this month in Chicago at the Allied Social Sciences Association meeting. The presentation of “Soldiers Returning From Iraq and Afghanistan: The Long-Term Costs of Providing Veterans Medical Care and Disability Benefits” went off without controversy and might have escaped Pentagon notice. But Bilmes also published an op-ed version of her findings in the Los Angeles Times. The Pentagon did notice that piece.

The central argument of the new Bilmes paper is that so many soldiers are being injured that the costs of caring for them over their lifetimes is likely to be $350 billion, or up to twice that, depending on how long the war lasts. The high cost is the result of huge advances in military medicine that have greatly reduced the chances that a soldier injured in Iraq will die. As a result, the ratio of injuries to deaths — 16:1 by her estimate — is higher than in any other war in U.S. history. (By comparison, in Vietnam the ratio was 2.8:1 and in World War II the ratio was 1.6:1.)

Bilmes uses a series of calculations based on the types of care those injured will require over their lifetimes to offer various scenarios for the costs of the care, and she also argues that the current veterans’ health-care system is not ready for the influx of injured or the associated costs. She offers suggestions for streamlining the process of getting injured veterans the benefits they have earned. And while both her studies and the op-ed are critical of the Bush administration’s response (or lack thereof) to the veterans’ health needs, the tone is academic, not polemic.

What set off the Pentagon was Bilmes’ estimate for the current number of injured of 50,500. William Winkenwender Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, called the Los Angeles Times, Bilmes, and David T. Ellwood — dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government — to complain that the real figure is less than half that — just over 22,000. When Bilmes was asked where she got her data, she pointed out that it came from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which in turn gets its data from the Pentagon.

The Pentagon investigated further and found that the VA “misunderstood” the Pentagon’s reports, according to Cynthia Smith, a Department of Defense spokeswoman. She acknowledged that the VA had been using numbers consistent with what Bilmes reported, but said that once the Pentagon explained “the error,” the Veterans Affairs department changed its Web site so its injury numbers are consistent with those of the Pentagon.

Why the misunderstanding and the “error”? The original figures from Veterans Affairs were for “non-mortal” injuries. But that doesn’t include only those who are shot at in combat. That includes people who get sick, people who are in accidents and so forth — a group of people that is as large as those injured in combat. The Pentagon doesn’t want those people counted.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Pre-war plans for the US invasion of Iraq assumed that only 5,000 US troops would be left in the country by the end of 2006, disclosed military briefing slides disclosed show.

Prepared by the US Central Command in August 2002, the briefing slides set forth a series of other assumptions about post invasion Iraq that also turned out to be wildly off the mark.

Planners believed a credible provisional government would be in place by “D-Day;” that a co-opted Iraqi army would not fight and that the US invasion force would number 383,000 troops.

A slide titled “Phase IV – Notional Ground Force Composition” showed US force levels declining steadily from 270,000 to just 5,000 within 45 months of the invasion phase, as Iraq proceeded from “stabilization” to “recovery” to “transition.”

WASHINGTON – The U.S. government is at risk of squandering significantly more money in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has already wasted or otherwise overcharged taxpayers billions of dollars, federal investigators said Thursday.

The three top auditors overseeing contract work in Iraq told a House committee of $10 billion in spending that was wasteful or poorly tracked. They pointed to numerous instances in which Defense and State department officials condoned or otherwise allowed poor accounting, repeated work delays, bloated expenses and payments for work shoddily or never done by U.S. contractors.

That problem could worsen, the Government Accountability Office said, given limited improvement so far by the Department of Defense even as the Bush administration prepares to boost the U.S. presence in Iraq.

Given “the need for continued support for deployed forces, it is essential for DOD to address these shortcomings if the department is to increase its return on its investment in Iraq,” said David M. Walker, comptroller general of the GAO, Congress’ auditing arm, in prepared testimony.

The auditors’ joint appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee comes as Congress is preparing for a showdown with
President Bush next month over his budget request of nearly $100 billion to pay for more U.S. troops in Iraq.

Also testifying Thursday were Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, and William Reed, director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency.

According to their testimony, the investigators:

_Found overpricing and waste in Iraq contracts amounting to $4.9 billion since the Defense Contract Audit Agency began its work in 2003, although some of that money has since been recovered. Another $5.1 billion in expenses were charged without proper documentation.

_Urged the Pentagon to reconsider its growing reliance on outside contractors to run the nation’s wars and reconstruction efforts. Layers of subcontractors, poor documentation and lack of strong contract management are rampant and promote waste even after the GAO first warned of problems 15 years ago.

During the press conference however, Bush paid a noticeable amount of attention to Iranian influence in Iraq, particularly administration claims Iranian government forces are arming Iraqi fighters that are attacking and killing US troops.

Before getting into the President’s statements, recent government assessments of Iran’s role in Iraq should be reviewed.

January’s National Intelligence Estimate, titled ‘Prospects for Iraq’s Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead,’ addressed the effects Iraq’s neighbours were having on the war. In the unclassified executive summary, the report, a consensus opinion of all 16 American intelligence agencies, read,

‘Iraq’s neighbors influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics. Nonetheless, Iranian lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants clearly intensifies the conflict in Iraq.’

The remaining classified portion has been described by members of Congress who have read it to continue in the same vein.

A recent Congressional Research Service report given to Congresspersons also reviewed Iran’s role in Iraq.

‘Iran’s influence over the post-Saddam government in Iraq is substantial and growing because the dominant parties in Iraq have long-standing ties to Tehran.’

…

‘Iranian influence in Iraq has added to U.S.-Iran tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and regional ambitions, such as its aid to Lebanese Hezbollah. U.S. and allied officials assert that Iran is providing financial and materiel support to the Shiite militias discussed above, although a few reports say some of the weapons might also be flowing to Sunni insurgents. In providing support to armed groups, Iran might be seeking to develop a broad range of options in Iraq that includes sponsoring violence to pressure U.S. and British forces to leave Iraq, or to bog down the United States militarily and thereby deter it from action against Iran’s nuclear program. On the other hand, Iran might not necessarily want attacks on U.S. forces because a U.S. departure from Iraq, if that were the result, might leave the pro-Iranian government in Baghdad vulnerable to collapse. Those who believe Iran is proceeding cautiously in Iraq tend to view Iran’s aid to Shiite militias as a means of increasing its influence over them.’

After listing similar claims made in the Defense Department’s Iran dossier (more on this later), the report threw caution to the allegations.

‘Some might argue that the U.S. accounts have some inconsistencies. High-explosive shaped charges are being used primarily by Sunni insurgents against U.S. armor, and far less so by Shiite militias who generally field light weapons and have not attacked U.S. forces often, to date. This raises the question of whether or not Iran, as a deliberate policy, is aiding Sunni insurgent groups as a means of harming U.S. forces, or whether these explosives are reaching Sunni groups without official Iranian involvement. Other questions have arisen over the quality of U.S. evidence; a U.S. briefing to detail evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq, planned for late January 2007, has been postponed repeatedly. Others question U.S. assertions that Iran might have helped insurgents conduct a January 20, 2007, attack on a U.S.-Iraq liaison facility in Karbala, in which five U.S. soldiers were killed.’

Early this month the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that it has compiled a list of 51 still-unsolved murders reported in connection with Southern civil rights campaigns during the 1950s and 60s. Congressman John Lewis has called for funding their investigation.

The number of unsolved cases suggests that activists and sympathizers of the Movement, as it was called, were participants, not merely in a series of protests, but in an unrecognized and asymmetric civil war.

The nation hasn’t called the civil rights turmoil a war, and the consequence of its lexicon of evasion and elision has been a failure to honor, absolve and compensate hundreds of its veterans.

Those who were killed and brutalized by racists during that period have not been termed, Argentine- or Mexican-style, victims of a “Dirty War,” nor have civil rights soldiers been honored as war heroes, perhaps they were pledged to a strategy of nonviolence–and kept their word. But on the other side of the war, as the FBI’s list makes clear, violence was S.O.P., Standard Operating Procedure.

Dozens bombings and burnings of churches, schools and stores, “acts of terror,” we’d say today, are still officially untallied, not scheduled for even an FBI review. Nor are hundreds of attacks in which bullets missed their marks. Many of these assaults were carried out by Ku Klux Klansmen who, in the current lexicon, would be styled as “members of a Christian extremist militia.” If there’s collusion today between the Malaki government and the Mehdi army, it is a mirror of the nexus between Southern lawmen and the Klan.

Commentators and historians have avoided the term “displacement of the civilian population” to describe events of the civil rights movement. Yet the tents of black sharecroppers who were evicted from their homes for attempting to vote dotted woodlands across the South. In plain language, theirs were “refugee camps.”

A bill introduced last week by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) is beginning to raise eyebrows.

[It] would require ISPs to record all users’ surfing activity, IM conversations and email traffic indefinitely . The bill, dubbed the Safety Act by sponsor Lamar Smith, a republican congressman from Texas, would impose fines and a prison term of one year on ISPs which failed to keep full records.

This is a terrifying development and it must be stopped before it gains any significant momentum. Background, Action items and contact information below the fold.

Under the guise of reducing child pornography, the SAFETY (Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth) Act is currently the gravest threat to digital privacy rights on the Internet. Given the increasing tendency of people, especially young people, to use the Internet as a primary means of communication, this measure would affect nearly all Americans in ways we are only beginning to understand. Also, given the fact that the Act requires all Internet Service Providers to record the web surfing activity of all Internet users, this amounts to the warrantless wiretapping of the entire Internet.

Amazingly, although the bill was introduced and referred to the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday Feb. 6, it has been virtually ignored by both the corporate media and major blogs alike. By combining such draconian legislation with several child pornography measures, Smith is trying to pull a fast one on the Judiciary Committee and on the democratically controlled Congress as a whole. I say we don’t let this happen. So, first, a little background information. Then below, I’ve outlined a few actions you can take if you’d like to spread the word on this.

Background :
The original SAFETY Act, introduced in June of 2006 by Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), was shot down due to free speech concerns over aspects of the bill other than the ones I’ve focused on here. At the time, the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote that the bill “would undermine First Amendment free speech protections and do nothing to protect children on the Internet.”

So what was Lamar Smith’s response, you ask? He added the misguided measures discussed above in an attempt to fulfill the demands of the FBI. In an October 2006 conference of police chiefs, FBI Director Robert Mueller made the following statement :

Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms. All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims.

Mueller was signaling to Congress that he would like to see measures put in place that would require ISPs to store records of all Internet usage so he could access it when he felt it was neccessary. But, as has been pointed out :

The thing about retention laws is that they require all data to be maintained, not simply the data from child pornographers and terrorists. This means that such laws are usually favored by other, unrelated groups who would like access to such log files. Groups like the music labels. In Europe, where retention rules are already in place, the entertainment industry has already stated its belief that the data should be available for use in the investigation of any crime, even copyright infringement.

Action:
There are two ways to make members of Congress listen to your concerns.

1. Inundate them with phone calls and emails.
2. Get negative media coverage of what they are trying to accomplish.

Please contact any or all of the people and organizations listed below. Let them know that the SAFETY ACT, as it is written, is not acceptable.

Sponsor:
Rep. Lamar Smith, web form , 202-225-4236

Cosponsors:
Rep. Steve Chabot, (202) 225-2216
Rep. Tom Feeney, (202) 225-2706
Rep. J. Randy Forbes, (202) 225-6365
Rep. Trent Franks, (202) 225-4576
Rep. Elton Gallegly, (202) 225-5811
Rep. Dan Lungren, (202) 225-5716
Rep. Mike Pence, (202) 225-3021

Professor Sami Al-Arian, whose persecution and show trial are parts of a long string of egregious acts of injustice perpetrated by the Bush administration, has been on a hunger strike since Jan. 22 to protest the prolongation of his imprisonment.

Al-Arian’s travels through the halls of American justice, and now the subterranean corridors of the nation’s Stygian prison system, reads like a bad rip-off of Kafka. Al-Arian was acquitted on eight of the 17 counts against him by a Florida jury, which deadlocked on the rest. He agreed to plead guilty to one of the remaining charges four months later in exchange for being released and deported. The judge gave Al-Arian as much prison time as possible under a plea deal – 57 months at his sentencing. He was set to be released this April, something that now appears unlikely.

The trial was a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration’s drive to turn the American judicial system into kangaroo courts. Over the six-month trial a parade of 80 witnesses, including 21 from Israel, attempted to brand the Florida professor as a terrorist. The government submitted thousands of documents, phone interceptions and physical surveillance culled from 12 years of investigations. The trial cost taxpayers an estimated $80 million. The 94 charges against Al-Arian and his co-defendants resulted in no convictions. But because Al-Arian has twice refused to testify before a grand jury in Virginia in a case involving a Muslim think tank, he has now been charged with contempt of court. The date of his release could be extended by as much as 18 months.

Al-Arian, who is a diabetic, began a hunger strike in response.

The number of waivers granted to Army recruits with criminal bacckgrounds has doubled in three years, according to press reports on data released by the Defense Department.

“The Army and Marine Corps are letting in more recruits with criminal records, including some with felony convictions, reflecting the increased pressure of five years of war and its mounting casualties,” Lolita C. Baldor reports for the Associated Press.

In Wednesday’s New York Times, Lizette Alvarez notes that “the number of waivers the military granted to Army recruits with criminal backgrounds has nearly doubled in the past three years, jumping to more than 8,000 in 2006 from about 4,900 in 2003, Department of Defense records show.”

“In the past few years, the Army has employed a range of tactics to expand its diminishing pool of recruits,” Alvarez adds. “It has offered larger cash bonuses for enlisting, allowed more high school dropouts and applicants with low scores on the Army’s aptitude test to join, and loosened weight and age restrictions.”

Excerpts from Associated Press article:

According to data compiled by the Defense Department, the number of Army and Marine recruits needing waivers for felonies and serious misdemeanors, including minor drug offenses, has grown since 2003. The Army granted more than double the number of waivers for felonies and misdemeanors in 2006 than it did in 2003. Some recruits may get more than one waiver.

The military routinely grants waivers to admit recruits who have criminal records, medical problems or low aptitude scores that would otherwise disqualify them from service. Overall the majority are moral waivers, which include some felonies, misdemeanors, and traffic and drug offenses.

The number of felony waivers granted by the Army grew from 411 in 2003 to 901 in 2006, according to the Pentagon, or about one in 10 of the moral waivers approved that year. Other misdemeanors, which could be petty theft, writing a bad check or some assaults, jumped from about 2,700 to more than 6,000 in 2006. The minor crimes represented more than three-quarters of the moral waivers granted by the Army in 2006, up from more than half in 2003.

Army and Defense Department officials defended the waiver program as a way to admit young people who may have made a mistake early in life but have overcome past behavior. And they said about two-thirds of the waivers granted by the Marines are for drug use, because they — unlike the other services — require a waiver if someone has been convicted once for marijuana use.