Veterans for Common Sense

July 16, 2008 – Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Congresswoman Betty Sutton (D-OH) were joined by Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D – IL) and Congressman Walter Jones (RNC) to call on Congress to compensate troops affected by “stop loss,” a policy that involuntarily extends military service beyond an enlistment contract.Colby Buzzell, a veteran from Operation Iraqi Freedom who was stop-lossed; leadership of the Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States and Veterans for America; and Kimberley Peirce, writer/director of the nationally-released feature film “Stop Loss” also voiced their support.

Senator Lautenberg and Congresswoman Sutton have introduced a bill, the Stop-Loss Compensation Act in the Senate and House (S. 3060 and H.R. 6205), which would require the Pentagon to pay affected troops an additional $1,500 for each month their service is extended.

“After months and years of risking their lives, our troops are too often being told they cannot return home to their families as scheduled,” Senator Lautenberg said. “The military made a deal with our men and women in uniform-and if our troops are required to serve longer than that commitment, that sacrifice should be rewarded.”

“Since introducing this bill, soldiers have written to tell me about the negative impacts stop loss has had on their lives and the lives of their families. While stop-loss may provide a temporary fix for maintaining troop levels, the lasting result of abusing this policy will be to deter young men and women from joining the Armed Forces,” Congresswoman Sutton said. “We have already asked our soldiers to sacrifice so much for their country, and they have honored that commitment with bravery and dignity. Now too many of them are being forced to go back. Compensating our troops for this continued sacrifice is the least we can do.”

“The stop-loss policy not only undermines the voluntary nature of our armed forces, but it also hurts the morale of our troops by unexpectedly prolonging their service” Schakowsky said. “Instead of turning its attention to providing incentives for recruitment, the Bush Administration continues to utilize a stop-loss policy, forcing those who have already completed the terms of their enlistment to return to the front lines. This legislation represents a small token of our appreciation for the troops who have been forced to return to Iraq because of the poor decisions and lack of planning by the Bush Administration.”

“The persistent use of stop loss authority violates the spirit of an all-volunteer force and imposes a significant burden on our troops and their families. I have personally spoken to service members who have lost limbs after their service was extended,” Congressman Jones said. “By requiring additional monthly pay for U.S. service members whose service on active duty is extended by a stop loss order, this legislation would ensure that additional service and sacrifice do not go unrewarded. It is also my hope that the Stop Loss Compensation Act would serve as an incentive for the Department of Defense to discontinue its reliance on stop loss.”

“Stop loss is a beautiful way to destroy troop moral and lower military recruitment and retention,” Colby Buzzell said. “I’ve seen the effects of involuntarily extending soldiers’ service and I feel that the stop loss compensation act is the least we can do to support our troops, both those currently serving, as well as those who already have sacrificed for our country.”

“Hundreds of thousands in the Guard and Reserve have set aside their families and lives and taken up arms to defend their country in the war on terror. Compensating our service members for this selfless but non-contracted service is appropriate and necessary-these men and women deserve no less for their extraordinary sacrifice,” Frank Yoakum of the Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States said.

“Of all the abuses borne by our service members since the beginning of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, excessive reliance on stop-loss is one of the most egregious. Involuntary service negates the promise of our all-volunteer military. By forcing tens of thousands of troops to stay in the military, we have broken the contract that our service members willing entered into with their country,” Bobby Muller of Veterans for America said. “Senator Lautenberg’s and Congresswoman Sutton’s bill are important steps toward recognizing the incredible sacrifice that stop-loss creates.”

“While researching and screening our film STOP-LOSS, patriotic soldiers and family members said they were proud to have fought for and defended our country and, having completed their contractual terms of service, felt they had earned the right to move on with their lives. These soldiers claim stop-loss amounts to ‘recycling the soldiers who served and should be getting out’ and a violation of the promise of the volunteer army they signed up for,” Peirce said. “I have observed some of the real costs of stop loss: fathers who hadn’t met their newborn children, soldiers who suffered psychologically and physically and soldiers who did not survive these extra tours.”

The Stop Loss Compensation Act would apply both to service members who are forced to continue service after their enlistment is up and after their eligibility for retirement has been extended. The bill also includes a provision that would be retroactive to October 2001 to compensate any service member who has been stop-lossed since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army’s stop loss policy can keep a soldier in service if his or her unit deploys within 90 days of the end of the soldier’s commitment. However, soldiers are not currently compensated for that extra commitment. On average, soldiers affected by stop loss now serve an extra 6.6 months.

Stop loss often takes members of the National Guard away from their civilian jobs and educational pursuits, and away from their posts in border security. This lack of available National Guard leaves the nation more vulnerable during national emergencies, such as earthquakes and hurricanes.

Many of the soldiers who are deployed for multiple tours suffer from mental trauma following their service which has contributed to skyrocketing rates of divorce and combat stress. Suicide rates are up, with the Pentagon reporting that some 20 percent more troops committed suicide in 2007 than in 2006.

Divorce rates, which have been escalating since 2003, remain at about 3.3 percent, up from 2.9 percent before the start of the war.

July 15, 2008, Kabul, Afghanistan – The Taliban insurgents who attacked a U.S.-run outpost near the Pakistani border on Sunday numbered nearly 200 fighters, almost three times the size of the allied force, and some breached the NATO compound in a coordinated assault that took the defenders by surprise, Western officials said.

The attackers were driven back in a pitched, four-hour battle, and they appeared to suffer scores of dead and wounded of their own, but the toll they inflicted was sobering. The base and a nearby observation post were held by just 45 American troops and 25 Afghan soldiers, two senior allied officials said Monday, asking for anonymity while an investigation was under way.

With 9 Americans dead and at least 15 wounded , that means that one in five of the U.S. defenders was killed and nearly half the remainder were wounded. Four Afghan soldiers also were wounded.

American and Afghan forces started building the makeshift base just last week, and its defenses were not fully in place, one of the senior allied officials said. In some places, troops were using their vehicles as barriers against insurgents. The militants apparently detected the vulnerability and moved quickly to exploit it in a predawn assault in which they attacked from two directions, U.S. officials said.

It was the first time insurgents had partly breached any of the three dozen outposts that U.S. and Afghan forces operate jointly across the country, according to a Western official who insisted on anonymity in providing details of the operation.

The attack underscored the vulnerability of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which are increasingly stretched thin as they are dispatched to far-flung outposts with their Afghan allies. The United States now has about 32,000 troops in Afghanistan, about one-fifth the number in Iraq, even though Afghanistan is about 50 percent larger than Iraq.

American commanders and NATO military officials said the assault had also reflected boldness among insurgents who had benefited from new bases in neighboring Pakistan.

It underscored the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, where war casualties have jumped this year and where U.S. commanders have said repeatedly that their force is undermanned.

The fact that the base, on the western side of Kunar Province, was manned by just 70 soldiers was first reported Monday by The Los Angeles Times. The death toll amounted to the worst single loss for the U.S. military in Afghanistan since June 2005 and one of the worst since the Taliban and their Qaeda associates were routed in late 2001.

American and Afghan soldiers inside the base were hit by flying fragments from bullets, grenades and mortars that insurgents fired from houses, shops and a mosque in a village within a few hundred meters of the base, several officials said. At the lightly fortified observation post nearby, American soldiers came under heavy fire from militants streaming through farmland under the cover of darkness. Most of the American casualties took place there, a senior U.S. military official said.

U.S. warplanes, attack helicopters and long-range artillery were urgently summoned to help repel the militants.

But the insurgents made it so far that a few of their corpses were found inside the base’s earthen barriers, and others were lying around it, Tamim Nuristani, a former governor in the region, said after talking to officials in the district.

The attack was unusually bold. Taliban guerrillas and other militants in Afghanistan rarely attack better-armed allied forces head on, preferring suicide bombs and hit-and-run ambushes against foot patrols and convoys. But they have made occasional attempts to overrun lightly manned or otherwise vulnerable outposts.

The United States and Afghanistan have been establishing dozens of military outposts, often in remote areas controlled by the Taliban or their allies.

“We’re looking at places to stop the flow of insurgents and establish relations with the local tribes,” a senior U.S. military official said.

Insurgents have been present in the area for months, including Pakistani militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group that was originally formed to fight in Kashmir, Nuristani said.

He said some local people might have joined the militants since a group of civilians were killed in U.S. airstrikes on July 4 in the same area.

“This made the people angry,” he said. “It was the same area; the airstrikes happened maybe one kilometer away from the base.”

Nuristani strongly criticized those airstrikes, saying that 22 civilians had been killed. The provincial police chief later confirmed that at least 17 civilians had been killed. The U.S. military said planes had struck vehicles of insurgents but has announced an investigation. Days after his comments, Nuristani was removed from his post.

He said that the security in the region was precarious and that insurgents had freedom of movement from the border with Pakistan through 95 kilometers, or 60 miles, of Nuristan Province to the base at Wanat.

For their part, NATO officials gave little further detail of the attack on Monday. “It has been quiet overnight; the insurgents had been pushed away,” said Captain Mike Finney, a spokesman for the NATO force in Kabul.

July 13, 2008 – There are those who say that President George W. Bush should be impeached for intentionally overstating the case for war with Iraq and misleading the American public and Congress about the threat of WMD as well as Saddam Hussein’s alleged role in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Since then, there have been administration insiders like Richard Clarke and Scott McClellan who’ve written books confirming these long-held suspicions, providing meticulously detailed accounts of how the Busheviks, as early as January 2001, began their mission to manipulate, misrepresent and manufacture evidence in order to justify an invasion.

And then there are those like former criminal prosecutor and best-selling author Vincent Bugliosi who believe mere impeachment is not enough. According to his website, his new book “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” is “a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq…”

Bugliosi, most famous for prosecuting Charles Manson for the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, appeared Friday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program with host Joe Scarborough, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and the Boston Globe’s Mike Barnicle. Citing reams of documentary evidence to support his contention that Bush should be tried for murder, Bugliosi bases his case not on Bush’s false claims of WMD, but rather that the president lied that the WMD posed a grave and imminent threat to the security of the United States, which in turn became the justification for the war.

As just one example, Bugliosi points to Bush’s October 7, 2002 speech to the Nation in which the president, for the first time, informed Americans of the “urgent” threat from Saddam and Iraq. Here’s a few excerpts from that fateful speech:

“…Tonight I want to take a few minutes to discuss a grave threat to peace, and America’s determination to lead the world in confronting that threat…Many Americans have raised legitimate questions: about the nature of the threat; about the urgency of action…First, some ask why Iraq is different from other countries or regimes that also have terrible weapons. While there are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone — because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant…who has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States…Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction…If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today — and we do — does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?…Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints…We have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring…I hope this will not require military action, but it may…The attacks of September the 11th showed our country that vast oceans no longer protect us from danger. Before that tragic date, we had only hints of al Qaeda’s plans and designs. Today in Iraq, we see a threat whose outlines are far more clearly defined, and whose consequences could be far more deadly. Saddam Hussein’s actions have put us on notice, and there is no refuge from our responsibilities…”

The problem with all this, and which Bugliosi also cites, is that just six days prior to Bush’s speech the CIA presented him its 2002 assessment entitled Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction in which it was the consensus of 16 federal intelligence agencies that in fact Saddam and Iraq was not an imminent threat to U.S. security at home. Bush knew all along that his speech was a lie as was the fallacy of an “imminent threat,” but he nonetheless pursued his aggressive mission of selling his war to the American people and to Congress. A sales job based on pure lies, deception and misrepresentations that result in over 100,000 deaths. And therein lies Bugliosi’s case for murder.

Referring to what is now widely known as the Downing Street Memos, in a March 27, 2006 front-page story the NY Times reported the following:

“In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush’s public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war. But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons…”Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” David Manning, Mr. Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides. “The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,” Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. “This was when the bombing would begin.”… The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.” Five days later Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to make Bush’s case for war.

Remember the timeline here. This is key. The meeting between Bush and Blair occurred four months after the CIA’s report in which it stated that Iraq was not an imminent threat. Yet, not only did Bush continue sounding the alarms over Saddam’s WMD, but he and his blood-thirsty neocons–VP Dick Cheney, then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld–had already secretly drawn up the war plans and were angling to concoct the saleable justification.

And where was the media while the Busheviks were perpetrating these lies in their march to Baghdad? Nowhere. The press was embarrassingly neutered and utterly useless. I recall possibly one or two noble attempts by MSNBC’s David Gregory to doggedly get some truth out of Bush during a couple of White House press conferences, but his efforts were summarily dismissed by a smirking Bush, whose smug, arrogant, defiant reply of “I told you, we’re not gonna go there, David” was beyond infuriating. Headline: Bush to Media…Fuck Off.. And that was the end of that. America’s free press was rendered impotent by a tyrannical president defiantly pissing on the Constitution and laughing about it.

Nothing’s changed. It’s been five years, a half-trillion dollars and 4000 dead troops since the invasion and the media still has about as much impact as a flaccid wiener in a whorehouse. That was evidenced yet again with Scarborough’s interview, or shall I say mocking session, with Bugliosi. Scarborough was noticeably confrontational, to the point of being belligerent in his defense of Bush’s march to war. While Bugliosi was diligently trying to demonstrate, from a purely scholarly, legal, non-partisan standpoint, how the U.S. president is responsible for the death of over 100,000 people, Scarborough and Barnicle had that “behind the teacher’s back” grinning/laughter thing going on as if they were a couple of high-school cut-ups. While all this was taking place, Mitchell sat in a robotic trance. On multiple occasions, Scarborough repeated the GOP talking point that “everyone said Saddam had WMD.” Bugliosi, albeit unsuccessfully, kept trying to hammer home the point that it wasn’t Bush’s lies about the existence of WMD, but the imminent threat that Bush regurgitated ad nauseum to bolster his case for war.

But that’s just the problem. From the start, the media never took this war seriously in terms of its justification; what the sacrifices would be; or its consequences. It never did its job in questioning the obvious lies and misrepresentations. Never held Bush or the administration accountable for its actions, especially when those actions included egregious violations of the U.S. Constitution, international law, the Geneva Conventions, or just plain simple morality and ethics. So why should it start now? It’s as if the media at this point needs to remain hands off so as not to call attention to its gross negligence over never being hands on. It may be maddening to watch Scarborough, Barnicle and Mitchell sit it mock judgment and disdain of a former prosecutor presenting a cogent scenario for Bush’s indictment for war crimes, but it sure as hell ain’t surprising.

July 16, 2008, Kabul, Afghanistan – The killing of civilians in foreign military airstrikes is shattering Afghans’ support for keeping international troops in their troubled land and driving angry young men into the arms of the Taliban, analysts say.

International troops do not target civilians and say they do their utmost to avoid harming them, but even as Taliban suicide bombers kill more innocents, it is foreign forces and the Afghan government they support that bear the brunt of the backlash.

“Such acts provoke public hatred towards internal and foreign forces and force people to join the enemy who encourages them to carry out terrorist and suicide attacks,” said the state-run Hewad newspaper after the first of two controversial airstrikes this month.

First, Afghan officials say, U.S. aircraft killed 15 civilians in the northeast on July 4, then just three days later, hit a wedding in the east, killing 47, mostly women and children.

“The Americans will soon face new resistance with new motives if they continue such operations and do not care even a little about the lives of the people,” the state-run daily Anis said.

While the U.S. military first of all denied civilians had been hit, then launched what is likely to be a lengthy investigation, most Afghans have already made up their minds.

“Such arbitrary bombing raids and brutal killings have been repeated so many times during the past nearly seven years that now it is difficult to believe these foreign forces have come to our country for assistance,” the pro-government Weesa daily said.

“There is a perception problem,” said NATO’s civilian spokesman in Afghanistan, Mark Laity.
“But it is a perception problem not a reality problem. The reality is that we are very careful and the number of mistakes we make is very small.”

The perception though that international forces are not careful enough when launching airstrikes is becoming entrenched in Afghan public opinion, and officials have been known to make hasty claims of civilian casualties.

FOG OF WAR

The Taliban also claim troops wantonly kill civilians almost every day, adding to the fog of war.

The remoteness of most airstrikes, the speed with which bodies are buried and a cultural taboo against mostly male reporters seeing wounded women in hospitals also make verifying claims and counter-claims a major problem.

More than 250 Afghan civilians were killed by Afghan and foreign forces in the first six months of this year, the United Nations says. NATO disputes the figure and says it is much lower.

The Taliban have killed many more civilians, at least 450 so far this year, according to the U.N., and as many as 80 percent of the victims of suicide bombs are innocent bystanders.

Even so, after such attacks ordinary Afghans more often than not blame local and foreign security forces for failing to stop them from happening, rather than those who carried them out.

A suicide bomb attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul last week that killed 58 people was no different.

“Such incidents in Kabul where, apart from Afghan security forces, a countless number of foreign security forces are based, show security bodies are in fact not capable of doing anything or they deliberately do not want to do anything and are involved in the incidents,” the independent Rah-e Nejat daily said.

Airstrikes by both NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan are either pre-planned targeted airstrikes, or in response to calls for assistance from troops in combat.

The level of preparation that goes into pre-planned strikes means mistakes are extremely rare, Laity said.

But when troops’ lives are threatened from militants firing from, for example a walled compound, “you are entitled to reply even if you cannot be 100 percent sure there are not civilians in the compound. That is the right of self-defence,” he said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly called for international troops to coordinate their operations more with Afghan forces so as to avoid civilian casualties.

But if most mistakes happen when airstrikes are called in during the heat of battle, it is hard to see how that could have an effect. Mistakes do and will continue to happen.

“The problem is this is a war,” Laity said.

“Although our weapons are remarkable and our people incredibly well-trained, although the rules of engagement and the principles under which we operate are of the highest standard, we are not perfect.”

July 15, 2008, Washington, DC – Bob Filner, Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, will hold a screening of the documentary “All the Way Home” on Wednesday, July 23 at 10 a.m. in Cannon 334.  The documentary follows a Montana fishing outfitter and his team of volunteers while they take severely injured Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from Walter Reed down an isolated river. 

“There hasn’t been a movie or documentary or a creative piece like this that has moved me so much,” say Shad Meshad, President and Founder of the National Veterans Foundation (NVF).  The National Veterans Foundation runs “Lifeline for Vets,” a crisis hotline that has fielded over a quarter of a million calls from veterans in need of emergency medical treatment, suicide intervention, post-traumatic stress disorder counseling, benefit advocacy, food, shelter, employment training or legal aid. 

The screening will be followed by an opportunity to discuss the documentary and related veterans’ issues with Filmmaker Edward Nachtrieb, Chairman Filner and Shad Meshad of NFV.  

Who:         Chairman Bob Filner, House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs
                Shad Meshad, Founder of National Veterans Foundation
                Edward Nachtrieb, Filmmaker/Documentarian 

What:   Screening of the documentary “All the Way Home” followed by a media availability with Chairman Bob Filner and others 

When:           Wednesday, July 23, 2008

10:00 – 11:00 a.m. (Movie Screening)
11:00 – 11:30 a.m. (Media availability)

Where:  House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, 334 Cannon House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515

“This is a powerful documentary that really shows the realities faced by our wounded warriors – up close and personal,” said Chairman Filner (D-CA).  “It also shows what we can do – individuals, communities, neighborhoods – to help our veterans as they return home from war.  What may seem insignificant can lead to powerful changes for our heroes and ourselves.”