Comments on: Why They Wait For Retirement

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 05:25:20 +0000

The court gets to decide what is appropriate on a case by case basis with laws any Federal court would find unconstitutionally vague.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:09:44 +0000

i was a bit surprised to see this actually. i've never been an officer, but i suppose i could pull off being gentlemanly if the occasion demanded it.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:35:51 +0000

There’s always “conduct unbecoming an officer” which means just about anything your superior doesn’t like. There’s a lot of that vagueness in the UCMJ.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:28:56 +0000

Somewhere in the UCMJ they must define what the code means by “contemptuous.” apparently not. a search for "contemptuous" brings up just the one article, and a search for "contempt" brings up a total of these four references, all of which seem to leave the definition rather open-ended.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:37:08 +0000

I think Sanchez was waiting to see if he going to get his fourth star after Abu Ghraib was investigated, but there has been no real investigation. He’s probably further PO’ed at being bad mouthed by people more responsible for the disaster than he was.

He may have decided that if he didn’t speak up people would decide he had something to hide.

By: Jack K.

Jack K. — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:02:52 +0000

…my bigger concern – about General Sanchez, at least – isn’t so much that he didn’t go public with his reservations at the time he was in charge (you can’t even really get away with that in my outfit; there aren’t criminal penalties, but you might well find yourself in Thorne Bay, Alaska, when it’s all said and done), but that it’s a couple of years after retirement that he is sharing his thoughts about how things went. It’s nice to know that he had concerns at the time, but the passage of time since his retirement makes it just seem like factoids…

…on the other hand, maybe I’m just being grumpy…

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:46:15 +0000

You file a report through the chain of command giving your opinion. If you are given an order that is not illegal or immoral, you obey. They concept of civilian control is drilled into officers.

Under the Rumsfeld rules, anything that didn’t slavishly follow the party line was contempt, and was punished. Go along or get out are your only options as an officer.

By: Mustang Bobby

Mustang Bobby — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:22:59 +0000

Somewhere in the UCMJ they must define what the code means by “contemptuous.” Accusing the President, etc. of indecent conduct with barnyard creatures is one thing, but saying that a policy or action is dangerous or misguided sounds like a professional opinion based on experience and circumstance and could be that the officer is warning his superior against an action that might be unnecessarily dangerous.