Veterans for Common Sense

April 16, 2008 – Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes speaks about the book on the Iraq war’s costs that she wrote with Joseph Stiglitz. The two former Truthdiggers of the Week have been working hard to uncover even more hidden expenses for the war, which they estimate will cost the taxpayers and their children trillions of dollars.

Transcript:

James Harris: This is Truthdig.  James Harris here with Linda Bilmes.  She is the co-author of the new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War.” She’s also a Harvard economist, and she did serve in the Department of Commerce during the Clinton administration.  As we watch the sensational news coverage of the governor of New York’s resignation, “The Three Trillion Dollar War” reminds us that nearly 4,000 American soldiers and more than half a million Iraqis have been killed in this war.  And that spending will total more than $3 trillion.  Linda, why is it important that we take this war, and our spending, more seriously?

Linda Bilmes: Well, I think if you look at what happened throughout this war, we have essentially translated the human cost into a financial cost, and then we’ve deferred that cost to the next generation.  So what I mean is, we are fighting the war with a volunteer Army, with soldiers and Marines who we pay, and with another army of contractors who we pay, but all of that money has … been borrowed.  So, in effect, the average American has not felt the cost of the war, either in blood or in treasure, and that accounts for the fact that although I think people feel very badly about it, it is not as immediately gripping as some of the scandals in the news.

Harris: You’d mentioned off-air that you’re not a very popular person at the White House right now.  In a nutshell, they’re saying it’s easy to go in a room, write a book and point fingers about how much this war costs.  The White House’s position to this point is, pretty much, “What’s the cost of doing nothing?  What is the cost of not bringing democracy to Iraq?” How do you respond?

Bilmes: Well, you know, and actually, first of all, it is very challenging to write a book like this because the numbers are simply not there.  The way the government keeps its accounts is very misleading, and government accounting is very poor.  So they don’t actually produce any materials that would enable the average person who doesn’t spend two years working on it and uses the Freedom of Information Act—without doing that, you really cannot tabulate all of the costs of the war that are hidden and all the long-term costs.  And so when the president says that he does not go to war, as he said, “on the basis of green-eye-shaded accountants,” I think we should all consider whether it is correct to go to war with no idea of what it’s going to cost.  And you know the president and his advisers said that this war would cost us $50 or $60 billion.  At the time Larry Lindsey, who was the economics adviser, said that it might cost $200 billion, and he was fired for that moment of honesty.  And now we have a situation where even the Congressional Budget Office is saying that this war will cost $1.7 to $2.7 trillion, we have our estimate of $3 trillion at least.  The Joint Economic Committee says it will cost $3.5 trillion.  So there is a general consensus that the cost is so large that it is of very considerable concern and that it is having a major impact on our economy.  So I don’t see how one can ignore this any longer.

Harris: Why is it that there is no accountability for the spending that has taken place over the last five years?

Bilmes: Well, that is a very good question.  There is no accountability for the spending that has taken place.  And, unlike any other war, in this war, the United States cut taxes and raised spending at the same time it was going to war.  And, unlike any other war—apart from the Revolutionary War—we borrowed something close to 40 percent of the money for this war from overseas.  You know, in the Revolutionary War, the colonies borrowed from France.  So we have financed this war with debt, and if you look at how the money for the war has been appropriated in Congress, it is simply … it is simply unbelievable.  But all of the money has been appropriated through a series of what are called “Emergency Supplementals.” And what these are is a vehicle that exists in order to circumvent the normal checks and balances on budget spending.  And it exists because, in certain circumstances, in genuine emergencies, such as Katrina, you want to get the money to the field very, very quickly without going through the normal budgetary process.  But here we are, five years, 25 supplemental appropriations later, still funding the war on a bipartisan basis through this emergency mechanism which denies both Democratic and Republican budget experts in the Congress and in the Budget Office and other places the chance to actually look at how much it costs to get anything done.  And under these circumstances, it is inevitable that we will see the kind of shenanigans that we have seen in terms of profiteering and corruption and cost overruns and overpayments to Halliburton, and money on which, as the Pentagon puts it, we have “lost visibility.”

Harris: So 25 times over the last five years we’ve used this discretionary funding, these Emergency Supplemental Funds.  And you said this is done to circumvent the normal budgetary process.  That sounds like a short way of saying, “We can get this by them if we do it this way.” Have any laws been broken?

Bilmes: Well, you know, here you have a situation where, I mean, laws have not been broken because there’s no law that would have anticipated that anyone would have done something like this.  The reason for having this Emergency Supplemental concept in the first place is so that, if Congress enacts something new during the year or if there was a genuine emergency, that there is a way to get money quickly to a new program or to an emergency area.  And what has happened here is that you had an administration and a Congress that has not wanted to face, or to vote on the full cost of the war.  So instead you’ve had a series of dribs and drabs that have been appropriated outside the regular budgetary caps.  And we as taxpayers have all seen this:  $25 billion here, $72 billion here, $52 billion here.  It’s gone on and on and on, to the point that people are almost, I think, hardly notice.  And this is, I think, one of the things we have criticized heavily.  But, in addition, what’s important about the money that is being appropriated is that this is simply the tip of the iceberg in terms of the total cost of the war.  Because the money that has been appropriated to date, the $800 billion that will have been appropriated for the wars through 2008, that is only paying for the combat operations.  That’s the monthly—annual burn rate of the operations going on in the field right now.  And that ignores the cost of taking care of our veterans when they come home, providing disability compensation for our veterans, of replenishing all the military equipment that’s been used up, of resetting the military forces to their prewar strength, and of paying interest on all the money we’ve borrowed to pay for the war.  So if you add all of those up, you essentially double or triple the amount of money that we are spending every month. 

Harris: One of the more telling lines from your book discusses veteran payouts from the first Gulf War.  You write, “The United States still spends over $4.3 billion each year paying compensation, pension, disability benefits to more than 200,000 veterans of the Gulf War.” What do you think veterans’ benefits and health care will cost us 20 years from now for this war?

Bilmes: Well, it’s a very good question because the important thing to note about veterans’ disability benefits is that they grow over time and they peak many, many years after the war.  For example, in the Spanish American War, the peak year for paying disability benefits was 50 years after the end of the war.  In World War II, these benefits peaked in 1993.  In the Vietnam War we are currently paying out some $20 billion a year in disability benefits.  And even in the first Gulf War, which was a one-month war, we are spending $4.3 billion a year in paying disability benefits.  So, in this war we’ve had a very, very high rate of casualties.  We have had 1.65 million troops deployed, over 70,000 of them wounded in combat or injured in accidents or contracting serious diseases that required them to be medically airlifted out of the country.  There have been another 250,000 who have been treated for other things at veterans hospitals and clinics and, of those, 68,000 have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder.  There have been near-epidemic problems with hearing.  Hearing loss, vision problems, joint problems.  And the long-term cost of caring for our servicemen and -women will be felt by the next generation.  We expect that, overall, if you include medical care and disability benefits, the cost of taking care of our veterans will cost around $600 billion, depending on—in today’s money.

Harris: I was always taught—when I was spending a significant amount of money—to think about the consequence of that spending.  Not so much how much money I lost, but what else that money could have been spent on.  So when you say just a portion of this war has cost us upwards of $600 billion, what are some other things that we could have spent this money on?

Bilmes: Well, the opportunity costs are really staggering.  For the amount of money we’ve spent so far, we could have made Social Security solvent for the next 75 years.  We could have provided universal health care to children.  We could have paid for a significant investment in our infrastructure here at home in paying for our own roads and bridges and tunnels and electrical grids instead of essentially spending that money on repairs and construction in Iraq, much of which has been bombed and attacked and had to be reconstructed again and again.  And I think that the amount of money is so large that it’s almost hard to conceive what a large amount of money this is.  For example, I was reading a report that the Centers for Disease Control issued last week.  This is their long-awaited report on autism.  And the Centers for Disease Control say that one in every 150 American children is now being diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, which is a huge number.  And we spend, in the Federal Government, $108 million a year on autism research, which is the equivalent of four hours of the Iraq war in cash costs, not even counting all the veterans and other costs.  So once you start thinking about it in that way, and there’s almost a new method of measurement now, in Washington, of how many hours, how many days of the Iraq war would it cost to pay for this or that.  And certainly in many communities throughout the country there are very serious problems which require investments—infrastructure problems, problems with homelessness, problems for the elderly—which would require …  the amounts of money required are minutes or hours of the cost of fighting in Iraq.

Harris: Linda, there’s a growing sentiment that we are spending too much money on the war in Iraq.  How would you reallocate funds in a way that … puts us on a path to recovery?  How would you reform this process?

Bilmes: Well, we have, in our book, a chapter on exiting Iraq, in which we lay out the fundamental question about whether it is worth spending another $600 to $900 billion to stay in Iraq, in the way that we are, for the next two or three years.  We also lay out in another chapter a number of recommendations that would make, hopefully, it less likely for us to get embroiled in this kind of quagmire again.  Some of those recommendations have to do with transparency of financial reporting, of better control and oversight over where our money is going, of better checks and balances between the Congress and the executive.  And a very important thing which we have not touched on yet is improvements in the way our veterans are being treated.  And if I can just say one point about that: We wrote the book for two reasons.  Partly because we believe that the public has a right to know how much the war is costing and, secondly, to call attention to the fact that our veterans are being shortchanged.  And we discovered this, essentially by accident, as we were doing our research.  We discovered that many veterans are encountering an enormously difficult bureaucratic battlefield when they come home, just trying to get their disability benefits and get access to doctors for their disabilities that they have suffered.  And this is something which is particularly painful because it’s a fixable problem.  There are some parts of the Iraq situation that are very, very difficult and complicated.  But doing right by our veterans should not be impossible to fix.  And we’ve laid out, in our book, a series of steps that would improve substantially the situation for returning veterans. 

Harris: I actually do mean to harp on this because I agree with you that it is important to respect the veterans.  After all, they are doing a service that we’ve asked them to.  Can you share with us some of the stories, some of the accounts from veterans returned from Iraq, veterans who had trouble accessing their benefits?

Bilmes: We had, during the course of our research—and we had written two papers previously, one specifically on veterans—we had hundreds of veterans and current military servicemen write to us with their concerns.  But I think a typical story is a story of a 19-year-old soldier.  His name is Patrick.  He’s from Texas.  His aunt wrote to us because Patrick had been seriously wounded in Iraq.  He had been in four hospitals, he had been, miraculously, after nine months, in Walter Reed and so forth, he had recovered.  He had been visited by President Bush in the hospital.  He received a Purple Heart, and so forth.  But when he got back to Sugar Land, Texas, he was, for 18 months, unable to receive a single penny in disability compensation or any money that would have enabled him to take some online training courses and other training that he wanted.  So, he couldn’t do his previous job as a mechanic again because he couldn’t stand up, but he wanted to try and acquire some training in another field.  And it was only after his aunt contacted us and we looked into this story and we contacted Newsweek magazine, that decided to put him on the cover, or threatened to put him on the cover, that all of a sudden, remarkably, all of his benefits were paid retroactively for 18 months, from the veterans organizations.

Harris: Sure.

Bilmes: But, I mean, there are hundreds of stories.  We tell some of them in the book.  But the fundamental issue is that the system for transitioning troops from the military to veteran status is not working.  There is no seamless transition.  And what we should be doing is we should be automatically providing disability benefits to our returning veterans who are wounded.  Instead, when they come back, even if they are in a wheelchair, we are forcing them to prepare the equivalent of a graduate school application with dozens of different forms and pieces of paperwork that they have to fill in correctly before they can even begin the process of securing disability benefits.  And on the medical side there are fantastic doctors and very dedicated nurses in many veterans hospitals and facilities, but there simply is not enough of them, and particularly if it’s a nationwide network, there are many veterans who are coming back, particularly needing mental health care, who simply do not have access to these facilities.

Harris: And you mentioned, minutes ago, that we will spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of the next 20 years alone on these types of care initiatives, helping veterans who’ve returned.  Do you get the sense that a majority of the soldiers that return will be treated properly or do you get the sense that they will be stiffed? 

Bilmes: Well, you know, that’s a good question.  I think that there are many excellent advocates in the veterans service organizations who are working very, very hard on behalf of veterans.  I think there is a bipartisan desire to do right by our veterans.  On the other hand, when you look at some of the stories that have surfaced, it is hard not to feel depressed.  We discovered, for example, that veterans who are enlisting and taking signing bonuses, if they are wounded, have been asked to repay their signing bonuses because they didn’t serve out their contract.  We have found—and the GAO has chronicled hundreds of veterans who are being chased and hounded for small amounts of money that they allegedly owe the government, in most cases related to pieces of equipment that they lost because they were wounded or their vehicle exploded.  So some of these stories are deeply disturbing, but I do believe this is an area where the American public feels very strongly that they want to fix the problem.  And I just hope that we can change the mentality, change the culture of the Veterans Affairs Department to one which basically, instead of trying to sort of pre-audit every veteran before we give them the benefit, we should give them the benefit when they come home, and then we can audit a subset of them later, which is what the IRS does.  We don’t all have our taxes audited, but we audit all of the veterans.

Harris: You and Joseph Stiglitz have done this remarkable evaluation of the way that money is being spent over there.  Due respect, neither of you is in a position to change the policy on this.  Do you get the sense that the policy that governs spending during times of war will actually be changed?  What’s your gut tell you?

Bilmes: Well, I think that, in terms of veterans, we do see some encouraging signs.  There are currently 18 pieces of legislation pending which are based, in some form, on our recommendations.  There is a strong, bipartisan desire to improve the situation for veterans.  And some of the recommendations of the Dole-Shalala commission, which were sensible, have also been enacted.  So I think there is some reason for optimism there.  On the other hand, I do not see any progress in trying to bring greater transparency and greater financial accountability to the Pentagon.  We’ve had a situation there where the Pentagon has flunked its financial audit every year for the past 10 years, where they have thousands of material weaknesses throughout their balance sheet and they are essentially unauditable.  Whereas pretty much the entire rest of government has been able to figure out ways to track where its money goes.  And I think until we get really serious about making financial accountability for money important in the Pentagon—important and required—essentially what we did for the private sector with the Sarbanes-Oxley bill—until we do something similar in the Pentagon, I am not optimistic that we will have a better understanding of how our taxes are spent with regards to the military. 

Harris: You said earlier that it appears that no crimes have been committed or no laws have been broken.  Policy aside and politics aside, I think crimes have been committed; both American and Iraqi citizens have been wronged on a scale much larger than we will ever be able to imagine, and that there seems to be nothing tangible that we can reach out and say, “OK but at least that’s going to happen,” or “At least she’s going to make a change.” I don’t see that, and it’s quite disheartening as you mentioned earlier.  This could be depressing.

Bilmes: Well, it could be, and I think one of the things that we found in writing the book was that, every single week, we kept coming across another incredible, unbelievable finding.  I mean, it was to the point where whoever—Joe or I—found it, we were saying, “No, this can’t be.” But it was.  “No, this can’t be.” But it was.  Just last week, another one emerged when it was discovered that the major contractor in Iraq, which is the Halliburton subsidiary KBR—and this really is an incredible one—has been employing its workers using a shell company in the Cayman Islands, thereby evading hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxes.  Now, this is not right.  Now, it was not breaking a law because there was no law saying you couldn’t do that because no one imagined it would be done.  But here we have a situation where sort of official, our official contractor, who is deeply embedded in every aspect of the war, is evading paying U.S. taxes for its employees.  And we will feel the pinch about this because eventually those employees will need Medicare and Social Security and they will have never paid into the system and this only exacerbates our already looming health care and Social Security crisis.

Harris: One of the things that this text, “The Three-Trillion-Dollar War,” does extremely well is outline a plan that prevents this from happening again.  It also speaks to some of the insufficiencies of the Constitution.  Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Bilmes: It certainly speaks to a series of limitations.  We do go through, in our book, a whole chapter of changes, legal and regulatory changes that we think should be enacted to prevent this kind of thing from happening again because we have certainly seen that it has been possible for this war to be conducted in a way that, I think, very few Americans—whether they were in favor of the war initially or not—very few Americans would have wanted to see the war conducted in the manner in which it has been.

Harris: At a time when our nation appears desperately in need of a recipe for change, here comes this book, “The Three-Trillion-Dollar War.” This should be required reading for every American citizen and every American politician, most certainly.  Linda Bilmes, thank you for joining us.

Bilmes: Thank you.

Harris: For Linda Bilmes, this is James Harris, and this is Truthdig.

April 24, 2008 – Earlier this month, at a conference in San Francisco, several renowned computer scientists warned that electronic voting machines remain vulnerable to computer hackers due to serious security flaws in the operating software, calling into question the integrity of a presidential election that is still seven months away, and all other elections in the U.S. where paper ballots have been replaced by these paperless electronic machines.

There wasn’t anything particularly new in the scientists’ revelations other than the fact that the magazine PC World covered the issue and several other mainstream news organizations.

Arguably, any mainstream coverage these days of election fraud, a topic of such national significance that it literally affects anyone who has ever cast a ballot, can be credited to a handful of hard core voting rights activists and muckraking citizen journalists who have made it their life’s mission to overhaul the way people vote and restore much needed integrity to the process.

The scientists’ warnings that this year’s historic presidential election can be tinkered with came on the heels of the publication of a groundbreaking new book, “Loser Take All,” click here a collection of eye-opening investigative reports into past issues of election fraud authored by voting rights experts, activists, and journalists, who used old-fashioned gumshoe reporting to expose the seedy side of the business of counting votes.

Unlike the reportage leading up the invasion of Iraq, which relied heavily on anonymous sources who spoon fed mainstream reporters wild tales of Iraq’s vast weapons cache, lapped up by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and printed as fact, the reports about stolen elections, the massive purge of minorities and poor people from voter rolls, in “Loser Take All” is backed up by smoking gun evidence in the form of documents and on the record accounts from public officials and behind-the-scenes executives employed by e-voting companies.

Perhaps no one has been passionate about this issue or has worked as hard to attract mainstream attention to the cause than bestselling author Mark Crispin Miller and blogger Brad Friedman, who co-authored an essay for the book with voting rights advocate Michael Richardson.

Well before anyone understood what election fraud meant, Miller, also a professor at New York University, and Friedman, whose BradBlog website is the go-to place on the Internet for comprehensive coverage on voting issues, were sounding early warning alarms and educating the public about voting machines plagued with software bugs, the ease at which hackers can bust into the system and change the vote count for candidates, such as George W. Bush, and place him ahead of Democratic challenger John Kerry in states such as Ohio.

Miller, who wrote extensively in his book “Fooled Again” click here about the theft of countless votes cast during the 2004 presidential election–in Ohio and many other states– were stolen from Kerry and handed to Bush, said in an interview that the 2008 election can be stolen “through pre-emption of innumerable votes, as well as through the use of e-voting machines, both paperless touch-screen machines and op-scans.”

“It’s safe to say that the entire federal government, insofar as it’s controlled by BushCo’s appointees, has been diligently working to suppress all but those votes that will support the [Republican] party,” Miller said. “The [VA], for example, has announced that it will not help badly injured veterans register to vote since those who’ve been thus damaged by Bush/Cheney’s war aren’t likely to be big McCain supporters.”

“On top of all this, there is, of course, the fact that somewhere between 85 and 90 percent of the electorate will either cast its votes on, or have its votes counted by, computerized e-voting machinery that was manufactured, and that is being serviced, by private companies with close ties to the GOP,” Miller added. Warren O’Dell, the former chief executive of Diebold, the top manufacturer of electronic voting machines, famously declared in August 2003 that his company was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president [Bush] next year.”

O’Dell’s promise became prophetic. Not only did Ohio “deliver” electoral votes for Bush in 2004, the votes were delivered to Bush illegitimately, which Bob Fitrakis documents heroically in the chapter, “As Ohio Goes…” Fitrakis has repeatedly documented the rip-off in Ohio in several books, and was instrumental in assisting the House Judiciary Committee’s probe of what took place in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election.

Miller said as long as the GOP makes the 2008 presidential campaign “look “close” enough–and, with a media system like ours, “close” can be as much as eight percentage points or even more–they’re in a very good position to steal it…again.”

“All that they really need is a convincing rationale for the surprising victory of John McCain; and that rationale has been set up already–“America’s not ready to vote for a black man” or “for a woman,” and/or “for that woman”, and, as well, “It was that long, fierce civil war within the Democratic Party,” a “civil war” fomented by the GOP itself, through their manipulation of the e-voting machines used in many primaries, and the mass cross-over vote by thousands of Republicans,” he said.

Sadly, while these events in “Loser Take All” are supported by a mountain of documents, there are many, including some of the more prominent players in the progressive movement, who dismiss these findings and disregard calls to action because they believe, wrongly, that it may cast them as some sort of left-wing loon. Indeed, publications such as Salon, Mother Jones, The Nation, and TomPaine.com, have virtually ignored this hot-button issue or have written about it in such a way as to dismiss it as conspiracy theory. Editors at those publications did not return emails or phone calls seeking comment.

However, progressive news organizations such as Online Journal, BuzzFlash, AlterNet, CommonDreams, OpEd News, have been covering the issue since 2002 and are largely responsible for disseminating much of the information that appears in “Loser Take All.”

Miller attributed such ignorance by the progressive elite to a “toxic combination of denial and careerism.”

“On the one hand, there’s that all-too-human tendency to turn a blind eye to enormous threats because they’re just too devastating to acknowledge.. Better, therefore, to pretend they don’t exist,” Miller said. “This sort of blindness is, of course, well-known to therapists, who often have to struggle with it as they deal with families ravaged by addiction or domestic violence–families whose members can’t and won’t allow themselves to see that, for example, mommy is an alcoholic, or that daddy is a batterer. When they hear the awful truth, they just go deaf to it, and stay stone-blind to all the painful evidence that it is so.”

But if progressives are truly defined as a movement of change than it is the authors of “Loser Take All,” including Larisa Alexandrovna, Paul Lehto, Steven Rosenfeld, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and a dozen others, who deserve the accolades for speaking up mightily and forcing the powers that be in Washington, D.C in the blogosphere, and in the media, to take note.

“Loser Take All” is indeed an important historical document; a damning indictment of the electoral process that also tells the real story of how Bush was “elected” to a second term.

April 23, 2008 – We’re feeling a twinge of pride upon hearing that Sen. Patty Murray — along with Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii — asked for the resignation of Veterans Affairs mental health director Ira Katz, who she says covered up the jump in veteran suicides.

According to The Associated Press, “An e-mail message from Katz disclosed this week as part of a lawsuit that went to trial in San Francisco starts with ‘Shh!’ and refers to the 12,000 veterans per year who attempt suicide while under department treatment.” Sorry, but “Shh!” is hardly an acceptable response from someone charged with the delicate and crucial task of catering to the mental health needs of our veterans.

As Murray put it, “Dr. Katz’s irresponsible actions have been a disservice to our veterans, and it is time for him to go.” Katz tried to keep a lid on the fact that 12,000 vets under VA-provided treatment try to kill themselves each year. According to the VA, of the 18 vets who try to kill themselves each day, more than 20 percent are being treated by the VA. “The number one priority of the VA should be caring for our veterans, not covering up the truth,” added Murray.

What’s clear is that the system is failing these men and women on every level. We’ve seen numerous reports this past year indicating that the number of suicides among veterans and active duty troops are spiking. This is a case where shuffling vets in and out of paper work won’t just lose them in the system. It puts them at risk of being lost in the greatest and gravest sense of the word.

April 25, 2008 – Once again, the Department of Veterans Affairs is out of sync with the needs of returning soldiers. The disconnect is especially daunting for those who have attempted suicide because of post-traumatic stress syndrome or other mental-health issues.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington calls for the resignation of Dr. Ira Katz, who is in charge of mental-health issues for the Veterans Health Administration. She is right to do so.Internal e-mails reveal a combination of bad faith and incompetence in calculating how widespread the suicide problem is among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and even from Vietnam.

It does not take extraordinary logic to realize the VA should have a better grasp of the magnitude of the suicide problem, rather than trading in specious numbers that are ridiculous, lowball estimates. How can an agency tackle a problem it can’t honestly describe?

Murray does not mince words. She accuses the VA of lying about the number of veterans who have attempted suicide.

She makes an important point. If you can’t accurately count the number and be honest about the size of the problem, you can’t provide services for thousands of veterans grappling with depression and an ultimate decision.

Murray says internal VA e-mails suggest that 12,000 soldiers a year attempt suicide, while the VA publicly admitted to a number closer to 800 a year.

“The suicide rate is a red alarm bell to all of us,” Murray says. The VA’s mental-health programs are overwhelmed by war veterans with mental issues. She is furious the VA would downplay something so important. “They (the VA) need to stop hiding the fact this war is costing us in so many ways.”

Internal e-mails obtained in a lawsuit against the VA in San Francisco show department employees trying to manage publicity surrounding the larger estimate rather than getting real about steps to deal with this alarming problem.

The VA is charged with providing a range of services for our veterans. Changing the story, fudging numbers, shows an agency failing brave citizens who fought for their country, put their lives on the line and deserve honest and immediate mental-health care.

April 25, 2008 – No matter how divided the nation’s opinion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is, nearly all Americans believe we should honor our veterans. Sadly, when soldiers return home from the battlefield in the Middle East, they are facing a domestic attack as well.

After the mental health ward at the Dallas VA was shut down in early April because the fourth suicide of the year, more questions are being raised about the quality of veteran suicide prevention.

Tuesday, in a lawsuit questioning the mental health programs at VA hospitals, an expert witness testified that veterans are killing themselves at three to seven times the rate of the general population, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Perhaps that statistic shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering VA lacks a comprehensive plan for suicide prevention.

While the Dallas VA has spent more than $250,000 in the last six months in the name of suicide prevention, the money was used to safety-proof rooms of at-risk patients, not to create a better plan for diagnosis and treatment. Obviously, ensuring that doorknobs, shower curtains and light fixtures could not be easily used to hang oneself is an important part of making veterans safer.

But the more important issue is: why do they want to take their own life in the first place? We must look deeper into the issue rather than settling for a quick fix.

Unfortunately, if someone really wants to inflict personal injury, there is no amount of metal filing or safety locking that can prevent it.

We must look beyond furniture renovations to address the increased rate of depressed and suicidal veterans. The current method of “diagnosing” the severity of mental illness includes asking the patient if he or she has thought about committing suicide or that life was meaningless in the last two weeks. This is an insufficient way to treat any human being who has experienced trauma, much less our military heroes.

These men and women have seen unspeakable horrors of war and deserve much more personal attention and mental analysis than is currently provided.

Especially considering the possibility that large levels of troops will be headed home in the next few years, we need to take a more proactive approach to suicide prevention.

We have already lost more than 4,000 soldiers in combat and we cannot afford to lose any more to suicide.

Before the Dallas psychiatric ward re-opens, there needs to be more comprehensive psychological treatment in place. When treating a mental illness, one must take into account more than just the physical environment as a means of prevention.

April 24, 2008 – Patty Murray and other senators are right to call for the chief mental health official of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to resign — because he tried to cover up the rising number of suicides among veterans.

Add yet another sad chapter to the nation’s entrenched “treatment” of its military veterans.

Recovered e-mail messages don’t leave Dr. Ira Katz, the VA’s mental health director, with much room for denial. One e-mail begins with “Shh!” and refers to the 12,000 veterans a year who attempt suicide while under department treatment.

“Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?” the e-mail asks.

How depressing, yet unsurprising, that covering one’s backside is the catalyst for contemplating releasing such news. The suffering veterans certainly aren’t the motivation.

Murray, the senior member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, accuses Katz of deliberately withholding crucial information on the suicide risk among veterans. Such backward, “damage control” thinking is so outrageously wrong, his resignation hardly seems enough.

The e-mails emerged as part of a lawsuit being heard in San Francisco that alleges the VA failed to properly treat thousands of veterans for mental illness. One e-mail said that an average of 18 military veterans kill themselves each day — and five of them are under VA care when they commit suicide.

Study after study shows that a high number of service members who return from Iraq or Afghanistan report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression. One in five military personnel report such symptoms, but little more than half seek mental health treatment.

Mental health experts agree: Early intervention and good treatment will save lives and money.

Murray and Sens. Tom Harkin and Russ Feingold on Tuesday introduced legislation calling on the VA to track how many veterans die by suicide each year. Currently, VA facilities record the number of suicides and attempts in VA facilities — which have increased from 492 in 2000 to 790 in 2007 — but do not record how many veterans overall take their own lives. The bill would require the VA to report to Congress the number of veterans who have died by suicide since Jan. 1, 1997, and continue reports annually.

Tracking the number is crucial to learning the full scale of the problem. To actually begin to help our service members, it’s imperative to follow up on earlier legislation promising more and better health care for all veterans, and reducing the number of tours forced on troops currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

April 23, 2008,  Washington, DC – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) grilled Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Deputy Secretary Gordon Mansfield on recent e-mails showing that the head of VA mental health, Dr. Ira Katz, purposely underestimated statistics on veterans suicides. The e-mails – read here – surfaced as part of a class action law suit that veterans groups have filed against the VA in San Francisco.

“I am very angry and upset that we find out this week that several internal VA e-mails that were made public – not because you wanted them to, but because of a lawsuit that was ongoing – showed that the VA downplayed significantly the number of suicides and suicide attempts by veterans in the last several years,” Murray said at today’s hearing.

Murray went on to demand that Deputy Secretary Mansfield answer why she should believe his testimony today, given the VA’s history of repeatedly hiding the true needs of veterans: “How do we trust what you’re saying when every time we turn around we find out that what you’re saying publically is different from what you’re saying privately? How can we trust what you’re saying today?” Murray asked.

Secretary Mansfield responded “I share your concern and I apologize for the fact that I have to apologize again.” He then said he was not sure that he would characterize the e-mail as “keeping information from this Congress.”

Murray responded by reading Dr. Katz’s e-mails back to Secretary Mansfield which described the previously unreleased amount of suicides officials at VA facilities were seeing – 1000 per month – and began with the line “Shh!!”

After listening to Murray, Mansfield called it “unfortunate” and that the e-mail “does not bode well” or “send the right message.”

“If the attitude inside the VA is ‘shh!!’,” Murray later said. “Then we are doing a disservice to the men and women we have asked to serve us.”

“We are not your enemy, we are your support team, and unless we get the accurate information we can’t be there to do our jobs. We have to know what the facts are,” Murray said.

April 22, 2008 – Washington, DC — U.S. Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., introduced legislation Tuesday requiring the Veterans Administration to track veteran suicides.

Currently, the VA records suicides and suicide attempts in VA facilities, but does not track how many veterans commit suicide each year outside of those facilities.

VA records show that the number of veterans who kill themselves in VA facilities increased from 492 in 2000 to 790 in 2007.

A recent report by the Rand Corp. also shows that nearly 300,000 American military personnel returning from Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or depression.

Harkin and Feingold said that puts returning veterans at risk for suicide.

“We are looking at a real crisis among our veterans and it is high time the VA recognizes it,” Harkin said.

Feingold said the lack of data on veteran suicides shows how much needs to be done to address their mental health needs.

“With ongoing reports showing that service members are returning from combat with alarming rates of mental health problems, understanding and responding to these problems is critical in preventing death,” he said.

The Veterans Suicide Study Act would require the VA to report to Congress within 180 days how many veterans who committed suicide since Jan. 1, 1997, and continue to issue reports annually.

It is a companion bill to legislation introduced by Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-Iowa, in the House.

It also follows up on the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Law, signed into law last year. It requires the VA to integrate mental health services into veterans’ primary care and increase counseling and other mental health services for veterans returning from war.

The law was named after Joshua Omvig, a soldier from Grundy Center, who committed suicide in December 2005 after he returned from Iraq.

April 20, 2008 – To date, 56 senators and more than 200 representatives have signed on to legislation to revamp GI educational benefits. They recognize that the men and women fighting today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not getting their due. But if Congress is serious about doing right by America’s veterans, it has to do more than come up with a list of names. It’s time to enact a new GI bill and pay for it.

Impetus for the bill comes from Sen. James Webb (D-Va.), a veteran with a family history of military service. Mr. Webb and a co-sponsor, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), also a veteran, rightly argue that post-Sept. 11 veterans are being shortchanged by a system designed for peacetime that has not kept pace with increased college costs. Their bill, introduced in January 2007, would be true to the original GI bill enacted after World War II in providing a cost-free education to those who serve in the military.

The bill got an important boost last week with backing from Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee. Even with that support, though, advocates are worried that the bill might not advance, and so they are targeting other influential lawmakers, especially those who sit on important appropriations committees, to add the measure to the emergency supplemental appropriations bill this spring.

Disappointingly, Sen. John McCain, presumptive Republican candidate for president, so far declines to back the measure. He seems to be responding to concerns of the military brass that enhanced educational opportunities could negatively affect retention rates. Not only is it wrong to want people to stay in the military because they have no alternatives, but such thinking ignores the advantages enhanced educational benefits offer in recruitment. To meet recruitment goals, the military has offered bonuses and lowered some of its standards. Imagine being able instead to promise possible recruits a first-class college education.

The bill is not cheap; cost estimates range from $2 billion to $4 billion a year. But better-educated veterans have more favorable readjustment experiences, which means less money spent on treating post-traumatic stress disorder and other difficulties. More to the point, this should be considered part of the cost of war — and an obligation that the nation should gratefully fulfill.

April 23, 2008 – War affects different people in different ways. We know more about that because of advances in various sciences, technology and computing power. There’s still a lot left to learn. But this is certain: The price of war isn’t limited to the cost of bullets.

That’s why it’s so important to have a strong, efficient, accountable federal agency to disburse care to those among us whom our nation sent off to fight. For the first time in its modern incarnation, the Department of Veterans Affairs is led by a general who is also a doctor, James B. Peake.

Peake, a surgeon, is a decorated veteran of the war in Vietnam and formerly was Army surgeon general. He became secretary of veterans affairs late last year, in the wake of the Washington Post’s investigation of bureaucratic nightmares and scandalous conditions affecting injured war veterans.

Secretary Peake was in the Twin Cities last week to cut the ribbon on the Paralyzed Veterans of America Vocational Rehabilitation Center here, and he stopped by for a discussion with the Pioneer Press editorial board.

Earlier that day, the Rand Corp. had released a new study concluding that “fundamental gaps remain in our understanding of the mental health and cognitive needs of U.S. service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, the costs of mental health and cognitive conditions, and the care systems available to deliver treatment.”

The Rand study focused on post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression and traumatic brain injury. It examined their prevalence among returning soldiers, the care system available to them, the societal costs of these conditions and the cost of delivering high-quality care to all who need it.
The consequences of PTSD, major depression and traumatic brain injury, Rand Corp. said, “can have a high economic toll; however, most attempts to measure the costs of these conditions focus only on medical costs to the government. … Far higher are the long-term individual and societal costs stemming from lost productivity, reduced quality of life, homelessness, domestic violence, the strain on families and suicide.” Rand recommended more capacity for mental-health care and policies that encourage more service members and veterans to seek the care they need.

At the time we talked with Peake, he said he hadn’t yet seen the report. But he advocated for essentially the same measures — early intervention and evidence-based treatment.

Peake also talked about the professionals and caregivers he’s seen at VA hospitals, about how impressed he is “with the quality, and their passion for what they’re doing.” He talked about recognizing that some vets will need lifelong treatment but making sure that others know they will recover. “You need to have the expectation that you’re going to get better,” he said.

He talked about the efficiency and focus of the VA’s medical efforts and the urgent push to take advantage of technology to deliver more and better care. He talked about the strong, bipartisan support for the VA in Congress. “Everybody’s got their own political agenda,” he said, “but I think everybody’s sincere in wanting to do right by our veterans.”

He also talked about the differences on the home front between the Vietnam era and today. Today, in debates about the war in Iraq, we’re better at distinguishing between the soldiers and the politicians who sent them off to fight.

This week, internal e-mails released in response to a lawsuit against the VA have raised questions about how forthcoming the agency has been about the mental health of returning combat vets, about whether the agency held back information for political reasons.

Given what Peake has observed himself — skilled, dedicated caregivers at the VA, bipartisan support for doing right by our veterans, more mature public sentiment — there’s no reason for anything less than clarity about returning vets. As a retired general and a surgeon, Peake is well-prepared to deal with the facts as they are, whatever they are. We trust that he will.