Back in April, we wrote about Green Card Troops, the 37,000 non-citizen, green card holders in the military. A major incentive for them to join is that they receive a shortcut to citizenship.

The Al Jazeera English website is back up today and has this report on British MP George Galloway's criticism of the U.S. over the policy:

Galloway went on to attack the US policy of putting its poor minorities and non-citizens in the frontline of its foreign wars. In an exclusive interview he told Aljazeera.net that it was part of a long US tradition of using its underclass as cannon fodder.

The statistics, buried by White House spin doctors, reveal that a significant minority of troops fighting under the US banner are not in fact US citizens but residents hoping to speed up their citizenship.

Galloway said that this was typical of a government used to having the marginalised fight its battles. "Nothing has changed since that last failed attempt to invade and determine the future of another country, Vietnam," he told Aljazeera.net from his holiday villa in Portugal.

"Of course the underclass has now become increasingly more Hispanic than black." This explains why a disproportionate number of the so-called US casualties in the invasion and occupation of Iraq have borne Latino names.

U.S. military officials confirm the shortcut:

"The military services have processes and programmes in place to help service members expedite their citizenship," says a US Department of Defence spokesperson. "The estimated time for the application is about six months."

There is a serious downside: Advancing the process only helps if the soldier comes home alive. Given the number of deaths in Iraq, it appears to us to be more and more like a proposition of Russian Roulette.