Silent As a Grave - And Keep it That Way!

The Bush Administration has been pulling some weaselly shit at Arlington National Cemetery:

When Gina Gray took over as the public affairs director at Arlington National Cemetery about three months ago, she discovered that cemetery officials were attempting to impose new limits on media coverage of funerals of the Iraq war dead -- even after the fallen warriors' families granted permission for the coverage. She said that the new restrictions were wrong and that Army regulations didn't call for such limitations.

Six weeks after The Washington Post reported her efforts to restore media coverage of funerals, Gray was demoted. Twelve days ago, the Army fired her.

"Had I not put my foot down, had I just gone along with it and not said regulations were being violated, I'm sure I'd still be there," said the jobless Gray, who, over lunch yesterday in Crystal City, recounted what she is certain is her retaliatory dismissal. "It's about doing the right thing."

The Pentagon claims they're respecting the families' privacy -- except that in some cases the families have okayed the reporters being there:

Through at least 2005 -- during Rumsfeld's tenure, no less -- reporters were placed in a location where they could hear the prayers and the eulogies and film the handing of the folded flag to the next of kin. The coverage of the ceremonies -- in the nearly two-thirds of cases where families permitted it -- provided moving reminders to a distracted nation that there was a war going on. But the access gradually eroded, and Gray arrived to discover that it was gone.
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Arlington's problems with the burial of the Iraq dead go far beyond Gray; the cemetery is looking for its fourth public affairs director in the past few years. Gray contends that Higginbotham has been calling the families of the dead to encourage them not to allow media coverage at the funerals -- a charge confirmed by a high-ranking official at Arlington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Gray says Higginbotham told staff members that he called the family of the next soldier scheduled for burial at Arlington and that the family, which had originally approved coverage, had changed its mind. Gray charges that Higginbotham admitted he had been making such calls to families for a year and said that the families "appreciated him keeping the media out."

Higginbotham, White and Metzler did not respond to e-mail messages yesterday seeking their comment. An Army spokesman said Higginbotham and other Arlington officials call families only if their wishes regarding media coverage are unclear.

Wait, it gets better:

On June 27, Gray got her termination memo. White said Gray had "been disrespectful to me as your supervisor and failed to act in an inappropriate manner." Failed to act in an in appropriate manner? The termination notice was inadvertently revealing: Only at Arlington National Cemetery could it be considered a firing offense to act appropriately.

Read the whole thing here.

Navy: Accelerate Your Sex Life

A Navy officer has resigned after revealing that she worked as a hooker for 13 years for D.C. madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey. The Navy Times reveals all:

Lt. Cmdr. Rebecca Dickinson told federal prosecutors at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that she had sex with nearly every client she met while working for Deborah Jeane Palfrey from October 2005 until April 2006.

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Navy spokesman Capt. Jack Hanzlik told Navy Times that Dickinson, 38, was fired from her position as an instructor at Naval Supply Corps School in Athens, Ga., earlier this month after she gave detailed information about her involvement in the case to superiors.

After her statement, Dickinson also received nonjudicial punishment and was given a punitive letter of reprimand. Hanzlik said she could face additional punishment in the future and has been placed on leave. When she exhausts her accumulated leave time, Dickinson will revert to unpaid leave status and remain there until she is separated from the Navy.

“We expect the men and women who serve in our nation’s Navy to adhere to a standard of conduct that reflects our core values of honor, courage and commitment,” Hanzlik said. “Lt. Cmdr. Dickinson’s conduct will prevent her from wearing this uniform again in the service of our country.”

Actually it wasn't not wearing the uniform that got her in trouble?

Seriously though, sailors and whores are a great combination that have worked great together throughout the ages, kind of like Reese's chocolate and peanut butter. Don't tell me that the Navy doesn't look the other way when male sailors patronize whores. So why is the Navy coming down on this poor woman, who was apparently just trying to pay her bills?

Double Standard?

The stupid military policy set 15 years ago as a "compromise" policy by Congress and President Clinton almost came around to bite an openly gay Representative.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon at first blocked Rep. Tammy Baldwin's domestic partner from traveling on a military plane with a congressional delegation on a trip to Europe but gave in after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intervened.

The Pentagon said it was merely following House rules, which do not define domestic partners as spouses. Pelosi's office countered that the Pentagon has its own rules about who can go on its planes.

Both sides agree that Defense Secretary Robert Gates reversed the decision to keep Azar off the plane after getting contacted by Pelosi, D-Calif.

I think the Pentagon made the right decision. I actually wish, however, that they would have prevented Rep. Baldwin's domestic partner from getting on that plane.

If the Pentagon would have kicked a Congresswoman's homosexual partner off a military airplane, a good portion of Congress would be outraged. And while Congressmen who support "don't ask, don't tell" may find it easy to tell gay people they'll never meet that they cannot serve in the military, it might hit home a little more when they have to tell a fellow Congresswoman that her partner cannot travel with her on routine business travel.

Even though both Democratic presidential candidates claim to oppose the policy, I don't believe they are sincere enough to pursue any real change if they get what they're really after in this campaign: being elected president. I hope I'm wrong and I'm just being overly cynical. But I think something like a personal conflict between people who have to work together every day (or, most days) would be a lot more effective in bringing about a change in the policy.

"Don't ask, don't tell" will eventually dissolve, and eventually sexually orientation will not affect military service. But the policy has already been around for over 15 years, so if it takes congressional infighting to get rid of it, so be it.

Safety on Campus: Why a Reactionary Military Model is All Wrong

MSNBC military analyst Jack Jacobs thinks he's figured out how to deal with violent episodes on college campuses, like the massacre at Virginia Tech last week.

Events such as this are unpredictable and unlikely, but that doesn’t mean that institutions don’t have to plan for them. In the military, we spend a great deal of time on planning, and for two good reasons: we can’t predict the future, and good planning is the essence of success in crises. It should come as no surprise that the Department of Defense has plans to conduct all kinds of military operations against a wide variety of real, imagined and potential foes. Defend against an incursion by Russia into Western Europe? We have a plan for that. Invade Iran after it attacks Turkey? We have a plan for that, too.

Though Jacobs makes a few good points about the unforgivable inaction of the university after the first homicides on campus last week, Jacobs, a military hero, is wrong about pretty much everything else in his piece -- and for a host of reasons.

First, Jacobs isn't proposing any measures that would prevent future shooting sprees. Instead, he suggests measures to help minimize the messy aftermath of such events. (Appropriately, Jacobs uses a life-insurance metaphor to illustrate his point.) What good is a plan to lock down a campus during a shooting? None, unless you see a positive in trapping unarmed students inside a campus building alongside a gun-wielding madman.

Second, just because the military has a whole bunch of plans in place and "spend[s] a great deal of time on planning" doesn't mean all that planning does a whole hell of a lot of good. The military may or may not have had a plan in advance of 9/11 -- and I'm suggesting the existence of a contingency along the lines of what Jacobs notes above, not a conspiracy -- to prevent just such attacks. If it did have one, the plan failed. Instead, it was the people on the ground (and in the air, as was the case aboard United 93) who saved lives with spontaneous cooperation rooted in courage, ability, intuition, fear, and patriotism. (As the closing credits of the United 93 docu-drama note, military commanders were authorized to shoot down unresponsive aircraft on 9/11 but chose not to share that information with subordinates in the skies. So much for planning.) Our military may also have had a plan to invade Afghanistan before they actually did, but that mission, spurred as it was by the 9/11 attacks, has gone decidedly better than the U.S. military's well-planned slog in Iraq.

Third, Jacobs ignores a major factor that makes murder on domestic military bases so rare as to be the stuff of movies (albeit true-to-life ones): everyone's armed. If Jacobs wants to make state college students safer, as I no doubt believe he does, he should suggest that Virginia support its students' right to bear arms on campus.

Jenna Thrives While Avoiding Service

In an LA Times opinion piece Kitty Kelley wonders why the Bush twins aren't signing up to join the army.

When I was a little girl in a convent school, the nuns impressed on me the power of setting a good example. These beloved teachers are no longer around to instruct the president and his family, so I recommend that the Bushes learn from Mark Twain, who said: "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."

My suggestion comes after the White House announcement earlier this month that Jenna Bush, one of the president's twin daughters, is writing a book on her all-expenses-paid trip to Panama, where she worked for a few weeks as an intern for UNICEF. Jenna Bush is quoted as saying she will donate her earnings from her book to UNICEF, a commendable gesture, considering her father's net worth of $20 million. But while the 25-year-old makes the rounds of TV talk shows this fall in a White House limousine, dozens of her contemporaries will be arriving home from Iraq in wooden boxes. In Britain, Prince Harry is insisting on going off to Iraq — even as his country is reducing its troop commitment.

It is a good question. If Bush is so convinced that the Iraq War is the cause of our day then why don't his children enlist?