Roger That: Former military officers urging caution in arming U.S. domestic troops

Former senior military officers who are sharpshooters and have served in high government posts are urging caution in the wake of calls in Congress and beyond to arm domestic service members following last week’s deadly rampage in Tennessee, according to a report from the McClatchy Newspapers Washington, D.C. Bureau.

In the days since a Kuwaiti-born gunman, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, shot up a Chattanooga military recruiting center and then killed four Marines and a sailor at a Navy Reserve center in the city, lawmakers have pushed legislation to allow all personnel on bases inside the United States to carry weapons.

Weapons were barred from military bases under President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. The prohibition was drafted by aides to his predecessor, President George H.W. Bush, a Republican.

Some governors are not waiting for Congress. From Florida to Texas and North Carolina, chief executives in at least six states have authorized their National Guard units to be armed, moved them to fortified armories or taken other steps to increase security.

“I think we have to be careful about over-arming ourselves, and I’m not talking about where you end up attacking each other,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno told reporters last week. The danger of too many weapons includes “accidental discharges and everything else that goes along with having weapons that are loaded that causes injuries.”

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Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation issued a landmark apology this weekend for using U.S. prisoners of war for forced labor during World War II, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is hosting the event.

A senior executive of Mitsubishi Materials Corp. will apologize to 94-year-old James Murphy, of Santa Maria, Calif., and relatives of other former POWs who toiled at plants its predecessor company operated in Japan during the conflict, the British Broadcasting Corporation is reporting.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the center — an organization that primarily educates about the Holocaust — called it an important gesture, coming as it does ahead of the 70th anniversary in August of the end of the war that has heightened scrutiny of Japan’s attitude to its past abuses.

Murphy spent a year of forced labor, from 1944 to ’45, at a copper mine owned by the company in Japan. He told the Associated Press this week that the experience was a complete horror, “slavery in every way.”

But in his statement, Murphy took a tone of optimism. “Hopefully,” he said, “the acceptance of this sincere apology will bring some closure and relief to the age-old problems confronting the surviving former Prisoners of War and to their family members.”

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During a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars conference set for today, President Barack Obama will announce changes in consumer protections rules meant to keep predatory lenders from taking advantage of troops, according to Stars and Stripes.

The Military Lending Act was passed in 2006 to tighten rules on payday loans and similar short-term loan operations that often pop up near U.S. military installations. But loopholes allowed many businesses to continue charging rates that sometimes topped 400 percent, according to White House and Defense officials.

“We know this is a serious problem in the field,” Brad Carson, acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness at the Department of Defense, said during a media call ahead of Obama’s speech.

The new rules are meant to cap interest rates on loans to U.S. troops at 36 percent without exception, a move that officials said is not only good for troops, but important for the readiness of the American military. Officials said that troops take out short-term loans at twice the rate of other Americans, and that commanders say financial problems caused by cycles of debt have caused some troops to leave the service and made others less effective.

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A bipartisan pair of House lawmakers is urging their colleagues to keep legislation protecting male victims of sexual assault in the military in the fiscal 2016 defense policy bill, according to The Hill.

The Support Uniformed Patriots; Prevent Offenses and Restore Trust Act, sponsored by Reps. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) and Niki Tsongas (D-Mass.), requires the Defense Department to better train and educate service members about the sexual assault of men. The bill requires providing medical and mental health needs specific to male survivors, and the development of agency-wide metrics to research and combat male victimization.

The legislation, which also includes extending sexual-assault prevention and response training to Reserve Officer Training Corps programs and requiring the DOD to develop a strategy against retaliation, was included in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) but Tsongas and Turner want to make sure their proposal survives conference with the Senate’s draft.

This story was originally published July 21, 2015 at 11:17 AM with the headline "Roger That: Former military officers urging caution in arming U.S. domestic troops."