Skip to main content

Army recruiters nationwide will "stand down" today for a refresher class in ethics

Rocky Mountain News: Local: "The premise was simple: McSwane would try to join the Army as a high school dropout with an insatiable fondness for marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms. No matter how stoned and stupid McSwane acted, a pair of recruiters wouldn't wouldn't let him go.

McSwane insisted to the recruiters that he couldn't lick his drug habit, but one recruiter told him to take some 'stuff' that would 'clean you out.' It turned out to be a detoxification kit the recruiter said had worked with other applicants. McSwane said the recruiter even offered to pay half the cost of the kit.

McSwane's claim of being a dropout didn't discourage his recruiters either. He was encouraged to take a high school equivalency diploma exam, which McSwane deliberately failed. That's when he said one recruiter introduced him to the 'home-school option.'

McSwane was told to order a phony diploma and transcripts from an online diploma mill.

'It can be like Faith Hill Baptist School or something - whatever you choose,' one of the recruiters can be heard saying in a taped phone call.

Several days and $200 later, McSwane became a proud graduate of Faith Hill Baptist High School in Longmont.

'I ordered my four years of high school sweat with a few clicks,' he later wrote.

But McSwane knew that if his story was going to hold up, he would need proof. So he enlisted his sister, Victoria, to pretend that she was keeping a photo album of her big brother's military accomplishments. She took pictures of McSwane shaking hands with his recruiters.

McSwane convinced a high school friend to operate a video camera across the street from a head shop while one of the recruiters drove him to the store to buy a drug detox kit. He even got his mother to covertly slip him some cash during the episode after the head shop refused to accept her credit card.

Since McSwane didn't wear a wire on most of his visits to the recruiting office, he parlayed his natural forgetfulness as a supposed druggie into an opportunity to tape his recruiters' during phone calls."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Jodie Lane Project Responds to City Council Testimony

The Jodie Lane Project : New York, NY -- February 12, 2004. The City Council Transportation Committee held a hearing today to investigate the causes of Jodie S. Lane’s tragic electrocution death on January 16th. The testimony revealed a startling lack of oversight on the part of the Public Services Commission, charged with overseeing Con Edison’s compliance with the National Electric Safety Code, last revised in 1913. With only 5 inspectors at their disposal, the Public Services Commission relies entirely on Con Edison to report safety problems. Because Con Edison only reports incidents resulting in injury or death, the PSC was aware of only 15 shock incidents in the last 5 years. Con Edison has acknowledged that it actually received 539 reports of shock incidents in the same period, effectively admitting to misleading the PSC by an order of magnitude. It is not only this discrepancy that is alarming, but also the fact that the Public Services Commission, charged with ensuring

New York Post Online Edition

news : "December 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Startling new Army statistics show that strife-torn Baghdad - considered the most dangerous city in the world - now has a lower murder rate than New York. The newest numbers, released by the Army's 1st Infantry Division, reveal that over the past three months, murders and other crimes in Baghdad are decreasing dramatically and that in the month of October, there were fewer murders per capita there than the Big Apple, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Bush administration and outside experts are touting these new figures as a sign that, eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, major progress is starting to be made in the oft-criticized effort by the United States and coalition partners to restore order and rebuild Iraq. 'If these numbers are accurate, they show that the systems we put in place four months ago to develop a police force based on the principles of a free and democratic society are starting to