Mistrust the military?

Gallup poll in the WaPo

More than three-quarters of Americans also believe that the military occasionally provides false or inaccurate information to the media, according to the poll, which surveyed 1,016 adults during the first two weeks of June.

An ex miltary guy in the article theorizes....

Grange, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division. "The military gets negative points because they come across sometimes as being deceptive or using [operational security] as an excuse."

Really. It doesn't have anything to do with other stories in the WaPo today? Stories like this....

Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004, while fighting with his Army Ranger unit in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border. Tillman was shot multiple times by soldiers in his unit who told investigators they mistook him for the enemy in a twilight fight in a rocky canyon.

Officials in Afghanistan then burned Tillman's uniform and body armor. They filed reports saying that Tillman had been killed by enemy fire while charging up a hill, ordered other soldiers in the unit not to discuss the incident, and then honored Tillman with a Silver Star. Army officials waited until weeks after a public memorial service in the United States to tell the family that they believed it was a friendly-fire case.

Or this.....

In late 2003, the Pentagon quietly decided that 15 Chinese Muslims detained at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be released. Five were people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, some of them picked up by Pakistani bounty hunters for U.S. payoffs. The other 10 were deemed low-risk detainees whose enemy was China's communist government -- not the United States, according to senior U.S. officials.

More than 20 months later, the 15 still languish at Guantanamo Bay, imprisoned and sometimes shackled, with most of their families unaware whether they are even alive.

They are men without a country. The Bush administration has chosen not to send them home for fear China will imprison, persecute or torture them, as the United States charges has happened to other members of China's Muslim minority. But the State Department has also been unable to find another country to take them in, according to U.S. officials and recently filed court documents. ........

Oh, and the irony that we're imprisoning Chinese citizens at Guantanamo so they won't be imprisoned in China was not lost on me.

And, a little more from the same article. Not so much on distrust of the military, just on the bad policy that is Guantanamo. Remember, these guys have been cleared.

One of the Uighurs was "chained to the floor" in a "box with no windows," Willett said in an Aug. 1 court hearing.

"You're not talking about your client?" asked Judge James Robertson of the U.S. District Court in Washington.

"I'm talking about my client," Willett said.

"He was chained to a floor?" Robertson asked again.

"He had a leg shackle that was chained to a bolt in the floor," Willett replied. .......

All 15 Uighurs have actually been cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay twice, once after a Pentagon review in late 2003 and again last March, U.S. officials said. Seven other Uighurs were ruled to be enemy combatants and will continue to be detained.

Even after the second decision, however, the government did not notify the 15 men for several months that they had been cleared. "They clearly were keeping secret that these men were acquitted. They were found not to be al Qaeda and not to be Taliban," Willett said. "But the government still refused to provide a transcript of the tribunal that acquitted them to the detainees, their new lawyers or a U.S. court." .......

The Justice Department has argued in court that it has no obligation to release the Uighurs because of "wind-up power," which gives a government the time necessary at the end of a conflict to figure out what to do with detainees. As a precedent, it cited the treatment of Italians held in the United States after World War II.