Inside Bay Area has a piece about corruption in the California National Guard.
From 1986 until her retirement last year, Jaffe’s job with the California Army National Guard was to give away money — the federally subsidized student-loan repayments and cash bonuses — paid for by federal taxpayers nationwide — that the Guard is supposed to use to attract new recruits and encourage Guard members to re-enlist.
Instead, according to a Guard auditor turned federal whistle-blower, as much as $100 million has gone to soldiers who didn’t qualify for the incentives, including some who got tens of thousands of dollars more than the program allows.
The Austin American-Statesman has an interesting piece about John Galligan and the MAJ Hasan case.
On Tuesday, Galligan will begin his courtroom defense of Hasan, whose Article 32 pretrial hearing — which will determine whether Hasan faces a court-martial and potentially the death penalty — is expected to feature weeks of testimony by dozens of witnesses, including all 32 wounded victims.
But though his role as Hasan’s attorney has thrust him into the national discussion, Galligan has long been a polarizing figure in Bell County, where friends and foes alike describe him as a fearless fighter who has courted controversy — and the spotlight — in recent years.
Here’s a Austin American-Statesman piece on some of the players involved in the MAJ Hasan case.
Salon is reporting and has published an Article 32, UCMJ, report for United States v. Patano. Patano is running for Congress and it appears those who do not support him have obtained and released the Article 32. Patano had been charged with premeditated murder in violation of Article 118, UCMJ.
The military ultimately agreed with Pantano’s version of events, in which the two Iraqi men made a threatening movement toward him, and decided to drop the charges. Officials also opted not to subject Pantano to nonjudicial punishment for desecrating the bodies of the two men (by reloading his rifle and emptying another magazine into the men after they were already dead).
The Seattle Times reports on the Ramrod Five/Stryker Brigade cases.
A [] document[ review] raises questions about the oversight by the soldiers’ leaders. Why through most of the winter and spring months did they fail to uncover wrongdoing and remove rogue soldiers from the unit?
Some officers and enlisted soldiers with direct oversight roles did have clues that something might be amiss, according to information in sworn statements they made in May to Army criminal investigators.
But these leaders appear to have given the benefit of the doubt to their men, enmeshed in a difficult deployment in the heart of Taliban country