UPDATE: 8th Army clarifies "arrests":
U.S. Army officials said Thursday that the eight soldiers they earlier reported under arrest in connection with an ongoing drug investigation were never arrested.
But 8th Army spokesman Lt. Col. Brodrick Bailey refused to clarify any details — including what duty or legal status those troops are under, or if eight was even the correct number involved in the secretive case.
“I’m not going to give you details about the investigation to justify the correction,†Bailey said during a phone interview. [Stars & Stripes]
I think what is going on is that the US military doesn’t want to "arrest" these guys until the Korean authorities decide whether or not to seek jurisdiction over them or not. These guys have probably had their pass privledges removed and are confined to their battalion areas until such a decision is reached. I’m sure there will be plenty more to come out on this in the near future.
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The foreign English teacher potheads in Korean jail may soon have some new company in the slammer:
South Korean customs agents discovered marijuana in a box mailed to a U.S. soldier in South Korea, launching a joint investigation that resulted in the Dec. 29 arrest of eight Camp Casey-based troops, customs officials confirmed Tuesday.
A customs official said that marijuana was detected in a box that arrived with a normal military mail shipment at Incheon International Airport in late December.
Customs agents contacted the U.S. military, the official said, and the box was delivered to its intended recipient as part of a joint sting operation.
8th Army spokesman Lt. Col. Brodrick Bailey confirmed eight soldiers had been arrested but declined to provide additional details, including the soldiers’ names, units and type of drugs allegedly involved.
Though the release of that information is common in most cases, 8th Army officials refused to release it because it would “interfere with the ongoing joint investigation being conducted†by Army criminal investigators and South Korean police. [Stars & Stripes]
Yonhap News has a report on this as well.
Obviously these idiots haven’t been reading the ROK Drop. As I have been saying over and over again, all you potheads out there do not mail drugs to yourself in Korea! Drug laws are something that are actually stringently enforced in Korea. I suspect that these idiots will be handed over to the Korean courts since this should be considered an off duty incident making them under the US-Korea Status of Forces Agreement to be tried in ROK courts.
The Korean authorities at Incheon Airport have definitely done a heck of job lately cracking down on illegal drugs going through the mail and should be commended.Â
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9:24 am on January 18th, 2008 1
Oh !!! let me guess this … this is again a plot devised by the Korean anti-americans groups trying to inflate anger and sensationalism against the GIs, Right?
Those bastard Koreans !!!!
11:10 am on January 18th, 2008 2
Expect another expat blogs hatefest against Koreans.
It’s the Koreans reporting lies, all lies to make expats look bad.
1:22 pm on January 18th, 2008 3
Ooooooooh…
The plot thickens.
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=51734
I must commend Stars & Stripes for aggressively perusing this incident which an arrogant and secretive Leadership does NOT want to discuss.
Nice to see ‘em squirm, though.
I wonder what those GIs were thinking?
1:25 pm on January 18th, 2008 4
Moral waiver?
1:56 pm on January 18th, 2008 5
Koreans at Estripes is printing this outrageous lie to fan anti foreigner, anti American hate. Don’t believe a word of it.
2:10 pm on January 18th, 2008 6
What’s with all the Corean rhetoric? Is it the reflexive ch’emyon defense mechanism as part of NPD?
5:43 pm on January 18th, 2008 7
Mark,
Good point, some people sure do have some thin skin around here. I actually commend Korean authorities and this is some how an anti-Korean posting? If anything the Korean authorities are doing USFK a big favor in helping track down these idiots.
3:33 am on January 19th, 2008 8
GI,
I’m just repeating the same things you say everytime news on GIs or english teachers committing crime is brought to korean media.
If you think this is anti-korean, than you are admitting that you have been anti-korean on that cases.
Am’I right or Wrong? Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Oh … you also say “ingrate people, look at what they are doing … despite of all the things we have done for them …. let’s pull the GIs out”.
5:25 am on January 19th, 2008 9
I have never said any such thing as you claim and I would like you to find any such time I have called Koreans “ingrate people, look at what they are doing … despite of all the things we have done for them …. let’s pull the GIs outâ€.
This is a total fabrication.
11:24 am on January 19th, 2008 10
“This is a total fabrication.”
Your excuses are getting predictable. Its time to be more creative.
9:47 am on January 23rd, 2008 11
Mark,
“Moral waiver?”
I see now. That “all Army recruits MUST have a high school diploma” policy doesn’t exactly mean “all”, “must”, “have”, “high school” or “diploma”.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080122/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/military_recruiting
I bet there is some kind of scientific-ie correlation between not graduating from high school with the rest of your class and being a poor-decision-making dumbarse.
9:55 am on January 23rd, 2008 12
Just wait for this recession to kick in…we’ll start getting higher quality personnel then.
10:27 am on January 23rd, 2008 13
Remember the Army is in the midst of an expansion and the recruiters have to find people from somewhere. Plus it seems a bit snobby to say someone should not be given the opportunity to serve their country because they have a GED. If they can’t cut it when they get in it easy enough to chapter them out.
Additionally the jobs the lower scoring ASVAB types are eligible for do not necessarily require a whole lot of brain power like flipping eggs in the DFAC.
11:49 am on January 23rd, 2008 14
Uh-huh…
“Just wait for this recession to kick in”
Forget recession… let’s go for a full-fledged depression (without the fallback of a 1930s agrarian economy)… and we can get some PhDs begging to flip eggs in the DFAC. Then, we can get out of it with a good paradigm-changing world war… kinda like WWII bringing about the end of the last depression. I’m sure we can find a reason in the Gulf of Tonkin… er… Strait of Hormuz to kick one off if the dollar drops too low.
Sadly, there may be a little too much truth to these statements.
“Plus it seems a bit snobby to say someone should not be given the opportunity to serve their country because they have a GED. If they can’t cut it when they get in it easy enough to chapter them out.”
The first half is right… the second is part of the problem.
Back In the Day, screw-ups, slackers and misfortunates made their way into the Army where they were forced to perform, accept training and develop skills and abilities to make them successful (or functional) in society. Many found their inner potential after a few sessions of wall-to-wall.
Now, recruiters will take any lost cause with a heartbeat (even if it requires fibbing). They get sent off to a kind and gentle, watered-down basic where many are coddled into finishing to keep the numbers up… with the expectation that any non-hackers will be straightened up when they get to their unit. Wrong.
Once there, after lots of expensive feeding, housing and training, the idiots aren’t forced into getting on the program but are paperworked to death for each screw-up. Once enough of that builds up, it becomes “easy enough to chapter them out.” Problem solved.
But it isn’t solved. We have jails full of unsolved problems.
Despite my snarky-ness, there really isn’t any problem with non-graduates going into the military (or even petty criminals or former pot smokers). The military is (should be) a fantastic place for young people who got off to a bad start in life to get pointed in the right direction… even if it has to be forced on them.
These days, the Army is letting a lot of losers in and it isn’t forcing them to become winners. Chaptering them out is an easy fix for poor leadership.
12:52 pm on January 23rd, 2008 15
Notice I said can’t cut it because some of the poor recruits from my own personal experience could not be reformed no matter how much leadership is devoted to them. And poor recruit isn’t always GED types, there are plenty of poor recruits with high school diplomas.
I had a guy that came in as an E4 with a masters degree in Chemistry who joined the army to pay off his student loans. Very book smart guy but as a soldier almost worthless.
Soldiers need to be judged on a case by case basis and making grand proclamations that soldiers with GEDs are poor recruits is not fair to them and they should be given every opportunity to succeed until they prove otherwise.
4:55 am on February 7th, 2008 16
[...] 135 of them were because of people trying to receive drugs through the international mail. Like I said before who ever is working at the Incheon airport detecting this activity now, needs to be commended, [...]
6:12 pm on February 15th, 2008 17
[...] a sign of things to come. Now that the Camp Humphreys drug ring is all in jail, there is a whole crew of potheads at Camp Casey that need to be dealt with [...]