In the Stars and Stripes a couple of days ago, there was a cover story about some bonehead soldier over here in Iraq shooting a Koran on the rifle range.  Here's the story in the New York Times about a General apologizing for the incident and now comes word that President Bush has apologized to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for the same incident.  I knew instantly that some idiots would say this is yet another incident like Abu Ghraib prison scandal and I've already seen at least one story, I won't bore you with the link.  But, it won't be long before President Bush, Karl Rove, and now Secretary Gates will be part of the evil cabal that planned this all along, just as the leadership of our nation directed those National Guard troops to humiliate those Iraqi prisoners in what has now been called the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Just a couple of days ago, that scandal came up and I mentioned out loud how insane it is to think that the President and SECDEF, then Rumsfeld, directed that whole series of stupid events to happen and how anyone that thought this was not quite grounded in common sense.  The soldier next to me opined "oh yeah, and they (Rumsfeld and Co.) told them to take pictures too!.  Exactly.  Do I think that whole incident was a humiliation and disgrace to those prisoners, absolutely.  Did someone have to pay for those acts, you're damn right and not  enough people were charged. Former General Karpinsky, are you listening? Do I think it was directed from on high, of course not.

If you have an ounce of sense, you will see those images and the acts were the result of stupidity among a night shift in a wing of a prison, not some organized attempt to humiliate prisoners, for whatever reason is cited.  The same with this Koran shooting, the soldier has been disciplined and sent home and now our leadership is apologizing, quite rightly, for the act of someone with no common sense.  The idea of these consipiracies is well, as loony as the notion that our government destroyed the twin towers on Sept 11th 2001 and are hiding the passengers form the flights somewhere (or of course that they are dead). Or that the moon landings were filmed on some abandoned SAC base on a sound stage in Arizona or New Mexico. While here, I watched the Penn and Teller episode of "Bulls&*t" on Conspiracy theories and that really tells the tale.

The other article that caught my eye in that same newspaper was the plan to (finally!) take our social security numbers off our ID cards.  We use our SSN's for everything in our society and with identity theft such a huge concern and reality, it's about time.  When I was going through perdeployment actoins, I asked for a new set of dog tags and the woman asked me why?  I said if I am captured, I don't want the terrorists to get my SSN and she said you'd have a lot worse problems than that.  I told her she's right, but I plan on coming home and that doesn't excuse the fact that if I did make it home, someone could have completly trashed my personal identity and records and she had no answer to that.

 Just as it's time to get the SSN of of everything, it needs to come off our ID tags too.  A belatedly Happy Armed Forces Day to all those GI's out there on post. Keep a close eye out and Charlie Mike!