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Upholding the Constitution in Hard Cases
Just as Bill Cosby was rightly freed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on solid constitutional grounds, so now two Marines have been cleared of wrongdoing in a 2011 incident, where Marine snipers recorded themselves urinating on Taliban corpses. The reason for reversal of lower adverse actions? Improper command influence from the top of the Marine Corps.
The Acting Secretary of the Navy just cleared the record of a Marine officer who had be separated from service under a cloud, even though he was not at the scene. At the same time, the Navy has upgraded the rank of a senior noncommissioned officer, a senior sergeant, who had been forced into retirement at a lower rank.
It is a gross violation of military justice for a senior commander to make statements indicating the desired result of a supposedly fair process.
245 years ago, on November 10, 1775, The Continental Congress authorized the creation of two battalions of Marines. The Marines were disbanded, along with the navy, after victory in the American Revolution, and re-established on 11 July 1798. So, for a century July 11 was celebrated as the Marine Corps birthday. The earlier date was adopted as the official birthday in 1923, placing the Marines properly in the context of our fight for independence.
I thought it noteworthy that an unnamed Pentagon source claims that “
In 2009, my wife was invited to a function in Washington, DC. Our local library had won a prestigious national award and, as treasurer of one of the library’s most popular community programs, she was asked to attend. When she arrived, she found herself seated at a table with an elderly gentleman in his mid-80’s. Raised on a dairy farm in West Virginia, he had lived quite a life. He had worked odd jobs and drove both trucks and a taxi for a living before he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. He was working on a project through them in Montana on December 7, 1941.
