The Untied States military recruited “gang members and criminals” to fight its “illegal wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, said a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War.
More than 800 US soldiers are under criminal investigation for fraudulent kickbacks they received during the Recruiting Assistance Program, which began in 2005 with the aim of increasing recruitment for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The current investigation of military recruiting in front of the United States Senate brought to light a lot of failures of America’s military,” Gordon Duff, a senior editor of Veterans Today told Press TV on Tuesday.
“Recruiters were paid bounties to bring people in. These bounties of course were illegal,” he said.
Though the program helped the US Army meet its recruiting goals, it was also a ripe target for fraud. Because full-time uniformed Army recruiters were prohibited from participating, soldiers would be paid to get friends to join up and Army recruiters would receive a kickback.
“The recruiters would hire anybody off the street who could find any other person to bring in paying $7,000, $10,000 a head to drag the illiterate, the homeless, the mentally disturbed off-the-street gang members,” Duff explained.
“Thousands of gang members who were recruited and brought into the military formed criminal gangs across Iraq and Afghanistan and involved themselves in unspeakable crimes,” he added.
Duff said that while authorities now seek to punish those recruiters, they were simply doing what they were told.
“The illegal war had to be fought with gangsters, illiterate criminals, they had to be dragged in through somewhere, someone had to be paid to do it and now people don’t like the idea of it.”
The investigation, described as “one of the largest criminal investigations in the history of the Army,” was the subject of a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on Tuesday.
AT/HJ
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