Editorial Column: Blackwater’s Bright Future

Posted on June 17, 2008 by Team VCS

June 16, 2008 – From California to Iraq, business has never been better for the controversial private security firm Blackwater Worldwide. Company President Gary Jackson recently boasted that Blackwater has “had two successive quarters of unprecedented growth.” Owner Erik Prince recently spun his company as the “FedEx” of the U.S. national security apparatus, describing Blackwater as a “robust temp agency.”

Such rhetoric may seem brazen, given Blackwater’s deadly record in Iraq and troubled reputation at home, but here is the cold, hard fact: Blackwater knows its future is bright no matter who next takes up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The company’s most infamous moment came last September, when Blackwater operatives were alleged to have gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. A U.S. military investigation labeled the shootings a “criminal event,” and a federal grand jury in Washington is hearing evidence in the case.

The father of one of the dead, a 9-year-old boy shot in the head, testified before the grand jury in late May. He has rejected offers of monetary compensation from the U.S. government and Blackwater; he demands a public admission of guilt by the company. “This is important for me, morally, for my family and my tribe,” said Mohammed Hafidh Abdul-Razzaq. Other survivors have been offering testimony to the United Nations, and some have filed a lawsuit in federal court in this country.

At the end of the day, perhaps criminal charges will be brought against a handful of Blackwater operatives as a token gesture. But this will not bring substantive change to the unaccountable private war industry. Indeed, the killing of Iraqi civilians and other scandals do not seem to hurt Blackwater’s business at all. Quite the opposite.

In April, over the objections of the U.S.-installed Iraqi government, which has demanded Blackwater’s expulsion, the Bush administration quietly renewed the company’s lucrative Iraq contract for yet another year. To date, the company has pulled in over $1 billion from its Iraq and Afghanistan “security” contracts alone.

Blackwater is also winning at home. The company recently fought back widespread local opposition to its plans for a new warfare training center in San Diego. When residents and local officials tried to block it, Blackwater sued the city. A federal judge, appointed by President Bush’s father, ordered San Diego to stand down. Now the company is entrenched, guns a blazin’, in San Diego and is well positioned to cash in on the increasingly privatized border-patrol industry.

Blackwater’s California expansion is just one of several ventures that reveal how Blackwater is growing. Among the others:

* Prince’s private spy agency, Total Intelligence Solutions, is now open for business. Run by three veteran CIA operatives, the company offers “CIA-type services” to governments and Fortune 1000 companies.

* Blackwater was asked by the Pentagon to bid for a share of a whopping $15-billion contract to “fight terrorists with drug-trade ties” in countries such as Colombia, Bolivia, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Analysts say it could be the company’s “biggest job” ever.

* Blackwater is wrapping up work on its own armored vehicle, the Grizzly, as well as its Polar Airship 400, a surveillance blimp Blackwater wants to market for use in monitoring the U.S.-Mexico border.

But is Blackwater counting its chickens before they hatch? Some may see it as a foregone conclusion that if Barack Obama wins in November, Blackwater’s days on the federal payroll would be numbered. Obama has labeled it “unaccountable” and a danger to U.S. troops in Iraq. (By comparison, John McCain’s top strategist, Charlie Black, has worked for Blackwater.)

But it is far more complicated than that. Obama may want to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq, for instance, but “diplomatic security” is where Blackwater’s bread is lathered with golden butter. Obama has pledged to increase diplomatic activity in Iraq and to keep in place the Green Zone and the monstrous U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Despite his criticism, Obama may have no choice but to use these private forces. His top advisors have painfully acknowledged Obama “cannot rule [it] out.”

Consider the numbers: At present, Blackwater has about two-thirds as many operatives in Baghdad as the U.S. State Department has diplomatic security agents in the entire world, including Iraq. Although Obama has said he wants diplomatic security to be done by U.S. government employees, accountable under U.S. law, the State Department estimates that it could take years to recruit, vet and train a force to take over Blackwater’s work.

In addition, Obama’s rhetoric on Latin America strikes familiar “drug war” chords, which bodes well for Blackwater, and he plans to send 7,000 more troops to Afghanistan, where the company is already firmly entrenched.

Blackwater’s work in Iraq began with one $27-million no-bid contract to guard the U.S. administrator for the country, L. Paul Bremer III, in 2003. In five years it has metastasized into a central component of the U.S. presence in Iraq and is spreading fast into the most sensitive areas of the national security apparatus.

There is no question that a McCain White House would be preferred by Blackwater and its allies. The question is: Would a Democratic victory really be bad for business?

Jeremy Scahill is the author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.”

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Veterans Risk Ruin While Awaiting VA Disability Benefit Checks

Posted on June 17, 2008 by Team VCS

June 17, 2008, San Antonio, TX – His lifelong dream of becoming a soldier had, in the end, come to this for Isaac Stevens: 28, penniless, in a wheelchair, fending off the sexual advances of another man in a homeless shelter.

Stevens’ descent from Army private first-class, 3rd Infantry Division, 11 Bravo Company, began in 2005 – not in battle, since he was never sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan, but with a headfirst fall over a wall on the obstacle course at Fort Benning, Ga. He suffered a head injury and spinal damage.

The injury alone didn’t put him in a homeless shelter. Instead, it was military bureaucracy – specifically, the way injured soldiers are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow.

“When I got out, I hate to say it, but man, that was it. Everybody just kind of washed their hands of me, and it was like, `OK, you’re on your own,'” said Stevens, who was discharged in November and was in a shelter by February. He has since moved into a temporary San Antonio apartment with help from Operation Homefront, a nonprofit organization.

Nearly 20,000 disabled soldiers were discharged in the past two fiscal years, and lawmakers, veterans’ advocates and others say thousands could be facing financial ruin while they wait for their claims to be processed and their benefits to come through.

“The anecdotal evidence is depressing,” said Rep. John Hall, D-N.Y., who heads a subcommittee on veterans disability benefits. “These veterans are getting medical care, but their family is going through this huge readjustment at the same time they’re dealing with financial difficulties.”

Most permanently disabled veterans qualify for payments from Social Security and the military or Veterans Affairs. Those sums can amount to about two-thirds of their active-duty pay. But until those checks show up, most disabled veterans draw a reduced Army paycheck.

The amount depends on the soldier’s injuries, service time and other factors. But a typical veteran and his family who once lived on $3,400 a month might have to make do with $970 a month.

Unless a soldier has a personal fortune or was so severely injured as to require long-term inpatient care, that can be an extreme hardship.

The Army, stung by the scandal last year over shoddy care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, has been working to help soldiers during the in-between period, said Col. Becky Baker, assigned to injured soldier transition at the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office.

In a change in policy that took effect last August, the Army is allowing wounded soldiers to continue to draw their full Army paychecks for up to 90 days after discharge, Baker said. It is also sending more VA workers to Army posts to process claims more quickly, and trying to do a better job of informing soldiers of the available benefits and explaining the application process.

“We make certain that we’ve covered all the bases before we discharge the soldier,” Baker said.

She acknowledged, however, that the changes have been slow to take hold across an Army stretched by war. “It’s definitely a practice that is new. It takes awhile for new practices to be institutionalized,” the colonel said.

Stevens was moved to the Operation Homefront apartment after a social worker at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, acting on her own initiative, rescued Stevens from a homeless shelter there.

“This is a situation where someone used their common sense and they did the right thing, versus saying, `This is the rules. We can’t do this,'” Tripler spokeswoman Minerva Anderson said of the social worker.

Typically, the first 100 days after discharge are spent just gathering medical and other evidence needed to make a decision on disability, VA officials say. If paperwork is incomplete, or a veteran moves to another state before the claim is decided, the process can drag on longer. Disagree with the VA’s decision, and the wait time grows.

“The claims are a lot more complicated than people think,” said Ursula Henderson, director of the VA’s regional office in Houston.

Amy Palmer, a disabled veteran and vice president of Operation Homefront, which helps newly disabled servicemembers, said: “Nobody’s assigned to them. You’re on your own once you get out.”

Hall is pushing legislation that would force the VA to use compatible computer systems and more consistent criteria and to reach out to veterans better.

“A veteran goes and serves and does what the country asks them to do,” the congressman said. “But when they come back they’re made to jump through these hoops and to wait in line for disability benefits.”

Simon Heine served three tours in Iraq as a tank mechanic before he was discharged with severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

His wife quit college so she could figure out how her four children could live on less than $1,000 a month. Eventually, she moved the family of six into an Operation Homefront apartment so they could finish navigating the bureaucracy and wait out the arrival of Social Security and VA benefits.

“It is like giving you a car and taking the steering wheel off. They say, `There is the gas and the brake. Just go straight,’ and hopefully, you are going in the right direction,” Heine said.

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Editorial Column: Bush Detention Policy Seemed All About Him

Posted on June 17, 2008 by Team VCS

June 17, 2008, Washington – President Bush is in the midst of a farewell tour of some of the nations that like him the least – from oft-ridiculed France, which his defense secretary derided as part of “old Europe,” to formerly loyal England.

Nonetheless, the Old World landscapes seem to have put Bush in a plaintive mood. The president, who rarely admits to any second-guessing, told The Times of London that he regrets some of his bellicose statements, such as wanting Osama bin Laden “Dead or Alive” and saying of insurgents in Iraq, “Bring ’em on.”

“I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric,” Bush said, acknowledging that he may have given the impression that he was a “guy really anxious for war.”

The Times interview was the first time Bush acknowledged the costs of such statements – which put the spotlight on American aggressiveness at times when the United States needed the world to be focused on catching bin Laden and quelling the Iraqi insurgency.

One can only wonder whether Bush has similar regrets about his detention policy, which the Supreme Court swatted down in a dramatic and, to some conservatives, troubling, decision last week.

The president’s detention policy is connected to his intemperate statements in one way only: He turned a matter of understandable necessity – the need to detain people considered possible terrorists – into a matter of presidential prerogative. He made it seem like it was all about him.

In the early days of the Afghanistan war, no one raised objections to detaining alleged Taliban fighters and suspected terrorists picked up on the battlefield. But Bush soon faced a dilemma. The traditional concept of prisoners of war, as outlined by the Geneva Conventions, didn’t easily fit a terrorist conflict.

These detainees weren’t uniformed troops in a regular army. And proven terrorists might easily take up arms again as soon as they were released, pursuing a never-ending showdown.

But if the threat of terrorism would never end, neither was it practical nor fair to expect that suspects could be held forever without a proper hearing. Whether or not this was Bush’s intention, his initial legal position raised such a possibility. Bush contended that courts should have no role in handling enemy combatants, and that the treatment of detainees should be solely a matter of the commander in chief’s discretion.

So rather than be seen as grappling to balance procedural fairness and national security, Bush was widely seen as dismissive of the problem. All that seemed to matter to him was keeping people locked up.

The Supreme Court signaled in its early decision on detainees that it was struggling with the issue and wanted Bush to provide a fairer system. But the president’s response, amid furious denunciations of the court by conservatives, was grudging. First he enacted a system of hearings without congressional approval, raising a fresh concern about presidential power. Later, working with the Republican-led Congress, he coupled a military-commissions law with the removal of detainees’ rights to challenge their imprisonment in federal court.

By the time the Supreme Court was called upon to determine the constitutionality of this law, some detainees had been behind bars for so long that justices were clearly alarmed.

“Some of the prisoners represented here today [have] been locked up for six years,” noted Justice David Souter.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision that the courts, not the White House or Congress, should ultimately decide which inmates can be held and which must be released. Conservative justices warned in their dissenting opinions that appointed judges aren’t properly equipped to weigh national-security concerns, and declared the ruling a mistake.

But Bush’s initial brashness in handling the cases – and the suspicion of a presidential power grab – clearly factored into the court’s ruling. Meanwhile, Bush’s decision to collect all the detainees into Guantanamo Bay – an offshore prison that looks to much of the world like a Soviet gulag – put an unnecessary focus on American actions rather than the terrorists’ offenses.

Bush’s moves have been the policy equivalents of “Dead or Alive” and “Bring ’em on” – decisions that turned much of the world against the United States and pitted Americans against one another.

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June 17, VCS Weekly Update: Bush Administration Overruled by Supreme Court Again – Three Strikes, You’re Out

Posted on June 17, 2008 by Team VCS

June 16, 2008 – This week’s update contains important news about a new Supreme Court ruling, about a special VCS report, and about our landmark lawsuit against VA.

First, VCS applauds our Supreme Court for restoring Habeas Corpus last week. On Thursday, the Court decided that President George W. Bush’s dungeon at Guantanamo Bay was illegal and that the prisoners of war held there for six long, brutal years without legal rights do possess basic human rights.

While this is an critical court victory in favor of the rule of law, VCS hopes our courts will also end President Bush’s domestic spying and torture policies, two of the Administration’s other unconscionable acts against the rule of law.

VCS believes in the words of Thomas Paine who wrote in 1776 that “Law is King.” No single person should be able to hold hundreds and possibly thousands of people indefinitely without access to our courts. Please keep the flame of Paine alive with a generous contribution to VCS so we can protect and defend our Constitution.

Conservative Justice Kennedy’s swing vote: The bold ruling of the Supreme Court re-establishing the right to Habeas Corpus sends a loud and strong message to the Bush Administration that their days of ignoring our Constitution are over. “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

New York Times analysis: “It is extraordinary that during the Bush administration’s seven years…the court has been prompted to push back four times. Last week’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush, in which the court ruled that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have a right to challenge their detentions in the federal courts, marks only the most recent rebuke.”

Washington Post supports decision: “It shouldn’t be necessary for the Supreme Court to tell the president that he can’t have people taken into custody, spirited to a remote prison camp and held indefinitely, with no legal right to argue that they’ve been unjustly imprisoned.”

In keeping with his positions in favor of torture and indefinite imprisonment without trial, Senator John McCain said the Supreme Court ruling was “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country,” reports Financial Times.

New VCS Special Report: Meanwhile, our military continues suffering under the current Administration. Later this week Veterans for Common Sense plans to release a detailed report describing how the Administration broke our military. In just one example of many , a general states that 72{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of eligible recruits fail to meet minimum standards.

Lawsuit Verdict Soon: U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti said in court he expects to issue a ruling “soon” in our landmark lawsuit against VA. Please visit our website daily for updates on this historic lawsuit.

Veterans for Common Sense stands up for our veterans and our Civil Liberties, and we do that with the help of our members, who are committed to these American values. Please, set up a sustaining gift today to help Veterans for Common Sense continue working hard for America and her veterans.

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June 18, Essay About Lawsuit Against VA: Vet Déjà Vu – Parades, Forgotten, Again?

Posted on June 17, 2008 by Team VCS

When Johnny and Joan Come Marching Home How We Treat Our Veterans Says Much About America’s Character

June 17, 2008, How America treats returning soldiers once the confetti is swept off the streets, long after the ubiquitous “Support the Troops” bumper stickers and yellow ribbons are removed, and tiny flags come off our car aerials, is a revealing measure of a country’s character.

The U.S. soldiers and reservists were sent to Iraq ostensibly to protect us from the perils of weapons of mass destruction. As we issued them rifles and armor-less Humvees; we said “Go fight the enemy.” But we betray our young veterans, mostly 18 to 25, when we hand them a pencil and say, “Now go fight the bureaucracy,” as William Fox, Dean of Catholic University Law School testified in April at the trial for a lawsuit filed in San Francisco District Court by two veteran advocacy groups.

Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth seek an established policy of fair medical treatment for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

Every town in America makes some attempt to welcome home its National Guard units to help them reconnect. In San Francisco, private advocacy groups include Military Spouses for Change, mental health professionals like bay area native Joe Brobow’s Coming Home Project, and Swords to Plowshares. These individual efforts are making a difference, and there is much to be proud of because they reflect the caring nature of the American people.

However, private advocacy cannot replace public commitment.  With a sizeable majority of the public opposing the Iraq war, commitment from our government to ensure veterans receive effective treatment is even more important.

In 2003, the Bush administration announced major combat had ended for the Iraq mission, yet on June 12, the death toll of U.S. troops reached 4,098. The Iraq and Afghanistan war now exceeds by almost a third the cost of the also unpopular 12-year Vietnam War, according to World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes. The Iraq war now exceeds the duration and budget of World War II (adjusted to 2007 dollars)–when expenditures reflected unprecedented, unified national commitment.

By contrast, two-thirds of Americans oppose the Iraq war.

“So?” was Dick Cheney’s response on ABC news to the poll numbers back in March. A “major success” is how Cheney unwaveringly characterized this costly, deadly war.

Cheney and the “Vulcans”

While George W. Bush was such a novice in foreign policy when he became president that he suggested that the Taliban was a rock-and-roll band, Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, annd other members of the Bush administrations’ war cabinets, date back to the Nixon years and the Vietnam war. Twice Defense Secretary Rumsfeld (the youngest-serving Defense Secretary during the Fall of Saigon and the oldest during the Fall of Baghdad in 2003) rebuffed outcry over the military not being provided proper armor.

“You go to war with the army you have,” he said.

These seasoned military “vulcans,” as James Mann in his book Rise of the Vulcans calls them, appear to have, at least publicly, an “iceberg” cost analysis of this war–factoring in only the tip of the real costs. Tens of thousands of veterans have returned to America broken, burned, and likely nuclear irradiated, according to the BBC, from exploded and spent tank munitions, or overwhelmed by what they witnessed or did.

Adjustment Disorders May Be Tip of Treatment Costs for Veterans

An astounding 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer from major depression or PTSD, according to a RAND report, and more than 300,000 have suffered traumatic brain injury. Four hundred thousand vets are now waiting for their cases to be processed, so that treatment for these complicated medical conditions can begin. The number actively seeking assistance for homelessness is up 600 percent in the past year.

The San Francisco lawsuit claims that the VA’s failure to respond to rising veteran suicides and mental trauma reflects a VA national strategy to reduce the expense of treatment veterans deserve and desperately need. However, veterans achieved a major victory in the court last week, as Fog City Journal  reported, when Federal Judge Samuel Conti allowed into evidence an incriminating email in which VA psychologist Norma Perez may have, by implication, directed counselors to downgrade PTSD to mere “adjustment disorders,” which requires shorter-term treatment. The judge earlier allowed into evidence the “Shh” Katz memo in which Ira Katz, the VA’s mental health chief, acknowledged internally within the VA, the Rand Corporation’s attempted suicide figures of 1,000 per month, after representing publicly to CBS News that the number was much smaller – only 800 in all of 2007.

Congressional Hearings, “Deny, Deny, Deny”

At a June 5 hearing, Bob Filner, D-California, chairman of the House Veterans Committee, accused the VA of criminal negligence in failing to respond to rising suicides among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

“The pattern is to deny, deny, deny” he told Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Peake. “Then when facts seemingly come to disagree with the denial, you cover up, cover up, and cover up.”

Ft. Bragg “Squalor” YouTube Posting Preceded President’s Visit

Soldiers returning from a tour of duty in Afghanistan may be facing a different type of negligence. The upset father of a soldier returning to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after a 15-month mission in Afghanistan has posted a video on YouTube to communicate the run-down conditions in which his son and other members of the 82nd Airborne Division were living. The video clip features one the son’s roommates straddling a barracks sink plunging fecal matter floating in a cloudy sea across the floor of a latrine.

“Soldiers should never have to live in such squalor,” said Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who claims to have watched the video posted by Ed Frawley, the father of an 82nd Airborne soldier.”

The video was posted shortly before Bush spoke to troops at Fort Bragg during an official presidential visit.  The popular video has received more than a half-million hits since it was first posted in February.

Senate Democrats Take Action – Rockefeller Reports

At another June 5th hearing, the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV, and the Committee released two bipartisan reports alleging numerous misstatements on intelligence relied upon to justify going to war. The reports detail Bush Administration prewar statements that misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq.

“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qaida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.” Rockefeller stated. “Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.”

Impeachment Back on the Table

Last week, a 17-member delegation of Veterans for Peace presented some 23,000 petitions to Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan), demanding the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Conyers, chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, has the authority to call for impeachment hearings.

At their meeting with Conyers, several of the Veterans for Peace members, each carrying a bundle of petitions, placed them on a table in front of the 21-term Michigan Democrat, and stated why they were in favor of impeachment.

Elliott Adams, Veterans for Peace president, emphasized to Conyers, a Korean War veteran: “It’s not just about impeaching a President, it’s about defending democracy. It is about whether we will continue to have a government of the people and for the people.”

After listening to the veterans, Conyers said he was not prepared to comment on the impeachment articles Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced, but would examine them carefully. He invited members of the veterans group back immediately after the Fourth of July recess to tell them his path forward.

Later that afternoon Kucinich met with the Veterans for Peace delegation in a corridor of the House of Representatives. Kucinich said that if the Judiciary Committee did not schedule hearings by the time the Independence Day break was over, he would “be back with 68 articles the next time, and more after that until they are heard.”

Vincent Bugilosi’s new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, outlines a step-by-step blueprint to prosecute Bush for murder for all prosecutors in every jurisdiction across America.

“Why Not, Nancy?”

Meanwhile congressional candidate Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq, in an  open letter is calling on opponent Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) to put impeachment on the table.

Perhaps Pelosi doesn’t see Kucinich’s 35 articles of impeachment, the Rockefeller report, the Bugilosi book, and the Vets for Peace 23,000 signatures as sufficient to support impeachment.  But Kucinich and others are convinced that much greater public support lies beneath the surface.  At the very least, Pelosi could keep these arguments in full public view during the final months of the presidential election.

She also could show compassion for returning Johnnys and Joans by expressing visible and vocal suppport for Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth in their historic lawsuit – filed in her San Francisco jurisdiction – demanding a VA-wide policy to provide prompt, fair, and effective medical diagnoses and treatment for desperate veterans.

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Editorial Column: Army General Admits U.S. Lacks Qualified New Recruits

Posted on June 16, 2008 by Team VCS

May 31, 2008 – The U.S. Army today faces an imminent and menacing threat to our national security. Failure to resolve this problem could leave us vulnerable and our enemies victorious.

The threat? The lack of fully qualified young people to serve in the military.

Many young Americans are willing to serve, but too little is made of the declining number of young people who are qualified to serve. This is the real story and it’s a shocking one. Only 28 percent of the 17- to 24-year-old population qualifies to wear a military uniform. The other 72 percent fail to meet minimum standards on education, character and health. Of those eligible to serve, many choose not to for a variety of reasons.

Faced with these declining numbers, we have two choices: Lower the military admission standards or raise the health and education standards for our young people.

As the commander responsible for recruiting, training and educating U.S. Army soldiers, I believe the choice is obvious: we must declare war on poor education, lack of fitness and poor health and help foster future generations of educated and healthy young Americans.

Here is our plan.

Encourage education

First, we are working to create better educated young people. The Army has always been a vehicle for advancement. In past years, soldiers who served were sometimes given land grants. In today’s Information Age, education is the greatest means of mobility. Today, soldiers take part in lifelong learning. Initiatives like the Distributed Learning Education and Training Programs offer soldiers the chance to be in the classroom even while they prepare for the battlefield.Still, we need to reach people at a younger age to encourage educational achievement. While still not optimized in some states, we continue to promote Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps and National Defense Cadet Corps programs. Participating students have higher attendance and greater graduation rates than their peers and are also exposed to 120 hours of physical activity and leadership assessment training. Because most of these kids will go on to careers outside the military, our society as a whole benefits as their discipline and determination will serve them and their country well beyond their high school years, regardless of career choice.

The Army is also investigating the opening of the first Army Preparatory School to help non-high school graduates get caught up on fitness while becoming academically eligible for the military. We are taking these simple steps because we believe they will have a profound impact on educating our nation’s youth.

Target obesity in children

Second, we are working to create healthier young people. The military has always been a catalyst for health care. World War I stimulated efforts to improve nutrition and World War II led to the publication of nutritional information on products. Today, our health challenge with young people isn’t lack of food but too much of it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the number of overweight children tripled between 1963 and 1999. With poor nutrition habits leading to spiraling health care costs due to high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and stroke, we all suffer.

The military can’t win this war alone. It will take the effort of all Americans — particularly those in government, business and education. By coming together to raise awareness about this issue, we can raise the bar for better education and better health. That will lead to a stronger and more capable military and a better America.

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After a Feud and Two Deaths, Iraq War Soldiers’ Families Torn

Posted on June 16, 2008 by Team VCS

June 16, 2008 – Capt. Phillip Esposito and Staff Sgt. Alberto Martinez went to war together, two very different soldiers from the same New York National Guard unit. After five months in Iraq, a bombing sent both men back home, one in a coffin, the other in handcuffs, a suspect in his murder.

Captain Esposito, as straightforward as his M4 carbine, was an Eagle Scout and West Point graduate who built a civilian career as a computer specialist for a Wall Street investment bank. His service as a National Guard company commander, family members said, was a matter of honor and old-fashioned patriotism.

Sergeant Martinez came from a tougher background, documents and interviews show, and found camaraderie and discipline in military service. Transplanted from Puerto Rico as a teenager, he drifted through a series of part-time jobs after high school, taking community college classes in electronics. But he had a habit of playing by his own rules, some of his managers said, and lacked maturity. Rejected by the Army Reserve and Navy Reserve, he was fired by U.P.S. in 1999.

The National Guard eventually admitted him on a waiver after three failed attempts to pass the military’s standardized aptitude test. Working at the Watervliet Arsenal, near Albany, Sergeant Martinez strained to handle duties that called for more than basic clerical or mechanical work.

In January 2005, with the Iraq insurgency in violent bloom, the dutiful company commander and the struggling sergeant deployed with the 42nd Infantry Division to Kuwait and then to northern Iraq. At a forward operating base in Tikrit, under battlefield conditions in a hostile Sunni Arab region, a mutual distrust between Sergeant Martinez and Captain Esposito devolved into acrimony and, according to Army prosecutors, premeditated murder.

“I want him to die,” one soldier later testified he heard Sergeant Martinez say soon after their arrival in Iraq.

On June 7 of that year, Sergeant Martinez detonated a Claymore mine he had placed in the window of Captain Esposito’s quarters, Army prosecutors said, killing him and severely wounding a first lieutenant, Lou Allen, who died later in surgery. They said three hand grenades were also used in the attack.

In the coming months, Sergeant Martinez is expected to face court-martial in the deaths. He has consistently maintained his innocence. If convicted, he would be eligible for the death penalty.

Attacks on soldiers by another soldier usually of a lower rank, known in military slang as “fragging” because a fragmentation grenade was often the weapon of choice, were an alarming problem during the Vietnam War but have been extremely rare in Iraq. The 2005 attack is only the second such case the Army has prosecuted since the beginning of the Iraq war. By comparison, in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970, the Army logged more than 300 attacks that killed 75 commissioned and noncommissioned officers, said Paul J. Springer, a history professor at West Point.

Experts attributed the dropoff to the professionalism and higher morale that came with the all-volunteer military instituted in 1973. “With fragging, you’re likely to find someone who never really fit into the military system, who probably felt like an outsider,” said Dr. David Walker, a psychiatrist who served in the Air Force.

Prosecutors have argued that in this case, the evidence points squarely at Sergeant Martinez.

They said that he was the only soldier with access to grenades and Claymore mines who had repeatedly threatened the captain; that after the attack, investigators discovered a grenade crate in the sergeant’s supply room bearing the same serial number as the one stamped on grenade parts found near the scene; that shortly before the attack, 10 grenades from Sergeant Martinez’s supply area disappeared; and that immediately after the attack, he was seen wearing a Kevlar vest and standing in the road a few yards from where the mine’s firing apparatus was found.

Army defense lawyers have argued that the evidence is circumstantial and does not come close to showing that their client, who remains in military custody in North Carolina, committed any crime. Many soldiers had access to grenades, they said, and serial numbers on grenade crates did not always match those on the grenades inside.

Moreover, they argued, Sergeant Martinez’s statements about the captain “were of a venting nature,” and neither of the officers who testified that they heard them thought they were serious enough to report.

“Their argument is far more persuasive than any of the evidence that was presented,” one of the sergeant’s military lawyers, Maj. E. John Gregory, said of prosecutors’ case in a Nov. 1, 2005, hearing. “They rely on inference and circumstance.”

The deaths of Captain Esposito, 30, and Lieutenant Allen, 34, have led to a painful reckoning among their families.

Their widows, now raising five children between them, question why Sergeant Martinez, now 40, an underachiever rejected by other military branches, was accepted, promoted and sent to war by the National Guard. Within the 42nd Division, a proud unit with a distinguished history, questions linger over whether an embittered soldier’s threats to kill his commander should have been taken seriously.

“I’m convinced this was 100 percent preventable,” said Captain Esposito’s wife, Siobhan Esposito. “This guy was a problem, and they knew he was a problem.”

Barbara Allen, Lieutenant Allen’s wife, said, “We’re never going to be free of this until the death penalty is carried out.”

Sergeant Martinez’s lawyers declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for the National Guard said he could not discuss an active case.

Friction From the Start

In a National Guard reliant on soldiers from divergent backgrounds, Captain Esposito and Sergeant Martinez never got along. The sergeant saw the captain as an arrogant taskmaster. To the captain, according to other soldiers in the unit, Sergeant Martinez was a knucklehead who lacked wartime discipline. Sergeant Martinez fumed none too quietly at what he saw as his young commander’s hubris, telling another sergeant months before the explosion: “I can’t wait for him to get his.”

“When I meet the commander for the first time, he express himself to be better than me and other people,” the sergeant wrote hours after the fatal explosion, in a sworn statement laced with grammatical and spelling errors. “He never have respect for the lower enlisted personel.”

There are no clear-cut rules about what, if anything, soldiers should do when another soldier makes threats against a superior. But though military culture tolerates grumbling, Sergeant Martinez’s expressions of anger and violence toward his captain should have caused other officers to act, said Dr. Springer, the history professor.

“That’s the sort of thing that Martinez should have been brought up on charges for,” he said. “There’s a huge difference between saying ‘I hate that guy’ and ‘I want to kill that guy,’ ” Dr. Springer added. “You can’t let that kind of thing go, because if you do, you’re encouraging a breakdown in discipline.”

By the time Phillip Esposito graduated with honors from Albertus Magnus High School, in Rockland County, in 1992, Alberto Martinez was a married father of two working as a part-time U.P.S. deliveryman around Albany.

After graduating in the top 10 percent of his class at West Point, Cadet Esposito became a first lieutenant and platoon leader in the Army’s 66th Armor, Fourth Infantry Division, at Fort Hood, Tex., where he earned numerous commendations, including one in 1999 for “dedication and professionalism.”

“He was one of the most meticulous people I ever met in my life,” Staff Sgt. Ashvin Thimmaiah said of Captain Esposito during a 2005 military hearing on the evidence in the murder case. Rules and standards were always uppermost in the captain’s mind. “He followed them to the letter,” Sergeant Thimmaiah said. “He enforced it to the letter as well.”

At his wife’s urging, Captain Esposito left active duty in 2000, joined the National Guard and began a civilian career as a technology manager for Salomon Smith Barney in Lower Manhattan.

An Exception to Join

Sergeant Martinez had been serving part-time as a Guardsman in 1999 when U.P.S. fired him, he said, for repeatedly failing to properly deliver packages. He collected state unemployment benefits for five months until the National Guard gave him a job verifying vehicle and weapons inventories at armories around the state.

Sergeant Martinez had needed special permission just to enter the military, after scoring in the 15th, 17th and 21st percentile in his attempts to pass its standardized aptitude battery between 1987 and 1990, according to records obtained by The New York Times. To pass, applicants must score above the 30th percentile. On Dec. 20, 1990, a Guard colonel granted him what is known as a Mental Category IV waiver, for recruits with low test scores who the service believes can be trained to be good soldiers.

Waivers have long been a touchy subject for a military that markets itself as being interested in only the most capable recruits. Since 2001, so-called mental and moral waivers, for enlistees with low test scores or scrapes with the law, have received increasing public and official scrutiny.

In the 1980s, roughly 10 percent of Army recruits required Category IV waivers. After the 1991 gulf war, the Pentagon restricted those recruits to less than 4 percent of new enlistees across all branches, David S. C. Chu, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, said in a conference call with reporters last October. The New York National Guard grants roughly the same number of waivers as the Army over all.

In the late 1990s through 2002, Sergeant Martinez seemed to do well in the National Guard and was rated “among the best” soldiers by his superiors, who commended him for “exceptional military bearing” in 2000 and “absolute loyalty to the unit” in 2002, documents showed. At the same time, his U.P.S. managers repeatedly urged him to show improvement.

Outside work, he also struggled. On the morning of Dec. 18, 2002, fire swept through his home in Cohoes, which he bought eight years earlier. Fire officials decided the cause was electrical. But his insurer, Liberty Mutual, refused to pay, believing Sergeant Martinez had set the fire to collect on his policy.

By January 2003, fed up with months of late payments, the mortgage holder, Wells Fargo, moved to foreclose on the home.

In a brief interview, Sergeant Martinez’s wife, Tamara Martinez, described him as a good husband and attentive father of two teenagers. “He’s got a family that loves him,” she said. “Albert is a terrific guy,” she added, before politely ending the conversation.

By 2004, the war had begun its turn for the worse, and Guard units across the country were mobilized for active duty. That May, Captain Esposito was called up to Latham, N.Y., near Albany, and became the leader of the 42nd Division’s Headquarters and Headquarters Company, a division-level supply and logistics company.

He was put in charge of a Guard company that was, by his standards, frustratingly informal and unfocused as it prepared to deploy to Iraq, soldiers said later in military court testimony.

Not everyone in the unit appreciated the captain’s hut-to style.

As the unit counted the days to deployment, Captain Esposito scheduled more and more meetings; Sergeant Martinez, the unit’s supply sergeant, seemed unable or unwilling to keep up with the myriad demands on him and grew increasingly bitter, soldiers said.

The unit relocated to Fort Drum, N.Y., late in 2004, after which the sergeant began threatening Captain Esposito to other soldiers, according to testimony. “I could kill him; I want him to die,” a major in the division testified hearing Sergeant Martinez say.

Increasing Acrimony

By the time the company was ready to deploy to Kuwait, the relationship between the captain and the sergeant had reached a low point.

“It wasn’t pretty,” Sgt. First Class Peggy Schumacher said of one heated argument between the two men. “I was appalled.”

Once in Tikrit, Sergeant Martinez, as supply sergeant, was doing the work normally handled by three or four people; the entire unit felt the pressure of operating in the heart of a Sunni insurgency. When the unit lost track of $30,000 worth of equipment, including night-vision goggles and radio encryption devices, the division command docked both Captain Esposito and Sergeant Martinez a month’s pay. Each man blamed the other for the blunder, said Luis J. Badillo, a lieutenant and the company’s executive officer at the time.

“My thought process at that time was to try to keep them as far apart and away from each other as possible,” said Mr. Badillo, now a New York State Police trooper.

By late May, Captain Esposito began openly belittling Sergeant Martinez, soldiers said, and forbade him from even entering the supply room without an escort from a superior officer. Sometime that month, Sergeant Martinez, worried about losing his job, made threats against Captain Esposito in a conversation with another captain in the unit.

“He said that he hated Esposito,” that captain, Carl Prober, testified in 2005. Sergeant Martinez, in a profanity-laced tirade, threatened to “frag” Captain Esposito, Captain Prober said.

In military court hearings examining the murder case, Captain Prober was not asked what, if any, action he took after hearing the threat.

Just days before the explosions, Lieutenant Allen, a friend of Captain Esposito’s from Milford, Pa., and a high school science teacher, joined the unit to organize a supply function that under Sergeant Martinez had become, according to Mr. Badillo, a “nightmare.”

On June 5 or 6, Captain Esposito began a search to replace Sergeant Martinez as supply sergeant. In one of the last orders he would give, he asked Sergeant Thimmaiah to draw up a list of candidates.

On the evening of June 7, Captain Esposito and Lieutenant Allen played the board game Risk with Sergeant Thimmaiah and were catching up afterward in the captain’s office.

Around 10 p.m., a thunderous blast shook the building. Three smaller explosions followed. Everyone assumed they were under an insurgent mortar attack. Then came a cry for help.

Entering the captain’s office, Captain Prober, a 19-year Army veteran, found Lieutenant Allen on the floor, conscious but gravely wounded. Captain Esposito was face down amid shattered furniture and glass, not breathing and “just destroyed,” Captain Prober said.

Combat triage quickly gave way to a murder investigation. Military investigators found fragments of the Claymore at the scene. In and around a manmade lake nearby, they discovered the metal handles from three American grenades and the Claymore’s detonation cord and firing device.

Moments after the explosions, Staff Sgt. David Wentzel, who had taken refuge in a small cement building nearby, saw Sergeant Martinez standing in the road near the captain’s quarters, visibly shaking, as if shell-shocked, according to Sergeant Wentzel’s testimony.

“After I had time to think about it, it was almost like he knew it was over,” he said. “He wasn’t running around trying to seek cover. He was standing there.”

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Venezuela President Chavez’s Blockbuster Proposal: Message for Peace for Columbia and Venezuela

Posted on June 16, 2008 by Team VCS

June 16, 2008 – President Hugo Chávez’s statement regarding the increasingly unproductive and ill-focused guerrilla war being staged by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) could be a hugely positive step towards reframing the terms and goals of hemispheric relations in this era. But the full realization of this development’s potential benefits hinge upon the Bush administration’s willingness to engage in constructive diplomacy. It must not allow itself to be gripped by a radical ideology or drowned by repetitive propaganda that all along has characterized its foreign policy making style. For once, Secretary of State Rice should urge negotiations rather than enflame the two warring sides to seek far-fetched goals thus guaranteeing that the conflict will not be resolved.

President Chávez’s comments reveal a dramatic reversal of his previous stance in favor of the guerrilla group and admirably contrasts with the sterile regional policy embraced by Washington. It was only last January that Chávez called for the FARC to be granted belligerent status by the international community, which would give the leftist guerrillas a sense of legitimacy and recognition under the terms of the Geneva Convention. Whatever the motivation for his move, Chávez’s statement is sure to improve his reputation in the wake of the discovery of the potentially embarrassing “FARC files” that were found on laptops seized after the March 1 bombing of a FARC unit camped just inside the Ecuadorian border. However, Chávez’s recent declaration that the FARC has been bypassed by history is too important a statement to be ignored or explained away as a publicity stunt.

Chávez’s call for peace and the release of hostages held by the FARC is a genuinely important and productive gesture and is perhaps the most daring promulgation on the regional dispute to date. Rather than continue his submissive role as Washington’s most faithful servitor, Colombia’s President Uribe should respond to Chávez in a sober and fully participative manner. The possibility of a positive relationship could represent the break that observers of the decades-long internal strife in Colombia have been waiting for.

As previously stated in ¡Necesitamos un Acuerdo Humanitario!, COHA believes that international pressure should now be directed towards all parties involved in the conflict – the FARC, paramilitary groups, and the Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, and Colombian governments – in order to accelerate a negotiated settlement. Therefore, President Chávez’s statement is to be thunderously applauded and he should be encouraged to continue his campaigns to end the violence in the region, affect the immediate release of all those taken hostage during the conflict and encourage the implementation of a immediate cease-fire between the two sides.

Furthermore, Chávez and Uribe should give careful thought to the transfer of the FARC’s entire force, estimated to be between 10,000 and 15,000 fighters, to Venezuela as part of a peace process. Once there, former combatants will be guaranteed their security as well as receive a subsidized pension and vocational training. The funding for such programs – which is likely to be no more than $100 million a year – will come, in large part, from Venezuela. This strategy would negate the problem of impoverished, idle, demobilized soldiers falling into organized crime rings. It would also provide the former FARC fighters with the personal security against possible political assassinations, which no Colombian president could guarantee with any certainty.

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Veterans Programs Get Boost from House Panels

Posted on June 16, 2008 by Team VCS

June 13, 2008 – Two House panels on Thursday approved remarkably generous spending bills for the upcoming budget year, awarding veterans programs with record increases and restoring proposed cuts to local law enforcement subsidies.

Veterans programs would receive a 12 percent increase under a bill unanimously approved by a House Appropriations subcommittee, including funding to reduce enrollment backlogs, improve mental health care and fix up aging facilities. It adds $1.1 billion above President Bush’s budget to expand six Veterans Administration hospitals, as well as 145 less-ambitious construction projects.

A second measure, funding the Commerce and Justice departments, NASA and science and “competitiveness” programs, would provide increases averaging almost 9 percent over current funding.

Even so, Democrats rejected a last-minute $540 million administration request to fix major problems with the 2010 Census.

The two bills face an uncertain future as election-year politics are likely to grind Congress’ annual appropriations process to a halt. Bush is likely to threaten vetoes of both bills as too costly, and Democrats want to avoid such a confrontation.

While lawmakers in both parties supported the bills, Republicans grumbled that that Democrats were showering virtually every program with increases.

“This legislation does nothing to rein in federal spending,” said Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif. “Tough budgetary choices must be made. Trying to please everyone by fully funding every program is something we simply cannot afford to do.”

Subcommittee Chairman Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va., acknowledged that it looked like his panel was “swimming in cash” with a $5 billion increase over current spending, but he said much of the increase was due to rejecting cuts to state and local law enforcement grants.

Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., said the big increases for domestic programs allowed lawmakers to “avoid making tough but necessary decisions to maintain fiscal discipline.”

Under congressional Democrats’ recently adopted budget blueprint, non-defense programs funded by Congress each year would receive $24 billion more than current levels.

Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., is also shifting billions of dollars billion from Bush’s record-setting Pentagon budget to domestic programs such as education and health research.

The record $8.8 billion increase over current levels for veterans spending comes on top of major increases in recent years. Congress has increasingly followed the ambitious budget recommendations of a group of veterans service organizations such as Disabled American Veterans.

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Mental Health and the Military Mindset

Posted on June 16, 2008 by Team VCS

June 15, 2008, Bellmore, NY – Kristofer Goldsmith was so distressed about the prospect of returning to Iraq that he decided he was willing to kill himself to avoid serving a second tour.

The Army had mandated an extension of his three-year contract, which had been set to expire, as his unit was set to deploy to Baghdad as part of the troop surge. The day before he was to ship out in May 2007, he washed down a dozen Percoset with more than a liter of vodka.

Soon after he was admitted to the Winn Army Community Hospital at Ft. Stewart, Ga., a top noncommissioned officer from his brigade’s rear detachment visited the young sergeant, along with an Army psychologist, to discuss discharging him from the military.

“We all agreed that it was for the best that my Army career come to an end then,” said Goldsmith, who added that he’d scrawled the words “stop-loss killed me” in marker on his body before his suicide attempt. “It was a few days later when they told me that they were going to come at me for faking a mental lapse.”

The rear commander of his unit, Maj. Douglas Wesner of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, quickly initiated an administrative punishment known as an Article 15 against Goldsmith for malingering — that is, feigning a mental lapse or derangement or purposely injuring oneself — in order to avoid being deployed to Iraq.
Eventually, his commanders dropped the Article 15, but not before removing the 22-year-old from the service on a general discharge. Because he did not receive an honorable discharge, Goldsmith was stripped of his Montgomery GI Bill benefits, which he’d been counting on to help pay for his college education.

Goldsmith’s treatment is hardly unheard of. In fact, 21 Iraq soldiers have been punitively discharged since 2003 after being convicted of malingering, said U.S. Army spokesman Paul Boyce.

Goldsmith’s case illustrates the complex decisions facing the U.S. military, which says it is eager to address the mental health problems plaguing its troops but at the same time must maintain its warrior ethos and respect for the chain of command.

Goldsmith remains adamant that he did not fake a mental illness. A Department of Veterans Affairs psychologist later diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Wesner declined to comment. A 3rd Infantry Division spokesman said that Goldsmith was provided legal counsel and received a medical evaluation before his discharge, but he declined to speak further about the case.

Sitting in his parents’ home in this working-class suburb on Long Island, Goldsmith said his mental unraveling began when he returned from his first tour in Iraq in 2005.

The collapse accelerated after he learned he would be subject to “stop-loss”: The Army was involuntarily extending his three-year contract so that it could return him to Baghdad.

Goldsmith, now an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, is part of a growing population of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have suffered from PTSD. .

Pentagon officials recently disclosed that at least 40,000 U.S. troops had been diagnosed with PTSD after returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. But those figures accounted only for those who had sought help; a recent study by Rand Corp. put the number closer to 300,000.

Last month, the Defense Department announced that 115 U.S. troops had committed suicide in 2007, the highest annual toll since the military began tracking the figures. And the Pentagon acknowledges that 12{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} to 15{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of war-zone soldiers are taking antidepressants or sleep medication.

Goldsmith served much of his yearlong deployment in the Shiite slums of Sadr City. On patrols, his unit took potshots from insurgents and was attacked by brick-throwing adolescents.

Sadr City was plagued by sectarian fighting, and U.S. troops regularly found the tortured corpses of Sunni men. Goldsmith’s duties included photographing them.

When he got back to Ft. Stewart in late 2005, Goldsmith said, he suffered deep bouts of depression and drank so much that he would often black out.

At first he refused to seek help.

“Before we were heading back to Iraq, [a senior noncommissioned officer] said that if we tried to use mental stress as a way to get out of going, he would see to it that we’d become his personal IED kicker,” Goldsmith said. “No one wanted to be stigmatized. . . . You also feared that there would be career consequences.”

One night Goldsmith became so irritated by a man at a party that he choked him until he was unconscious. He realized that he had to tell his commanders he needed help.

Goldsmith is fighting for an upgrade to an honorable discharge so he can regain his eligibility for GI Bill benefits.

Some of the soldiers who worked most closely with him have written letters to the 3rd Infantry Division brass on his behalf.

His company commander and platoon leader had recommended him for a Bronze Star at the end of his tour.

“If I were to go to war tomorrow, I would want Kris Goldsmith to go with me,” Capt. Edward McMichael, who was Goldsmith’s company commander in Iraq, said in an interview. “I don’t think Kris would fake it.”

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