Based on comments made today in the press.....a minimum of five US army guys will get a disciplinary review after this stupid burnt Qur'an episode in Afghanistan. This recommendation, coming from both a senior Afghan military and US military review.....doesn't really solve much, because it's mostly a recommendation. The review did admit by the end....none of this was intentional.
So you can imagine this scenario. It's a layered screw-up. Some intelligence guys find coded messages in Qur'ans being handed around the prison. They confiscate the documents, and hand them to some superior officer. The officer reviews the case, and likely assigns his chief of staff the task of getting rid of the problem.
This chief of staff probably puts them into a box and sits on the issue for months, and then his replacement gets the box. The replacement guy probably doesn't know anything, and just assigns Private Snuffy the job of burning the items (just like the fashion that we'd dispose of an old US flag). By the time you come to the end....it's probably six to ten folks who had some part in this whole thing. Sadly, there's probably not a single Army regulation that clearly says what to do with coded Qur'ans.
So you come to two problems. First....this disciplinary review. I would have problems in believing you can find any Army officer who would give out paperwork to any GI.....without some direct violation of a written regulation. In this case.....I have my doubts such a regulation exists. So the joke is.....the idiots will issue a bogus disciplinary document to some kid. The kid will hand it to a judicial review panel, and toss it out six months later....admitting they can't find any violation of the regulations. Everyone pats themselves on the back....because the whole bogus situation is now fixed.
The second problem is more difficult. What do you do with those future coded Qur'ans that turn up? My advice? Pack all these code Qur'ans up and ship them to the nuclear storage pit out in Nevada, and just let them sit 10k years until they dissolve. It's best way to get rid of nuclear waste and coded Qur'ans. We can pay some guy named Larry to truck them from Washington DC.....after some four-star generals bless them as nuke waste-like material. Larry would have a security convey to escort him....ensuring no Qur'ans are actually dropped on interstates, or stolen by any stupid idiots along the interstate system. Eventually, Larry would deliver them to the pit, and they'd be sealed in 55-gallon barrels, taken as far down as possible, and sat by some nuke material.
The sad part about this whole mess? The coded messages written? They probably had Super Bowl picks announced by the various guys in the prison, and it was the only way to communicate their picks to other members of the prison. The truth is....you just don't know what the coded messages ever said. All you know.....is Private Snuffy burned some Qur'ans, and he got caught. Sadly, he'll return to Iuka, Mississippi one day, and tell momma why he got into trouble, and everyone in the family will talk badly about the US Army for the next hundred years.
Only in America
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