USAFA Cadets Lied, Broke Rules as OSI Informants
A fascinating article by the Colorado Springs Gazette accuses the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of encouraging misconduct while using cadets to inform on their peers — and then disavowing them when they were no longer useful.
Eric Thomas, 24, was a confidential informant…OSI ordered Thomas to infiltrate academy cliques, wearing recorders, setting up drug buys, tailing suspected rapists and feeding information back to OSI. In pursuit of cases, he was regularly directed by agents to break academy rules…
Through it all, he thought OSI would have his back. But when an operation went wrong, he said, his handlers cut communication and disavowed knowledge of his actions, and watched as he was kicked out of the academy.
The Gazette claims to have obtained documents validating the cadets’ claims.
A lengthy article, but interesting.
Repeated at the Stars and Stripes.
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I didn’t find this interesting.
I found it completely engrossing, and to be honest, absolutely heart-breaking.
Lately, I’ve been hearing story after story about how morale is down, and how so many folks can’t wait to “get out” of the Air Force. They feel like it’s becoming more separated from itself. Many feel they are doing the work of two or three people. They feel their work is not appreciated, and they feel they are not being heard.
I’m not quoting any statistics here. I’d love to have time to do the research. I’m just repeating what I’ve heard from others. Why are so many Air Force personnel so unhappy, and scared?
And now, I hear that the place I went to school has pretty much dropped their “honor code”. They’ve pretty much rendered it illegitimate if there is a need to motivate cadets to “break” the honor code, in order to act as a “secret police” amongst their classmates. The stasi would have been proud, here. I see more legitimacy in having agents pose and live as cadets if they really need to spy on sexual assaults, and the like… But to recruit other cadets? Why don’t people have much to say about this?
Considerable time, effort, blood, sweat, tears, @#*, and the rest go into instilling loyalty to your classmates. “Don’t pimp your classmate over…” they would say.
Now it all means absolutely, nothing?
I appreciate the authors for having a place for me to express my grief. This just destroys me. Now I’m beginning to see this “unhappiness” and lack of morale is much more of a problem than I thought.