Saturday updates

Welp, now that the HMFIC has confirmed the Search button has been removed, I’m gonna have to revert to “y’all remember when we talked about XXX?” (And hope some of you deplorables don’t instantly actually GO XXX.) Oh, and the Army Times suggested you woo your significant other with WWII acronyms for Valentine’s Day. I suspect FUBAR or DILLIGAFF aren’t on the list.

First up is what sounds like an “everyone loses” situation we talked about before. An American Marine then-Captain, now Major, name of Mast, was involved in a major adoption brouhaha over a little Afghan girl he and his wife wanted to adopt after finding her on a battlefield in 2019. It was not a pretty situation – at one point she was given to another couple, nominally in her ‘family’ by a family patriarch, who had her for 18 months, before CPT Mast and his wife took her back to the States with them. Multiple allegations that decisions were appealed after deadlines, she was kidnapped, the new family wasn’t really related – it was a thorough cluster. Supposedly the Virginia Supreme Court has clarified it by deciding she goes to MAJ Mast.

Judge Richard Moore granted them a final adoption in December 2020. When the six-month statute of limitations ran out, the child was still in Afghanistan living with her relatives, who testified they had no idea a judge was giving the girl to another family. Mast contacted them through intermediaries and tried to get them to send the girl to the U.S. for medical treatment but they refused to let her go alone.

When the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban took over, the family agreed to leave and Mast worked his military contacts to get them on an evacuation flight. Mast then took the baby from them at a refugee resettlement center in Virginia, and they haven’t seen her since.

The Afghans challenged the adoption, claiming the court had no authority over a foreign child and the adoption orders were based on Mast repeatedly misleading the judge.

The Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday wrote that the law prohibiting challenges to an adoption after six months is designed to create permanency, so a child is not bounced from one home to another. The only way to undercut it is to argue that a parent’s constitutional rights were violated.

The Supreme Court returned repeatedly to Moore’s finding that giving the girl to the family “was not a decision the United States initiated, but rather consented to or acquiesced in.”

The three judges who dissented were unsparing in their criticism of both the Masts and the circuit court that granted him the adoption.

Three justices issued a scathing dissent, calling what happened in this court “wrong,” “cancerous” and “like a house built on a rotten foundation.”

“A dispassionate review of this case reveals a scenario suffused with arrogance and privilege. Worse, it appears to have worked,” begins the dissent, written by Justice Thomas P. Mann, and signed by Chief Justice Cleo E. Powell and LeRoy F. Millette, Jr.

A Virginia court never had the right to give the child to the Masts, the dissent said.

They castigated the Masts for “brazenly” misleading the courts during their quest to adopt the girl.

“We must recognize what an adoption really is: the severance and termination of the rights naturally flowing to an otherwise legitimate claimant to parental authority. Of course, the process must be impeccable. An evolved society could not sanction anything less than that. And here, it was less,” Mann wrote. “If this process was represented by a straight line, (the Masts) went above it, under it, around it, and then blasted right through it until there was no line at all — just fragments collapsing into a cavity.”  Military.com

I don’t think anyone wins in this. May not be final, either. That kind of language is expected from a lawyer pleading. From judges?

Another followup – one of the headline ICE deportees was a fella weedwhacking at an IHOP when Ice took him in – pretty violently from descriptions from ICE  (witnesses at the scene denied the man “attacked ICE with his weedeater”.) Either way, an immigration judge has ruled that his fathering three serving Marines (along with no criminal record) entitles him to stay and go for citizenship. Fathered three Marines… more than most natural-born Americans do. Hope he gets a green card.  Military Times

And last, a few thousand officers in a few CMFs will have about three years to find another job or get out.

The officer functional areas, or career fields, that are affected include Force Management, Functional Area 50; Acquisitions, Functional Area 51; Simulations Operations, Functional Area 57; Strategy, Functional Area 59; and Marketing, Functional Area 58.

Two functional areas were flagged for growth in the process: Space Operations, Functional Area 40; and Operations Research/System Analysis, Functional Area 49  Military.com II

Sounds like a good time to get in touch with your inner astronaut.

Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", Afghanistan, Army, Marines