First They Came for the Nurses[THE DRAFT:Selective Service System]

[AnIndependentTexan]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

First They Came for the Nurses
First the Back-Door Draft; Now the Foot-in-the-Door Draft
By DAVE LINDORFF

So the cat's out of the bag. With reports today in the New York Times, AP and other media outlets that the Pentagon is contemplating a draft call-up of health professionals because of a shortage of doctors, nurses and medics in the increasingly thinly stretched U.S. military, we can see the lie in Bush's (and in Kerry's) promises not to reinstate conscription.

And so it would seem, but the clever minds in the Bush administration have found a way around this.

They'll call up docs and nurses.

Who in Congress, or the media, or even among much of the public, is going to argue if the administration next January announces that there is a critical shortage of doctors and nurses in Iraq, and that our noble soldiers are at risk of death or permanent injury because of inadequate emergency medical services near the front?

Yet to call up those medical personnel, first that draft authorization legislation would have to be passed by Congress and signed into law by the president.

Obviously, such a bill would be presented as "just" a measure so that medical personnel could be required to serve, but of course, a draft bill is a draft bill. Maybe at first the Pentagon would only ask for a certain category of skills in a limited call-up, but the bill itself would be passed into law. The decision on who to call next would be an administrative, not a political, decision, to be made by the generals and the folks at the Selective Service System.

[bluestateguy]

1. Even if I was a doctor I would not go

This war is illegal, immoral, unecessary and makes the US no safer. Anybody who answers the call of a draft for this war is only further feeding the war machine.