Obama has a very long list of things to clean up from the disastrous George W. Bush Administration and there may be more urgent issues, but this issue has to be addressed as a priority before we head further down the road to a military dictatorship.  A symptom of this proposition that we are headed in that very direction is the trend in the matter of torture  to have the Army Field Services Manual be the standard for whether an interrogation technique should be considered torture.   Seriously?  Are we going to let the military inform us whether they are torturing based on their own definition of torture, or is the military subject to the will of the people and therefore required to respond to the definition presented by Congress, if not the Geneva Convention of which the United States is a member? 

The military is getting away from democracy and becoming its own self-serving entity but for the fact that they operate funded by the US taxpayers.  It seems a moot point, however, when one considers that they receive billions of dollars from the US Treasury with little if no resistance anyway.  However, with the concurrent trend of privitizing military functions, we are already letting a separate military develop even further from the will of the people.

While Obama wrestles with the economy and the issue of torture, he also needs to see the larger picture of how the relationship between armed forces and the government has changed.  There is an urgent need to restore a military that serves a government of the people, by the people and for the people, rather then a profit-seeking entity determined to make their own rules.