Veterans for Common Sense

April 15, 2008 – When the American Civil Liberties Union released the FBI e-mail in December 2004 – after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit – the White House emphatically denied that any such presidential Executive Order existed, calling the unnamed FBI official who wrote the e-mail “mistaken.”

President Bush and his representatives also have denied repeatedly that the administration condones “torture,” although senior administration officials have acknowledged subjecting “high-value” terror suspects to aggressive interrogation techniques, including the “waterboarding” – or simulated drowning – of three al-Qaeda detainees.

But the emerging public evidence suggests that Bush’s denials about “torture” amount to a semantic argument, with the administration applying a narrow definition that contradicts widely accepted standards contained in international law, including Geneva and other human rights conventions.

The FBI e-mail – dated May 22, 2004 – followed disclosures about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and sought guidance on whether FBI agents in Iraq were obligated to report the U.S. military’s harsh interrogation of inmates when that treatment violated FBI standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential Executive Order.

According to the e-mail, Bush’s Executive Order authorized interrogators to use military dogs, “stress positions,” sleep “management,” loud music and “sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.” to extract information from detainees in Iraq.

The FBI e-mail was put into a new light by news reports last week that senior White House officials – including Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice – did meet secretly to discuss specific interrogation methods that could be used against detainees.

“The most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al-Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA,” ABC News reported, citing unnamed sources.

“The high-level discussions about these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed – down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

“These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al-Qaeda suspects – whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC News.”

On Friday, President Bush confirmed the report, stating matter-of-factly: “I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

ACLU Comment

Reacting to Bush’s comment, the ACLU called on Congress to demand that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate whether the President and other officials broke federal and international laws, “including the War Crimes Act, the federal Anti-Torture Act, and federal assault laws.”

“No one in the Executive Branch of government can be trusted to fairly investigate or prosecute any crimes since the head of every relevant department, along with the President and Vice President, either knew or participated in the planning and approval of illegal acts,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office.

“Congress cannot look the other way; it must demand an independent investigation and independent prosecutor. Congress is duty-bound by the Constitution not only to hold the President, Vice President and all civil officers to account, but it must also send a message to future presidents that it will use its constitutional powers to prevent illegal, and immoral conduct.”

Anthony D. Romero, the ACLU’s executive director, said the fact President Bush admitted he approved of high-level meetings so members of his Cabinet could brainstorm about brutal interrogation methods “confirms our worst fears.”

“We have always known that the CIA’s use of torture was approved from the very top levels of the U.S. government,” Romero said. “It is a very sad day when the President of the United States subverts the Constitution, the rule of law, and American values of justice.”

FBI E-Mail

The May 2004 FBI e-mail stated that the FBI interrogation team in Iraq understood that despite revisions in the Executive Order that occurred after the furor over the Abu Ghraib abuses, the presidential sanctioning of harsh interrogation tactics had not been rescinded.

“I have been told that all interrogation techniques previously authorized by the Executive Order are still on the table but that certain techniques can only be used if very high-level authority is granted,” the author of the FBI e-mail said.

“We have also instructed our personnel not to participate in interrogations by military personnel which might include techniques authorized by Executive Order but beyond the bounds of FBI practices.”

One month after the e-mail was sent to FBI counterterrorism officials in Washington, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales held a news conference in an attempt to contain the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Gonzales told reporters that the abuses, which included sexual humiliation of Iraqi men, were isolated to some rogue U.S. soldiers who acted on their own and not as result of orders being handed down from high-level officials inside the Bush administration.

“The President has not directed the use of specific interrogation techniques,” Gonzales said on June 22, 2004. “There has been no presidential determination necessity or self-defense that would allow conduct that constitutes torture.

“There has been no presidential determination that circumstances warrant the use of torture to protect the mass security of the United States.”

Prior to the news conference, the White House selectively declassified and released documents to reporters, including one dated Feb. 7, 2002, and signed by President Bush, that cited the Geneva Convention’s rules about humane treatment of prisoners during conflicts.

Describing the contents of the Feb. 7, 2002, memo, Gonzales said, “This is the only formal, written directive from the President regarding treatment of detainees. The President determined that Geneva does not apply with respect to our conflict with al-Qaeda. Geneva applies with respect to our conflict with the Taliban. Neither the Taliban or al Qaeda are entitled to POW protections.”

Gonzales added: “But the President also determined – and this is quoting from the actual document, paragraph 3; this is very important – he said, ‘Of course, our values as a nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment. Our nation has been, and will continue to be, a strong supporter of Geneva and its principles. As a matter of policy, the Armed Forces are to treat detainees humanely, and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva’.”

But the FBI e-mail’s reference to an Executive Order describing specific harsh interrogation techniques, allegedly approved by President Bush, appeared to contradict Gonzales’s assertions.

Yoo’s Memo

The issue surrounding U.S. interrogation methods and whether they amount to torture resurfaced two weeks ago when the Defense Department released an 81-page document in response to the ACLU’s ongoing FOIA lawsuit.

John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, drafted the document, dated March 14, 2003. It essentially provided military interrogators with legal cover if they resorted to brutal and violent methods to extract information from prisoners.

“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al-Qaeda terrorist network,” Yoo wrote.

“In that case, we believe that he could argue that the Executive Branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

The legal opinion for military interrogators was virtually identical to an earlier memo that Yoo had written in August 2002 for CIA interrogators. Widely called the “Torture Memo,” it provided CIA interrogators with the legal authority to use long-outlawed tactics, such as waterboarding, when interrogating so-called high-level terrorist suspects.

In declaring that the United States does not engage in torture, Bush administration officials appear to be relying on a narrower U.S. definition of torture than that is accepted under international law, such as the 1984 Convention Against Torture that was signed by the Reagan administration in 1988 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994.

“The threshold for torture is lower under international law: acts that do not amount to torture under U.S. law may do so under international law,” wrote Philippe Sands, law professor at University College London, in a column published in the Dec. 9, 2005, edition of The Financial Times.

“Waterboarding – strapping a detainee to a board and dunking him under water so he believes that he might drown – plainly constitutes torture under international law, even if it may not do so under U.S. law. …

“When the U.S. joined the 1984 convention it entered an ‘understanding’ on the definition of torture, to the effect that the international definition was to be read as being consistent with the U.S. definition. The administration relies on the ‘understanding.’

“So, when Ms. Rice says the U.S. does not do torture or render people to countries that practice torture, she does not rely on the international definition. That is wrong: the convention does not allow each country to adopt its own definition, otherwise the convention’s obligations would become meaningless. That is why other governments believe the U.S. ‘understanding’ cannot affect U.S. obligations under the convention.”

At the June 22, 2004, news conference, Gonzales said the White House defined torture as a “a specific intent to inflict severe physical or mental harm or suffering. That’s the definition that Congress has given us and that’s the definition that we use.”

However, on March 8, 2008, President Bush vetoed congressional legislation that called for a specific ban on waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques, including stripping prisoners naked, subjecting them to extreme cold and staging mock executions.

“This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe,” the president said in a radio address explaining his veto.

“We created alternative procedures to question the most dangerous al-Qaeda operatives, particularly those who might have knowledge of attacks planned on our homeland.” Bush said. “If we were to shut down this program and restrict the CIA to methods in the [Army] field manual, we could lose vital information from senior al-Qaeda terrorists, and that could cost American lives.”

April 16, 2008 – Fresno, CA — Forced to leave the combat zone after his two brothers died in the Iraq war, Army Spc. Jason Hubbard faced another battle once he returned home: The military cut off his family’s health care, stopped his G.I. educational subsidies and wanted him to repay his sign-up bonus.

It wasn’t until Hubbard petitioned his local congressman that he was able to restore some of his benefits.

Now that congressman, Rep. Devin Nunes, plans to join three other lawmakers in introducing a bill that would ensure basic benefits to all soldiers who are discharged under an Army policy governing sole surviving siblings and children of soldiers killed in combat. The rule is a holdover from World War II meant to protect the rights of service people who have lost a family member to war.

“I felt as if in some ways I was being punished for leaving even though it was under these difficult circumstances,” Hubbard told The Associated Press. “The situation that happened to me is not a one-time thing. It’s going to happen to other people, and to have a law in place is going to ease their tragedy in some way.”

Hubbard, 33, and his youngest brother, Nathan, enlisted while they were still grieving for their brother, Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Hubbard, who was 22 when he was killed in a 2004 bomb explosion in Ramadi.

At their request, the pair were assigned to the same unit, the 3rd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, and deployed to Iraq the next year.

In August, 21-year-old Cpl. Nathan died when his Black Hawk helicopter crashed near Kirkuk. Jason was part of the team assigned to remove his comrades’ bodies from the wreckage.

Hubbard accompanied his little brother’s body on a military aircraft to Kuwait, then on to California. He kept steady during Nathan’s burial at Clovis Cemetery, standing in dress uniform between his younger brothers’ graves as hundreds sobbed in the heat.

But Hubbard broke his silence when he found his wife, pregnant with their second child, had been cut off from the transitional health care the family needed to ease back to civilian life after he was discharged in October.

“This is a man who asked for nothing and gave a lot,” said Nunes, R-Calif., who represents Hubbard’s hometown of Clovis, a city of 90,000 next to Fresno. “Jason is one person who obviously has suffered tremendously and has given the ultimate sacrifice. One person is too many to have this happen to.”

Hubbard went to Nunes, who began advocating for the former soldier in December, after hearing the Army was demanding that he repay $6,000 from his enlistment bonus and was denying him up to $40,000 in educational benefits under the GI bill.

After speaking with Army Secretary Pete Geren, Nunes got the repayment waived, and a military health policy restored for Hubbard’s wife.

But the policy mandated that she be treated at a nearby base, and doctors at the Lemoore Naval Air Station warned that the 45-mile trip could put her and the fetus in danger. Hubbard said doctors offered alternative treatment at a hospital five hours away.

Meantime, Hubbard and his two-year-old son went without any coverage for a few months.

The Hubbard Act, scheduled to be introduced Wednesday, would for the first time detail the rights of sole survivors, and extend to them a number of benefits already offered to other soldiers honorably discharged from military service.

The bill — co-sponsored by Rep. Jim Costa, D-Calif., Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga. — would waive payback of their enlistment bonuses, allow them to participate in G.I. educational programs, give them separation pay and access to transitional health care.

Meanwhile, Hubbard, his wife Linnea and his son Elijah, have permanent health coverage now that he is once again working as a Fresno County sheriff’s deputy, the job he left in 2004 to serve in Iraq.

The Army will adopt to any changes in policy springing from the legislation, said Army spokesman Maj. Nathan Banks.

“Foremost the Army itself sympathizes with him for the loss of his brothers,” Banks said. “We will do everything within our means to rectify this issue. He is still one of ours.”

Hubbard’s father, Jeff, said that resolving the family’s bureaucratic difficulties would provide some comfort, but would not help lessen their pain.

“We’re still very much deeply involved in a grieving process. We’re pretty whacked,” he said. “This doesn’t relate back to the loss of our boys, it can’t, but we would consider it a positive accomplishment.”

Last November, CBS News broke the story of the staggering number of veterans who commit suicide. The report was the result of a five-month investigation into veteran suicides [VCS worked with CBS News on their report].  

April 15, 2008, Dallas, Texas (CBS/AP) – A fourth suicide among mentally ill patients treated at the Dallas VA Medical Center this year has led the hospital to close its psychiatric ward, and investigators from the national Veterans Affairs office are expected to arrive next week to assess safety.

This comes on the heels of an exclusive CBS News investigation that revealed 1,758 VA patients killed themselves in 2005. That number rose from 1,403 VA patient suicides in 2001.

Joseph Dalpiaz, director of the VA North Texas Health Care System, ordered the shutdown after a 44-year-old man hanged himself April 4. The hospital stopped admitting patients to its 51-bed psychiatric unit the next day.

Dalpiaz “decided he wanted to … give us some time to assess the environment of care and make sure things were as safe as possible in our patient unit,” said Dr. Catherine Orsak, head of mental health for the VA’s North Texas health system.

Three other suicides have also raised alarm. In January, two men who met in the hospital’s psychiatric ward committed suicide days after being released.

On Feb. 5, a 55-year-old mental health patient also took his own life while staying in the same unit. The Associated Press reported the veteran who committed suicide on this day hanged himself on a frame attached to his wheelchair.

In a statement to CBS News, VA spokesperson Phil Budahn said the “VA remains committed to ensuring its patients receive top quality care.” Any veterans who need “inpatient mental health care will be referred to VA facilities in Waco and Temple [or] non VA facilities in the Dallas Fort Worth area.”

Last November, CBS News broke the story of the staggering number of veterans who commit suicide. The report was the result of a five-month investigation into veteran suicides [VCS worked with CBS News on their report].

The results were startling: according to data from 45 states, 6,256 men and women who had served in the armed forces took their own lives in 2005 – that’s 120 suicides every week. Chief Investigative Correspondent Armen Keteyian and his investigative team found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide that year than non-veterans.

April 14, 2008 – Washington, DC — With long-term estimates of the cost of the Iraq war ranging from $1 trillion to $3 trillion or more, the question naturally arises of what else the country could have done with the money.

The issue occasionally crops up on the campaign trail and in public debate. Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, told voters in West Virginia last month that the war was costing each American household $100 a month. “Just think about what battles we could be fighting instead of fighting this misguided war,” Mr. Obama said.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Indiana recently that the war was costing $12 billion a month and was crowding out urgent national needs. “We’ve got to begin not only to withdraw our troops,” said Mrs. Clinton, Democrat of New York, “but bring that money back home.”

On the other hand, Senator John McCain of Arizona, the likely Republican nominee, says repeatedly that success in Iraq justifies any cost and that overspending in other areas is causing the strain on the federal budget. He says the government can afford whatever the war costs as well as a big corporate tax cut if it reins in wasteful federal spending.

President Bush addressed the cost more directly than before in remarks on Thursday at the White House. Mr. Bush acknowledged that the human and material costs had been high and would demand continued sacrifices from all Americans. But he said that relative to the cold war, the war in Iraq had consumed a “modest fraction” of the country’s wealth.

Even if the country can afford the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or, as Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain assert, cannot afford not to fight them, the amounts being spent on the conflict are of a scale that war critics say would allow the country to address what they see as more compelling problems.

At the low end of estimates of the cost of the war — $120 billion a year — the money would cover the projected cost of Mrs. Clinton’s universal health care plan. It could pay for Mr. Obama’s less inclusive health care plan and his proposal to bail out homeowners with troubled mortgages. Or for development of new renewable energy sources and a nationwide public works program. Or pay toward a long-term fix for Social Security. Or the unpaid part of the Medicare drug benefit.

The American public, by an overwhelming margin, believes that the cost of the war is worsening domestic economic problems. In a New York Times/CBS News poll completed on April 2, 67 percent of respondents said the war had contributed “a lot” to American economic problems, and 22 percent said it was contributing “some.” Only 10 percent said “not much” or “not at all.”

Mr. Bush said in his speech on Thursday that the Defense Department budget today represented slightly more than 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with more than 6 percent in some years of the Reagan administration and as much as 13 percent in 1952-3, when the United States was engaged in the war in Korea.

But the war in Iraq is largely being paid for off the books, with emergency and supplemental spending rather than from the Pentagon’s operating budget, so Mr. Bush’s figures are a low estimate of the relative cost of the war, analysts have observed. And growing entitlement costs today make such comparisons with previous eras questionable.

“Even if you assume the war costs will phase down, either quickly or slowly, we are still on an unsustainable track under current budget policy,” said James R. Horney, director of federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, a liberal research group. “Before the war started and without any of the new ideas of the candidates, we’re in a situation where we have to reduce spending and reduce the rate of growth of Medicare and Medicaid and, to a lesser extent, Social Security. So the costs of the war have to be seen in that context.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Mr. McCain’s chief economic adviser and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said the benefits of success in Iraq dwarfed the $150 billion annual cost. He also said that if the war and the personal and corporate tax cuts that Mr. McCain advocated added to the federal deficit and debt, so be it.

“I would like the next president not to talk about deficit reduction,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said at a symposium sponsored by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “The next president should talk about what’s good for American families — education, health care at reasonable costs, pensions that are secure, opening our borders to trade. If we can take care of that, we can take care of the budget.”

Mr. McCain has said he plans to pay for tax cuts and modernizing the military by eliminating earmarks and wasteful spending from the federal budget. Both Senators Clinton and Obama would allow the Bush administration’s personal income tax cuts to expire in 2011 and are proposing new levies on wealthy individuals, oil companies and other businesses to help pay for expansive and expensive new government programs.

While both promise to remove troops from Iraq, Mrs. Clinton does not expect any big savings that could be used to finance her domestic initiatives. Mr. Obama does expect the winding down of the Iraq war to ultimately produce a “peace dividend” that can be used for other things.

Austan D. Goolsbee, a University of Chicago professor who is advising Mr. Obama on economic matters, said that any such dividend would emerge slowly, and he did not fix a dollar figure on it.

Dr. Goolsbee said Mr. Obama’s programs would be financed from a variety of sources, including elimination of the Bush tax cuts and anticipated federal spending reductions. “They will more than pay for everything Senator Obama has proposed,” he said.

An economic adviser to Mrs. Clinton, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said she proposed to pay for all of her domestic programs, including universal health insurance, without taking money from the Pentagon that would be needed to redeploy troops now in Iraq and to pay for their health care costs.

“Everything is paid for,” the adviser said. “We have been very careful and clear in all our domestic initiatives to show how we’d pay for them.”

All three candidates may be living in a fiscal fantasyland, some neutral observers believe. “With or without the war, we can’t afford the current policy,” said Mr. Horney of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “What the war has done is bring us a little closer to the day of reckoning, because we will have squandered the opportunity to address these long-term problems.”

April 14, 2008 – Auburn, Maine — The Iraqi translator called Shark knew his life was at risk every day that he worked for American troops in Iraq. Insurgents viewed translators as traitors and had wounded or killed scores of his colleagues. But he believed the Americans would improve life in his country, and despite receiving dozens of death threats, he translated for Americans while they trained Iraqi soldiers and went on patrols.

After a bomb ripped through his car just as he, his wife, and baby son were about to get in, he asked the United States for asylum.

“I held the visa in my hands and thought, ‘We’ll live the American dream,’ ” he said.

But since arriving in September, the translator has discovered a harsh reality: He can barely survive. With little notion of where to go, he landed in Auburn, the hometown of a military officer he had befriended in Iraq, where he cannot find steady work. He, his wife, and son share a cramped two-bedroom apartment, a 1995 Buick, and a cellphone with another Iraqi translator and his wife. They live on food stamps and the meager pay they collect from a nearby college, where both men work as part-time janitors. Sometimes they can afford to eat only once a day.

“We both have college educations,” said the translator, who asked to be identified by the moniker American troops gave him, Shark, out of fear that insurgents will hurt his relatives in Iraq if they find out that he is now living in the United States. “We both risked our lives for the American government. Now we wash dishes and mop floors. There’s something wrong with that.”

Across the country, hundreds of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters who aided the US war effort and then fled their homelands fearing for their lives are struggling with little help from the government, according to private groups assisting translators from the war zones. After granting them refuge, the United States has done little to assist in the transition to a foreign culture where the translators have few connections, few prospects for employment, and little access to healthcare.

“It’s as if we think that our obligation to honor their service is simply to bring them here,” said Kirk Johnson, whose nonprofit organization in New York, the List Project, helps Iraqis who work for US forces apply for special immigrant visas. One Iraqi family the List Project had helped move to the United States became so frustrated that the family returned to the Middle East, though not to Iraq, Johnson said.

“They can only clean toilets for so long before they give up and decide that maybe it’s not worth the struggle here,” he said.

The program that enabled Shark and his family to move to the United States is open to Afghan and Iraqi interpreters who worked with US forces in those war zones for at least 12 months. Under a recent law, Iraqis and Afghans who have arrived in the United States under the program on or after Dec. 27, 2007, are entitled to a multitude of benefits that include one month of free rent, temporary cash assistance, free medical insurance, and the support of a caseworker who helps the immigrants settle. The law also raises the quota of special immigrant visas from 500 a year to 5,000 a year starting October 2008.

But the benefits do not extend to the hundreds of translators who arrived before Dec. 27, like Shark. A Department of State spokesman, who spoke on background because he was not authorized to talk in detail about the topic, said the government is reviewing whether and how to make the benefits available to immigrants who arrived earlier.

The special immigrant visa “was a way to act quickly to be able to give people refuge here in the United States” in recognition of the threat the interpreters face in their home countries, said Jane Leu, executive director of Upwardly Global, a San Francisco-based agency that helps refugees and immigrants find jobs.

But the program “could have done a better job in linking [the translators] to services that exist,” Leu said. “We are in a gap right now as far as plugging them into the system is concerned.”

For the translators, finding employment is the biggest challenge, said Anne Kirwan, who works in the San Francisco office of Upwardly Global. They often base decisions about where to live in the United States on the residence of American service members who worked with them, she said, compounding the difficulties of finding work.

For Shark and his roommate, that service member was Maine Army National Guard Lieutenant Paul Bosse, whom they met during his deployment in 2006.

Bosse, who regularly checks on Shark, is aware of their financial difficulties.

“They went from a country where literally their lives were in danger and now they have opportunities,” he said. “Not all of them have to be very successful, but they’ll be safe and their kids will grow up safe.”

But safety is not enough, said Shark’s roommate, who also asked to be identified by his American moniker, Steve.

“Being safe is a good thing for us. All the Americans I have met are very nice,” he said. “But we wish we had something to do. Look at our refrigerator: it’s rice, chicken, and beans. We haven’t eaten meat for the last four months.”

Shark and Steve, who are both 27, work part time at Bates College in Lewiston, across the Androscoggin River from Auburn. They make $8 an hour and work only when the college calls, typically 10 hours a week or less, the translators said.

They had briefly held other jobs. They lost work packing bottles at a sauce factory when they couldn’t make it to work on time without a car. Another job packing and sorting clothes at LL Bean was seasonal and ended after the Christmas rush.

One afternoon last week, Shark and Steve sat on donated furniture in their Spartan living room with their wives, hoping for Bates College to call for another late-night cleaning shift. Shark’s son crawled from one adult to another, then disappeared in the tiny bedroom he shares with his parents, who have decorated the room with their wedding pictures. A deflated Mylar balloon from a recent birthday was tacked to the wall.

Steve’s wife said life in Iraq was “much better.”

There, she said, “I worry all the time. But here, we haven’t seen anything that makes us feel good. All we think about here is how we are going to pay the bills.”

Ten other interpreters came with Shark and Steve to Auburn in September, and most of them have moved away. Several found jobs at a Wal-Mart in Utah. One found a job translating at the US Army Academy at West Point. One joined the Army. Shark and Steve don’t know if they can afford to move their families someplace where they are more likely to find better jobs.

“I was risking my life for this country,” said Shark. “I don’t know why the government doesn’t help us.”

April 13, 2008 – Some locals say that care and customer service at veterans’ medical clinics in Galveston County has been so bad it’s made some sick and left others worrying they might get sick if they keep using them.

They question whether an arrangement under which the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs pays a contractor a flat, per-patient rate to operate the clinics gives the contractor a financial motive to deny care.

Whatever the cause, patients have become so frustrated with the clinics that they’ve been quitting them and are driving back to the Michael E. DeBakey Medical Center in Houston.

The clinics were opened a little more than two years ago under a $19 million contract intended to give the county’s 25,000 veterans — many of whom lack transportation — a convenient alternative to driving to Houston. But enrollment numbers at the clinics have actually dropped in the past two years after a big initial signup.

The president of the company that runs the Galveston County clinics said he hadn’t been told of widespread complaints about the clinics and said the VA’s internal and outside reviews of service had been glowing.

But the VA on Thursday said it hasn’t been satisfied with the company’s performance in Galveston County.

It said it had taken action against the company and would do more if its performance didn’t improve. The VA, however, refused to say how it disciplined the company or what it might do in the future.

And despite its dissatisfaction with the company’s local performance, the VA has more than a dozen other contracts with it to operate outpatient clinics across the United States.

The VA and the contractor apparently even opened a new one on Friday.

Grand Opening

In December 2004, the VA made an announcement that was a big deal to the county’s veterans: It would open outpatient clinics on 61st Street in Galveston and on the Emmett F. Lowry Expressway in Texas City.

“We were really happy to get them,” said Jim Rose, president of the county’s chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America. “We tried very hard for a very long time to get them here.”

The local clinics, part of an initiative to open 156 such facilities across the country, were to be run by American Medical Services of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Under its contract, it would be paid $400 annually for every vet who received primary care at the clinics.

The deal would be worth $19 million throughout five years, Larry Seward, outpatient clinic coordinator at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston, said at the time. The VA last week wouldn’t say how much it had paid the company.

The contractor has since changed its name to Valor Healthcare and moved its headquarters to Miami.

Dissatisfaction

That’s not the only thing about the clinics that has changed. Many veterans’ enthusiasm for them quickly evaporated.

Rose said veterans were treated disrespectfully at the clinics and had difficulty getting through on the phones — often to clear up minor problems with prescriptions and other small matters. But if they went to the clinics in person, they often would have to wait most of the day to be seen, Rose said.

Worse, personnel at the clinics seemed bent on limiting the care veterans received there, Rose said.

“It seemed like the more money they saved, the more money they made,” Rose said. “If you went in with something drastically wrong, you wouldn’t get the test because the test costs money.”

Gerald Bloom, a Vietnam veteran who now works as a dispatcher for the sheriff’s department, said his doctor ordered that tests be done every three months.

“More than 50 percent of the time, they called and postponed my three-month appointment by more than a month,” he said.

Rose said that in time, most of his group’s more than 60 members stopped going to the local clinics and started driving to the VA-run facility in Houston instead.

Staffing Adequate, Company Says

Dr. Ray Lanier is president of Valor. In a phone interview Wednesday, he vehemently denied the troubles local vets complained of at the clinics his company runs.

“We’ve been seeing in excess of 1,000 people a month. There’s a disconnect in some way,” Lanier said. “If I thought there was a problem, I would come down there and take care of it myself.”

In terms of not getting through on the phones, Lanier said he’d called the Texas City clinic three times that day without a hitch. And when The Daily News called, the phone was answered on the third ring.

In addition, Lanier said, his company’s clinics have enough resources to provide good care.

“There are more than enough staff and providers for our patients,” he said, explaining that his company intentionally left open three or four slots in each doctor’s schedule each day to accommodate patients without appointments.

More generally, Lanier said that the “cafeteria rate” the VA paid his company was enough for it to turn a profit and give good care.

A Skeptic

But Lynn Richards isn’t buying it. Because her husband, Danny Richards, is a 100 percent disabled veteran, she qualifies for medical care from the VA as well.

Richards and her husband are well known among Galveston County veterans. For years they’ve donated their time and money in efforts such as driving veterans without transportation to medical appointments. Lynn Richards also is an officer in the Texas Chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Ladies Auxiliary.

A diabetic, Richards, 55, said that her doctor at the VA hospital told her to get tests done once every three months to make sure her blood sugar was at acceptable levels.

But she said she was enrolled at the VA’s Texas City clinic for a year-and-a-half before it was checked even once. When her blood was finally checked by a professional, it was badly out of whack, Richards said. She transferred to the VA center in Houston and is only now getting back to normal, she said.

“We transferred up there because (the Texas City clinic) almost killed us,” Richards said of herself and her husband.

Richards said she’s heard similar complaints from many of the veterans she works with through her volunteer efforts.

And if county vets are voting with their feet, they’ve voted down the local clinics.

Between October 2005, the first year the clinics were open, and September 2006, they had a total of 8,132 patients, according to numbers furnished by the VA. Before the clinics opened, officials at the VA predicted they would draw about 8,000 patients the first year and grow from there.

But the following year that number dropped to 7,815: about one-third the number of county veterans.

Some of the loss could be due to the rapidly declining number of World War II veterans. But at the same time, new veterans are returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Contradictory Claims

Lanier, the president Valor, insisted that his company’s performance has been consistently evaluated and has passed every test. He said the VA conducted internal checks, the agency’s inspector general looked at it and it was reviewed by the agency that accredits hospitals.

“They found great results,” he said of the Joint Commission, the accrediting agency. He said the VA’s inspector general also produced a glowing review.

But the VA did not respond to a request for copies of those findings.

In an e-mail response to written questions, the agency reported significant problems with the company.

The VA “is not satisfied with Valor Healthcare Inc.’s performance at our outpatient clinics in Galveston and Texas City,” the agency wrote. “We have concerns about their failure to meet established benchmarks and standards including wait times, access and patient satisfaction. We continue to work with the contractor to make improvements; however action has been taken against the contractor and if performance does not improve, further action will be taken.”

But the agency wouldn’t say what that action was or whether the company’s contract would be renewed when it expires.

Lanier didn’t return follow-up calls late last week to ask about the VA’s concerns.

Those concerns apparently don’t run very deep, though. Lanier on Wednesday said his company runs 16 outpatient clinics for the VA and was opening another on Friday.

A spokeswoman in the VA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters couldn’t say last week whether that was true and if so, where the clinic was.

April 13, 2008 – The image of CIA officers demonstrating and detailing torture techniques considered for use during detainee interrogations in the White House is one most Americans could probably never conceive. And yet, ABC News reported last week that senior Bush administration officials were privy to such presentations in the Situation Room as they discussed and approved the brutal treatment (such as waterboarding) of terror suspects. They also approved combining various techniques to be used on a suspect.

Included in the group were Vice President Dick Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (currently a lead contender for vice president on the Republican ticket), former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell. Regarding the use of the techniques, Rice told the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it,” as though assigning a casual project or giving a pep talk.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft was also part of this committee, and while he was fine with the torture techniques, he was uncomfortable with the fact that the White House knew so much about them — doing so blows the whole “plausible deniability” argument. A former intelligence official told The Associated Press that the meetings were timed to the Justice Department memos approving the use of the techniques.

We agree with the American Civil Liberties Union calling for a congressional investigation into the matter. The fact that we torture suspects is unacceptable. That the White House reviewed and approved the techniques is beyond the pale.

April 14, 2008 – The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancient regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War. Since then, the spectacle of hunger sparking revolutionary violence has been the stuff of Broadway musicals rather than the real world of politics. And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world. Ironically, it may be the very success of capitalism in transforming regions previously restrained by various forms of socialism that has helped create the new crisis.

Haiti is in flames as food riots have turned into a violent challenge to the vulnerable government; Egypt’s authoritarian regime faces a mounting political threat over its inability to maintain a steady supply of heavily subsidized bread to its impoverished citizens; Cote D’Ivoire, Cameroon, Mozambique, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia are among the countries that have recently seen violent food riots or demonstrations. World Bank president Robert Zoellick noted last week that world food prices had risen 80{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} over the past three years, and warned that at least 33 countries face social unrest as a result.

The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to feed their children and themselves, but when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That’s especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, “We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it.”

When all that stands between hungry people and a warehouse full of rice and beans is a couple of padlocks and a riot policeman (who may be the neighbor of those who’re trying to get past him, and whose own family may be hungry too), the invisible barricade of private-property laws can be easily ignored. Doing whatever it takes to feed oneself and a hungry child, after all, is a primal human instinct. So, with prices of basic foods skyrocketing to the point that even the global aid agencies – whose function is to provide emergency food supplies to those in need – are unable, for financial reasons, to sustain their current commitments to the growing army of the hungry, brittle regimes around the world have plenty of reason for anxiety.

The hunger has historically been an instigator of revolutions and civil wars, it is not a sufficient condition for such violence. For a mass outpouring of rage spurred by hunger to translate into a credible challenge to an established order requires an organized political leadership ready to harness that anger against the state. It may not be all that surprising, then, that Haiti has been one of the major flashpoints of the new wave of hunger-generated political crises; the outpouring of rage there has been channeled into preexisting furrows of political discontent. And that’s why there may be greater reason for concern in Egypt, where the bread crisis comes on top of a mounting challenge to the regime’s legitimacy by a range of opposition groups.

The social theories of Karl Marx were long ago discarded as of little value, even to revolutionaries. But he did warn that capitalism had a tendency to generate its own crises. Indeed, the spread of capitalism, and its accelerated industrialization and wealth-creation, may have fomented the food-inflation crisis – by dramatically accelerating competition for scarce resources. The rapid industrialization of China and India over the past two decades – and the resultant growth of a new middle class fast approaching the size of America’s – has driven demand for oil toward the limits of global supply capacity. That has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s, which has also raised pressure on food prices by driving up agricultural costs and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. Moreover, those new middle class people are eating a lot better than their parents did – particularly more meat. Producing a single calorie of beef can, by some estimates, require eight or more calories of grain feed, and expanded meat consumption therefore has a multiplier effect on demand for grains. Throw in climate disasters such as the Australian drought and recent rice crop failures, and you have food inflation spiraling so fast that even the U.N. agency created to feed people in emergencies is warning that it lacks the funds to fulfill its mandate.

The reason officials such as Zoellick are sounding the alarm may be that the food crisis, and its attendant political risks, are not likely to be resolved or contained by the laissez-faire operation of capitalism’s market forces. Government intervention on behalf of the poor – so out of fashion during globalization’s roaring ’90s and the current decade – may be about to make a comeback. View this article on Time.com

April 14, 2008 – It’s easy to identify some of the U.S. veterans permanently injured in the Iraq war. The sign could be a missing limb, disfigured skin, scars that resemble zippers, wheelchairs they must use.

Less simple is identifying who carries mental disorders from the war, which has now stretched past five long years. Those maladies may crop up immediately or take years to manifest themselves. In any case, they can rarely be seen at a glance.

And with each additional tour on the battlefield, more and more soldiers descend into a state of madness. They confront thoughts and emotions and impulses they don’t understand and can feel powerless to fight. The risk of suicide will increase.

With America’s armed forces stretched thin from the long conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, military leaders are warning of the serious toll of repeated deployments.

The New York Times noted this past week that among combat troops sent to Iraq at least three times, more than a quarter “show signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress, according to an official Army survey of soldiers’ mental health.” Army personnel officers said that of the 513,000 active-duty soldiers who have served in Iraq since 2003, more than 53,000 have deployed at least three times.

The study indicates another, harder-to-calculate cost of the Iraq war. Besides the 4,000-plus deaths and billions of dollars expended, soldiers are returning broken in mind, as well as body. Marriages and families are failing under the strain.

These soldiers may need medical and psychiatric care for the rest of their lives. Americans must tend to those wounds.

The Times’ report occurred the same week that Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, addressed Congress about the status of the war. He recommended the United States discontinue pulling troops from the country in July, leaving about 140,000 U.S. forces there. The president endorsed the strategy.

The general also recommended reducing tours of duty from 15 months to 12, a positive nugget of news in a fairly gloomy address.

The general’s comments provide indirect support for a campaign by Virginia’s junior senator and for its return to the national stage.

Democrat Jim Webb waged a highly publicized fight last year to pass “dwell time” legislation. The bill would have granted individual soldiers at least as much time at home as they spend on deployment. Republicans in the Senate used procedural moves to prevent passage last year.

Congress should revisit the issue. The Army report indicates our troops need the break from the battlefield not just for their physical well-being, but for their sanity.

April 13, 2008 – The war in Iraq has been labeled many things: a mission, an occupation, a controversy, a black hole. But last week, it officially became something else.

An inheritance.

With President George W. Bush’s decision to leave troop levels where they are, he ensured that Iraq would be someone else’s problem in January. Unlike the Persian Gulf War, Kosovo or even World War I, Iraq soon will straddle two American presidencies.

That seems somehow unfair. This is Bush’s war. He started it in his first term and continued it in his second. There is no end in sight. And he seems uninterested in exploring one. Instead, he will hand it off, like a baton, while he goes home to Texas and a rich, quieter life.

Now, I am not one of those people who think we should pack our bags and flee Iraq tomorrow. Like someone stuck on a flight he didn’t want to take, I recognize the consequences of bailing out — regardless of how little I wanted to be there in the first place.

But if last week was Bush’s final door slam on an ending, then it warrants a look back on where this thing began.

One misstep after another
We went into Iraq to get the weapons of mass destruction. Except there were no weapons of mass destruction.

We went in to stop Al Qaeda’s terror operations in Iraq. Except there were no Al Qaeda terror operations in Iraq — until we got there.

We went in to take out Saddam Hussein, a tyrant in the region. Except we took him out, and now we fret over Iran, the new tyrant in the region.

We went in to protect and control a major oil supply. Except oil is now well over $100 a barrel and we are as enslaved to it as ever.

We went in to be greeted as liberators. But we are seen by most as occupiers.

We went in with the world’s sympathy. We stay there with the world’s scorn.

If you took this list of mistakes and changed objectives and squeezed it into a three-month time frame, Americans would be screaming over the failure. Screaming. Howling mad.

But the biggest danger of a long, prolonged war is how used to the morass you can get. How accustomed you grow to setbacks, negative reports, minimal progress or, worst of all, 140,000 of our sons and daughters stationed over there.

And now a new president will have to finish what Bush started.

Where would you begin?

The words of war
Remember, this president stood before a banner that read “mission accomplished.” Later he said, “Stay the course.” Last week he told reporters that Americans had been worried about “failure in Iraq” but today things were better. The fact that the president even acknowledged the word “failure” showed you how far across the table this plate had skidded.

Here is what hasn’t changed since the day we arrived: You can’t make people love democracy. You can’t make them implement it. You can’t get feuding sects that have battled each other for hundreds of years to suddenly forget it in a matter of months. And you can’t tip the whole of the Arab and Muslim world by clamping down on one tiny part of it. Bush, always tone-deaf to the region, said of Iraq, “If we fail there, Al Qaeda would claim a propaganda victory,” and “Iran would work to fill the vacuum.”

Which made the cynical listener wonder whether these problems wouldn’t go away with an Iraqi dictator who could frighten Iran and want nothing to do with Al Qaeda.

Which brings us back to where we started.

They say we can’t leave or the place will fall. But they don’t say it won’t fall no matter when we leave. They call it war, but it doesn’t play like war. There are no moving tanks, no land to capture — just hidden bombs in fruit stands and on highways, plucking a soldier here and a soldier there.

Last week, Bush said, “While this war is difficult, it is not endless.” Four years ago, an Al Qaeda newsletter told its readers: “This war has been going on since there first were the faithful and the unfaithful.”

As we enter the sixth year, which best describes it?