Veterans for Common Sense

Mar. 13, 2008, “It has often been remarked but seldom remembered that war itself is a crime. Yet a war crime is more and other than war … It is an act beyond the pale of acceptable actions even in war. Deliberate killing or torturing of prisoners of war is a war crime. Deliberate destruction without military purpose of civilian communities is a war crime.” — Former infantry platoon leader William Crandell opening the “Winter Soldier Investigation” in Detroit, Jan. 31, 1971

More than 100 veterans gathered in a Detroit hotel in early 1971 to talk about things they had seen and done in the Vietnam War. Called the Winter Soldier Investigation, the group spoke about a horrifying array of allegations: convoys driving over civilians; burning of villages; bodies thrown out of helicopters; torture, mutilation and infamous “free-fire zones,” where anyone not wearing a U.S. uniform could be killed.

Thirty-seven years later, more than 100 veterans will gather over the next several days for “Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan.” The event is designed to be another purging of the horrors of war, and another effort to put American military policy on trial in the public eye. The gathering this time, at the National Labor College outside Washington, D.C., is sponsored by the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. “Soldiers will certainly be testifying about their experience and observation of actions which are absolutely in violation of international law,” says IVAW spokesperson Perry O”Brien, who served as an Army medic in Afghanistan in 2003.

In interviews with Salon, several veterans from the group described incidents in Iraq that they believed constituted wrongdoing by the U.S. military, including disproportionate use of air power resulting in civilian deaths. The soldiers were unable to provide Salon with any conclusive evidence of war crimes. But as the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq approaches, the allegations they and other Winter Soldier members will publicize in Washington this week add to a long-term set of questions about the damage and destruction wrought by U.S. military operations over years of war.

The first Winter Soldier Investigation, sponsored in 1971 by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ultimately helped fuel the antiwar movement in the United States. And the kinds of atrocities in Vietnam they alleged have been well documented since then. The first event also resulted in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asking John Kerry, the young veteran who would go on to be a U.S. senator, to testify three months later, when he famously asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

In fact, the first Winter Soldier investigation was largely ignored by the media, initially. “I don’t think we had nearly the effect we had hoped for,” the Vietnam veteran Crandell told me in a telephone interview. “The reporters on the scene were very impressed,” he said. “But the networks sat on it.” Perhaps that was because it was held in the Motor City (a bad decision then, organizers admit). Perhaps it was because the country wasn’t yet ready to hear how a seemingly invisible enemy in Southeast Asia had driven otherwise honorable American soldiers to commit unthinkable atrocities, including acts that were officially or unofficially condoned by military policy.

It is unclear whether Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan will gain wider attention from the media and the public, but its organizers say that today’s technology could make a difference. “The modern soldier carries a digital camera almost as a sidearm,” explained O’Brien. The group says that potentially explosive photos and video from Iraq displayed at this Winter Soldier investigation will help “expose the human consequences of failed policy” in the war zones. The searing images from Abu Ghraib, of course, came to light because soldiers working inside the prison made use of their personal digital cameras.

The veterans of Winter Soldier face the challenge of condemning U.S. military policy without the event being interpreted as — or twisted into — an unpatriotic attack on their fellow troops. “That is the tightrope they have to walk,” explained Rick Weidman, a Vietnam veteran and director of government relations at Vietnam Veterans of America. “Don’t blame the troops who are thrust into the middle of a goddamn civil war where you can’t tell who the enemy is.” He added: “You don’t blame the troops for being put in an impossible situation. Some of this stuff is part of war. You could not retake Fallujah without what many people consider atrocities.”

Vietnam veterans faced a similarly difficult balancing act 37 years ago. When Crandell opened the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971, he tried to make it clear that the event was not intended to put American troops on trial. “There will be no phony indictments; there will be no verdict against Uncle Sam,” Crandell said back then. The testimony, he argued, was supposed to expose “acts which are the inexorable result of national policy.”

But it is unclear if Americans who are politically conservative will pick up on that distinction, particularly at a time when just about any critique of the war is quickly spun by both right and left. “I think they have to be as clear as they can,” Crandell continued. “I still have conversations with Vietnam vets 40 years later who feel defamed by what we did. I feel sorry about that.” But Crandell said this new Winter Soldier event should still go forward, “to whatever extent it helps with resolving the war or the maverick policies that need to be curtailed.”

Some Iraq veterans agree that the pro-war crowd will work to create the impression that the event is an unpatriotic smear against the troops. “It troubles me a little bit,” Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America said about the coming event. “I hope that they are thinking this out, because there are plenty of people who are going to want to have their ass.”

Rush Limbaugh is likely to be one who goes after them. The widely heard right-wing radio host last fall claimed that some veterans who oppose the war are, in fact, “phony soldiers.”

Limbaugh has said he was referring to the case of Jesse MacBeth. Several years ago MacBeth, then an IVAW member, alleged he committed war crimes in Iraq as a soldier in the Army. In May 2006, the Army reported that MacBeth, in fact, had never served in Iraq at all.

IVAW counters that the MacBeth incident occurred before the organization put in place a requirement that members provide proof of service. For Winter Soldier, the group has also assembled a verification team of combat veterans to interview soldiers testifying, examine discharge paperwork and review corroborating evidence including additional witnesses, video and photos.

But even with all that evidence, people sitting in the audience at National Labor College may have trouble evaluating some of the testimony they hear. Wartime accounts are notoriously difficult to untangle and verify, even when coming from multiple primary sources who appear to be telling the truth to the best of their knowledge.

Soldiers are limited to a grunt’s-eye-view of the world. They will tell it like they saw it, but admit that they don’t have all the answers about what may have happened in a given incident.

One example that will likely be discussed at the Winter Soldier meeting in Washington involves a powerful air attack carried out on apartment buildings in Baghdad in 2003. Soldiers who witnessed the attack told Salon that they believe innocent civilians were killed. But they witnessed it at night, from a distance, and never saw direct evidence of dead civilians.

“I’m pretty sure we saw some pretty fucked-up shit,” said Clifton Hicks, who was a private in the 1st Armored Division in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 and will be testifying at the Winter Soldier event. Hicks and two other soldiers from the division’s 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment described a Nov. 13, 2003, nighttime airstrike on five apartment buildings a few hundred yards outside the perimeter of Camp Slayer, their sprawling base located just south of the Baghdad airport.

In separate interviews with Salon, all three soldiers described the buildings as shoddily constructed structures, maybe four stories high. The Iraqis living there would stand and stare when the soldiers rode by on vehicle patrols. Laundry hung out to dry on the balconies. But the structures provided one of the few clear lines of sight into the soldiers’ compound, and occasionally somebody would take a random pot shot at the base from one of the apartment buildings. After one such attack involving a lieutenant colonel on the base in fall 2003, the military launched an airstrike using an AC-130, a four-propeller gunship armed with powerful cannons.

The strike appears to have occurred as part of Operation Iron Hammer, an early effort to snuff out a growing insurgency through massive use of air power in Baghdad. The officer allegedly involved in calling in the airstrike, Lt. Col. Chuck Williams, was quoted on Nov. 13, 2003, by CBS News discussing Operation Iron Hammer. “If you are trying to send a message by firing and harboring yourself inside of an area like this, we want to send the message right back that you can be reached,” he told CBS. “We will find you and surgically remove you.” A Pentagon news article dated the next day noted only that an AC-130 “destroyed a building that had sheltered terrorists firing on U.S. forces for several days.”

Steven Casey, who back then was a scout in the same Army unit, provided Salon with videotape of the strike taken from the roof of a building at Camp Slayer, date-stamped Nov. 13, 2003. While the airstrike can clearly be heard on the tape, darkness and distance render it mostly useless for verification purposes. (Word had quickly spread through Camp Slayer that the strike was coming and soldiers had gathered on a rooftop to watch.)

The Army would not comment on the airstrike. Williams, the lieutenant colonel allegedly involved in calling in the airstrike, refused a request for an interview.

But it is not just the darkness on the videotape that makes the story hard to gauge. News clips from that time period claim that the military was evacuating civilians prior to Operation Iron Hammer airstrikes, in an effort to destroy empty buildings that had been used to launch attacks on U.S. forces. Brig. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who commanded the 1st Armored Division at the time, claimed in a Nov. 20, 2003, press conference that “we have had no civilian casualties resulting from Iron Hammer.”

Salon also contacted a human rights group, which said they had staff in Iraq at that time, but they could verify no details about the airstrike or its outcome. And the three soldiers interviewed admit that while they saw the heavily damaged buildings after the strike, nobody got out of their vehicles to see if there were, in fact, dead civilians in the rubble.

Regardless of what happened that night, dozens if not hundreds of interviews with returning veterans have shown that throughout the war, the military regularly responded to real or perceived threats with overwhelming firepower. Some of those incidents clearly resulted in unwarranted civilian deaths. Other attacks may have inadvertently resulted in an unknown but potentially significant number of civilian casualties. (It should also be said that many officers and soldiers have taken great pains to protect civilians throughout the war.)

The U.S. military’s overall approach with using overwhelming force supposedly changed under the counterinsurgency strategy implemented by Gen. David Petraeus starting in early 2007. Civilians were now seen as the “center of gravity” in the war effort, and it was deemed that great lengths should be taken to protect them and win over their support. High-level military officials say Petraeus has been successful in changing the way the military conducts itself in this regard; the Air Force has implemented rigorous protocols to reduce collateral damage from airstrikes.

Still, the vast majority of the American public does not have a clear picture of what has gone on for years in Iraq and Afghanistan due to U.S. military operations. In the coming days, the new generation of veterans gathering for the Winter Soldier event hope to make it more clear.

March 12, 2008 – San Bernadino, CA — A disabled combat veteran-turned-veterans counselor in San Bernardino is accusing the Department of Veterans Affairs of pressuring him to retire because he refused to drop Vietnam-era patients to make room for Iraq war returnees.

“I said I will not cut the (counseling) groups,” said Phil Garcia, a former Army paratrooper whose right shoulder was shot up in Vietnam.

A VA official acknowledged that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are increasing the workload for counselors. But she denied making any attempt to slash counseling for Vietnam vets.
“I never implied or stated that services need to be cut for Vietnam veterans. I have no idea what reference he’s making,” said Joan O. Smith, the VA’s associate regional manager for counseling. “We need those support groups.”

Many of Garcia’s patients have spent the past two weeks picketing outside the San Bernardino Vet Center on Hospitality Lane, saying that the fundamental problem is there is only one veterans center in San Bernardino County dedicated solely to counseling for post-traumatic stress and other readjustment issues.

Dozens of placard-carrying veterans from World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars say they steadfastly support Garcia.

“He’s the best counselor at this vets center,” said former Army paratrooper Steve Dedeaux, a Vietnam vet. “Most of the counseling groups are packed, and it’s because of Phil.

“It’s easier for a combat veteran to open up to someone with combat experience,” Dedeaux added. “Now they’re taking him away from us. That doesn’t make sense.”

Smith insisted that no attempt is being made to force Garcia to retire.

“There is a personnel action, but I can’t comment on it,” Smith said.

She acknowledged that the workload in San Bernardino County may warrant additional counselors and at least one more office.

“We’re looking to possibly open another there. We’re doing a needs assessment,” she said. “We recognize that it is a very large area.”

According to Garcia’s figures, the San Bernardino Vet Center had 7,844 counseling visits by about 700 veterans during the past fiscal year, up 24 percent from the 6,313 visits in fiscal year 2003.

Of those visits, he handles about half the counseling, he said.

Patient to Counselor

Garcia speaks softly. But his eyes harden as he talks about the four times he was wounded 40 years ago and how those injuries, physical and emotional, have shaped his life and career.

“I’m a poster boy for the Vets Center,” Garcia says. “I had a lot of problems: anger … sleep disorders. I still jump at sounds that resemble war.”

In his private life, he has been an affectionate father, he said. Yet, there are times when his reactions — even to children — might seem harsh and unreasonable to anyone who has never been in a war zone.

“I was a squad leader. You think what you’ve learned (in combat) works: Give orders, take control, ‘They will listen to me, and we will make it through alive,’ ” he said.

But that was then. Over the years, Garcia has slowly but steadily readjusted. As a counselor, his job is to help others readjust more quickly, confidently and effectively.

With a master’s degree in rehabilitation psychology from Cal State San Bernardino, he went to work for the VA in 1993. He spent six years working with homeless vets in Los Angeles.

In 1999, he transferred to the San Bernardino Veterans Center, cutting the commute time from his home in the San Bernardino County’s western end.

In his view, the Vet Center is a perfect fit for him.

“I’ve been there. I can get your life back in order,” Garcia said he is able to tell his patients. “I make you feel normal right off the bat.”

The key is explaining to patients that what other people view as war-zone quirks, or worse, are really normal reactions to the abnormal experiences of war: remaining constantly hypervigilant for the slightest sign of danger, for example.

Fundamentally, post-traumatic stress — it was called shell shock in World War I and combat fatigue in WWII — is nothing more than anxiety, Garcia said.

His opportunity to help veterans is a gift from God, he believes.

“I had to make sense of losing my shoulder. And whatever you view as the Creator put me there in Vietnam for a reason,” Garcia said. “It allowed me to get to where I am to help all the veterans we deal with.”

Eyeing Retirement

But the end may be in sight.

Garcia said his boss, Smith, visited from the Bay Area last July and wasn’t impressed.

The upshot, said Garcia, was that the caseload of Vietnam vets would have to be reduced to make room for Gulf War vets. Smith denies that.

Garcia said she also told him that he wasn’t keeping adequate records of his counseling sessions with patients.

Smith declined to discuss anything regarding patients’ records, citing privacy concerns. She declined to say whether any paperwork deficiencies are the basis for the personnel action she said is pending against Garcia.

Garcia readily acknowledges that for years, he has cobbled together his patient-counseling reports using general boilerplate entries that he keeps in his computer for exactly that purpose. It allows him to cut and paste, finishing the reports more quickly, he said.

As he tells it, it’s not laziness or incompetence.

Garcia’s useless right shoulder and problems in his left wrist leave him unable to type, he said.

Although the VA gave him a voice-activated computer, Garcia said he was never taught how to use it efficiently.

It’s unreasonable to expect him to file adequate reports, he said.

He has always passed his job evaluations and has received cash incentive awards, he said.

But now, he said, it’s his word against the system, and he figures he’ll lose.

“Will they force me into retirement? Probably,” he added.

March 10, 2008 – Washington, DC — An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn’t due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.

President Bush and his aides used Saddam’s alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had “bulletproof” evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam’s secular dictatorship.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.

As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims,” he said.

The new study, entitled “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents”, was essentially completed last year and has been undergoing what one U.S. intelligence official described as a “painful” declassification review.

It was produced by a federally-funded think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, under contract to the Norfolk, Va.-based U.S. Joint Forces Command.

Spokesmen for the Joint Forces Command declined to comment until the report is released. One of the report’s authors, Kevin Woods, also declined to comment.

The issue of al Qaida in Iraq already has played a role in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, mocked Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, recently for saying that he’d keep some U.S. troops in Iraq if al Qaida established a base there.

“I have some news. Al Qaida is in Iraq,” McCain told supporters. Obama retorted that, “There was no such thing as al Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade.” (In fact, al Qaida in Iraq didn’t emerge until 2004, a year after the invasion.)

The new study appears destined to be used by both critics and supporters of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq to advance their own familiar arguments.

While the documents reveal no Saddam-al Qaida links, they do show that Saddam and his underlings were willing to use terrorism against enemies of the regime and had ties to regional and global terrorist groups, the officials said.

However, the U.S. intelligence official, who’s read the full report, played down the prospect of any major new revelations, saying, “I don’t think there’s any surprises there.”

Saddam, whose regime was relentlessly secular, was wary of Islamic extremist groups such as al Qaida, although like many other Arab leaders, he gave some financial support to Palestinian groups that sponsored terrorism against Israel.

According to the State Department’s annual report on global terrorism for 2002 — the last before the Iraq invasion — Saddam supported the militant Islamic group Hamas in Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a radical, Syrian-based terrorist group.

Saddam also hosted Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, although the Abu Nidal Organization was more active when he lived in Libya and he was murdered in Baghdad in August 2002, possibly on Saddam’s orders.

An earlier study based on the captured Iraqi documents, released by the Joint Forces Command in March 2006, found that a militia Saddam formed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the Fedayeen Saddam, planned assassinations and bombings against his enemies. Those included Iraqi exiles and opponents in Iraq’s Kurdish and Shiite communities.

Other documents indicate that the Fedayeen Saddam opened paramilitary training camps that, starting in 1998, hosted “Arab volunteers” from outside of Iraq. What happened to the non-Iraqi volunteers is unknown, however, according to the earlier study.

The new Pentagon study isn’t the first to refute earlier administration contentions about Saddam and al Qaida.

A September 2006 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Saddam was “distrustful of al Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al Qaida to provide material or operational support.”

The Senate report, citing an FBI debriefing of a senior Iraqi spy, Faruq Hijazi, said that Saddam turned down a request for assistance by bin Laden which he made at a 1995 meeting in Sudan with an Iraqi operative.

March 12, 2008 — Senators Daniel Akaka, Charles Schumer and Patty Murray and Representatives Bob Filner and Chet Edwards joined veterans in a press conference today to discuss how the Democrats’ budget will help improve the quality of life for our nation’s veterans. Democrats have a fiscally responsible plan to restore military readiness, honor our commitment to troops and veterans, and enhance national security.

“The costs of war are not limited to the battlefield,” said Akaka, Chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. “Care for our troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and those from previous wars, must be considered part of the ongoing costs of war. I am pleased that the Budget Resolution for Fiscal Year 2009 contains $3.2 billion more than the President requested for VA, another historic increase provided by Congress. This increase means that VA can provide mental health care to those who return home with invisible wounds such as PTSD, that valuable programs like VA research will not be cut, and that care for more visible wounds, such as amputations and traumatic brain injury, will be of the best quality. Caring for the men and women who have fought for our nation shows future generations that America appreciates the sacrifices required to serve in uniform.”

Said Schumer: “With his budget, the Administration has effectively told the troops, you must take care of us, but we will not take care of you. Today, Democrats in Congress are standing up and offering a budget that says ‘if the President will not fulfill his duty to America’s heroes, we will.’ Veterans returning home deserve the best healthcare that we can provide. We cannot forget that when soldiers’ duty to this country ends, our duty to them has barely begun.”

“Democrats know all too well what happens when the VA gets shortchanged — the men and women who have served us end up paying the biggest price,” Murray said. “So we’re saying, ‘No,’ to the Administration’s shortsighted budget cuts. Our service members are our heroes, and they deserve the best we can give them.”

Said Filner (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs: “This budget builds on the success of last year, recognizes the needs faced by America’s veterans today and invests in our veterans for tomorrow. In this time of war, as we continue to send men and women into harm’s way, we must be committed and prepared to provide the resources to care for these heroes upon their return – and this budget does that.”

“With this budget, Democrats in Congress in just two years will have increased veterans funding for health care and benefits more than the Republican led Congress did in 12 years combined when they held the majority,” said Rep. Chet Edwards (D-TX), Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction and Veterans Affairs.

Said Jon Soltz, Chairman and Co-founder, Votevets.org and Iraq War Veteran: “For far too long, this administration has tried to shortchange our troops and our veterans. Certainly, it’s the most anti-troop, anti-veteran administration in my lifetime. It’s time to restore responsibility to the budget, and the proposal from the majority does just that.”

Jesse Broder Van Dyke is a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii.

March 9, 2008 – Washington, DC — Oops! When Congress and the White House put together the recent bipartisan $150-billion economic stimulus package, they raised the maximum mortgage limits in high-cost areas for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration.

But lawmakers neglected to include a similar increase for VA-backed loans. While the limits of the other three programs now extend to $729,500 in the highest-cost areas — at least through Dec. 31 — VA loans remain capped at $417,000.

For home buyers such as Greg Rasnake, a lawyer and disabled veteran who works for the federal government, the $417,000 VA limit is a deal-killer. He, his wife and children moved to the Washington, D.C., area a year ago from Oklahoma. Since then, they’ve been searching for a single-family detached house in the D.C.’s Virginia suburbs but have been unable to use the VA loan guarantee program because of the $417,000 ceiling.

“There’s just no way you can find anything here where that limit comes even close,” he said. “You’d think that in a time of war, when you’re doing a stimulus bill and raising all the other loan limits, you might remember the vets. But that didn’t happen.”

As a result of the omission, areas of the country with some of the highest concentrations of veterans and high housing costs — California, Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia and Florida, among others — are effectively cut out of the stimulus package’s benefits when it comes to VA loans. Mortgages backed by the VA are especially attractive because they allow qualified veterans to buy houses without a down payment.

Without a legislative fix, the situation won’t change.

You might ask: How could this happen? How could a wartime president, a speaker of the House who represents high-cost San Francisco with its extensive military installations, an entire Cabinet-level agency, plus Veterans Affairs committees in the House and Senate all fail to include the VA program along with generous loan limit increases for Fannie, Freddie and FHA?

Asked for comment, the Department of Veterans Affairs declined to discuss the matter.

But House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Filner, a California Democrat who represents Chula Vista, was blunt: “I think it was out of ignorance,” he said. “Nobody thought about it, so this just slipped through.”

The VA program guarantees 25{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of the Fannie-Freddie conforming loan limit. Since private lenders generally are willing to make a zero-down payment loan for four times the guarantee level, the program has an effective mortgage limit of $417,000 nationwide.

The stimulus plan, however, temporarily reset the Fannie, Freddie and FHA limits to 125{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of metropolitan area median home prices, creating dozens of different limits around the country, without referencing the VA guarantee formula.

“It makes the VA program irrelevant in a lot of places,” Filner said. He is sponsoring legislation that would raise the VA’s effective limits to 150{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of the Fannie-Freddie maximums.

He also is seeking a “technical correction” amendment to the stimulus law but is not optimistic that it can be rushed through given Congress’ other priorities and tight schedule.

When Rasnake learned that the VA limits were overlooked, “I was devastated,” he said. Rasnake’s mortgage loan officer told him he is hardly alone. The lender said there were many vets looking to buy homes that he had lined up for VA financing in anticipation of the higher limits expected from the stimulus bill.

Though the VA program is smaller than Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or FHA, it is substantial in size and relatively low risk to the government. The program guarantees 2.2 million home loans totaling $243 billion, and the VA backs about 11,000 new loans a month, more than half of which go to first-time buyers, said Todd Bowers, director of government affairs for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Many VA-backed mortgages involve no equity investment up front — which typically raises default rates and foreclosures — yet the program performs well. During the third quarter of 2007, the VA 30-day delinquency rate was 6.58{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} compared with 12.92{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} for FHA and 16.3{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} for private, sub-prime loans, according to the Mortgage Bankers Assn. The foreclosure rate for VA loans during the same period was 1.03{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} versus 2.2{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} for FHA and 6.89{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} for sub-prime.

Hard to miss. But they did.

March 12, 2008 – Part 1 of a 3-part series

Thousands of American law enforcement officers have been called to military service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and authorities are increasingly focusing attention on how well some of those can reintegrate into domestic policing once they return home.

Isolated instances of serious problems have made headlines, raising concerns about potentially persistent negative effects of combat experience.

• In Texas, an officer recently back from reservist deployment to Iraq, opened fire on a suspect who was running through a crowded shopping center. The rounds narrowly missed the officer’s partner and one lodged in a van occupied by two children. “Everyone believes he should not have fired,” the officer’s attorney told USA Today. “His assessment of the threat level was wrong. He was assessing as if he was back in the military, not [as] a police officer.”

• In Georgia, an officer who’d served in Iraq with the National Guard was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter. He was part of a misdirected drug raid in which an elderly woman was killed. His lawyer says he was undergoing treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition afflicting a significant percentage of returning vets.

• In Nevada, a trooper who’d been in Iraq as an Army Guardsman, pleaded guilty to felony reckless driving and was sentenced to 2 to 12 years. According to the New York Times, he was driving 118 mph when he slammed into another car, killing four people and critically injuring another.

No one claims that all—or even a majority—of post-deployment veterans are menaces to society once they pin a badge back on and resume patrol duties. But by the same token, says Dr. Stephen Curran, a Maryland psychologist who counsels officers, “You can’t just put people back in [law enforcement] jobs, give them their guns and expect that things are going to be fine. Getting back into the flow of things is a challenge.”

Most manage the transition successfully. For others, the struggle can be more problematic.

To explore the issues involved in LEOs returning from combat zones, Dr. Beverly Anderson, clinical director and administrator of the Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Police Employee Assistance Program, convened a unique, invitation-only symposium at the department’s training academy. More than 200 police and mental health professionals representing 73 federal, state, county and city agencies in seven states attended to hear a panel of experts explain the harsh realities of returning to life stateside. PoliceOne was the only communications agency invited.

Drawing on the panel’s presentations, Part 1 of this exclusive series examines the roots of post-deployment adjustment problems. Part 2 will explore the challenges these present to officers, their families and their departments when they come home. In part 3, we’ll look at measures knowledgeable observers believe are necessary to assure a successful transition back to the streets.

WAR ZONE REALITIES.

During deployment, officer soldiers operate in a world that’s different in both subtle and significant ways from the domestic policing they left behind and will eventually return to.

When you’re in insurgent/terrorist-saturated combat zones, said Capt. Aaron Krenz, a criminal justice-trained reintegration operations officer and Iraq veteran with the Minnesota National Guard, “a box laying at the side of the road is a threat. You don’t trust anyone. Your life and your buddies’ lives depend on your being able to spot something out there, so you’re hyper-vigilant. You’re the law of the land, but you feel insecure. You’re expected to react without taking time to think about it. You start cutting emotional ties to your family, figuring they don’t need to know about things that are happening.

“It’s a selfish mentality, all about survival. And it doesn’t travel well when you come home.”

In the war zone, “we had unlimited powers,” explained Sgt. Patrick Campbell, a National Guard medic in Iraq and now a law student and legislative director of the Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans Assn. “If we wanted to stop someone, we stopped them. If we wanted to pull people out of a house, we pulled them. There was no need for probable cause or reasonable suspicion.”

Animosity and frustration regarding the local population quickly develop among combat warriors, noted Maj. David Englert, chief of the Behavioral Analysis Division of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. The common perception becomes that “they lie to us, they hide the enemy or are the enemy, they’re dirty and smell bad, they’re abusive to their women, their kids are constantly begging.”

Offensive vs. defensive driving tactics were noted by several panelists. “Every moment on the road, you had to make a split-second decision,” said Campbell, whose infantry unit was ambushed three times within its first four hours in Baghdad. “We’d drive down the center of the road and any car that got too close got shot. It was tempting to play bumper tag with irritating traffic.”

Krenz remarked, “When you swerved around a box or a plastic bottle, it wasn’t reckless driving. It was a survival technique. We’d get where we were going but we might push a dozen cars off the road to get there.” Englert added the “two rules of convoy: 1) Don’t stop; 2) Don’t let any car get between you and the guy ahead. You drive with a constant fear of being attacked or hitting an IED.”

Unrelenting fear can be difficult to escape. “In many areas of the combat zone,” said Englert, “bases are mortared almost every day and sometimes several times a day. Three of my agents were severely wounded in a suicide bomb attack inside the Green Zone while they were having lunch. There is no front line. When you go jogging you carry along a tourniquet so you can treat yourself if you’re hit.

“A ‘day off’ is hardly ever a day off. With loud sirens going off after rocket and mortar attacks, poor sleep is a common issue. People come back from the war worn out.”

And then there are the mind-bending experiences. You have to be always prepared with Police Medical Bag. Campbell told about two enemy snipers who tried to take out another medic from his unit but failed only because a chest plate saved him. Soldiers pursued the attackers’ pickup truck and riddled it with a thousand rounds. Wounded, the pair still clung to life. The person who treated them and brought them back from the brink of death was the medic they’d tried to kill. Indeed, Campbell’s first patient in Iraq was an insurgent who’d tried to plant a bomb to destroy him and a buddy.

Krenz described a married soldier with four children who killed three insurgents during an attack on his armored vehicle. He agonized about how he’d tell his family what he’d done, but “there was no time for him to sort things out before he had to be back on the road,” Krenz said. “What happened to that memory? He stuffed it.”

“I was shot at, blown up, nearly killed 15 times while I was there,” Campbell said. No psychological debriefing on any of his experiences took place. “You have to be like a porcupine over there,” he declared, “so nothing can get to you from the outside. But the memories don’t go away.”

CASUALTIES OF THE MIND.

The challenge of LEOs and other combat veterans attempting to reintegrate into families and jobs when they return from the war culture can be complicated by the type of injuries commonly suffered on our current battlefields. Dr. Louis French, a clinical psychologist who heads the Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (and the brother of a former cop), offered a sobering briefing on new research findings.

Nearly 70{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of injuries to troops in Iraq are caused by IEDs, French said, with these weapons constituting the leading cause of death. Flying objects from a device or “energized” from the environment by the explosion of course can inflict severe and obvious damage. Often less noticeably, shock waves from the blast can produce dangerous sudden pressure on the body and perilous movement or concussion of the head in particular. Among survivors, temporary unconsciousness is common.

French estimated that while in the war zone 10{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} to 20{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of our fighting troops experience traumatic brain injury (TBI), often from an IED detonation. Even mild TBI can affect impulse control, emotions and demeanor, cognitive awareness and memory, aggressiveness, sleep patterns and other behavioral aspects, he pointed out.

By the time they leave the war theater, at least two-thirds of TBI victims appear to be free of undesirable neurobehavioral symptoms, French said. Within a year, 85{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} to 95{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} “are completely better—back to baseline with no issues.” Some, however, “will continue to suffer” ill effects.

“A strenuous explosion can make you sick the rest of your life,” French said. “There are medications that can be helpful, but they are not foolproof.”

Another potential war zone injury—“one for which no Purple Heart is given”—is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which French said shares a “great overlap of symptoms” with TBI. “If you are wounded, you’re three times more likely to develop PTSD,” he said.

Englert cited research indicating that up to nearly 35{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of service personnel showed evidence of PTSD or other significant stress disorders immediately after returning from Afghanistan. According to Krenz, 30{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of National Guard reservists “show signs of mental health issues four to five months after demobilization.” And as officers know from experience with critical incidents in domestic policing, serious stress conditions, unresolved, can have a long-term detrimental impact.

Englert also mentioned another mind-risk that can affect an LEO’s performance once he returns home. That’s a fatalistic philosophy some soldiers absorb from the local population. “Those people think the day you are going to die is determined the day you are born,” Englert explained. That orientation can lead to “reckless behavior, because you think, If it’s my day, it’s my day and if it’s not, it’s not. My fate is out of my hands.”

“No one comes away from war unscathed,” said French, in a bottom-line summary of life in a combat zone. The other seminar presenters emphatically agreed. Campbell put it this way: “No one crosses a river without getting wet, and no one goes to war without being changed.”

In the next installment, we see how those changes may manifest themselves when law officers return to their families and the job.

VCS Reviews Book About Iraq War Costs – Bush’s Endless $3 Trillion Fiasco Crushes Our Military, Our VA, and Our Economy

A fantastic new book details exactly how President George W. Bush’s lost Iraq War fiasco bleeds our country of precious life and money every day. For the first time ever, two authors with impeccable objective academic credentials catalog the long-hidden human and financial consequences of the most disastrous foreign policy mistake in our history.

Thanks to your financial support, Veterans for Common Sense provided the authors of The Three Trillion Dollar War with hundreds of pages of official government documents VCS obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). We were honored to assist in this crucial effort.

The book, packed with facts and written in plain language for the American public, was written by Columbia University Professor Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Harvard University Professor Linda Bilmes, a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce. The book is perfect for schools and will serve as the benchmark for the need for open government and the power of FOIA.

Buy the book today so you can be the first of your friends to read it!

Due to the authors’ strong dedication to a reality-based world, the devastating facts from the two wars are now reported in the press. The military now admits there are nearly 74,000 battlefield casualties – defined as killed, wounded, injured, and ill. And VA now confirms there are 300,000 walking wounded U.S. veterans. The 40-year price tag for healthcare and disability benefits for our veterans may reach $700 billion.

As a result of the incomplete and misleading information produced by the military and VA since 2001 until this book was published, the public was mostly oblivious to the true human and financial costs of the wars. Others we rely upon for oversight were left in the cold: Congress, reporters, and academics were unable to obtain critical facts about the total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

In stepped VCS to fill the gap on the cost of caring for veterans. We used FOIA because the Bush administration orchestrated a broad attempt to deliberately conceal the human and financial consequences of the two wars.

Please make a donation to VCS now so we can continue our efforts to force the government to reveal the hidden costs of war.

All Americans – especially returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, reporters, and legislators – must read this book to fully comprehend the enormous long-term human and financial consequences from the two wars charged to our grand children’s credit cards. The significance of this information is only beginning to be felt.

The Three Trillion Dollar War also provides several reasonable and responsible recommendations on how to fix VA’s problems so that we don’t repeat the mistake of abandoning our veterans again. VCS supports these solid reforms proposed by Stiglitz and Bilmes because we want veterans to know about VA, for veterans to want to seek help at VA, and for VA to be fully prepared to assist all of our Nation’s veterans.

All Americans, especially veterans and our families, should thank the authors for sounding the alarm about the recklessness of the current administration. The lesson from the book is ominous: unless we plan now for the long-term care for an estimated 700,000 disabled veterans, the social consequences will be devastating – an increased risk of more broken homes, higher unemployment, more drug and alcohol abuse, increased homelessness, and even suicides.

Go to Amazon today to purchase your copy of “The Three Trillion Dollar War.”

Thanks to your generous support, Veterans for Common Sense was able to devote hundreds of hours time and other resources needed to identify and obtain the documents that made this book possible. Please continue supporting VCS in all of our endeavors for veterans!

Thank you,

Paul Sullivan
Executive Director
Veterans for Common Sense

VCS provides advocacy and publicity for issues related to veterans, national security, and civil liberties. VCS is registered with the IRS as a non-profit 501(c)(3) charity, and donations are tax deductible.

March 11, 2008 – Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia read the funnies over the radio to cheer up New Yorkers during a newspaper strike. President Franklin Roosevelt gave “fireside chats” to bolster Americans during the depression. President Bush used his radio address on Saturday to try to scare Americans into believing they have to sacrifice their rights and their values to combat terrorism.

Mr. Bush announced that he had vetoed the 2008 intelligence budget because it contains a clause barring the C.I.A. from torturing prisoners. Mr. Bush told the nation that it “would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror — the C.I.A. program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives.” That is simply not true. Nothing in the bill shuts down the C.I.A. interrogation program. It just requires the C.I.A.’s interrogators to follow the rules already contained in the Army field manual on prisoners.

The manual does not stop interrogators from questioning prisoners aggressively. It simply forbids the use of techniques that are regarded by most civilized people as abuse and torture, including sexual abuse, electric shocks, mock executions and the infamous form of simulated drowning known as waterboarding.

In a letter we published on Sunday, Mark Mansfield, the C.I.A. spokesman, said the agency has no objections to those restrictions and that the “C.I.A. neither conducts nor condones torture.”

We’re glad he cleared that up. Mr. Mansfield’s boss, the C.I.A. director, Gen. Michael Hayden, told Congress recently that he had banned waterboarding in 2006 (after the courts started questioning Mr. Bush’s detention policies), but he was still “not certain” whether it is legal.

General Hayden’s boss, the director of national intelligence, thinks it is, and Vice President Dick Cheney apparently agrees.

That made us wonder what Mr. Mansfield had in mind when he wrote that the field manual is too confining, that there are interrogation techniques the C.I.A. wants to use but won’t talk about. He said they are necessary and approved by the Justice Department and the intelligence committees in Congress.

But the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, John Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, disagreed strongly. He said the veto itself would hurt intelligence-gathering “in the name of preserving a separate C.I.A. interrogation program that Congress has determined is not necessary and, in fact, counterproductive.”

Mr. Bush said the C.I.A. program helped “prevent a number of attacks,” but Mr. Rockefeller said he had “heard nothing” to suggest that was true. He also said any information the C.I.A. collected could have been obtained through legal methods.

This is not the first time that Mr. Bush has misled Americans on intelligence-gathering and antiterrorism operations, and it may not be the last. It will be up to the next president to restore the rule of law.

March 12, 2008 – As the war in Iraq slides into its sixth year, a cottage industry has grown up to determine how much the conflict has actually cost. Senate Democrats just carried out a feckless debate over still-another bill to bring the troops home. This time, they said the nation’s troubled economy left President Bush no choice but to stop spending billions in Iraq. The proposal died quickly under the threat of another veto.

Now two economists, from Harvard and Columbia, are publishing a book titled “The Three-Trillion Dollar War.” That is near the upper end of the estimations of the war’s cost. The Congressional Budget Office says that number is bloated.

At the low end of the scale, the Department of Defense says it has spent $396 billion as of November 2007. In February, the Congressional Research Service noted that the Pentagon hadn’t counted more than $200 billion in approved but unspent funds, or money spent by other agencies.

How much has the Bush administration spent on the war? What will it cost in total if the next president begins bringing the troops home shortly after taking office next year? It all depends on what you count. The two authors blame the war, in part, for the rise in oil prices and add that to the cost. Some analysts add the lost dollars that might have flowed into the economy, had all of that money been spent in the United States. (In truth, much of the money spent for equipment is spent in the United States.)

Without larding on rank speculation, here are numbers that seem undebatable. Nonpartisan congressional analysts estimate that Iraq war’s direct cost will reach $1.2 trillion if the next president begins rapidly withdrawing troops, leaving only 30,000 in Iraq two years from now. Here’s what needs to be added:

Almost every dollar spent on the war is borrowed. The Congressional Budget office says, under the quick withdrawal scenario, interest payments through 2017 will total $590 billion.

“Reseting” the military — replacing worn and damaged equipment and rebuilding the force — is an unavoidable expense. In 2007, the Pentagon asked for $46 billion in “reset” funds. Most analysts believe the costs will reach at least $100 billion more.

Finally, comes the cost of veterans’ health care in the months and years ahead. So far at least 60,000 Iraq-war veterans have been wounded or received mental health care. Each totally disabled veteran is eligible to receive $1.4 million in lifetime disability payments if he lives an additional 50 years. Estimates of the total cost range from $200 billion to $650 billion, a number put out by a group of physicians a few weeks ago. Let’s go with the low number.

With all of that, the Iraq war will cost at least $2.1 trillion — and probably much more.

Billion, trillion … zillion. At these levels, a fictitious number seems to hold almost as much meaning as a real one. So writers and analysts try to make sense of the sums by showing what all that money could buy. One blogger noted that “you could buy 480 million Ferrari 612s,” at $268,000 a copy. That was a year ago, when the war-cost estimates costs totaled only about $1.2 trillion.

The two authors, Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia and Linda Bilmes of Harvard, note that, for less than the cost of the war, the nation could balance the Social Security system for at least 75 years.

Here’s another way to spend $2.1 trillion over 10 years: Eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax. Provide preschool for every child in the United States. Give every schoolteacher in the nation a $20,000 raise. Double the research budgets for cancer, heart disease and stroke.

In the end, however, all of this number gaming is meaningless. To fight the war, Bush has not taken money intended for other purposes. He is spending money the nation doesn’t have. Almost every dollar spent on the war is another dollar added to the national debt.

Some in the Bush administration argue that war spending stimulates the economy, giving some balance to the equation. But if that were so, why did administration find it necessary to enact a $168 billion stimulus plan a few weeks ago — even as it spends $15 billion a month on the war?

As Lawrence Lindsey, Bush’s former chief economic adviser, puts it: “Taking resources that could be used to build homes, manufacture appliances, or invent and develop new technologies and using them instead to make things that get blown up is not good for an economy.”

March 12, 2008 – The Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office has notified Eric Hall’s family this morning that the remains found in a culvert Sunday was the former Marine.

A detective from the agency notified the family at 10 a.m. and relayed the cause of death has not been determined.

Becky Hall, Eric’s mother, plans a press conference at noon.

The family scheduled a military memorial service at noon Thursday at the Faith Lutheran Church, 4005 Palm Drive, Punta Gorda.