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You’ll get paid – when the “war on terrorism” is over!Back in December 2003, Congress approved a special deployment allowance worth up to $600 a month but service men and women may never see a dime of it. The new allowance would pay $200 per month to anyone deployed more than 191 days in a row, $600 to anyone deployed 211 days in a row and more than 450 cumulative days out of the previous two years. Deployment clocks were halted in the weeks after September 11th because President Bush declared a national emergency and have not been restarted. Pentagon officials anticipate that even if the freeze on deployment clocks is lifted, they'd be reset to zero and past deployment days would not count! With over a hundred thousand troops deployed for year-long tours of duty in Iraq, in addition to the thousands in Afghanistan, the brass would rather not spend money on soldiers but on fat contracts for defense industry corporations. One aide to the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee said that the Pentagon's deployment clock scam came as “no surprise.”  “I would not be shocked, quite frankly, if nobody ever received this pay. I don't see deployed days being counted until the war on terrorism is declared over – if that were to ever actually happen.” Vice-President Dick Cheney has even said that the war on terrorism “may never end, at least not in our life times.”
So don't hold your breath for those checks. The Pentagon actually has the legal right to do this rip-off. Congress approved the 2004 Defense Authorization Act, leaving intact the loophole that allows the Dept. of Defense to stop counting deployed days in the interests of "national security," and even added a provision to the bill that would allow the DoD to declare that deployed days won't count for people with certain skills in certain units. The loopholes were requested by the Bush administration, Congress passed the bill overwhelmingly and Bush signed it into law on last year. Stealing service people's pay isn't just a Bush or Rumsfeld thing, or a Republican thing - almost all the Democrats in Congress voted for the bill too. This is just one more example of why the real enemy is at home, not in Iraq. Page 8--> |
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