Veterans for Common Sense

March 17, 2008 – David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico, recalled receiving an e-mail in late summer 2002 from the Department of Justice suggesting “in no uncertain terms” that U.S. attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials “to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases,” Iglesias writes in his forthcoming In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration.

I obtained an early copy of the book last week. It is scheduled to be published in June.
 
Iglesias was one of nine U.S. attorneys who were fired in December 2006 for reasons that appeared based on partisan politics. His name was added to a list of U.S. attorneys selected for dismissal on Election Day in November 2006.
 
Earlier this month, Congress filed a civil lawsuit against Joshua Bolten, President Bush’s chief of staff, and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, in an attempt to compel them to testify before Congress about the White House’s role in the U.S. attorney firings and to turn over documents to a congressional committee.

Miers and Bolten were subpoenaed by Congress to testify last year, but Bush refused to allow their testimonies citing executive privilege. Last month, Congress held Miers and Bolten in contempt for failing to respond to the subpoenas.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey said he would not convene a federal grand jury to consider the contempt charges. Congress sued the White House officials shortly thereafter.

In a chapter titled “Caged,” Iglesias recounts how the Department of Justice aggressively pushed him and other U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, an issue the former U.S. attorney says the DOJ became unusually obsessed with. 

“The e-mail imperatives came again in 2004 and 2006, by which time I had learned that far from being standard operating procedure for the Justice Department, the emphasis on voter irregularities was unique to the Bush administration,” Iglesias says.

‘Caging’

Iglesias says that Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes.

“But there was a more sinister reading to such urgent calls for reform, not to mention the Justice Department’s strident insistence on harvesting a bumper crop of voter fraud prosecutions. That implication is summed up in a single word: ‘caging.’
 
“Not only did the [Bush] administration stoop to such seamy expedients to press its agenda in 2004,” Iglesias wrote. “It had the full might and authority of the federal government and its prosecutorial powers to accomplish its ends.”
 
Vote caging is an illegal tactic to suppress minorities from voting by having their names purged from voter rolls when they fail to respond to registered mail sent to their homes.

The Republican National Committee signed a consent decree in 1986 stating it would not engage in the practice after it was caught suppressing votes in 1981 and 1986.

Last July, in a letter to then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, and Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, said, “caging is a reprehensible voter suppression tactic, and it may also violate federal law and the terms of applicable judicially enforceable consent decrees.”

Senators Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, and Whitehouse have called for a Justice Department probe into the practice, which has not been initiated thus far.

Documents released last year showed that Republican operatives engaged in a widespread effort to “cage” votes during the 2004 presidential election in battleground states, such as New Mexico, Nevada, Florida, and Ohio, where George W. Bush was trailing his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry.

The efforts to purge voters from registration rolls were spearheaded by Tim Griffin, a former Republican National Committee opposition researcher and close friend of Karl Rove.

Griffin resigned from his post as interim U.S. attorney for Little Rock, Arkansas, when details of his involvement in vote caging were reported. Griffin’s predecessor at the U.S. attorney’s office, Bud Cummins, was one of the nine U.S. attorneys forced to resign.

Coddy Johnson was another Republican operative involved in the effort to cage votes during the 2004 presidential election. Johnson worked as the national field director of Bush’s 2004 campaign and spent time in the White House as an associate director of political affairs, working under Karl Rove. Johnson’s father was Bush’s college roommate at Yale.

Mythical Fraud

Last week, Iglesias testified before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration probing the “myth” of in-person voter fraud and whether it leads to the disenfranchisement of individual voters.
 
During his testimony, Iglesias told the panel that he established an election fraud task force in September 2004 and spent more than two months probing claims of widespread voter fraud in his state.
 
“After examining the evidence, and in conjunction with the Justice Department Election Crimes Unit and the FBI, I could not find any cases I could prosecute beyond a reasonable doubt,” Iglesias told the Senate committee last week. “Accordingly, I did not authorize any voter fraud related prosecutions.”
 
No concrete evidence of systemic voter fraud in the United States has surfaced. Many election integrity experts believe claims of voter fraud are a ploy by Republicans to suppress minorities and poor people from voting.
 
Historically, those groups tend to vote for Democratic candidates. Raising red flags about the integrity of the ballots, experts believe, is an attempt by GOP operatives to swing elections to their candidates as well as an attempt to use the fear of criminal prosecution to discourage individuals from voting in future races.
 
In his book, specifically in the “Caging” chapter, Iglesias says that right when the Bush-Kerry race began to heat up, some Republicans in Bernalillo County, led by local Bush/Cheney campaign chairman Sheriff Darren White, showed up at the county clerk’s office demanding to know if there were any questionable voter registrations on file.

White is campaigning for the congressional seat that will be vacated by Heather Wilson, the Republican congresswoman who is the subject of a House ethics probe regarding phone calls that she may have improperly made to Iglesias inquiring about the timing of indictments prior to the 2006 mid-term elections.
 
In the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election, Bernalillo County had been the target of a massive grassroots effort by the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to register voters.

The effort apparently paid off as registration rolls in the county increased by about 65,000 newly registered voters.

Challenges

Sheriff White, Iglesias wrote, intended to challenge the integrity of some of the names on the voter registration rolls. Mary Herrera, the Bernalillo County clerk, told White that there were about 3,000 or so forms that were either incomplete or incorrectly filled out.

White seized upon the registration forms as evidence that ACORN submitted fraudulent registration forms and held a press conference along with other Republican officials in the county to call attention to the matter.
 
In testimony before the Senate committee last week, Iglesias said when he announced the formation of his election fraud task force in September 2004 he fully expected to uncover instances of voter fraud based on numerous stories that appeared in New Mexico media that said minors received voter registration forms and that “a large number” of voter registration forms turned up during the course of a drug raid.
 
“Due to the high volume of suspected criminal activity, I believed there to be a strong likelihood of uncovering prosecutable cases,” Iglesias said. “I also reviewed the hard copy file from the last voter fraud case my office had prosecuted which dated back to 1992.

“My intention was to file prosecutions in order to send a message that voter fraud or election fraud would not be tolerated in the District of New Mexico.”
 
Meanwhile, New Mexico Republicans had filed a civil suit in an attempt to force changes to the state’s voter identification statutes.
 
“The case was duly dismissed,” Iglesias wrote his book, “which only served to stoke the fires of voter fraud frenzy.”
 
Iglesias’s by-the-book work ethic only appeared to incite Republicans in New Mexico who expected the federal prosecutor to put loyalty to the Republican Party above the law.
 
“My announcement of a dedicated task force notwithstanding, the firebrands were still not placated,” Iglesias, wrote. “I got an angry e-mail from Mickey Barnett, an attorney, who, like me, had worked on the Bush-Cheney campaign and who berated me for ‘appointing a task force to investigate voter fraud instead of bringing charges against suspects.’”
 
In his testimony before the Senate committee, Iglesias said the task force received about 108 complaints of alleged voter fraud through a hotline over the course of about eight weeks.
 
“Most of the complaints made to the hotline were clearly not prosecutable – citizens would complain of their yard signs being removed from their property and de minimis matters like that,” Iglesias testified before the Senate committee.

“Only one case of the over 100 referrals had potential. ACORN had employed a woman to register voters. The evidence showed she registered voters who did not have the legal right to vote. The law, 42 USC 1973 had the maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.

“After personally reviewing the FBI investigative report and speaking to the agent, the prosecutor I had assigned, Mr. [Rumaldo] Armijo, and conferring with [a Justice Department official] I was of the opinion that the case was not provable. I, therefore, did not authorize a prosecution.

“I have subsequently learned that the State of New Mexico did not file any criminal cases as a result of the” election fraud task force.

March 17, 2008 – The first time Jonathan Lujan signed up for the Marine Corps, he was 23 and married, and the young couple wanted a way to see the world. The second time, on Nov. 1, 2001, it was because his sense of duty made him want to be part of the group seeking retribution for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on American soil. His patriotism was shaped by his grandfathers, one who served in the 10th Mountain Division and received a Silver Star in Italy, the other who served in New Guinea, aiding Navajo codetalkers. His dad served 32 years on the Denver police force. Two uncles served in Vietnam. Injured on the fourth day of the war, when he was thrown from the back of a convoy truck under fire, he returned to Colorado partly paralyzed. Now. the Littleton father of a 16-year-old daughter is operations manager at Mathias Lock & Key in Denver.

I spent my first year at Camp Fuji in Japan. It was a beautiful duty station, and I got to do a lot of neat things, like teach conversational English to Japanese soldiers. In December, I spent a couple of weeks with my family and then checked into Camp Pendleton on Jan. 6, 2003. Three weeks later, I was standing in the sand in Kuwait.

The unit I was attached to at Camp Pendleton was an engineer battalion, sent over on a bulk fuel and water mission. The fuelers were there to make sure the coalition forces had fuel. Mine was tasked with water purification and electricity generation.

Initially, we were attached to a reserve unit out of Battle Creek, Mich., so we had active and reserves on the same team.

The first week, we were in charge of convoy security for logistical convoys moving north into Iraq. On the first day of the war, March 19, 2003, we were staging a breach to go to the line of departure. We wanted to do that to bypass combat and get our logistical trains in front of the combat teams.

It was pretty hairy. We went three or four days without sleep, constantly going back and forth.

On March 23, we were in An Nasiriyah. Our convoy was taking fire. I was sitting in the back of our vehicle, leaning out the see which direction to direct our fire. We took some fire from the front, and our vehicle swerved off the road. I went airborne, and when I came back down, I thought I got shot. But I didn’t find an entry or exit wound, so I rogered up and went on with the mission.

When I went to get out of the back of the truck, I fell. My legs weren’t working right. About 15 or 20 minutes later, I was able to stand up, carry on.

When I was injured, I told the corpsman I was good to go. It was more out of stubbornness. I promised 33 moms, dads, boyfriends and girlfriends that I would bring their loved ones home. I was adamant about the tasks that fulfilled that promise.

After three weeks, Lujan couldn’t stand up straight. He was ordered to an Army field hospital for evaluation.

I was medevaced to a hospital in Kuwait, where I was supposed to stay for four or five days, then go to Germany and then to the states for surgery. I asked my physical therapist, an Army captain, what it would take to get me out. He said, “If you can bend over and touch your toes right now, I’ll sign your discharge papers.” So I bent over and touched my toes. He said, “You must be one tough SOB.” I said, “Why is that, sir?” He said, “You must be in a lot of pain.” I said, “I am in a lot of pain, sir.”

I hitched a ride back up on a helicopter and made sure my guys got back.

I was picked to sail (home) on a six-ship armada. It was a month and a half of sea time. When we pulled into Australia, we were greeted like heroes. At Pearl Harbor, we got the same reception.

My family has a long tradition of serving the country, so mooring near the USS Arizona was really special for me.

Back in California, doctors assessed his injury and treated bulging disks with steroid injections until he could no longer tolerate the pain. On July 18, 2005, he underwent surgery to fuse his lower back. When he woke up, he was paralyzed from the waist down. He was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital, where he mastered a wheelchair, a walker and a cane and, eventually, learned to walk again using braces to support his lower legs.

We all know the sacrifices all of us make. We leave our friends, our family and our jobs, not knowing if we’re gonna come back. Our sacrifice isn’t a light sacrifice. We just do it because that’s how we’re built; certain people are made up to be in the military.

When I went back in, I knew I was gonna do 20. I had goals for myself. I wanted to be a drill instructor and I wanted to reach the rank of sergeant major. The injury had a pretty big impact on that. It’s been hard to adjust back to civilian life. The seven months I was in war — but when I got back was when the battle really began. I will have a lifelong battle with post-traumatic stress disorder.

As a kid, I always wanted to be firefighter. When I went back in the Marine Corps, I was testing for the Denver Fire Department. I had gotten to the point they were going to hire me; I had a conditional letter of employment. I got that letter when I was in Japan.

So I sacrificed that, but it was something I needed to do.

If I could go back to Iraq and be 100 percent effective, I would be there in a heartbeat. Not necessarily for combat, but I really believed in what we were doing there.

When we went, we knew our mission. We thought it would be six to 18 months before we liberated Iraq. We thought we would occupy for five to 10 years. We couldn’t tell our families or friends, but we knew. But there were some poor decisions made, politically, by high people, that made the American public think, “Hey, the war’s over. Let’s bring our boys home.” They should have said, “We are not actively engaging the enemy, but we are going to occupy and rebuild.”

The last year has been pretty rough on me. I was engaged to be married. My daughter was living with me, but decided to go back to her school in Phoenix.

A lot of what happened, I can attribute to PTSD. I’ve been going to the VA to see a therapist and counselor, and they’ve been instrumental in helping me see that a lot of the anger and rage and nightmares are PTSD-related. Unfortunately, I didn’t address it soon enough, and it cost me my engagement and the loss of my daughter.

My daughter was used to being away from me during my deployments. But she didn’t have to see the aftermath of my temper tantrums and saying hateful things to her.

If I could take it all back, I would. But I’ll get better, and we’ll all just move on.

March 18, 2008 – The manager of anti-war candidate Ned Lamont’s 2006 Senate campaign was named Monday as coordinator of a $20 million nationwide effort to oppose the war in Iraq as a continuing economic disaster.

Tom Swan is the manager of Iraq Campaign 2008, an effort to tie the war to an issue with a higher profile: the struggling U.S. economy.

“The public is already with us on this,” Swan said in a telephone interview.
Several cornerstones of the Democratic anti-war political base back the campaign, including a pioneer in Netroots activism, MoveOn.org, and one of the nation’s most politically active unions, the Service Employees International Union.

Its launch coincides with the fifth anniversary on Wednesday of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the publication of a book by two economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who estimate that the cost of the war could range from $2.2 trillion to $5 trillion by 2017, far more than any previous estimate.

In “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Stiglitz and Bilmes go far beyond actual military spending to include costs such as the long-term disabilities of wounded soldiers and oil-price increases that they attribute to the war.

Swan and the campaign already have adopted the $3 trillion estimate as fact.

“I am honored to be working with the growing alliance of organizations that make up the Iraq 2008 campaign to ensure that we bring an end to this misguided $3 trillion Iraq war,” Swan said in a statement the coalition issued.

The campaign is kicking off Wednesday with candlelight vigils across the country. In Connecticut, events are planned in Hartford, West Hartford, Meriden, Durham, Barkhamsted and at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

Swan, 46, will keep his job as executive director of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group while he works on the Iraq project, but he has restructured the job.

In 2006, he took a nearly yearlong leave of absence to run Lamont’s campaign against Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, then considered one of the biggest Democratic backers of the war.

Lamont defeated Lieberman in a Democratic primary, but Lieberman was re-elected as a petitioning candidate. Lieberman remains a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, but he calls himself an “independent Democrat” and is actively working for the election of the Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting, John McCain.

Lamont is backing Barack Obama, as is MoveOn.org and the SEIU. The other groups involved in the Iraq campaign are VoteVets.org, USAction, the Center for American Progress, the Campaign for America’s Future and Americans United For Change.

John Edwards, the former presidential candidate who has yet to endorse either Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton, also is affiliated with the new anti-war effort.

March 18, 2008 – For more than two years, the Pentagon delayed screening troops returning from Iraq for mild brain injuries because officials feared veterans would blame vague ailments on the little-understood wound caused by exposure to bomb blasts, says the military’s director of medical assessments.
Air Force Col. Kenneth Cox said in an interview that the Pentagon wanted to avoid another controversy such as the so-called Gulf War syndrome. About 10,000 veterans blamed medical conditions from cancer to eczema on their service.

The Pentagon did not acknowledge the syndrome until Congress created a committee to study it in 1998.

For troops who think they may have a condition not designated as war-related, Cox said, often “they’re reacting to rumors, things that they’ve read about or heard about on the Internet or (from) their friends.”

That uncertainty, Cox said, means “some individuals will seek a diagnosis from provider to provider to provider.” It also makes treating veterans “much more difficult and much more costly,” he said.

March 9, 2008 – On Feb. 13, 2008, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens voted against a Senate measure that limits the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual (and so did Lisa Murkowski). That was a vote to allow the CIA to continue the use of “waterboarding” as an interrogation technique.

So what’s the big deal?

Well, waterboarding is torture, pure and simple. In the words of a former master instructor for U.S. Navy SEALs:

“Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration — usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death.”

By any measure, waterboarding is cruel and unusual treatment. It is classified as torture by the Geneva Conventions. Tyrants have used waterboarding for centuries. Waterboarding was used extensively in the Spanish Inquisition; it was used against African slaves in our own country and against our troops in World War II; and it’s currently being used against pro-democracy activists in Burma. The use of waterboarding for any purpose is repugnant to American values.

In an op-ed in the Feb. 18, 2008, New York Times, Air Force Col. Morris Davis (former chief prosecutor for the military commission trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba), stated:

“My policy as the chief prosecutor … was that evidence derived through waterboarding was off limits. That should still be our policy. To do otherwise is not only an affront to American justice, it will potentially put prosecutors at risk for using illegally obtained evidence … I was overruled on the question, and I resigned my position to call attention to the issue.”

It’s hard to believe that Sen. Stevens wants an America that employs torture, but that’s the way he voted.

And it’s not the first time. In the fall of 2005, he voted against an amendment to the Military Appropriations Bill that requires all service members to follow interrogation procedures in the Army Field Manual (which, not surprisingly, do not include torture). Stevens was only one of nine senators to vote against the amendment. (Lisa Murkowski voted with the majority that time.)

At the time, he commented that he might be able to support a measure to outlaw torture, but only if it contained guidance that authorized the use of torture in some proceedings: “I’m talking about people who aren’t in uniform, may or may not be citizens of the United States, but are working for us in very difficult circumstances … sometimes interrogation and intimidation is part of the system,” he told the Congressional Quarterly.

So, it seems Stevens will only vote to prohibit torture if the statute in question permits torture.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Perhaps Stevens should reflect on the words of Patrick Henry, who stated that if we “extort confession by torture in order to punish with still more relentless severity, we are then lost and undone.”

Indeed.

So how about it, senator? Will you explain to Alaskans your votes for torture, or will you keep your silence? As an American, an Alaskan, and a veteran, I am deeply saddened that you have not accounted for those shameful votes. Alaskans deserve an explanation.

——————————————————————————–
Philip J. Smith is a lifelong Alaskan and a veteran of the U.S. Army (1964 — 1967). He is a retired civil servant and is the president of the Juneau chapter of Veterans for Peace.

March 15, 2008 – Washington, DC — Chris Scheuerman believes the military he served for 20 years failed his Army son Jason, who shot himself to death in his Iraq barracks almost three years ago.

Carefully choosing his words before a hushed congressional audience Friday, the father spoke of how the 20-year-old private’s superiors largely ignored the soldier’s signs of distress and his family’s expressions of alarm in the days leading up to his suicide.

“I do not believe there is a safety net right now for those who fall through,” Scheuerman, a veteran with service in Army medicine, told a House Armed Services subcommittee.

Scheuerman was one of several people who testified about their experiences with the military’s mental health system. Military personnel, facing prolonged warfare and lengthy deployments, are under particular stress these days.

Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gutteridge, an Iraq war veteran treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, spoke of the military’s prejudices toward service members with mental health problems. “PTSD sufferers are lepers without lesions,” he said.

At the same time, Gutteridge and others cited improvements in the military’s responses to the high levels of mental health problems and brain injuries among those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dr. S. Ward Casscells, assistant defense secretary for health affairs, and the surgeons general of the Army, Navy and Air Force also efforts to help address psychological issues. Steps include recruiting more mental health professionals, providing prompt care and extending outreach programs to military personnel and their families.

The military is “charging their battle buddies, enlisted leaders and their company commanders to identify people who are struggling,” Casscells said. “Early detection is important.”

Rep. Susan Davis, who heads the military personnel committee, urged further improvements.

Mental health “weighs heavily upon the readiness of our force, our ability to retain combat veterans and our obligation to care for those who volunteer to serve our nation,” said Davis, D-Calif.

The increase in military suicides has dramatized the issue. The Army said recently that as many as 121 soldiers committed suicide last year, more than double the number reported in 2001.

Casscells said that although the suicide rate is below that of the civilian population, it is of serious concern.

Chris Scheuerman’s travails over his son’s suicide, which he earlier shared with The Associated Press for an extensive story, included both frustrations over how his son was treated and obstacles in getting information about his death.

He told lawmakers that three weeks before Jason’s death, the family contacted the Army about suicidal e-mails they received from the private. The family said it got no response from the Army.

Jason Scheuerman displayed erratic behavior, including putting the muzzle of his weapon in his mouth. Also, the base chaplain had concerns about his well-being. Nonetheless, the base psychologist told commanders to send the soldier back to his unit because he was capable of feigning mental illness to get out of the Army.

Soldiers with mental health issues should be afforded a second opinion with a civilian psychologist, by teleconference if necessary, Scheuerman said. “It should be mandatory for psychologists to contact family to gather pertinent information,” he said. “If they had called us there would have been a different outcome.”

Gutteridge related how he began suffering from nightmares, anger, “horrible thoughts” and heavy drinking after he was redeployed from Iraq to Germany last year. “Reliving the horror of evacuating fallen soldiers’ and Marines’ remains as well as searching through body bags for dog tags and watching soldiers die was too much.”

But when his condition worsened, he was told it would be three weeks before he could get an appointment with his nurse practitioner or a doctor. “The only way to get immediate help was to be suicidal,” he said.

Rep. Bob Etheridge, D-N.C., said the system had failed Jason Scheuerman and others. The military, he said, is “intent on treating this as a public relations problem rather than a mental health problem. I’m hopeful this is beginning to change.”

March 15, 2008 – Silver Spring, Maryland — Garret Reppenhagen received integral training about the Geneva Conventions and the Rules of Engagement during his deployment in Kosovo. But in Iraq, “Much of this was thrown out the window,” he says. “The men I served with are professionals,” Reppenhagen told the audience at a panel of U.S. veterans speaking of their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, “They went to Iraq to defend the U.S. But we found rapidly we were killing Iraqis in horrible ways. But we had to in order to remain safe ourselves. The war is the atrocity.” The event, which has drawn international media attention, was organised by Iraq Veterans Against the War. It aims to show that their stories of wrongdoing in both countries were not isolated incidents limited to a few “bad apples”, as the Pentagon claims, but were everyday occurrences. The panel on the “Rules of Engagement” (ROE) during the first full day of the gathering, named “Winter Soldier” to honour a similar gathering 30 years ago of veterans of the Vietnam War, was held in front of a visibly moved audience of several hundred, including veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Winter soldiers, according to U.S. founding father Thomas Paine, are the people who stand up for the soul of their country, even in its darkest hours Reppenhagen served in Iraq from February 2004-2005 in the city of Baquba, 40 kms northeast of Baghdad. He said his first experience in Iraq was being on a patrol that killed two Iraqi farmers as they worked in their field at night. “I was told they were out in the fields farming because their pumps only operated with electricity, which meant they had to go out in the dark when there was electricity,” he explained, “I asked the sergeant, if he knew this, why did he fire on the men. He told me because the men were out after curfew. I was never given another ROE during my time in Iraq.” Another veteran of the occupation of Iraq on the panel was Vincent Emmanuel. He served in the Marines near the northern Iraqi city of Al-Qaim during 2004-2005. Emmanuel explained that “taking potshots at cars that drove by” happened all the time and “these were not isolated incidents”. Emmanuel continued: “We took fire while trying to blow up a bridge. Many of the attackers were part of the general population. This led to our squad shooting at everything and anything in order to push through the town. I remember myself emptying magazines into the town, never identifying a target.” As other panelists nodded in agreement, Emmanuel spoke of abusing prisoners who he knew were innocent, adding, “We took it upon ourselves to harass them, and took them to the desert to throw them out of our Humvees, while kicking and punching them when we threw them out.” Two other soldiers testified about planting weapons or shovels on civilians they had accidentally shot, to justify the killings by implying the dead were fighters or people attempting to plant roadside bombs. Jason Washburn was a corporal in the marines, and served three tours in Iraq, his last in Haditha from 2005-2006. “We were encouraged to bring ‘drop weapons’ or shovels, in case we accidentally shot a civilian, we could drop the weapon on the body and pretend they were an insurgent,” he said, “By the third tour, if they were carrying a shovel or bag, we could shoot them. So we carried these tools and weapons in our vehicles, so we could toss them on civilians when we shot them. This was commonly encouraged.” Washburn explained that his ROE changed “a lot”. “The higher the threat level, the more viciously we were told to respond. We had towns that were deemed ‘free fire zones’. One time there was a mayor of a town near Haditha that got shot up. We were shown this as an example because there was a nice tight shot group on the windshield, and told that was a good job, that was what Marines were supposed to do. And that was the mayor of the town.” Jason Wayne Lemue is a Marine who served three tours in Iraq. “My commander told me, ‘Kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved’, that was our mission on our first tour,” he said of his first deployment during the invasion nearly five years ago. Lemue continued, “After that the ROE changed, and carrying a shovel, or standing on a rooftop talking on a cell phone, or being out after curfew [meant the people] were to be killed. I can’t tell you how many people died because of this. By my third tour, we were told to just shoot people, and the officers would take care of us.” John Michael Turner served two tours in the Marines as a machine gunner in Iraq. Visibly upset, he told the audience, “I was taught as a Marine to eat the apple to the core.” Turner then pulled his military metals off his shirt and threw them on the ground. “Apr. 18, 2006 was the date of my first confirmed kill,” he said sombrely. “He was innocent, I called him the fat man. He was walking back to his house and I killed him in front of his father and friend. My first shot made him scream and look into my eyes, so I looked at my friend and said, ‘Well, I can’t let that happen’, and shot him again. After my first kill I was congratulated.” Turner explained one reason why establishment media reporting about the occupation in the U.S. has been largely sanitised. “Anytime we had embedded reporters, our actions changed drastically,” he explained. “We did everything by the books, and were very low key.” To conclude, an emotional Turner said, “I want to say I’m sorry for the hate and destruction that I and others have inflicted on innocent people. It is not okay, and this is happening, and until people hear what is going on this is going to continue. I am no longer the monster that I once was.”

March 16, 2008 – Fot Knox, KY — When Sgt. Gerald Cassidy died alone from a prescription drug overdose at the Army’s Warrior Transition Unit here, at a facility set up expressly to help wounded soldiers, he had more than 600 prescription pills in his room.
His body was found Sept. 21 in a chair in his room, after he had missed required morning and afternoon check-in for three days.
A sergeant was supposed to have taken attendance and tracked down anyone not present. Instead, the sergeant ignored Cassidy’s absence the first afternoon, missed the next daily check-in with car trouble and the following day marked Cassidy present even though he wasn’t.
Cassidy was found dead more than eight hours after his wife, Melissa, began calling Fort Knox in an escalating panic on Sept. 21.
Finally, after she called at 6 p.m. and told a sergeant that she was getting ready to drive down from Westfield to look for her husband herself, the sergeant checked Cassidy’s room.
Two hours later, Melissa was told over the telephone that her husband had been found dead in his small room. Four hours after that, about midnight, an Army chaplain arrived at Melissa’s home.
The Army pronounced Cassidy’s death an accidental overdose. The 31-year-old soldier took too many prescription drugs that, in combination, suppressed his respiratory system. In his system were methadone, the antidepressant citalopram, multiple opiates, a tranquilizer and a hypertension drug.
These and other details about how Cassidy lived his last few days and how he died were revealed recently by his wife and mother in an interview with The Indianapolis Star.
Cassidy’s family also provided to The Star key documents from the Army’s investigation of his death that had not previously been released and shared some notes Cassidy wrote at Fort Knox about his anxiety over loud noises and lack of sleep and his concern for the impact of his illness on his family.
The family says it is speaking out in hopes that greater public awareness will help other soldiers get better treatment.
The family found an ally in Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, who is calling for numerous changes in the way the military handles mental health services for wounded soldiers.
“The pain is never going to go away,” said Cassidy’s mother, Kay McMullen, Carmel. “You’ve got to do something then to change the outcome for other people.”
Failure at Fort Knox

Too little staff, too little training, Army finds
The Army investigation of Fort Knox after Cassidy’s death concluded that “the unit was not resourced properly to accomplish its mission” and “failed to provide effective leadership.”
The problems included not having enough staff to fill the three key positions — a squad leader who wounded soldiers are supposed to see daily, a nurse case manager they see weekly and a primary care manager they see monthly.
Army investigators also found the staff didn’t have the proper training or appropriate skill levels; there was not a simple and direct chain of command; and soldiers were not properly accounted for.
The unit also did not have controls to track prescriptions and no established process to communicate prescription reactions with alcohol.
Officers told investigators that they had raised concerns about the lack of resources but said no one paid attention — until Cassidy died.
“We are told that WTU is the Army’s priority, and yet we are not receiving the NCOs (non commissioned officers) that we need to get the job done, nor the facilities we need,” a captain told investigators. “WTU was set up for failure.”
Fort Knox was not the only unit short-staffed last year. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported that in mid-September, fewer than half of the 32 U.S.-based units had enough key personnel.
In an updated report last month, the GAO commended the Army for making substantial progress but said it still faces problems hiring medical staff in a competitive market, replacing temporary borrowed personnel with permanent staff, and getting eligible soldiers into the units.
“Following the Walter Reed controversy, there was a burst of activity, a sense of urgency about making sure that medical care and conditions for our soldiers was improved,” said Bayh, who has been demanding answers about Cassidy’s care. “But then that dissipated as soon as the spotlight moved on to something else.
“We can’t let that happen again. We need to continue to focus on this to make sure that the government not only says the right things but does the right things for our soldiers.”
The Army initially called Cassidy’s death an isolated incident. But last month, the Army said it was investigating 11 accidental deaths or suicides in its Warrior Transition Units. At least three deaths, including Cassidy’s, were accidental overdoses.
A soldier from the start

“The thing that he loved the most was the camaraderie”
Cassidy, or “G.J.” as he was known to friends and family, grew up playing soldier, wearing camouflage and toting wooden guns.
He pestered his mother until she let him spend summers at the Culver Military Academy in Northern Indiana, where he became a member of the Black Horse Troop, an elite equestrian detail. By age 17, he was an adjutant commander.
“He was so passionate about being a soldier,” his wife, Melissa Cassidy, said. “I think the thing that he loved the most was the camaraderie, knowing that you’re standing beside someone who would give their life for you.”
His last civilian job was with a landscaping company, although his goal was to get a full-time National Guard job and finish college so he could teach high school or junior high history.
Cassidy enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve in 1992 and joined the Indiana National Guard in 2003. He volunteered in 2004 to go to Iraq, where he served with a Guard unit from Minnesota.
Cassidy decorated his quarters in Iraq with an American flag, its stripes formed by tiny ink handprints made by his daughter, Abbey, and her preschool classmates.
He was escorting a convoy to Camp Scania in Iraq in August 2006 when an improvised explosive device went off about 11 yards from his Humvee, spraying it with shrapnel. Cassidy lost hearing for a few minutes, then had a strong headache that lasted at least six hours. That was the beginning of the migraines that began to plague him every seven to 10 days.
The last days

Soldier’s family said
he got worse, not better
When his tour in Iraq was finished in March 2007, seven months after his injury, Cassidy was evaluated at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin where he was diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
He arrived in Fort Knox in April, about two months before the Warrior Transition Unit was up and running.
Soldiers are supposed to be given a job or be taking classes, but that wasn’t initially enforced.
Melissa Cassidy said her husband was bored at Fort Knox and filled his room with movies, books and games.
Soldiers are told their main purpose is to heal so they either can return to duty or make the transition back to a productive civilian life.
Cassidy’s family, however, thought Cassidy was getting worse, not better, at Fort Knox.
He was still suffering from migraines, which could last from a few hours to nearly a full day. In addition to the narcotics he was prescribed at Fort Knox or during visits to the emergency room in Indiana, he drank beer and rum to dull his pain, although no alcohol was found in his body at the time of his death.
Soldiers in the units are allowed to have beer and a pint of liquor in their rooms.
“I don’t think alcohol has a place in a Warrior Transition Unit for folks like G.J.,” Melissa Cassidy said. “With all the medications he’s on, he doesn’t have any business drinking alcohol.”
A Fort Knox official said the Army is evaluating whether to ban alcohol from the units.
Cassidy knew his illness was rough on his family, writing in a notepad shortly before he died that, “When I’m there, sometimes I’m still not there.”
“I find myself wanting time alone or just wanting to be lazy,” he wrote. “I know she needs the help, but sometimes I just can’t get motivated to get off the couch.”
During his weekend visits and a monthlong convalescent leave over the summer, Melissa Cassidy said it was increasingly difficult for her to get him to go swimming or to a cookout with the children, 5-year-old Abbey and 3-year-old Isaac.
At Fort Knox, Cassidy saw a psychiatrist nine times in July, August and September but made only one visit to the private neurologist in nearby Elizabethtown that the Army contracts with.
He did not agree with the neurologist’s therapy plan and told his case manager at Fort Knox that an appointment with a different neurologist was unnecessary because he was taking medication prescribed during visits to Indiana, where he went to an emergency room and saw his family doctor.
Cassidy’s psychiatrist, Dr. William Kearney, agreed that the second neurology appointment was unnecessary, according to the case manager’s report.
Kearney told The Star that Cassidy pleaded with him to prescribe pain relievers, even though Kearney said he told Cassidy he should be following the neurologist’s treatment plan.
“They’re the ones that do pain management,” Kearney said he told Cassidy.
When Kearney agreed to prescribe methadone at Cassidy’s request, Kearney said they had a long discussion about how it should be taken.
If used improperly, methadone can build up in the body to toxic levels because the drug stays in the body long after the pain relief ends, according to the National Drug Intelligence center.
Fort Knox officials said they can’t comment on Kearney’s care of Cassidy because it is still under review. In a Feb. 12 letter to Bayh, Secretary of the Army Pete Geren said multiple reviews of Cassidy’s medical care include an ongoing independent assessment, but the investigations’ results are “privileged and confidential” under U.S. law.
Kearney, whose work at the base has been suspended, said he was being set up as a scapegoat.
“This was a clear case of a patient who tragically overdosed on drugs,” he said.
Cassidy’s family does not think Cassidy was sufficiently instructed on the dangers of methadone.
“He was sitting there with a cornucopia of medications to choose from, and he was the one who had to decide which ones he took,” his mother said.
On Sept. 18, Cassidy filled his prescription for 16 methadone tablets, which were supposed to be taken only twice a day. The bottle was empty when his body was discovered Sept. 21.
Death goes unnoticed

Platoon sergeant didn’t check
on soldier missing for days
Cassidy spoke with his mother for the last time on Sept. 18, a Tuesday, complaining in a phone call about construction work on his barracks’ roof.
He also wrote about it Sept. 17. “As I write this my hand is shaking,” Cassidy wrote in a notepad. “The roofers keep throwing down big blocks of shingles on the roof and with me being on the 3rd floor it sounds just like mortars coming in.”
A few hours later, Cassidy wrote of taking the antidepressant citalopram and the anti-anxiety medication Klonopin “because of the whole shingle thing earlier” — some of the more than a dozen prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications he had in his room. Still awake at 3 a.m., Cassidy took the antidepressant Elavil.
“Looks like it’s going to be one of those nights,” he wrote.
When Melissa Cassidy spoke with him Tuesday, he was happy to be coming home for good soon and looking forward to seeing his family over the weekend. They agreed to talk again that night, but Melissa’s call about 11 p.m. went into her husband’s voice mail.
She followed up with three messages Wednesday, asking him to call.
“I’m kinda worried about you, hope you’re all right,” she said Wednesday night.
Calls she left Thursday were not returned, either.
When she still hadn’t heard from him Friday morning, Melissa Cassidy accessed his voice mail and was alarmed to discover he hadn’t listened to any of his messages, starting with a good night message she’d left Tuesday.
Melissa started calling officials at Fort Knox for help, including her husband’s platoon sergeant, the officer responsible for taking attendance at the daily formations.
The sergeant later told investigators that he last saw Cassidy on Wednesday morning, outside of one of the barracks. He said Cassidy told him he had a migraine and wanted to rest. Cassidy did not show up for the afternoon formation.
On Thursday, the sergeant wasn’t there for the morning accountability check because his car had broken down.
When Cassidy was not in formation Friday morning, the sergeant said, he assumed Cassidy was being processed for his weekend trip home and marked him down as being present on the daily status report, even though he hadn’t seen or spoken with him for two days.
When the sergeant heard Cassidy’s wife was looking for him, he left a message for Cassidy on his cell phone Friday afternoon but didn’t check Cassidy’s room.
“I wish I would’ve done things differently,” the sergeant later told investigators.
After being put off all day, Melissa Cassidy told a different sergeant shortly before 6 p.m. that she would come down herself. That sergeant said he would get a key and enter Cassidy’s room. When she called the sergeant back about an hour later, his voice was quavering, she said.
” ‘I haven’t got in there yet. I haven’t got in there yet. Let me call you back, sweetie, let me call you back,’ ” Melissa recalls him saying. “That was all he said, and I knew something was terribly wrong.”
Cassidy’s body was found seated, head tilted back, in front of the computer he used to play games.
Chances missed?

Pathologist says soldier was alive, unconscious, for hours
The Army’s autopsy report does not include an estimated time of death.
“It’s virtually impossible to determine a time of death because there are just too many variables involved,” said Paul Stone, spokesman for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
Dr. Stephen Radentz, a forensic pathologist Cassidy’s family hired to do a second autopsy, agreed that time estimates are difficult. But he said the condition of the body and other evidence, such as when Cassidy was last seen and last used his cell phone and computer, enabled him to estimate that he had been dead about 24 hours when found, though it could have been as much as 36 hours or as little as 12.
Radentz said the depression of Cassidy’s respiratory system “basically knocked him out of commission” so he wasn’t awake but in a comalike state before he stopped breathing.
“There’s certainly a good possibility that if they had found him when he was still breathing, he would have come out OK,” Radentz said.
When she thinks back about what happened at Fort Knox, Melissa Cassidy said, it’s “very clear that there was no system that was working there.”
What’s worse is how many times she believes tragedy could’ve been avoided, starting with her husband getting better care in Iraq and ending with someone checking up on him in his final days.
“There are so many things,” she said. “If one of those things had changed, he might be alive today.”

March 15, 2008 – See a video presentation of this story at http://www.wvgazette.com/costofwar

Stan and Shirley White of Cross Lanes remember they were at a restaurant that day – Sept. 26, 2005. They were talking about their youngest son, Andrew, and about how happy they were to have him home safe from Iraq.

Then, Shirley’s cell phone rang.
It was their daughter-in-law on the other end – the wife of their middle son, Bob, who was stationed in Afghanistan with the Army. Bob’s Humvee had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. He was gone.

Now, 2 1/2 years later – on Feb. 12 – the Whites lost 23-year-old Andrew. He died mysteriously in his sleep, just as he was beginning an achingly slow climb out of the debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder.

Their oldest son, Will, a career Naval officer, is in the Persian Gulf.

“You really can’t compare the two deaths, but directly and indirectly, both of their deaths are a result of the war,” Stan said. “As a parent, you fear for them when they go to war. You fear for their lives over there. Andrew was home. We thought he was safe.”

They are waiting for autopsy results, but the circumstances of Andrew’s death mirror those of two other local servicemen, also treated for PTSD and taking the same medications.

“Is there a connection? We don’t know,” Stan said. “When you’re 23, you’re not supposed to go to sleep and not wake up.

Three sons, three military branches

Andrew was a toddler when big brother Will, now 40, went into the Navy. Bob followed in the Army six years later. Afghanistan was his first combat tour.

Bob loved to travel to foreign countries and enjoyed peacekeeping missions in Korea, Kosovo, Egypt and Panama. Bob was 34 when he died. He is survived by his wife, Cathy, and 17-year–old son Zachary in North Carolina.

Career military men, neither Will nor Bob were interested in college, Shirley said.

Andrew was different. He planned to go to college. Although the Whites live in Cross Lanes, Andrew attended Capital High School, largely because of its strong ROTC program. His father was assistant principal there, and handed Andrew his diploma upon his graduation. He joined the Marine Reservists in 2003.

Stan was not a serviceman, and their family did not have a strong military background, but Stan and Shirley supported all three sons’ decisions to join the military.

“Andrew’s life was the Marines. At one time, he wanted to make a career out of it,” Stan said. “After the war, he decided against it. He was still very proud to be a Marine. Everything in his room is about the Marines.”

Described as a homebody by his mother, Andrew was initially anxious about his Marine unit’s deployment, but seemed to adjust. He carried out his nerve-racking work searching for “improvised explosive devices” and land mines as a combat engineer. He patrolled areas near the Syrian border and returned fire as a navigational gunner on a Humvee.

At his funeral, his buddies told his parents about the time they swept an area, declared it clean and were prepared to move on, when Andrew took one more look. They gave the Whites a photograph of Andrew holding the mine he found, which led to the discovery of six more in the same area.

When he returned home, Andrew enrolled as a criminal justice major at West Virginia State University. As time passed, he found it difficult to focus on classes or on his job as a car salesman, where he was initially very successful.

By the summer of 2006, he was missing appointments and work times because he couldn’t focus or control his anger.

“He probably had eight or nine jobs,” Shirley said. “He just couldn’t hold a job. It’s a classic symptom of PTSD.”

News that his unit was being deployed back to Iraq may have triggered the disorder.

He finally sought help in February 2007 at the West Virginia Vet Center, where he was referred to a VA clinic in Kanawha City.

“It’s frustrating. We are sending these middle-class kids over who have had no trauma in their lives. They’re taught to respect life,” Shirley said. “Then they are seeing all these terrible things and bringing it back all bottled up inside.”

By late July, Andrew’s condition had escalated. He lost his short-term memory. He began missing his appointments at the VA clinic. He couldn’t remember to take his medications. Shirley called his psychiatrist and a social worker, who told her to come to his sessions and record what happened, since Andrew couldn’t remember.

“He had become like a child that’s ADHD,” said Shirley, a former elementary schoolteacher. “Every appointment after that, I went with him. In August and September, he had 19 appointments. His doctors were very concerned.”

The Whites tried to keep his environment as stress-free as possible. They read everything they could find on the disorder as Andrew retreated further from family and friends. From August until his death, he ate with his family only two times.

He obsessively played violent war video games and watched movies alone in his room. He gained 40 or 50 pounds
“He was fighting his battles in the games. He’d get angry. The characters became real to him,” Stan said. “It’s the last thing you’d think he’d want to play.”

But by December, Shirley noticed Andrew’s short-term memory was improving.

Andrew’s final days

Late in January, Andrew’s outlook started to improve after he started meeting with a local psychiatrist specializing in PTSD. He made plans for a beach trip this summer, the first time he’d shown any interest in the future in a long time.

On Feb. 11, he had an appointment with his psychiatrist, talked to his sister on the phone and even made a dinner date for the next day.

“I noticed he was smiling more,” his mother said.

Andrew seemed particularly tired that afternoon, but otherwise healthy. He went to bed early, after solidifying plans to meet his mother at a cell phone store at 1 p.m. the following afternoon. She gave him his medication as usual and checked on him the next morning before leaving for her job at Sylvan Learning Center. He was sleeping normally.

At about noon, she called to be sure he was awake, but didn’t get an answer. She tried again repeatedly with the same result, then called a neighbor and asked her to go next door to rouse him. The woman pounded on the front door and his bedroom window to no avail.

Shirley rushed home and found Andrew dead in his bed, without any apparent cause.

A toxicology screen indicated normal levels of his prescribed medications. They’re still waiting for the autopsy results.

“It seems like a cruel joke for him to die just when he was getting better,” Shirley said.

Searching for answers

Since then, the Whites learned that the mysterious circumstances of Andrew’s death are markedly similar to those of two other local servicemen who were being treated for PSTD with the same medications – Paxil, Klonopin and Seroquel.

Eric Layne, a soldier from Kanawha City whose wife, Janette, is expecting their second child, had recently returned from an extended treatment at a VA facility. Andrew and Layne knew each other from a PTSD support group that Andrew attended faithfully.

“Andrew really went through a tough time when Eric died,” Stan said. “We never thought that, two weeks later, it would be him.”

Stan immediately thought of Layne when Shirley called him after the paramedics failed to revive Andrew.

The next day, the Whites heard about Logan County resident Cheryl Endicott’s son, Nicholas, who died in his sleep Jan. 29 while being treated for PTSD at a military hospital in Bethesda, Md.

The Whites wondered: Were their deaths related to the drugs? Was there a problem with sleep apnea? Did they suffer brain injuries?

Immediately after he buried his son, Stan began looking for answers.

The Whites spoke with Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate committee on Intelligence and a member of the Veteran Affairs committee, who called them after Andrew’s death. The senator called and has corresponded with the Whites after Bob’s death, also.

Rockefeller has requested independent reviews from the Inspector General of the Departments of Veteran Affairs and Defense, said Jessica Tice, deputy press secretary for Rockefeller. He brought the three West Virginia servicemen’s deaths to the Veteran Affairs committee members’ attention and urges anyone with similar concerns to contact him at the e-mail address: v…@rockefeller.senate.gov.

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito has also expressed concern about the deaths.

“The main issue is that these men have given so much,” Stan said. “Our intent is to find answers and to keep this from happening to anyone else.”

West Virginia Friends of Veterans have supported the Whites, screening their e-mails and passing along any relevant information to them. The Whites requested donations to the group in lieu of flowers at Andrew’s memorial.

Stan and Shirley are spending more time with their daughter, Christina, a sophomore at Marshall University. Christina was especially close to Andrew because Will and Bob were so much older. She comes home more this year than she did during her first year at college.

Her parents think she’s coping well.

“We’re not bitter. Bitterness will kill you,” Stan said. “We’re just trying to keep someone else from going through this pain. We have a son, a daughter, a grandson and two granddaughters to live for.”

March 15, 2008 – Nearly five years since the start of the Iraq war, the Bush administration is still funding much of it through emergency appropriations, and only partially through the regular defense budget. This is one of several ways in which the administration has managed to hide the true cost of the war from the American people. Until Congress insists on a full and open accounting, the nation won’t know how much of a drag it is on the economy.

more stories like thisEconomists once believed that wars stimulated an economy. But when much of the funding goes to Iraqi or Filipino contractors working in Iraq, the benefit to the US economy diminishes, especially in light of what the funding could achieve if used for home-front needs.

In the run-up to the war, President Bush’s top economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, said it might cost as much as $200 billion. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the actual amount would be just $50 billion to $60 billion, calling Lindsey’s projection “baloney,” much as Rumsfeld had belittled General Eric Shinseki’s estimate that it would take several hundred thousand US troops to fight the war successfully.

Both Lindsey and Rumsfeld were far from the mark. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University’s Linda Bilmes have just published “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict,” and they consider that figure a conservative estimate.

In their estimate, Stiglitz and Bilmes include the long-term costs for care of the wounded and the financing costs of paying for the war with borrowed money. Calculating the cost for veterans’ care was not easy. While the government discloses figures on those wounded by hostile action, Stiglitz and Bilmes had to use Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to learn the total injured in Iraq.

The two authors make much of what the country could be getting if it were not paying for the war. For a fraction of the war’s cost, Stiglitz has noted, Congress could put the Social Security system “on solid financial footing.” The entire federal budget for autism research, about $108 million, is spent every four hours in Iraq. With just $1 trillion, the country could provide 43 million students with scholarships for four years at public universities.

Wasted dollars are just one of the costs of the war, and not the most important. Nearly 4,000 US troops and at least tens of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives. The conflict has left Iraq divided along its religious and ethnic fault lines, strengthened the theocracy in Iran, and made Uncle Sam a pariah in much of the Islamic world. This toll in human life and geopolitical consequences is all too obvious. Congress should make sure the country understands the economic cost of the war, too.