Veterans for Common Sense

September 26, 2008 – Lawmakers angrily criticized Veterans Affairs officials Wednesday for possible delays in implementing the new GI Bill benefits by the August 2009 deadline, calling for more urgency and ingenuity by department leaders.

Keith Pedigo, assistant deputy undersecretary for veterans benefits administration, told members of the House that the VA does not have the technical expertise or manpower to handle the transition from the old education benefits system to a larger, more complex formula.

As a result, the department expects to contract out the work. But he said the 11-month window left to get that work done will create challenges for the program.

House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Filner, D-Calif., charged that officials aren’t working hard enough to find solutions.

“I could find a geek to do this stuff for $1 million,” he said.

“We’ve got kids all over the country that could do this work. Maybe it’s a little more complicated than your normal computer work … but it’s not that conceptually difficult.”

The new GI Bill benefits, passed by Congress in June, mandate a $1,000 monthly housing stipend and four years of tuition at any state university for all veterans who served at least three years on active duty since Sept. 11, 2001.

Under the old system, veterans received a flat rate for their education based on their contributions into the system. Veterans Affairs officials said the new system will be much more complicated, calculating different rates for every recipient based on how long they served, what school they attend and where they live.

“The difference between the concept and getting it so payments arrive on time is huge,” said Stephen Warren, principal deputy assistant secretary for the Department’s information and technology office.

“It’s extremely complicated.”

Representatives on the committee raised concerns about contracting out the work to a private company, asking what safeguards and contingency plans are in place if the new system is not ready in time.

Meanwhile, Defense Department officials said they’re confident the computer systems designed to share personnel records with Veterans Affairs will be ready by March of next year.

“Right now it’s just a question of format. We don’t know how the contractor or the VA is going to want the data,” said Curtis Gilroy, director of accession policy for the DOD personnel office.

“Once that is determined, it will not be difficult.”

Veterans groups told lawmakers they want assurances that if a contractor takes over the check-issuing responsibilities, Veterans Affairs officials will still be the final arbiters for questions surrounding benefits.

But most importantly, they want the system to be ready by the fall semester next year.

Patrick Campbell, chief legislative counsel for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said he worries that thousands of veterans could enroll for classes next summer only to discover a few months later their government-promised reimbursement isn’t coming.

“I don’t care how they do it,” he said. “Veterans must get these benefits on time.”

September 26, 2008 – Military voting officials recommend that if soldiers have not received an absentee ballot from their state by Sept. 30, they should complete and mail a Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot as soon as possible.

Free Express Mail service will be offered by military post offices worldwide during the seven-day run-up to the election – Oct. 29 through Nov. 4.

The Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot allows voters who requested a ballot by their state deadline, but have not received it, to vote in the Nov. 4 election.

Rules governing the use of the FWAB vary among the states, and officials recommend that soldiers contact their unit voting assistance officer, or access the Federal Voting Assistant Program Web site (www.fvap.gov) for state-by-state details.

The Web site also includes an automated tool that allows service members to register and request a ballot through a secure server.

Brig. Gen. Reuben D. Jones, the Army adjutant general and director of the Military Postal Service Agency, said the FWAB and online Web site is especially helpful for service members from states and territories that held, or will hold, late primaries.

States and territories with late primaries are Alaska, Arizona, District of Columbia, Delaware, Florida, Guam, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Because the Military Postal Service Agency plays a critical role in the absentee voting process, Jones and his staff face a continuous challenge in keeping service members and families apprised of voting regulations for each of the states and territories.

“It would be so much easier if we could tell soldiers that there was one common system for voting,” Jones said, “and if they wanted to they would vote electronically.”

“It would be a huge improvement for the military voting process if service members routinely could get their ballots online,” Jones said.

“Even if soldiers would have to send the ballots back by regular mail, such a change would shorten the voting process by up to 30 days.”

Jones said that for the upcoming election more than 700 military postal operators have been trained in handling voting materials

About 5,700 people – typically junior officers and senior NCOs – have been trained as unit voting assistance officers.

September 25, 2008 – Of course Katharine Gun was free to have a conscience, as long as it didn’t interfere with her work at a British intelligence agency. To the authorities, practically speaking, a conscience was apt to be less tangible than a pixel on a computer screen. But suddenly — one routine morning, while she was scrolling through e-mail at her desk — conscience struck. It changed Katharine Gun’s life, and it changed history.

Despite the nationality of this young Englishwoman, her story is profoundly American — all the more so because it has remained largely hidden from the public in the United States. When Katharine Gun chose, at great personal risk, to reveal an illicit spying operation at the United Nations in which the U.S. government was the senior partner, she brought out of the transatlantic shadows a special relationship that could not stand the light of day.

By then, in early 2003, the president of the United States — with dogged assists from the British prime minister following close behind — had long since become transparently determined to launch an invasion of Iraq. Gun’s moral concerns were not unusual; she shared, with countless other Brits and Americans, strong opposition to the impending launch of war. Yet, thanks to a simple and intricate twist of fate, she abruptly found herself in a rare position to throw a roadblock in the way of the political march to war from Washington and London. Far more extraordinary, though, was her decision to put herself in serious jeopardy on behalf of revealing salient truths to the world.

We might envy such an opportunity, and admire such courage on behalf of principle. But there are good, or at least understandable, reasons why so few whistleblowers emerge from institutions that need conformity and silence to lay flagstones on the path to war. Those reasons have to do with matters of personal safety, financial security, legal jeopardy, social cohesion and default positions of obedience. They help to explain why and how people go along to get along with the warfare state even when it flagrantly rests on foundations of falsehoods.

The e-mailed memorandum from the U.S. National Security Agency that jarred Katharine Gun that fateful morning was dated less than two months before the invasion of Iraq that was to result in thousands of deaths among the occupying troops and hundreds of thousands more among Iraqi people. We’re told that this is a cynical era, but there was nothing cynical about Katharine Gun’s response to the memo that appeared without warning on her desktop. Reasons to shrug it off were plentiful, in keeping with bottomless rationales for prudent inaction. The basis for moral engagement and commensurate action was singular.

The import of the NSA memo was such that it shook the government of Tony Blair and caused uproars on several continents. But for the media in the United States, it was a minor story. For the New York Times, it was no story at all.

At last, a new book tells this story. “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War” packs a powerful wallop. To understand in personal, political and historic terms — what Katharine Gun did, how the British and American governments responded, and what the U.S. news media did and did not report — is to gain a clear-eyed picture of a military-industrial-media complex that plunged ahead with the invasion of Iraq shortly after her brave action of conscience. That complex continues to promote what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.”

In a time when political players and widely esteemed journalists are pleased to posture with affects of great sophistication, Katharine Gun’s response was disarmingly simple. She activated her conscience when clear evidence came into her hands that war — not diplomacy seeking to prevent it — headed the priorities list of top leaders at both 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and 10 Downing Street. “At the time,” she has recalled, “all I could think about was that I knew they were trying really hard to legitimize an invasion, and they were willing to use this new intelligence to twist arms, perhaps blackmail delegates, so they could tell the world they had achieved a consensus for war.”

She and her colleagues at the Government Communications Headquarters were, as she later put it, “being asked to participate in an illegal process with the ultimate aim of achieving an invasion in violation of international law.”

The authors of “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War,” Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, describe the scenario this way: “Twisting the arms of the recalcitrant [U.N. Security Council] representatives in order to win approval for a new resolution could supply the universally acceptable rationale.” After Katharine Gun discovered what was afoot, “she attempted to stop a war by destroying its potential trigger mechanism, the required second resolution that would make war legal.”

Instead of mere accusation, the NSA memo provided substantiation. That fact explains why U.S. intelligence agencies firmly stonewalled in response to media inquiries — and it may also help to explain why the U.S. news media gave the story notably short shrift. To a significant degree, the scoop did not reverberate inside the American media echo chamber because it was too sharply telling to blend into the dominant orchestrated themes.

While supplying the ostensible first draft of history, U.S. media filtered out vital information that could refute the claims of Washington’s exalted war planners. “Journalists, too many of them — some quite explicitly — have said that they see their mission as helping the war effort,” an American media critic warned during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. “And if you define your mission that way, you’ll end up suppressing news that might be important, accurate, but maybe isn’t helpful to the war effort.”

Jeff Cohen (a friend and colleague of mine) spoke those words before the story uncorked by Katharine Gun’s leak splashed across British front pages and then scarcely dribbled into American media. He uttered them on the MSNBC television program hosted by Phil Donahue, where he worked as a producer and occasional on-air analyst. Donahue’s prime-time show was cancelled by NBC management three weeks before the invasion — as it happened, on almost the same day that the revelation of the NSA memo became such a big media story in the United Kingdom and such a carefully bypassed one in the United States.

Soon a leaked NBC memo confirmed suspicions that the network had pulled the plug on Donahue’s show in order to obstruct views and information that would go against the rush to war. The network memo said that the Donahue program would present a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” And: “He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” Cancellation of the show averted the danger that it could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

Overall, to the editors of American mass media, the actions and revelations of Katharine Gun merited little or no reporting — especially when they mattered most. My search of the comprehensive LexisNexis database found that for nearly three months after her name was first reported in the British media, U.S. news stories mentioning her scarcely existed.

When the prosecution of Katharine Gun finally concluded its journey through the British court system, the authors note, a surge of American news reports on the closing case “had people wondering why they hadn’t heard about the NSA spy operation at the beginning.” This book includes an account of journalistic evasion that is a grim counterpoint to the story of conscience and courage that just might inspire us to activate more of our own.

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This article was adapted from Norman Solomon’s foreword to the new book by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion.”

September 22, 2008 – A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Army to grant conscientious objector status and an honorable discharge to Pfc. Michael Barnes, a Fort Richardson-based paratrooper who said he experienced a religious awakening in Iraq two years ago that left him opposed to war in any form.

The decision by U.S. District Judge John Sedwick supersedes the Army’s decision last year to deny Barnes’ request.

Military investigators failed to provide “a basis in fact” to support their contention that Barnes is insincere in professing religious objections to war, Sedwick said, and testimony by a chaplain, a psychiatrist, fellow soldiers and Barnes himself proved the contrary.

Barnes is currently stationed in the Lower 48 and was not available for an interview.

In a statement released Monday by his lawyer, however, Barnes said he was thankful to the federal courts in Anchorage for finding that his request was based on “my sincere belief as a Christian.”

In a 16-page ruling, the judge noted evidence of how Barnes’ faith grew stronger after he arrived in Iraq in September 2006. Soldiers in his unit testified that he became increasingly withdrawn, devoting much of his spare time to reading the Bible.

“I have been trying to justify being a soldier and finding a way to do so while still being a Christian, because that is what I wanted to do since I was a kid,” Barnes wrote in his request for conscientious objector status in December 2006.

“But I can no longer justify spending my short time in this world participating in or supporting war. … I must try to save souls, not help take them. I fear not for my life, but for my soul.”

Barnes remained in Iraq with the 4th Airborne Brigade Combat Team through the duration of the unit’s 15-month deployment. The brigade returned to Anchorage last November.

A native of Portland, Ore., Barnes, 26, enlisted in the Army for five years in March 2005 with the stated goal of “defending freedom and helping other people in countries no one else would help.”

Six months later he transferred to Fort Richardson and began preparing for his deployment to Iraq.

While training in Anchorage and listening to the stories of soldiers returning from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, Barnes said, he first began to question his beliefs and “whether or not I was living my life to serve the Lord.”

Married with two children, Barnes previously worked as a counselor to troubled youths in Oregon and Washington. In his request for conscientious objector status, he said he would like to return to similar work as a civilian.

September 25, 2008 – It took President Bush until Wednesday night to address the American people about the nation’s financial crisis, and pretty much all he had to offer was fear itself.

There was no acknowledgement of the shocking failure of government regulation, or that the country cannot afford more tax cuts for the very wealthy and budget-busting wars, or that spending at least $700 billion of taxpayers’ money to bail out Wall Street and the banks should be done carefully, transparently and with oversight by Congress and the courts.

We understand why he may have been reluctant to address the nation, since his contempt for regulation is a significant cause of the current mess. But he could have offered a great deal more than an eerily dispassionate primer on the credit markets in which he took no responsibility at all for the financial debacle.

He promised to protect taxpayers with his proposed bailout, but he did not explain how he would do that other than a superficial assurance that in sweeping up troubled assets, government would buy low and sell high. And he warned that “our entire economy is in danger” unless Congress passes his bailout plan immediately.

In the end, Mr. Bush’s appearance was just another reminder of something that has been worrying us throughout this crisis: the absence of any real national leadership, including on the campaign trail.

Given Mr. Bush’s shockingly weak performance, the only ones who could provide that are the two men battling to succeed him. So far, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is offering that leadership.

What makes it especially frustrating is that this crisis should provide each man a chance to explain his economic policies and offer a concrete solution to the current crisis.

Mr. McCain is doing distinctly worse than Mr. Obama. First, he claimed that the economy was strong, ignoring the deep distress of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have already lost their homes. Then he called for a 9/11-style commission to study the causes of the crisis, as if there were a mystery to be solved. Over the last few days he has become a born-again populist, a stance entirely at odds with the career, as he often says, started as “a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution.”

After daily pivoting, Mr. McCain now says that the bailout being debated in Congress has to protect taxpayers, that all the money has to be spent in public and that a bipartisan board should “provide oversight.” But he offered not the slightest clue about how he would ensure that taxpayers would ever “recover” the bailout money.

Mr. McCain proposed capping executives’ pay at firms that get bailout money, a nicely punitive idea but one that does nothing to mitigate the crisis. And that is about as far as his new populism went.

What is most important is that Mr. McCain hasn’t said a word about strengthening regulation or budged one inch from his insistence on maintaining Mr. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. That trickle-down notion has done nothing to improve the lives of most Americans and, even without a $700 billion bailout, saddled generations to come with crippling deficits.

Mr. Obama has been clearer on the magnitude and causes of the financial crisis. He has long called for robust regulation of the financial industry, and he said early on that a bailout must protect taxpayers. Mr. Obama also recognizes that the wealthy must pay more taxes or this country will never dig out of its deep financial hole. But as he does too often, Mr. Obama walked up to the edge of offering full prescriptions and stopped there.

We don’t know if Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama will do any good back in Washington. But Mr. McCain’s idea of postponing the Friday night debate was another wild gesture from a candidate entirely too prone to them. The nation needs to hear Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain debate this crisis and demonstrate who is ready to lead.

September 23, 2008 –  Five war veterans have begun a 24-hour hunger strike at the National Archives to protest what they call President George W. Bush’s violations of the Constitution.

Members of Veterans For Peace climbed a nine-foot fence early Tuesday and are sitting on the edge of a platform at an entrance to the marble building.

They have hung a large banner across three columns that reads “Defend Our Constitution. Arrest Bush/Cheney: War Criminals!”

The occupation of Iraq, the unlawful detention of prisoners and other issues are evidence the president and vice president have disregarded the Constitution, the veterans said.

The five protesters, veterans of wars in Vietnam and Iraq, are fasting and plan to sit on the platform until Wednesday morning. They are calling for the impeachment of Bush.

Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said she had no comment when asked if authorities planned to take any action against the protesters.