Military investigates Salon's allegations

As I have mentioned before, Salon recently wrote an article about how medically unfit soldiers were sent to war.
The article in question was written by Mark Benjamin, who uncovered the Walter Reed scandal as far back as 2003, and wrote about it in Salon in 2005. In other words, the writer has shown very good investigative skills in the past, and should certainly not be dismissed out of hand.

Today, Salon writes that the army has promissed to look into the allegations from the article: Army pledges to investigate injured troop charge

Top Army officials pledged during a Senate hearing Wednesday to investigate whether a brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division is dispatching injured troops to Iraq as part of the so-called surge into Baghdad, Iraq. Pete Geren, the acting Army secretary, told a Senate panel that the Army was troubled by such charges, raised in a March 11 Salon article. "These allegations are serious and any allegations of that sort, I can assure you, we are going to follow up on and investigate," Geren told Washington Democrat Sen. Patty Murray.

I'm glad to hear that they take such allegations seriously, but the Army secretary's remarks rings a little hollow when they ignored the Walter Reed conditions mentioned in Benjamin's articles for four years, until the articles in Washington Post forced them to take action.

I hope they also investigates the allegations made by The Hartford Courant, about the army keeping mentally unfit soldiers in combat zones.