Recruits with criminal backgrounds are performing criminal acts in Iraq. How did the military not see this coming?

Though not a representative sample, the 250 military personnel analyzed most closely for this story included 120 with questionable backgrounds, including felonies and serious drug, alcohol or mental health problems.

Ruby, Holmes and Gonyon were among 70 with troubled pasts whom The Bee linked to incidents in Iraq. “These guys are out there carrying weapons, fighting on the streets with drugs in their pockets,” said Tressie Cox, whose son, Lee Robert, had a history of drug and mental problems before he was charged with selling drugs in Iraq. “Shame on my son, but shame on all you people out there who are policing this and allowing this to continue to happen.”

Those identified by The Bee are among the tens of thousands of military personnel recruited or retained as the armed services, entering the sixth year of the Iraq war, lowered educational, age and moral standards and granted a growing number of waivers to applicants whose backgrounds would otherwise have barred them from serving.

The percentage of Army recruits receiving so-called “moral conduct” waivers more than doubled, from 4.6 percent in 2003 to 11.2 percent in 2007. Others, The Bee found, were able to enlist because they had no official criminal record of arrests or convictions, their records were overlooked or prosecutors suspended charges in lieu of military service — akin to a now-defunct Vietnam-era practice in which judges gave defendants a choice between prison and the military.

“How in the hell can they legally possess a gun?” asked Montgomery County, Ala., Sheriff D.T. Marshall, when questioned about a soldier from his county.

I wrote about the lowering of standards over three years ago and predicted that this would result in crimes being committed in Iraq and Afghanistan by soldiers who are unfit to be carrying weapons in such a volatile atmosphere.

The truth is that the military desperately needed to get more "troops on the ground" as recruitment numbers fell as more bad news came out of Iraq.

All this administration cared about what trying to give the impression that they had the troops they needed to continue this war as long as they deemed it necessary. We now know they were completely full of shit. They had to borrow the money from China to pay for it, they had to recruit criminals to fight it, and they had to lie to the American people to justify it.