Veterans for Common Sense

April 3, 2008 – Houston, TX — It was an early January morning in 2008 when 42-year-old Lisa Smith*, a paramedic for a defense contractor in southern Iraq, woke up to find her entire room shaking. The shipping container that served as her living quarters was reverberating from nearby rocket attacks, and she was jolted awake to discover an awful reality. “Right then my whole life was turned upside down,” she says.

What follows is the story she told me in a lengthy, painful on-the-record interview, conducted in a lawyer’s office in Houston, Texas, while she was back from Iraq on a brief leave.

That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand–but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp’s military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. “Because then, all of a sudden, if you’ve done exactly what you’ve been instructed not to do–tell somebody–then you’re in danger,” Smith says.

As a brand-new arrival at Camp Harper, she had not yet forged many connections and was working in a red zone under regular rocket fire alongside the very men who had participated in the attack. (At one point, as the sole medical provider, she was even forced to treat one of her alleged assailants for a minor injury.) She waited two and a half weeks, until she returned to a much larger facility, to report the incident. “It’s very easy for bad things to happen down there and not have it be even slightly suspicious.”

Over the next month and a half, she says, she faced a series of hurdles. She would be discouraged from reporting the incident by several KBR employees, she says. She would be confused by the lack of any written medical protocol for sexual assault (as the only medical person on site, she treated herself with doxycycline). She would wander through a tangled maze of interviews with KBR and Army investigators about the incident without any clear explanation of her rights. She would be asked to sign several documents agreeing not to publicly discuss the incident, she says. She describes having her computer–which she saw as her lifeline, her main access to the outside world–confiscated by KBR staff as “evidence” within hours of receiving her first e-mail from a stateside lawyer she had reached out to for help.

And eventually she would find herself temporarily assigned to sleeping quarters between two Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) officials, who, she says, assured her that it was for her own safety, since her alleged assailants were at the same camp for questioning; they roamed freely. When she wanted to move about the camp to get meals etc., she was escorted.

Smith felt very alone. But she was not.

In fact, a growing number of women employees working for US defense contractors in the Middle East are coming forward with complaints of violence directed at them. As the Iraq War drags on, and as stories of US security contractors who seem to operate with impunity continue to emerge (like Blackwater and its deadly attack against Iraqi civilians on September 16, 2007), a rash of new sexual assault and sexual harassment complaints are being lodged against overseas contractors–by their own employees. Todd Kelly, a lawyer in Houston, says his firm alone has fifteen clients with sexual assault, sexual harassment and retaliation complaints (for reporting assault and/or harassment) against Halliburton and its former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root LLC (KBR), as well as Cayman Island-based Service Employees International Inc., a KBR shell company. (While Smith is technically an SEII employee, she is supervised by KBR staff as a KBR employee.)

Jamie Leigh Jones, whose story made the news in December–when she alleged that her 2005 gang rape by Halliburton/KBR co-workers in Iraq was being covered up by the company and the US government–also initially believed hers was an isolated incident. But today, Jones reports that she has formed a nonprofit to support the many other women with similar stories. Currently, she has forty US contractor employees in her database who have contacted her alleging a variety of sexual assault or sexual harassment incidents–and claim that Halliburton, KBR and SEII have either failed to help them or outright obstructed them.

Most of these complaints never see the light of day, thanks to the fine print in employee contracts that compels employees into binding arbitration instead of allowing their complaints to be tried in a public courtroom. Criminal prosecutions are practically nonexistent, as the US Justice Department has turned a blind eye to these cases.

Jones’s case was the subject of a House Judiciary hearing in December. Right now, Jones’s lawyers are awaiting a decision on whether she will get her day in court or be forced to submit to binding arbitration, which KBR is insisting on. Likewise, the company is pressuring Lisa Smith into pursuing her claims against the company through its Dispute Resolution Program based on the contract she signed before she went to Iraq. Critics argue that the company’s arbitration system allows it to minimize bad publicity and lets assailants off the hook.

Smith, who retained a lawyer only two weeks ago, is weighing her options.

KBR attorney Celia Ballí, responding to a letter from Smith’s lawyer, wrote in a letter dated March 17, “The Company takes Ms. Smith’s allegations very seriously and has and will continue to cooperate with the proper law enforcement authorities in the investigation of her allegations to the extent possible.” Ballí noted that the matter has been turned over to the CID and said that Smith has been “afforded with counseling and referral services through the Company’s Employee Assistance Program.” Ballí wrote in the letter that there are “inaccuracies” in the description Smith has put forward regarding her treatment after the alleged sexual assault. “Therefore, the Company requests that you fully investigate all the facts alleged by Ms. [Smith] as the Company intends to pursue all available remedies should false statements be publicized.”

Such “investigation” may prove difficult for her attorney. In the next sentence, the company says it is “not in a position to release any personnel or investigative records regarding Ms. [Smith’s] allegations at this time.” In response to a request for comment on this story, a company spokesperson wrote in an e-mail that Smith’s “allegations are currently under investigation by the appropriate law enforcement authorities. Therefore, KBR cannot comment on the specifics of the allegations or investigation.” The spokesperson added, “Any allegation of sexual harassment or assault is taken seriously and investigated thoroughly.” It remains unclear, however, what law enforcement investigation is examining the KBR employee’s role in the alleged assault, since Army CID is charged with investigating only cases that involve US military personnel.

For her part, Smith can’t quite call herself a victim yet. In the course of several conversations over several days, she never once says the word “victim” out loud. Let alone “rape.” Let alone “gang rape.”

She simply describes what happened, moving through the course of events as if this had happened to someone else, as if the recitation of details were an act of contrition she was compelled to perform.

Like many rape survivors, she feels guilty. In this case, Smith confesses that she broke company policy the evening of the incident by having a drink (alcohol is expressly forbidden). She had landed at Camp Harper only a week earlier, when she returned from a stateside R&R with her family. Since arriving in Iraq six months earlier, she had been at a larger facility, Camp Cedar. But her new posting at Camp Harper put her in a smaller outpost of sixty people: part US military, part KBR employees, part SEII workers. When some KBR colleagues invited her to join them for a drink after work, she did.

Smith says she had only one drink–and she asked someone to hold it after a few sips while she went outside for a smoke. Smith’s attorney, Daniel Ross, speculates that someone slipped the date-rape drug Rohypnol in her drink.

Smith’s memory of the evening is fuzzy, and the only thing she remembers clearly about the events surrounding her assault is the aforementioned moment of oral and anal penetration. She also remembers screaming.

The morning after the incident, Smith says, she was called into the office of her supervisor, who was Camp Harper’s KBR manager; he appeared to know–at least in part–what had happened. She would later learn from an Army investigator that her supervisor had been in the room where the drinking and alleged rape had taken place at least twice that evening. Smith, who appears to have blacked out, has no direct knowledge of his participation–or indeed of who else among the crowd initially gathered in the room may have been involved. “He was one of the people involved in saying, ‘Don’t say anything,'” Smith says of her conversation with the KBR camp manager the morning following the incident. “Then he said, ‘This will never happen again.'”

Smith offered to pack up and go home. But he sent her back to work. First, though, he responded to Smith’s plea to get the soldier she still had not been able to rouse out of her bed by contacting the military’s Special Forces liaison at Camp Harper. The liaison, whom Smith knew only by his nickname, DJ, was direct. “He told me not to speak of this to anyone and that he would take care of it,” Smith says.

Smith sat tight for a few days but then contacted a friend at Camp Cedar, where her permanent assignment was, and asked if the Employee Assistance person for KBR was back from her R&R yet. She was not. Smith was worried about even discussing the incident, since she knew that none of her conversations were confidential. “Camp Harper has only three phones,” she says. “One is in the camp manager’s office. One is in the Operations Office. And one is in a hallway.” She wavered. A few days later, when she knew that the Employee Assistance person for KBR would be back, Smith called her on the phone. The Employee Assistance woman was a friend of hers and, without getting too specific about the details of the incident, Smith sought her advice. “We had worked other situations together in the past, and I talked to her and she was like, ‘I don’t know if I’d report that. You know what happens when you report things.’ And I did. I’d seen it.”

Despite Smith’s silence, rumors were circulating at the camp. Two and a half weeks after the incident, she was questioned by someone from the KBR Employee Relations office, who appeared to be investigating a series of improprieties at the camp, Smith says. Fearful, she denied knowledge of any wrongdoing at the camp.

When Smith returned to her original posting at Camp Cedar, a larger facility with a human resources person and more friends she could approach for advice, she recontacted the man from Employee Relations who had been investigating “improprieties” and told him her story.

This set the wheels in motion for a series of interviews, most of which concluded with Smith being asked to sign a nondisclosure statement by representatives of the company, she says.

Eventually, shortly before she was slated to return to the United States for R&R, one of the investigators for KBR suggested that Smith get tested for STDs, hepatitis, HIV, etc. and took her to the nearby military Combat Support Hospital. “The doctor took me into her office, and we talked a long time before she did an exam,” Smith says. “We talked about the assault and the details and she was actually very, very kind and encouraged me to report it to the military. She tried convincing me that it wasn’t my fault [for having a drink]. She was just a really kind lady–and that was the first time I had given any of the whole details of all that had happened.”

In fact, military protocol compelled the doctor to report the incident; Smith was immediately contacted by the Army Criminal Investigation Division and questioned.

A few days later, shortly after contacting an attorney in the United States to advise her on her rights, the attorney sent her a draft letter he was sending to KBR on her behalf, notifying the company that he was representing her and briefly summarizing her accusations. KBR came to her office within hours, she alleges, and confiscated her computer as “evidence,” effectively limiting her access to the outside world. The CID did not respond to requests for comment.

Many victims of sexual assault find themselves without meaningful recourse when they work for US defense contractors that are powerful companies on foreign soil. “It’s one big battle over where to fight the battle,” said Smith’s attorney Ross, who is considering if and how and against whom to file charges on behalf of his client.

Take Jamie Leigh Jones’s case, for example.

Since Jones alleged she was gang raped in 2005, while KBR was still a Halliburton subsidiary, her case is covered by an extralegal Halliburton dispute-resolution program implemented under then-CEO Dick Cheney in 1997. The program has all the hallmarks of the Cheney White House’s penchant for secrecy. While Halliburton declared the program’s aim was to reduce costly and lengthy litigation (and limit possible damage awards in the process), in practice it meant that employees like Jones signed away their constitutional right to a jury trial–and agreed to have any disputes heard in a private arbitration hearing without hope of appeal. (While two lower courts declared the tactic illegal, in 2001, the Texas Supreme Court overturned those rulings.)

Accordingly, Jones faces two major roadblocks in the fight for justice. The first is the battle to have the perpetrators prosecuted in criminal court–which, because of Order 17, may be nearly impossible. According to the order, imposed by Paul Bremer, US defense contractors in Iraq cannot be prosecuted in the Iraqi criminal justice system. While they can technically be tried in US federal court, the Justice Department has shown no interest in prosecuting her case. In fact, for more than two years now, the DOJ has brought no criminal charges in the matter. Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican who has taken up Jones’s cause, reports that federal agencies refuse to discuss the status of the investigation; meanwhile, in December, the DOJ refused to send a representative to the related Congressional hearing on the matter.

Even more appalling, the Justice Department, which can and should prosecute most of these cases, has declined to do so. “There is no rational explanation for this,” says Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School who specializes in the law of armed conflict. Prosecutorial jurisdiction for crimes like the alleged rape of Jones is easily established under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act and the Patriot Act’s special maritime and territorial jurisdiction provisions. But somebody has to want to prosecute the cases.

Horton wonders what the 200 Justice Department employees and contractors stationed in Iraq do all day, noting that there has not been a single completed criminal conviction against a US contractor implicated in a violent crime anywhere in Iraq since the invasion.

“We have a complete process in place for solving military criminal violations when soldiers commit crimes, but for the 180,000 employees of private contractors over there, there is nothing,” says Horton. “It’s like Texas west of the Pecos in 1890 over there!” It’s just common sense that you’re going to have some violent crimes when you throw this many people together, he says. “Think about it. You have 180,000 people over there, you’re going to have a few crimes. I don’t know how anybody could fairly view this as a partisan issue. Crimes happen when you bring people together anywhere, and in a war setting, without adult supervision, crimes are going to increase. That is just a fact. And if you eliminate law enforcement, the crimes are going to get worse because people will quickly learn they can get away with it.”

Things don’t look a whole lot rosier when it comes to seeking relief in the civil courts.

For example, KBR is fighting tooth and nail to make sure Jones’s case stays in private arbitration, as per her contract. And given that in February, a federal district court ruled that Tracy Barker–another KBR employee who says she was sexually assaulted–couldn’t present her case in open court, prospects for the civil suit Jones brought last May look dim.

And that’s particularly troubling, according to Jones’s attorney Todd Kelly, because the clandestine nature of arbitration allows corporate malfeasance to go unchecked. Trials serve a purpose above and beyond pronouncing verdicts. “It’s like the Enron trial here in Houston,” he says. “Where every day in the Houston Chronicle there was a story exposing what egregious things go unchecked in the corporate culture. The United States got to peek into the corporate underwear drawer and saw it was not as pretty as it looked from the outside.” Kelly argues that Halliburton and KBR ought to be similarly exposed to public scrutiny via jury trials. These civil remedies arranged in a secretive manner have repercussions beyond the dollar figures. “It allows for future rapes to occur,” he says, arguing that these defense contractors have been able to quietly settle and compel victims to remain silent: the public remains oblivious to the crimes, no one is punished and a hostile and violent workplace continues unchecked.

In the future, the sole recourse for victims like Jones may be through Congress. Last October the House overwhelmingly passed legislation that requires the FBI to investigate allegations of wrongdoing and permits all US contractors to be tried under American jurisdiction. The Senate has yet to vote on the legislation.

For her part, Jones intends to persevere. “Part of the reason I’m going forward with this case is to change the system,” she says. “Who knows how many of us rape victims are out there?”

Smith, who is now back in the United States on two weeks R&R, is uncertain what the future holds for her. “I don’t think I’ve been able to make any decisions or plans or goals yet,” she says. First of all, there is the fact that she arrived home from Iraq to learn that her husband had been rushed to the hospital earlier that day after a partial stroke. She needs her job with SEII because she is the one who gets health insurance–vital not only for the two teenage daughters still living at home but for her husband, with his health problems. She worries, “Human Resources made me sign statements saying that I’m supposed to be back in Dubai on April 7 at 10 p.m., and if I’m not there I will not be reimbursed my $1,600 airfare or for my two weeks’ vacation.”

And indeed, the March 17 letter her attorney received from KBR attorney Celia Ballí says that Smith can be placed on medical leave “pending resolution of the investigations related to this matter” but warns, “However, per Company policy, [her] leave will be unpaid.” She is welcome to apply for workers’ comp, the lawyer states.

Can she return to her old job as a paramedic in Lena, Illinois?

“Yes, my license is in good standing, and I’ve never had a problem,” she says. “But it means a difference of about $6,000 a month in salary and no health insurance. My biggest reason for working for KBR in the first place was so I could get insurance for my husband and girls…” Smith’s sentence trails off. She begins a new one. Stops midway. She tries again to organize her thoughts. “I’ve been trying to figure out how I’m going to go back to work. How am I going to make myself do this?” she says, manifesting the confused indecisiveness and sense of a “foreshortened future” that are hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Has she seen a rape crisis counselor?

Not yet, Smith says. “Someone from KBR Employee Assistance gave me a flier to call someone in Houston,” she says, but it turned out to be for general financial or emotional problems during deployment. They referred her to a website. “I’m 9,000 miles away in Iraq and the website says, ‘Please put in your zip code and we’ll refer you to a rape crisis counselor in your zip code area.'”

Smith, who says she cannot sleep, appears exhausted. She tells her story without affect, little inflection and tamped emotion. She only tears up twice, most visibly when speaking about one of her sons, a 22-year-old US soldier who served in the Middle East recently. While she was in the process of debating whether–and how–to go about reporting her assault, she contacted him to see what his feelings were on the matter. “I didn’t want him upset with his mom,” she says, explaining that she was very loyal to the mission in Iraq and that he was similarly loyal to his service. “I was assaulted by somebody who was wearing the same uniform as him, and I just didn’t want him to think bad of me. My children are pretty much my world.” Smith’s eyes fill with tears, and she pauses to collect herself. “I didn’t want him to be upset because I was calling out somebody who was wearing his same uniform. They’re supposed to be proud of what they do. And I’m proud of my sons. And in my mind, I live that war every day. I can make all sorts of excuses under the sun for bad behavior.”

Her son advised her to make the formal complaint.

“He was like, ‘Of course you’re going to talk to CID, Mom. Of course you are.'” Smith smiles. “He doesn’t think people should be allowed to wear his uniform and act like that. He’s been in the war too and says it’s no excuse. They’re better trained than that. That’s what my son thought. And he’s not angry at his mom.”

April 3, 2008 – Efforts to improve the machinery that will count the 2008 presidential vote fell prey to a classic Washington compromise on Wednesday, when a House committee approved a bill giving money to both opponents and supporters of controversial paperless electronic voting systems.

The “Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008,” or H.R. 5036, now goes to the House floor, where its goal is helping cities and counties create a “verifiable” paper trail and audits for individual votes cast for president and Congress.

But just how that paper trail is achieved is broadly defined in the bill. Opponents of paperless electronic voting can seek federal funds to buy paper ballot-based systems, where voters mark ballots by hand and computer scanners tally the result. Several states, notably California, Ohio and Florida, already are making this transition. Meanwhile, proponents of all-electronic voting can keep their machines but seek funds to add printers that theoretically will allow voters to see if their choices have been properly recorded.

Under the bill, jurisdictions can also federal money to buy back-up paper ballots for precincts outfitted with computer touch-screen voting machines. They also can seek funds for audits, where they would have to meet a minimum standard of hand counting at least 2 percent of the ballots cast. The audit’s goal is to ensure the vote count is accurate.

“It will reduce the uncertainly, questions and disputes about the election in many places in our country,” said Rep. Rush Holt, D-NJ and the bill’s chief sponsor. “It is intended for counties to provide voter verified paper ballots and or audits. And although it does not establish a national standard [for a paper trail], it encourages counties and states to do the right thing. And that means offer voter verified paper ballots and audits.”

Election integrity activists, who documented many problems with paperless, electronic voting systems and played a big part in convincing top officials in several states to return to paper ballot-based voting, were generally disappointed in the bill.

“I do not support any version of the HOLT bill or any other proposed bill that solidifies the continued use of DREs with printer,” said Nevada’s Patricia Axelrod, who has an extensive technical background, in an e-mail Wednesday. DRE, or direct recording equipment, is industry slang for the paperless voting systems.

“I am well-seasoned in the use of such machines as I battling against the Sequoia AVC Edge with Verivote printer now in use throughout the entire State of Nevada since 2004,” Axelrod said. “I hasten to assure you that the attachment of a Mickey Mouse printer to a poorly designed, engineered and manufactured computer – one built to the same specifications as your average lap or desk top computer; only with less oversight – is not going to assure accurate and reliable elections.”

“I do not support any legislation that perpetuates the myth of verified voting,” said New Hampshire’s Nancy Tobi, Election Defense Alliance legislative director. “The problem is the current bill is fundamentally wrong in its originating premise. Holt and his supporters believe the key is the audit, but the key is the first count. And the audits they recommend are not even audits. They are spot checks. So you have a fake audit for a fake election.”

Holt acknowledged H.R. 5036 was a compromise bill. Activists following its progress in Washington said lobbyists for the disabled community, election officials and the voting machine industry pushed to preserve the use of DREs. The House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-MD, siding with those constituencies, apparently would not allow a bill on the House floor that said paper ballots were superior to paperless voting, they said. However, Holt said most election supervisors at the local level recognized that the paper-based optical-scan systems were more reliable and accurate than DREs with printers.

“We have found that electronic machines with attached printers don’t work very well,” he said. “I think more and more states are moving away from that. My guess is that states and counties that choose to opt in [to buy new voting machinery] would probably use the technologies that are gaining favor.”

Beyond the apparent compromise appeasing both sides of the paperless voting machine debate, the bill also has constitutionally significant ramifications because it accords paper printouts with the same legal standing as hand-marked paper ballots. This factor could become very significant for close elections and recounts.

“Now we will rely on printed receipts as reflective of voter intent, when it’s the case that they jam, they don’t print, they cause long lines, and they cannot be trusted,” said John Bonifaz, Counsel for Voter Action, a public interest law firm. “Voter Action endorsed the original version of this bill, HR 5036, and did that because we think it is critical that we shift from DRE machines to optically scanned paper ballot systems. This substitute bill effectively undermines the underlying principle of that original bill.”

Holt said he believed hand-marked paper ballots would be taken more seriously in recounts than print-outs from add-ons to DRE systems. However, he said it was not possible, given the current political landscape, to establish a national standard for a paper record – such as legislation requiring hand-marked paper ballots.

“I think that a hard copy vote that the voter can verify is always going to be regarded better than an ethereal electronic memory. That’s the lesson of the last few years,” he said. “Now, it is true that in different states, the studies and the experience of the election officials shows that not all methods of recording ballots are equally good. Some systems break down. Some systems don’t seem to work very well in practice with voters. But it has not been possible, this year, anyway, to establish a national standard.”

The bill would also require any jurisdiction taking federal funds for new machines audit 2 percent of their precincts to determine if the vote count was accurate. An earlier version of the bill required that mandatory audit consist of 3 percent of the precincts. Election officials lobbied to ease that audit requirement, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-CA said, when telling Administration Committee of the changes in the bill’s text.

The bill also will cover the cost of printing backup paper ballots, in case the DRE systems fail. However, like the rest of the bill, it is an “opt-in” proposal, meaning that any jurisdiction can choose to take advantage of the federal funding, as opposed to mandate.

Still, not all election integrity activists criticized the bill.

“I think it’s a good bill,” said Warren Stewart of VerifiedVotingFoundation.org. “Maybe it gets us some more audits. It pays for back-up paper ballots for jurisdictions with DREs. It will help states like Iowa change to paper ballots. I think it is unfortunate that it funds the purchase of flawed printers. But legislation is compromise.”

April 3, 2008 – Hate mail is useful stuff. First, it proves that somebody is paying attention; second, it reveals public prejudices. Recently, the House of Commons voted to extend the military mission in Afghanistan until 2011.

This, I said in a television interview, was a mistake. Sure enough, a hate message soon came rolling into my inbox. “You must be a card carrying NDPer,” it said in part, “so go back to your safe little classroom with the rest of your left-wing students.”

Of course, being left-wing does not necessarily mean that you are wrong, although in fact, far from being a Birkenstock-wearing, bearded, tree-hugging leftist, I’m a suit-wearing, clean-shaven former soldier, who is a research associate at the French military academy at Saint-Cyr, has lectured at West Point, Sandhurst and the Royal Military College of Canada, and writes for The American Conservative.

Why is it that people assume that if you are against the West’s current military adventures you must be on the left, and that if you favour military intervention and more defence spending you must be a conservative?

Favouring military activism and higher defence spending is not a conservative trait. Rather it is the position of neo-liberal idealists smitten by what the British philosopher John Gray recently called “right-wing utopianism.”

There was a time when conservative-minded folk regarded standing armies as dangerous forces, liable to be used to suppress liberty.

Quite how this tradition vanished is not clear, but a possible turning point was when British politician Joseph Chamberlain left the Liberal party and sided with the Conservatives in protest over Irish Home Rule in 1885.

Chamberlain was a radical liberal by the standards of his day, and he imported into conservatism a form of liberal imperialism that was profoundly un-conservative in nature. Over decades the original distrust of armed forces and military expeditions overseas disappeared.

The Cold War cemented conservatives’ love of the defence establishment. The right identified itself by its hostility to communism and as a result married itself to the military. In doing so, it lost its ideological bearings.

Conservatism is hard to define, but if there is a hard core at the centre of it, it consists of skepticism about the perfectibility of the human condition and the ability of man to reshape his environment using reason alone.

On this basis, there is nothing conservative about the belief that we can reform the world for the better using military power. The true conservative is willing to use violence to defend the things he prizes against direct attack, but he doubts that exporting western values by force is ever likely to work.

Indeed, the post-Cold War interventionist phenomenon has been driven largely by those on the political left. The proponents of ideas such as “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect” have been men such as former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy and ex-British Labour prime minister Tony Blair, who proudly proclaim themselves to be “progressives.”

By allying itself with this movement, Canada’s Conservative party has shown that it is truly a party of the left, not the right.

Similarly, the preference of the Conservative party for higher defence spending is anomalous. For years, the Tories have preached the virtues of free markets, lower taxation and reduced government spending. They express regular skepticism about governments’ ability to solve social problems by increasing spending.

Yet for some unfathomable reason, defence is exempted from this logic. Magically, more defence spending will produce better security.

Yet the defence sector is notoriously inefficient. The procurement project that comes in on time and even remotely close to its projected budget is so rare as to be almost unheard of.

The true conservative position is hostile to war and hostile to defence expenditure. During the recent battles for the Republican presidential nominations, only one candidate could be truly described as anti-war: Ron Paul, probably the most conservative Republican of all.

Today’s so-called Conservative party is a party devoted to rapid increases in government spending, which has entered into a thoroughly un-conservative alliance with liberal imperialists.

This manifests itself in a naïvely utopian military policy. Criticizing this is a mark of realism.

If being anti-war really does make one a “card carrying NDP-er,” as my hate mailer believes, that must mean that the NDP has become the only truly conservative party out there.

Paul Robinson is a public and international affairs professor at the University of Ottawa. He was previously a military intelligence officer in both the British army and the Canadian Forces.

April. 3, 2008 – A week before Army Gen. David Petraeus updates Congress on the war in Iraq, two new studies have found that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from especially high rates of post-combat psychological problems, exacerbated by an unusually high rate of repeat deployments.

Some of the most severely affected troops are in the National Guard, often detailed to front-line combat positions.

The studies were conducted by Veterans for America, a nonpartisan advocacy organization led by Bobby Muller, whose efforts to ban landmines earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. Politico received early copies of the reports, set to be released Friday.

Muller is particularly concerned because Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to tell Congress that overall troop reductions should be put on hold, pending a reassessment.

Muller’s group argues that changing overall deployment policies to give troops time to recover from combat situations would have a far greater impact than piecemeal mental health legislation.

“We are compounding the injuries for those who already served,” Muller said, calling multiple deployments without sufficient rest a “prescription for catastrophe.”

Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Laurie Tranter said the department would have no comment because officials had not seen the studies.

But in a hearing before a House defense panel last month, Secretary of the Army Pete Geren said the military is trying to deal with the mental health issues.

“It’s a challenge for us,” he said. “The military has always struggled with it in wartime.” And he acknowledged that the mental health problems follow the troops home and “affect their families.”

A report by the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health last year found that the military health system “lacks the fiscal resources and the fully trained personnel to fulfill its mission.”

The veterans group’s findings come as Congress is considering numerous legislative initiatives to help veterans deal with the stress of the war, with programs ranging from counseling to suicide prevention.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) praised the veterans group’s work and called for “humane deployment cycles.”

“These critical reports reveal how our overstretched and misused military is among the most devastating costs of this war,” Reid said in a statement to Politico. “Our nation’s bravest volunteers deserve our gratitude for their service and sacrifice; they do not deserve to be sent on extended and repeated tours in an endless civil war.”

The studies found that National Guard troops do not receive the same level of care as regular Army soldiers when they return home. They often do not have the same on-base medical clinics as the regular Army and are often quickly thrust back into civilian life with little support.

Psychological effects were found in 49 percent of National Guard troops after returning from the battlefield – 29 percentage points higher than for regular soldiers.

The National Guard troops are treated like “bastard stepchildren,” Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said in a recent meeting with Maryland veterans.

In total, more than 1.6 million troops have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than a third have served at least two tours of duty, and some, as many as four.

Post-combat psychological problems for troops increased by 125 percent between their first and third or fourth deployments, according to one of the studies, which cited internal military statistics.

The military acknowledges the problems of lengthy deployments but says it needs to maintain troop levels.

In testimony last month before the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said the Army’s research showed that combat tours of “15 months is too long; 12 months home is too short.” He said that the Army’s goal this summer is to reduce deployment time to one year but that there were no immediate plans to increase leave times.

Over the past three years, the Army has begun a program to send mental health counselors to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army is also providing counseling to military families and is seeking more recruits in order to ease the burden on existing troops.

“We are doing everything we can to mitigate [the stress on soldiers] in a time of crisis,” Army public affairs spokesman Paul Boyce said Wednesday.

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) has sponsored legislation to give military personnel mandated periods of rest between combat deployments, but his bill was defeated twice last year after close votes and opposition from the Pentagon. Still, Senate Democratic leaders are considering reintroducing it.

The Veterans for America findings also appear to correlate with a recently published study in The New England Journal of Medicine, which found that 42 percent of reservists returning from Iraq required mental health services, more than double that of active-duty soldiers.

The report, which mixes military studies with firsthand reporting, found that National Guard troops received less care and had little institutional support when compared with regular soldiers. National Guard veterans who requested compensation by the Department of Veterans Affairs were twice as likely as regular soldiers to be rejected, the study found.

The wait time for mental health care can be long. For instance, Veterans for America reported some soldiers had to wait two months for an appointment.

Other veterans groups say soldiers who have seen combat may not be getting the mental health care they need, said Patrick Campbell, the legislative director for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group that was not involved with the studies.

His group is advocating for mandatory in-person screenings by mental health professionals for all veterans returning from combat, not just the over-the-phone interviews that are currently in place. “They are just being released from a war zone back into their normal lives. It is hard to process,” said Campbell, a decorated Iraq veteran who uses VA facilities himself.

The Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee has sought information from the VA on waiting times for mental and other types of health treatment, but the data the agency provided have been inconsistent, according to a committee aide. “It has been frustrating,” he said.

“Care for service members returning from combat must be considered a cost of war.”

The committee recently passed a bill that would provide for treatment of substance abuse at VA facilities and study its relationship with post-traumatic stress syndrome. The VA has cut back on substance abuse treatment in recent years.

Another bill, sponsored by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), would study the increase in suicide across the armed forces. Attempts have increased sixfold since 2002, according to the senators.

And Mikulski is among a group of legislators seeking $45 million for a state-run initiative, known as the “Yellow Ribbon” program, to help National Guard troops who have been in combat make the transition back to civilian life. The program was enacted early this year but so far has received no funding.

Rick Breitenfeldt, spokesman for the National Guard, said the Yellow Ribbon program is an important method of helping returning troops. “The word is out that National Guard troops and airmen need this program,” he said.

But while Congress debates specifics, the overall system of care for returning soldiers remains badly overburdened and will only get worse unless changes are made soon, veterans advocates say.

“We know what works,” Campbell said. “We’re just not doing it.”

April 2, 2008 – New York — The military is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance to obtain private records of Americans’ Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, the ACLU said Tuesday.

The American Civil Liberties Union based its conclusion on a review of more than 1,000 documents turned over by the Defense Department after it sued the agency last year for documents related to national security letters, or NSLs, investigative tools used to compel businesses to turn over customer information without a judge’s order or grand jury subpoena.

“Newly unredacted documents released today reveal that the Department of Defense is using the FBI to circumvent legal limits on its own NSL power,” said the ACLU, whose lawsuit was filed in Manhattan federal court.

ACLU lawyer Melissa Goodman said the documents the civil rights group studied “make us incredibly concerned.” She said it would be understandable if the military relied on help from the FBI on joint investigations, but not when the FBI was not involved in a probe.

The FBI referred requests for comment Tuesday to the Defense Department. A department spokesman, Air Force Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, said in an e-mail that the department had made “focused, limited and judicious” use of the letters since Congress extended the capability to investigatory entities other than the FBI in 2001.

He said the department had acted legally in using a necessary investigatory tool and noted that “unusual financial activity of people affiliated with DoD can be an indication of potential espionage or terrorist-related activity.”

Ryder said the information in the ACLU claims came in part from an internal review of DoD’s use of the letters.

“We have since developed training and provided it to the services for their use,” he said.

He said that there was no law requiring it to track use of the letters but that the department had decided it was in its best interest to do so.

Goodman, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said the military is allowed to demand financial and credit records in certain instances but does not have the authority to get e-mail and phone records or lists of Web sites that people have visited. That is the kind of information that the FBI can get by using a national security letter, she said.

“That’s why we’re particularly concerned. The DoD may be accessing the kinds of records they are not allowed to get,” she said.

Goodman also noted that legal limits are placed on the Defense Department “because the military doing domestic investigations tends to make us leery.”

In other allegations, the ACLU said:

• The Navy’s use of the letters to demand domestic records has increased significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks.

• The military wrongly claimed its use of the letters was limited to investigating only Defense Department employees.

• The Defense Department has not kept track of how many national security letters the military issues or what information it obtained through the orders.

• The military provided misleading information to Congress and silenced letter recipients from speaking out about the records requests.

Goodman said Congress should provide stricter guidelines and meaningful oversight of how the military and FBI make national security letter requests.

“Any government agency’s ability to demand these kinds of personal, financial or Internet records in the United States is an intrusive surveillance power,” she said.

April 1, 2008 – The scourge of suicides among American troops in Iraq is a serious and seriously underreported problem. One of the few high-profile cases involves a much-admired Army colonel named Ted Westhusing — who, in his 2005 suicide note, pointed a finger at a then little-known U.S. general named David Petraeus. Westhusing’s widow, asked by a friend what killed this West Point scholar, had replied simply: “Iraq.”

Now there is a disturbing update on this case.

Before putting a bullet through his head, Westhusing had been deeply disturbed by abuses carried out by American contractors in Iraq, including allegations that they had witnessed or even participated in the murder of Iraqis. His suicide note included claims that his two commanders tolerated a mission based on “corruption, human right abuses and liars.” One of those commanders: the future leader of the “surge” campaign in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus.

Westhusing, 44, had been found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport in June 2005, a single gunshot wound to the head. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq. The Army concluded that he committed suicide with his service pistol. Westhusing was an unusual case: “one of the Army’s leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor,” as Christian Miller explained in a major Los Angeles Times piece.

“In e-mails to his family,” Miller wrote, “Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.” His death followed quickly. “He was sick of money-grubbing contractors,” one official recounted. Westhusing said that “he had not come over to Iraq for this.” After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing’s death a suicide.

Last March, The Texas Observer published a cover story by contributor Robert Bryce titled “I Am Sullied No More.” It is featured in a chapter in my new book on Iraq and the media.

Bryce covered much of the same ground paved by Miller but added details on the Petraeus angle. Now, in the past few weeks, Bryce has added more in an update — which explores whether Westhusing was murdered.

“When he was in Iraq, Westhusing worked for one of the most famous generals in the U.S. military, David Petraeus,” Bryce observed last year. “As the head of counterterrorism and special operations under Petraeus, Westhusing oversaw the single most important task facing the U.S. military in Iraq then and now: training the Iraqi security forces.”

Bryce referred to a “two-inch stack of documents, obtained over the past 15 months under the Freedom of Information Act, that provides many details of Westhusing’s suicide….The documents echo the story told by Westhusing’s friends. ‘Something he saw [in Iraq] drove him to this,’ one Army officer who was close to Westhusing said in an interview. ‘The sum of what he saw going on drove him’ to take his own life. ‘It’s because he believed in duty, honor, country that he’s dead.'”

In Iraq, Westhusing worked under two generals: Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, and Petraeus, then a lieutenant general. But Bryce continued: “By late May, Westhusing was becoming despondent over what he was seeing.” When his body was found on June, a note was found nearby addressed to Petraeus and Fil. According to Bryce it read:

“Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name]–You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff–no msn [mission] support and you don’t care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied–no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. I trust no Iraqi. I cannot live this way. All my love to my family, my wife and my precious children. I love you and trust you only. Death before being dishonored any more.

“Trust is essential–I don’t know who trust anymore. Why serve when you cannot accomplish the mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness? No more. Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and I know it.”

Twelve days after Westhusing’s body was found, Army investigators talked with his widow, who told them: “I think Ted gave his life to let everyone know what was going on. They need to get to the bottom of it, and hope all these bad things get cleaned up.”

Bryce concluded: “In September 2005, the Army’s inspector general concluded an investigation into allegations raised in the anonymous letter to Westhusing shortly before his death. It found no basis for any of the issues raised. Although the report is redacted in places, it is clear that the investigation was aimed at determining whether Fil or Petraeus had ignored the corruption and human rights abuses allegedly occurring within the training program for Iraqi security personnel.” Since then, the corruption and failed training angles have drawn wide attention although the Petraeus’s role, good or bad, has not.

The writer returned to the case this past February with another Texas Observer article. I’ve run out of space here so I will merely quote its opening and link to it:

Since last March, when I wrote a story about the apparent suicide of Col. Ted Westhusing in Iraq, I had believed there was nothing else to write about his tragic death.
But in December, I talked to a source in the Department of Defense who met Westhusing in Iraq about three months before his death. The source, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, was investigating claims of wrongdoing against military contractors working in Iraq. After a short introduction, I asked him what he thought had happened to Westhusing. ‘I think he was killed. I honestly do. I think he was murdered,’ the source told me. ‘Maybe DOD didn’t have enough evidence to call it murder, so they called it suicide.'”

Bryce doesn’t yet back the “murder” claim but notes that Rep. Henry Waxman is now looking into the Westhusing case.

April 1, 2008 – Hastings on Hudson, NY — Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of Multi-National Force Iraq must be held accountable for systematic violations of international law by US forces in Iraq when he appears before Congress next week, argues a new war crimes report published today by ConsumersforPeace.org on its website http://www.consumersforpeace.org.

The report, which was prepared with the review of noted international human rights attorney Karen Parker, recommends the following areas of questioning with respect to Petraeus’ strategy and tactics in Iraq during the so-called “surge,” resulting in Iraqi suffering that is generally unreported:

* Increased use of attack helicopters and aerial bombing against individuals and buildings under circumstances where it is virtually impossible to ensure against civilian casualties; and the use of excessively powerful munitions that also cause civilian casualties.

* Massive detention of Iraqi civilians without charge, often under atrocious living conditions, a practice that has increased in 2007-2008 both by United States and Iraqi forces.

* Continuing, intentional avoidance by the United States of its responsibilities under international law to provide for the basic human needs of the Iraqi people.

“These strategies are all violations of long-established rules of the laws and customs of war, also referred to as humanitarian law,” the report says in its preface. “What we are witnessing is no less than the United States forces committing war crimes on a daily, wholesale basis for no discernible reason except perhaps to maintain a perception of US dominance in the Middle East.”

Parker is President of the San-Francisco-based Association of Humanitarian Lawyers (www.humanlaw.org) and Chief Delegate to the United Nations for the Los-Angeles-based International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law Project (IED/AHL), an accredited non-governmental organization on the U.N. Secretary-General’s list.

The report, prepared by Washington D.C. based researcher Bill Rau using government and non-governmental documents, press, and video reports, is the third in a series on U.S. war crimes in Iraq published by Consumers for Peace since the fall of 2006.

“We are reporting on US conduct in Iraq simply because international law requires us as individuals, not just our governments, to act to stop war crimes,” said Nick Mottern, director of Consumers for Peace, which is working for total withdrawal of US forces from Iraq through a boycott of ExxonMobil, Shell and BP oil companies.

April 2, 2008 – In Helmand province the British are supposed to be in charge. In Kandahar it is the Canadians, while in Uruzgan they have the Dutch. The Germans are in the north, the Italians in the west, the Americans all over the place but concentrated in the east. Welcome to the Nato mission in Afghanistan: a patchwork of fiefdoms nominally under one banner but which at times seem to be fighting different wars.

As Nato leaders assemble in Bucharest, at the back of many minds will be the thought that this was meant to be a peacekeeping mission, not a war. Doubts are mounting as to who has the will to stay the course in a conflict that could last decades. There are concerns, too, over the key policy of “Afghanisation” – handing over fighting, security and governance to the Afghans, seen as an exit strategy that has not always reaped encouraging results.

In the forward operating bases of Helmand, the British insist that progress is being made. Most soldiers believe that they will experience less intense fighting, expecting the war to switch from direct confrontation to a classic insurgency, giving them space to consolidate and concentrate on winning hearts and minds.

Bases in central Helmand that were under daily attack last summer are now relatively quiet. More development work is under way in villages, the British say, and they report that hundreds of enemy commanders want to give up the fight – the euphemism is “reconcile”.

But if reconciliation with the Taleban is a British policy, it is not an American one — “they just want to kill them” is a common refrain — and there are no signs of a more nuanced approach. A British official in Kabul said: “There is a lot of frustration that everything is on hold until the US election in November. Details of policy won’t be decided until that is out of the way.”

Other frictions have emerged. The smaller Nato partners – even Britain and Canada, which are fighting costly battles – are military minnows compared with the US contingent. At the other end of the scale is frustration at the Germans, whose 3,000-strong force is the third-largest International Security Assistance Force contingent but which is stuck in its relatively safe bases in the north. One disgruntled squaddie said: “The squareheads have got one of the finest armies in Nato but they hardly leave their bases.”

Internal squabbles are generally kept private but they surface often enough to demoralise the Afghans, who fear that the foreign soldiers will grow tired and leave. There is also distrust of the American liking for recruiting local militias, which reminds Afghans of the chaos of the 1990s.

Even if co-ordinating the Nato forces can be achieved, Afghanisation is proving a tougher nut to crack.

Building up the Afghan National Army has been one of the few clear-cut successes of the mission but it is still small – 61,000-strong at the moment, with 3,000 new recruits turned out each month. It remains dependent on Nato support, as well as being prone to desertion. It is years away from being able to take on the Taleban. The underpaid, ill-trained Afghan National Police are little better than bandits in many areas.

“Pulling out would have dire consequences for the alliance and it would be a disaster for Afghanistan,” Brigadier Andrew Mackay, the outgoing British commander in Helmand, told The Times. “It would lead to the return of the Taleban.”

Last month, when a Gurkha patrol reached a remote village in the north of Kandahar province, Zain Ullah, a farmer, gave them a stark picture of what law and order meant to him. He said: “We have to feed the Taleban because they have guns. Then the police come and harass us for feeding the Taleban. When we go to Kandahar robbers steal our money and motorbikes, some of them dressed like police or Taleban. We don’t know who is stealing from us — police, robbers or Taleban. What we need here is security.”

March 31, 2008 – The stories are shocking in their simplicity and brutality: A female military recruit is pinned down at knifepoint and raped repeatedly in her own barracks. Her attackers hid their faces but she identified them by their uniforms; they were her fellow soldiers. During a routine gynecological exam, a female soldier is attacked and raped by her military physician. Yet another young soldier, still adapting to life in a war zone, is raped by her commanding officer. Afraid for her standing in her unit, she feels she has nowhere to turn.

These are true stories, and, sadly, not isolated incidents. Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.

The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} report being raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and the downward spirals many of their lives have since taken.

Numbers reported by the Department of Defense show a sickening pattern. In 2006, 2,947 sexual assaults were reported — 73{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} more than in 2004. The DOD’s newest report, released this month, indicates that 2,688 reports were made in 2007, but a recent shift from calendar-year reporting to fiscal-year reporting makes comparisons with data from previous years much more difficult.

The Defense Department has made some efforts to manage this epidemic — most notably in 2005, after the media received anonymous e-mail messages about sexual assaults at the Air Force Academy. The media scrutiny and congressional attention that followed led the DOD to create the Sexual Assault and Response Office. Since its inception, the office has initiated education and training programs, which have improved the reporting of cases of rapes and other sexual assaults. But more must be done to prevent attacks and to increase accountability.

At the heart of this crisis is an apparent inability or unwillingness to prosecute rapists in the ranks. According to DOD statistics, only 181 out of 2,212 subjects investigated for sexual assault in 2007, including 1,259 reports of rape, were referred to courts-martial, the equivalent of a criminal prosecution in the military. Another 218 were handled via nonpunitive administrative action or discharge, and 201 subjects were disciplined through “nonjudicial punishment,” which means they may have been confined to quarters, assigned extra duty or received a similar slap on the wrist. In nearly half of the cases investigated, the chain of command took no action; more than a third of the time, that was because of “insufficient evidence.”

This is in stark contrast to the civilian trend of prosecuting sexual assault. In California, for example, 44{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of reported rapes result in arrests, and 64{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of those who are arrested are prosecuted, according to the California Department of Justice.

The DOD must close this gap and remove the obstacles to effective investigation and prosecution. Failure to do so produces two harmful consequences: It deters victims from reporting, and it fails to deter offenders. The absence of rigorous prosecution perpetuates a culture tolerant of sexual assault — an attitude that says “boys will be boys.”

I have raised the issue with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Although I believe that he is concerned, thus far, the military’s response has been underwhelming — and the apparent lack of urgency is inexcusable.

Congress is not doing much better. Although these sexual assault statistics are readily available, our oversight has failed to come to grips with the magnitude of the crisis. The abhorrent and graphic nature of the reports may make people uncomfortable, but that is no excuse for inaction. Congressional hearings are urgently needed to highlight the failure of existing policies. Most of our servicewomen and men are patriotic, courageous and hardworking people who embody the best of what it means to be an American. The failure to address military sexual assault runs counter to those ideals and shames us all.

Jane Harman (D-Venice) chairs the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence.

April 1, 2008 – On Tuesday, U.S. Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Daniel K. Akaka (D-HI) and committee member Senator Bernard Sanders (I-VT) met with Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake. They discussed funding for the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and a proposal to modify VA’s income threshold to make more middle-income veterans eligible for VA healthcare. Akaka, Sanders and other committee members have pressed Secretary Peake on both issues since his recent confirmation as VA Secretary.

“As we move through the final year of this Administration and this Congress, we must work together to find common ground for the sake of our veterans. I appreciate the Secretary’s willingness to work with us on these issues,” said Akaka. Secretary Peake agreed during the meeting to look more closely into the income threshold for veterans, as well as strengthening support for the National Center for PTSD.

Senators Akaka and Sanders wrote Secretary Peake on January 24, 2008, urging him to dedicate more funds to the National Center for PTSD. The Center has taken on a larger mission and workload in recent years, due in part to the increased number of veterans suffering from PSTD. Already, more than 100,000 servicemembers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have reported mental health disorders, according to the Congressional Research Service. Meanwhile, the PTSD Center’s budget, adjusted for inflation, has been flat for the past half-decade, and overall staff levels have been reduced since 1999.

The Senators and Secretary also discussed health care eligibility for middle income veterans, known as “Priority 8” by the VA. In response to a question from Chairman Akaka at a hearing on February 13, 2008, Secretary Peake stated that he was willing to work with the Committee to consider modifying the policy, adopted in 2003, that prohibits middle-income veterans from enrolling in the VA health care system. On March 14, 2008, Majority Members of both the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committees wrote Secretary Peake to follow up. Today in some geographical regions, veterans making as little as $28,430 are considered too wealthy to enroll for VA heath care.