Veterans for Common Sense

June 20, 2008 – In an opening statement Friday morning before former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s highly anticipated testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee, the panel’s Democratic Chairman, John Conyers, said the Bush administration may have committed an an “impeachable offense” by launching a “propaganda campaign” to win support for a U.S. led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The Judiciary Committee is receiving testimony from McClellan about whether White House officials, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, obstructed justice or broke other federal laws in an attempt to cover-up the roles of senior administration officials who unmasked covert CIA operate Valerie Plame’s identity to the media. McClellan published a book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and the Culture of Washington Deception, earlier this month that suggested Bush and Cheney played a bigger role in the scandal than they have publicly acknowledged.

Additionally, McClellan wrote that the White House mislead the public about Iraq’s arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and the threat the country posed to the U.S.

Conyers’ opening statement prior to the start of the hearing signaled that he may be inclined to consider a vote on the 35 articles of impeachment introduced against President Bush two weeks ago by his colleague, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich. The House voted 251-166 to send the impeachment articles to the Judiciary Committee for consideration.

“What Scott McClellan wrote in his new book about the administration’s propaganda campaign to promote and defend the occupation of Iraq was not a revelation,” Conyers’ opening statement says. “It was confirmation that the White House has played fast and loose with the truth in a time of war. Depending on how one reads the Constitution, that may or may not be an impeachable offense.”

Conyers did not elaborate on impeachment beyond what he said in his opening statement. A spokesman for Conyers did not return calls for comment. In the past, the Michigan congressman has said publicly that he did not support Democratic efforts to impeach President Bush. Last year, a resolution introduced by Kucinich to impeach Cheney died in Conyers’ committee.

Talk of impeachment, however, was not limited to Conyers’ opening statement. Several Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee, including Robert Wexler, and Sheila Jackson Lee, discussed the need for impeachment hearings based on revelations that McClellan made in his book.

Wexler and Jackson Lee’s comments lead Republican Congressman Dan Lungren to remark that the hearing was beginning to sound like “Kucinich light.” Lungren questioned whether McClellan’s motive in appearing before the committee was to make a case for impeaching President Bush.

“You didn’t come here believing that someone should be impeached did you?” Lungren asked McClellan. The former press secretary told Lungren that he did not support impeachment.

“I have listened to my colleagues refer to impeachment four different times and we have been told by the leadership that impeachment is off the table,” Lungren said, quoting Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. “We’re not hear to bring up an impeachment resolution.”

In an interview with The Public Record Thursday, Kucinich said he was scheduled to meet with Conyers Thursday evening to discuss how the Judiciary Committee will deal with the impeachment articles he introduced. However, the former 2008 Democratic presidential candidate said he was unclear on what course of action Conyers would take in the weeks ahead with regard to the articles of impeachment. Kucinich has vowed that he would continue to reintroduce articles of impeachment against President Bush if the Judiciary Committee does not take up the matter within the next 30 days.

“I have informed the leadership of the House should they fail to hold hearings I would come back to the Congress in 30 days with even more articles,” Kucinich told The Public Record. “I may have to do this one or two more times before I get their attention.”

Kucinich said Congressional hearings, such as the one taking place in the Judiciary Committee with McClellan, “reduces Congress to a debating society” if lawmakers fail to hold the Executive Branch accountable for their alleged misdeeds.

“How many hearings do we need to have to establish that this administration has violated the Constitution,” Kucinich said. “There is a point at which you reduce congress to a debating society, which diminishes Congress’ oversight role. It sets a terrible precedent.”

Conyers certainly appears to be probing whether the new revelations about Bush and Cheney’s role in the Plame leak–an incident directly linked to to the exposure of the White House’s use of fraudulent prewar Iraq intelligence–amount to High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

In a letter sent June 5 to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Conyers and Subcommittee Chairman Linda Sanchez, (D-Calif.), demanded the Justice Department turn over transcripts of Bush and Cheney’s interviews with CIA leak investigator Patrick Fitzgerald and other documents obtained by the special prosecutor during the course of his three-year investigation.

A June 13 letter written by Deputy Attorney General Keith Nelson in response to Conyers and Sanchez’s inquiry to the DOJ indicated that the lawmakers are trying to build a criminal case against the White House.

“Committee staff has indicated that in this newly-initiated inquiry, the Committee’s interest focuses on alleged White House attempts to cover up the involvement of White House officials in the leak and whether such attempts constitute an obstruction of justice or other violation of federal criminal law,” Nelson wrote.

Nelson refused to turn over the leak documents to the Judiciary Committee claiming the panel does not have “government-wide oversight jurisdiction and it does not have jurisdiction over the White House.”

While we appreciate that the Committee has oversight authority over the Department of Justice, we do not understand how the Committee’s jurisdiction could extend to the alleged conduct at the White House,” says Nelson’s letter to Conyers and Sanchez. “The executive branch has substantial confidentiality interests in these documents, which have been created and maintained by the Department but consist of White House information.”

“Additionally, we note that it is the responsibility of this Department to investigate possible violations of the criminal law, not the responsibility of any committee of Congress. Moreover, this theory of oversight jurisdiction would suggest that the Judiciary Committee could investigate allegations of this kind anywhere in the executive branch. We are not aware that the Committee has exercised this kind of jurisdiction in the past,” Nelson wrote.

Nelson’s response angered Conyers and Sanchez. They fired off a response to Nelson Wednesday that said they intended to subpoena the Justice Department “unless we receive a clear commitment to promptly produce these documents by next Tuesday, June 24.”

“There is absolutely no proper basis for this action… it’s patently absurd… and an affront to the entire Congress,” Conyers and Sanchez responded Wednesday in a letter to Nelson. “Both the rules and our previous oversight activity concerning the Fitzgerald investigation plainly encompass the current inquiry, and the notion that our oversight concerning criminal law enforcement should somehow stop at the gates of the White House has no proper basis.”

June 21, 2008 – The federal government has ordered a deserter from the U.S. Army to return to the United States by July 10. If he doesn’t leave voluntarily, the government will deport him.

Either way, Corey Glass, a former sergeant, would become the first Iraq war resister to be booted out of Canada – thereby setting a precedent for other U.S. war resisters who are seeking refuge in this country.

A majority of the House of Commons voted 137-110 two weeks ago in favour of a motion urging the government to refrain from ousting war resisters; about 100 of whom are believed to be in the Canada. All three opposition parties supported the measure, sponsored by the New Democrats’ Olivia Chow. The Conservatives dissented.

Yet the motion seems futile. Nothing obliges Prime Minister Stephen Harper to respect it – it’s non-binding. And while polls suggest that most Canadians support the resisters, as do such organizations as Amnesty International and the United Church of Canada, the issue is largely out of the public eye. This month’s parliamentary motion, for example, received scant news coverage.

This general apathy seems paradoxical. The Iraq war is, if anything, even more unpopular among Canadians than was the Vietnam war. Tens of thousands of U.S. draft dodgers and deserters fled to Canada during that conflict, and the government and the public received them well.

Why shouldn’t Canada be as open to resisters today as it was a generation ago? The political answer, of course, is that Harper is less willing to ruffle Washington’s feathers than were the prime ministers of the day, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.

The legal answer is that a well-founded fear of persecution is one of the base criteria for granting refugee status, and the Immigration and Refugee Board, the courts and Immigration Minister Diane Finley have all rejected the resisters’ claim that they would face persecution if they returned home. I agree with Finley and company. The U.S. military typically sentences Iraq war deserters (that is, those who have not left the country) to jail terms that run to about a year, and that’s hardly a harrowing fate.

Yet the weakness of the persecution argument doesn’t justify Canada’s rejection of the kind of people it once accepted. After all, the U.S. didn’t really persecute Vietnam war deserters either, and yet Canada gave them asylum.

Those who want to expel the resisters make two moral arguments. Let’s look at each.

The first argument is that volunteers make up 100 per cent of today’s U.S. armed forces, which wasn’t the case during ‘Nam. “Why,” the National Post’s Jonathan Kay asks in regard to Corey Glass, “should Canadians help this deserter go back on his freely given word?” That’s technically true: Guys like Glass signed army contracts of their free will. Yet they were deceived. The contractor – the U.S. government – assured them this was a just war. The premises – that Saddam had WMD and that he was in bed with Al-Qa’ida – turned out to be bogus.

Some deserters also claim, plausibly, that glib recruiters promised them non-combat jobs if they signed up with the army. Wrong. More false pretenses.

Finally, the army has called still others back into additional tours of Iraq under the Stop-loss program. That’s like a back-door draft.

Free will? Come on.

The second moral argument is that the resisters are unjustly claiming to be conscientious objectors. Real CO’s are against all wars, say the critics, and the resisters are against only this one war.

Yet to grant asylum only to those who are against all violent conflicts is to set the bar unreasonably high. Most soldiers don’t think in terms of absolutes. They think in terms of their own direct experiences.

In court testimony and interviews, those resisters who have served in Iraq suggest that the unjust war means there can be no excuse for the horrors they have seen. That’s a true show of conscience.

Critics of the resisters make one last argument, this one less moral than practical. They say that giving asylum would be bad for troop morale and thus undermine the U.S. war effort.

Think about that. If politicians knew that the citizenry would refuse to fight if the reason for a war was not persuasive, they might embark on fewer unjust wars – or, they might end such wars more quickly, as was the case with the Vietnam conflict.

There aren’t many checks and balances against military recklessness, but easy asylum can be one of them.

June 21, 2008 – Ten men who served in Vietnam with Sen. John Kerry want Dallas billionaire T. Boone Pickens to fork over the $1 million he said he would give anyone who could disprove claims that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made about Mr. Kerry’s war record during the 2004 presidential campaign.

The men sent a lengthy letter and supporting documentation to Mr. Pickens on Thursday.

Mr. Pickens, who helped support the anti-Kerry group, could not be reached for comment Friday night. He has not publicly responded to the letter.

“We are prepared now to come to Texas to see you, or meet somewhere else mutually convenient,” the crewmen wrote. “We are telling you, that we will bring with us a Navy/Pentagon certified copy of Senator Kerry’s full military record and his writings and the movie footage you have requested. We will sit with you while you go through them page for page, frame by frame and answer any questions you may have. We know the truth because we were there on the boat. ”

The men want the money given to a veterans charity.

In 2004 Mr. Pickens gave at least $2 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Its political ads questioning the military service of Mr. Kerry — who campaigned on his record as a war hero — were considered instrumental in his loss to President Bush.

President Bush won a narrow victory over Mr. Kerry, with many analysts contending the senator was late in responding to the swift boat ads.

Last November, Mr. Pickens offered to pay $1 million to anyone who could prove that the claims made against Mr. Kerry were wrong.

Mr. Kerry took the challenge and offered to debate Mr. Pickens in Dallas and Massachusetts.

June 20, 2008, Washington, DC – The House approved the largest war-spending bill to date Thursday, bending to President Bush’s call for $162 billion in war funding with no strings attached and giving his successor enough money to wage the wars until July 2009.

In exchange, Democrats won Bush’s blessing for several of their domestic priorities, including a 13-week extension of jobless benefits for workers who have exhausted theirs, and a new GI bill benefit allowing veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to attend a state college tuition-free.

The deal, negotiated between the White House and allies of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, takes the issue of the war off Congress’ plate for the rest of this election year. Lawmakers also intended to give the next president some time to set a new Iraq policy before having to return to Congress for more money.

But anti-war activists called it a betrayal by Democrats, who had pledged to end the war. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, dubbed it “the biggest blank check ever.” Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, said the vote was a “profound disappointment to the millions of Americans who put Democrats into power hoping we could force a change in Iraq.”

The House vote is likely to end almost two years of clashes between Democrats and the White House over the Iraq war, which Bush and Republicans have largely won.

House Democrats this spring once against approved a nonbinding measure calling for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by June 2009. But the Senate, unable to get the 60 votes needed to pass it, stripped it from the spending bill. The war bill ping-ponged between the House and Senate for weeks until Pelosi and other top Democrats decided to cut a deal.

“I don’t consider it a failure,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday. “We never sent them a bill that did not have deadlines, conditions and the rest.” She blamed Republicans in the Senate. “They are complicit with the president to make sure he never has to get a bill on his desk with a timeline, because the American people want a timeline,” she said.

The House passed the legislation by splitting it in two pieces to accommodate anti-war Democrats who refused to vote for any more war funding. The first piece, on the war funding, passed 268-155, with support from 188 Republicans and 80 Democrats. The second part, which included the domestic spending increases, was approved with strong backing from both parties, 416-12.

The bill now goes to the Senate, where Democratic leaders say it’s likely to be passed.

The deal required major concessions from both sides. Democrats were able to get the 13-week extension of jobless benefits, but had to drop their push for an additional 13 weeks of benefits for workers in high-unemployment states. Republicans also insisted that individuals must have worked for at least 20 weeks to qualify for the benefits.

The extended benefits will apply to all those who exhaust their aid between November 2006 and March 2009, an estimated 3.8 million workers nationwide.

The new education benefit for veterans, proposed by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., who served in the Marines, would offer any veteran who served active duty for at least three years since Sept. 11, 2001, a full college education – tuition, room, board and a monthly stipend covering the cost of the most expensive in-state public university. It would more than double the value of the current GI Bill education benefit from $40,000 to $90,000.

Bush had threatened to veto the proposal, saying it was too generous and could entice too many soldiers serving in Iraq or Afghanistan to leave the military. But the White House backed down after Democrats dropped a plan to pay for the benefit by raising taxes on individuals who earn at least $500,000 a year and couples who earn $1 million.

But the White House ended up adding at least $10 billion to the $52 billion price tag for the new benefit over 10 years by insisting that veterans be allowed to transfer the college education benefit to a family member.

The fiscally conservative House Blue Dog Democrats, who pushed for the tax hike to pay for the veterans’ benefit, expressed frustration that the war spending and the new GI bill benefit will be added to the growing national debt.

“We are making a serious mistake by not paying for these things,” said Rep. Allen Boyd, D-Fla., a Blue Dog member. “It is one our children and grandchildren will pay for.”

But House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, who helped broker the deal, insisted that the spending for the war and for veterans’ benefits was worth it. “The cost of this bill, frankly, is high, but it’s a price of freedom. And I don’t think you put a price on freedom and security in our country,” he said.

Democrats succeeded in keeping language in the bill postponing six Medicaid rules proposed by the Bush administration, which critics say would have led to cuts in services to seniors, families and the disabled.

The bill also would bar the United States from spending more money on the reconstruction of Iraq unless the Iraqi government matches it dollar for dollar. And it would ban the use of military construction funds to build permanent bases in Iraq.

Anti-war groups delivered “certificates of shame” and cardboard cutout “bloody hands” to Pelosi and other House leaders before the vote.

“We really feel that they have betrayed the American people who voted for them to get us out of this war,” said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group CodePink, based in San Francisco.

Pelosi gave a fiery anti-war speech Thursday night, but also expressed her disappointment that the bill will continue to fund Bush’s Iraq policy. “Let us think and hope that this is the last time there will ever be another dollar spent without constraints, without conditions, without direction,” she said.

How they voted
To see how members voted on the war spending bill:

clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll431.xml

What’s next
The war spending bill now goes to the Senate, where it’s likely to be passed.

It would then go to President Bush, who has indicated he will sign the bill.

June 19, 2008 – Iraq’s oil ministry says the country is close to signing oil service agreements with major international oil companies to boost its output capacity.

Once these Technical Support Agreements are signed, they will be the first major contracts which Iraq has undertaken with the majors since the 2003 US-led invasion to Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Ministry spokesman Assem Jihad told The Associated Press in a telephonic interview on Thursday that the companies are submitting their proposals which will be reviewed and sent to the Iraqi Cabinet for final approval.

Jihad said the names of the companies would be announced June 30.

June 18, 2008 – It’s time that the House and Senate committee chairs investigate the Department of Veterans Affairs for medical ethics. As a three-month Washington Times/ABC News investigation revealed Tuesday, the VA is testing drugs with sometimes-severe side effects on hundreds of military veterans, including many post-traumatic stress syndrome patients, in trials whose risks the participants may not fully recognize. Evidence of troublingly slow risk assessment and predatory-sounding enticements for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are the chief shortcomings that beg Galen’s principle: “First, do no harm.” The lives of service-member participants are too important, and the integrity of government post-traumatic stress disorder research is too vital, for the federal government to be taking these manifest risks.

The scope of the problem is potentially very large, even systemic. The federal government has conducted 25 drug tests on veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and carried out 300 studies on the disorder itself. (An estimated 300,000 Iran and Afghanistan veterans suffer from the disorder or from depression.) There are at least five test drugs bearing warnings about suicide or suicidal thoughts. Also, 4,796 military veterans are enrolled in post-traumatic stress disorder studies – including 940 in the smoking cessation study that raised red flags. One-hundred-forty-three veterans in this study take Chantix, which is made by Pfizer Inc. and is the drug-cessation drug under special scrutiny in The Washington Times/ABC News investigation. The potential side effects of Chantix include neuropsychiatric symptoms, such as suicidal thoughts and depressed mood. Twenty-one veterans have reported adverse side effects because of Chantix – and the drug is still being used in VA studies.

“Lab rat” is how one Iraq veteran describes his experience in the VA’s volunteer medical experiments – and little wonder. Former Army sharpshooter James Elliott of Silver Spring was not informed of the serious potential side effects of Chantix until after a post-traumatic stress disorder recurrence that resulted in a potentially lethal encounter with police. The Iraq veteran assumed the study would follow safe protocols when he signed up for a chance to quit his habit of three packs of cigarettes a day and to receive the $30 monthly enticement. But soon, his nightmares and stress reactions returned with suicidal thoughts, to the point that his fiance called the police fearing Mr. Elliott might hurt himself. In the resulting standoff, police Tasered the armed Mr. Elliott, who recollects in an interview: “I would have shot me.”

Why was a distressed veteran, who served 15 months in Iraq, not informed of Chantix’s serious potential side effects until after this potentially lethal encounter?

Chantix was a moving target, but the federal government was much too slow to respond. In November, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued its first warning about Chantix. On Jan. 18, Pfizer updated its warning label: “[P]atients who are attempting to quit smoking with Chantix should be observed for serious neuropsychiatry symptoms, including changes in behavior, agitation, depressed mood, suicidal ideation and suicidal behavior.” Yet it was not until Feb. 29 that the VA wrote to veterans and issued its own warning about “untoward changes in behavior” and side effects, including “anxiety, nervousness, tension, depression, thoughts of suicide, and attempted and completed suicide.”

According to the FDA, nearly 40 suicides and more than 400 incidents of suicidal behavior have been linked to Chantix. But it took three months for the Chantix warning to make its way through the VA system and to the patients, as this week’s Washington Times/ABC News study showed. It was during that time Mr. Elliott relapsed into post-traumatic stress.

Too many lives were put at unnecessary risk – veterans’ lives and those of neighbors, family and law enforcers – in a pattern that could easily recur unless and until the VA is better managed. At the very least, the VA should end the trials of Chantix.

The lax communications regarding the Chantix trials are unconscionable. The federal government can do better: It must do better.

The changes coming to bear at institutions like Walter Reed Army Medical Center and VA medical facilities are welcome. But human life is more important. This is a prime opportunity for those in Congress who strive for improved oversight of the executive branch. James Elliott’s story is not one the government should allow to be repeated.

June 18, 2008 – The Marine Corps is concerned about your health. We ENCOURAGE all former Marines, family members and civilian employees who resided or worked aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune between 1957 and 1987 to REGISTER with the Marine Corps for information regarding past water quality.

https://clnr.hqi.usmc.mil/clsurvey/