Veteran's Day
 
             Veterans, I salute you.

             People sometimes forget that "the news", like most other things, comes in twos. There's news you can file away, and maybe write a book about someday, or win a trivia game. And then there's news you can use right away.
             All the news the members of the US Army want to know is whether their head generals have their back. They didn't under Clinton, and it has been loudly shouted now that they don't, and won't with Casey, under Obama. All that is left to know is just how far this absence of loyalty will filter down.
             As I just said, this is not uncommon. With Afghanistan slowly being tabled (we called this the day after the election) the soldiers' generals are likely to start resigning/retiring pretty quickly. I expect to see both Petraeus and McChrystal in civvies by this time next year. Hopefully, Petraeus will be shooting higher.

             The investigation of the Ft Hood murders by a uniformed American-born jihadist will continue to move apace until exactly one day after it has passed from memory from all except the families of the victims. It won't matter what those findings will be, or how they will be couched (spun) or how much evidence will have been officially suppressed (uncorroborated, insufficent) to protect various agencies and their ranking bureaucrats for having neglected to do this or failing to do that. The first utterance from the FBI (read Justice Department) told us where this investigation would officially go before the last victim had been bagged and tagged and moved to the hospital. Remember, the FBI still stands by its refusal to issue a search warrant against the 20th hi-jacker in Minneapolis. Same mantra, same rationale. Protect the decision-makers.
             But the old days are gone when you could just put a lid on these things. Thank the internet and alternative media. One of the ultimate failings of the type of government Obama and the Left wish to impose on us is the knee-jerk protection of bureaucratic screw-ups by trying to re-define what is fact and what is not. After Waco, Janet Reno blamed "process", which she promised to fix. Not one single head rolled. The live bodies who brought about that murderous debacle walked away scot free. The job of management is to control bureaucracy, not protect it.
             This we know: by re-defining "fact" as only that which a commission declares to be a "fact" as it brings down the gavel, simply isolates the bureaucracy even more, bringing about its ultimate demise. Just ask the Soviets, East German, Romanians, Bulgarians, et al. Just ask our soldiers, who already know they had been the victim of a jihadist, a terror-attack.
             In the meantime we all try to soldier on with the knowledge we all know to be true. Nidal Malik Hasan was an anti-American, pro-jihad officer in the US Army and the Army and other agencies knew it. In all likelihood, the final report will gloss over this fact, and will spend most of its time absolving the actors who allowed him to move to his final scene unimpeded, and the atmosphere of fear from repercussion (Political correctness), instead focusing on the process.
             In this I will offer a qualified defense of the Army, in that ithe Army also comes in two's. There is the uniformed side, including the medical wing, I am sure there has been much banging of heads and gnashing of teeth by officers and enlisted for some time about this Maj Hasan, only to be blocked or intimidated by the "other" Army, made up mostly of civilian bureaucrats from the Dept of Army (DA) and Dept of Defense (DoD), and their arsenal of regulations saying that observations and complaints about "people like" (infer what you want with this) Hasan can only be handled in a certain way.
             In short, real soldiers in the Army were hamstrung by the syatem about "people like" Hasan from the git-go.
             So, in the end, Obama sends out his general (Casey) to protect his bureaucrats, this general in effect telling his troops, even during a war, that CYA politics comes first. It takes no time at all for this message to trickle down. In fact, it already has. It has also trickled sideways, for the same message has been read loud and clear with the Marines, the Air Force and Navy. If there were a morale-ometer in the military, it would have dropped by half when Casey made his first statement.

             What to watch for, of course, is how the investigation and trial will (and probably already is) being gerrymandered. This was a crime committed by a uniformed soldier against soldiers on a US military base. The lead investigation, in fact, arguably, the exclusive investigation, should be with Army CID. Yet I have not heard CID mentioned. The charges and trial should all be according to the UCMJ, the prosecutor an Army JAG, not a DOJ lawyer. Watch to see how that turns out, and whether TJAG, the Pentagon and Ft Hood command tries to influence how the case is put together and tried. The convening authority is the commander at Ft Hood, not Casey, not TJAG. Also, watch to see if the the Army brings in special trial judges (they can do this) rather than the regular judge rotation at Ft. Hood. This will mean they have been shopping for judicial rulings that will favor suppressing certain information that might embarrass DA, DoD or the medical command. I'm sure TJAG in Washington is hard on this search now.
            Sine Waco, I no longer trust TJAG.
VB