Veterans for Common Sense

February 27, 2008 – PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa. — Rows of hotline operators with muted voices mask the desperation of incoming calls on a recent afternoon: a soldier back from Iraq with a drinking problem and a broken marriage; an Army recruiter in the throes of depression; a Marine in Iraq eager to reach his wife after the birth of his son.

This warren of cubicles in a suburban-Philadelphia office building — with two other call centers in Arlington, Va., and St. Petersburg, Fla. — are the Pentagon’s front line for fighting the strain of war.

The 24-hour hotline program, Military OneSource, offers an array of services to soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines or their families, from tax preparation and financial advice to psychological and family counseling. It augments military chaplains and base programs.

DIALING FOR DIRECTION: Calls rise at Pentagon help hotline

A few years ago, OneSource consultants found a temporary home for a 15-foot pet boa constrictor while its owner, an Army National Guard soldier, went to Iraq. In 2005, U.S. military doctors at a combat hospital in Iraq used the hotline to find a translator who could help treat, by telephone conference call, a wounded Nepalese soldier.
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But the calls that send consultants to the “serenity room” here to chill out, or to take a walk around the building, are pleas for help from war-weary troops or their relatives.

“There’s a lot of stress (for) a lot of servicemembers who are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Amy DiMalanta, 34, who answers calls.

“They’re having a lot of issues they’re facing at home like reintegration (with their family) or just the stress of, ‘Am I going to go back (to war)?’ ” she says. “A lot of them emphasize that they have a hard time sleeping … having nightmares or they’re thinking that, ‘Oh, I’m still in Iraq,’ or ‘I’m thinking I’m going to hear a bomb go off.’ “

Through the program, operated by Minneapolis-based Ceridian Corp., callers to 800-342-9647 get up to six free sessions with a licensed therapist located no more than 30 miles from their home, says Cherie Zadlo, a former Air Force colonel who runs OneSource. The first session must be made available within three days.

Timothy Larsen, Marine Corps chief of family programs, calls OneSource “an invaluable tool.”

Once a week, there is a crisis call, often a threat of suicide, says Dan Lafferty, a licensed social worker and clinical supervisor here. Operators silently alert co-workers while keeping the servicemember on the line. Supervisors will listen in on the conversation. If necessary, authorities are contacted, Zadlo says.

“You ask them if they have a plan,” DiMalanta says. “(They say) ‘I just think I want to die. I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m desperate. I’m lost.’ And so you take it from there.”

A more common plea for help, however, is the call like the one from Army wife Angie Ayers, 36, of Lone Pier, Mich.

“They helped me deal with my teenage daughter’s anger over her dad being gone,” says Ayers, whose husband, Joe, deployed with the National Guard to Iraq in 2004-05.

Ayers’ daughter, Elizabeth, then 13, grew angrier with her dad’s absence: slamming doors, scrawling hate words on a photo of Osama bin Laden and dissolving into tears at news of a death in her father’s unit. OneSource found a family counselor for the Ayers family.

Mother and daughter attended. “She (Elizabeth) was getting better, and I noticed,” Ayers says.

Since early last year, Ceridian has operated OneSource under a bridge contract while the Pentagon has sought competitive bids for a new three-year deal.

Services from OneSource’s hotline offered to military families include personal finance management, information on educational loans, spouse employment training and career management, and self-help groups that focus on drug and alcohol abuse, gambling addiction and eating disorders.

Serious medical or psychological problems are referred to military health care, Zadlo says. But stress or marital issues can be treated by in-person counseling with private-sector therapists under a promise that the military chain-of-command will not be notified, she says.

Pentagon surveys last year show that 71{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of the wives of junior enlisted servicemembers say loneliness is a serious problem during deployments. A program goal is to offer a voice on the phone for military families. There are also online chat rooms and workshops.

“We’re thinking that Military OneSource is sort of like a club you belong to,” says Jane Burke, who supervises the program for the Pentagon’s Office of Military Community and Family Policy. “We think it is the way of the future for the military to get connected (to troops and their families).”

NEW YORK (AP) — Sen. Joseph Biden on Monday called for more U.S. aid for Afghanistan and deeper NATO involvement there, saying failure could also have dire consequences for neighboring Pakistan.

NATO must be “fully in the fight” in Afghanistan — nothing less than the future of the alliance is at stake, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told a luncheon crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Many of our NATO allies thought they were signing up for a peacekeeping mission, not counter-insurgency operations,” said Biden, D-Del. “Many are fighting with incredible bravery in the south. But the so-called “national caveats” are making a mockery of NATO — and the notion of a unified mission.”

Each nation that contributes troops operates under so-called national caveats that limit what its troops can do.

Nearly seven years after a U.S.-led invasion defeated the Taliban regime, NATO has about 42,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, 14,000 of whom are American.

Biden recently traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and he said the stakes are as high as they’ve ever been for the future of those nations.

“Afghanistan must never again become a safe haven for al-Qaida. But just as important, if Afghanistan fails, Pakistan could follow, because extremists will set their sights on the bigger prize to the east,” he said.

With Pakistan’s recent parliamentary elections swept by opposition candidates, President Pervez Musharraf seemed willing to leave office peaceably, Biden said.

“I think he will go gently into the good night,” Biden said.

Musharraf’s spokesman, Rashid Qureshi, told Dawn News television in Pakistan on Monday that the Pakistani leader would not respond to any suggestion by a U.S. senator that he should withdraw from the presidency quietly and gracefully.

Some Pakistani leaders and many media commentators also have called for Musharraf, a key U.S. ally against terrorism, to resign.

The parties of assassinated Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and former premier Nawaz Sharif won a majority of the seats in the new parliament and are expected to form a coalition government. But they fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to impeach Musharraf.

Biden urged a huge boost in U.S. spending on reconstructing Afghanistan, putting a single person in charge of reconstruction and focusing on arresting drug kingpins there.

“We have spent on Afghanistan’s reconstruction in six years what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq,” he said. “How do you spell hope in Dari and Pashtu? A-S-P-H-A-L-T.”

 The United States is funding and in many cases arming the three ethnic factions in Iraq—the  Kurds, the  Shiites  and the  Sunni Arabs. These factions rule over partitioned patches of Iraqi territory and brutally purge rival ethnic groups from their midst. Iraq no longer exists as a unified state. It is a series of heavily armed fiefdoms run by thugs, gangs, militias, radical Islamists and warlords who are often  paid wages of $300 a month by the U.S. military. Iraq is Yugoslavia before the storm. It is a caldron of weapons, lawlessness, hate and criminality that is destined to implode. And the current U.S. policy, born of desperation and defeat, means that when Iraq goes up, the U.S. military will have to scurry like rats for cover.

The supporters of the war, from the Bush White House to Sen. John McCain, tout the surge as the magic solution. But the surge, which primarily deployed 30,000 troops in and around Baghdad, did little to thwart the sectarian violence. The decline in attacks began only when we bought off the Sunni Arabs. U.S. commanders in the bleak fall of 2006 had little choice. It was that or defeat. The steady rise in U.S. casualties, the massive car bombs that tore apart city squares in Baghdad and left hundreds dead, the brutal ethnic cleansing that was creating independent ethnic enclaves beyond our control throughout Iraq, the death squads that carried out mass executions and a central government that was as corrupt as it was impotent signaled catastrophic failure.

The United States cut a deal with its Sunni Arab enemies. It would pay the former insurgents. It would allow them to arm and form military units and give them control of their ethnic enclaves. The Sunni Arabs, in exchange, would halt attacks on U.S. troops. The Sunni Arabs agreed.

The U.S. is currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pay the monthly salaries of some 600,000 armed fighters in the three rival ethnic camps in Iraq. These fighters—Shiite, Kurd and Sunni Arab—are not only antagonistic but deeply unreliable allies. The Sunni Arab militias have replaced central government officials, including police, and taken over local administration and security in the pockets of Iraq under their control. They have no loyalty outside of their own ethnic community. Once the money runs out, or once they feel strong enough to make a thrust for power, the civil war in Iraq will accelerate with deadly speed. The tactic of money-for-peace failed in Afghanistan. The U.S. doled out funds and weapons to tribal groups in Afghanistan to buy their loyalty, but when the payments and weapons shipments ceased, the tribal groups headed back into the embrace of the Taliban.

The Sunni Arab militias are known by a variety of names: the Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias call themselves “sahwas” (“sahwa” being the Arabic word for awakening). There are now 80,000 militia fighters, nearly all Sunni Arabs, paid by the United States to control their squalid patches of Iraq. They are expected to reach 100,000. The Sunni Arab militias have more fighters under arms than the Shiite Mahdi Army and are about half the size of the feeble Iraqi army. The Sunni Awakening groups, which fly a yellow satin flag, are forming a political party.

The Sunni Arab militias, though they have ended attacks on U.S. forces, detest the Shiite-Kurdish government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and abhor the presence of U.S. troops on Iraqi soil. They take the money and the support with clenched teeth because with it they are able to build a renegade Sunni army, a third force inside Iraq, which they believe will make it possible to overthrow the central government. The Sunni Arabs, who make up about 40 percent of Iraq’s population, held most positions of power under Saddam Hussein. They dominated Iraq’s old officer corps. They made up its elite units, including the Republic Guard divisions and the Special Forces regiments. They controlled the intelligence agencies. There are several hundred thousand well-trained Sunni Arabs who lack only an organizational structure. We have now made the formation of this structure possible. These militias are the foundation for a deadlier insurgent force, one that will dwarf anything the United States faced in the past. The U.S. is arming, funding and equipping its own assassins.

There have been isolated clashes that point to a looming conflagration. A Shiite-dominated unit of the regular army in the late summer of 2007 attacked a strong Sunni Arab force west of Baghdad. U.S. troops thrust themselves between the two factions. The enraged Shiites, thwarted in their attack, kidnapped relatives of the commander of the Sunni Arab force, and American negotiators had to plead frantically for their release. There have been scattered incidents like this one throughout Iraq.

If the U.S. begins, as promised, to withdraw troops, it will be harder to keep these antagonistic factions apart. The cease-fire by the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, extended a few days ago, could collapse. And if that happens, a civil war, unlike anything U.S. forces have experienced in Iraq, will begin. Such a conflagration, with the potential to draw in neighboring states and lead to the dismemberment of Iraq, would be the final chapter of the worst foreign policy blunder in American history.

The federal government could be a step closer to suing the state of Tennessee.

It all stems from problems at the Tennessee State Veterans Homes.

A NewsChannel 5 investigation first exposed problems at the state-run nursing homes.

And soon after, the U.S. Department of Justice opened its own investigation.

Investigative reporter Jennifer Kraus got a copy of the Justice Department’s final report, which was just delivered to Gov. Phil Bredesen. It’s filled with examples of how federal inspectors say the state has failed to care for its veterans and even contributed to some of their deaths.

The U.S. Justice Department lays it all out in its 43-page report, and it’s not pretty.

Federal inspectors visited the Tennessee State Veterans Homes in Murfreesboro and Humboldt three times last spring and early summer.

They came to the conclusion that, not only is Tennessee failing to take care of its veterans, but the report went on to say, “We have concluded that numerous conditions and practices at the TSVHs violate the constitutional and federal rights of the residents.”

The report describes how one patient after another has suffered at the state-run facilities from a laundry list of critical problems.

Specifically, it says, “We find that residents of the TSVHs suffer significant harm and risk of harm.”

And the report goes on to list the areas of greatest concern, including:

• Facilities’ inadequate medical and nursing care services
• Improper and dangerous psychotropic medication practices
• Failure to provide adequate safety
• Inadequate nutritional and rehabilitation services.

But, perhaps the Justice Department’s most disturbing finding was that this “unconscionably poor health care… is causing needless suffering and, in some cases, premature deaths.”

State Finance Commissioner Dave Goetz takes issue with some of the wording in the report.

“I would put it in past tense because I don’t believe that to be the case anymore,” Goetz tells Kraus.

But Goetz admits the Homes did have serious issues with patient care when federal inspectors visited last year.

Kraus asks Goetz, “How bad do you think it was a year ago?”

Goetz answers, “Worse than I thought.”

He insists though that the state began working to correct the problems immediately after the Department of Justice first pointed them out last year.

Goetz explains, “We have replaced the head operator, the manager of the home. We have replaced the medical director. We have added a dietician. We have replaced the director of nursing. We’ve replaced a significant number of staff. We have added social workers so people get activities that they’re supposed to be. We have made enormous efforts.”

When state lawmakers toured the Murfreesboro home less than two weeks ago, they gave it high marks.

Now, state officials hope federal inspectors will do the same.

Goetz says, “We believe that if the Department of Justice would go into the homes today, they would find dramatically different circumstances.”

The Justice Department however does not, as far as we know, have any plans at this point to revisit any of the homes.

Instead, the federal government has given the state a long list of changes it wants made at the homes. The state has 49 days to make the improvements.

Goetz says most have already been made.

If, in 49 days, the Justice Department doesn’t agree that enough has changed, it has now put the state on notice that the U.S. Attorney General will file a federal lawsuit against Tennessee. It’s something that could wind up costing Tennessee millions of dollars.

NEW YORK (Commentary) In the autumn of 2002, the drumbeat began for a U.S. attack on Iraq. Our “coverage of the coverage” of the war has earned several prestigious national awards, but one of our most significant efforts came near the very beginning. It was a special issue, dated Jan. 27, 2003 — E&P was still a weekly then — and it carried a color photo of the president in an Army jacket. The cover line read: “Unanswered Questions: In Grip of War Fever, Has the Press Missed the Mark on Bush and Iraq?”

As it happened, E&P was one of the few mainstream publications to repeatedly raise serious doubts about the basis for the war and how the media was going about covering that.

Inside that issue (which appeared almost two months before the U.S. invasion), the cover story, based largely on interviews conducted by Joe Strupp and Dave Astor, carried the headline, “On the War Path: As public opinion swirls, the press must dig deeper for answers to key questions surrounding the likely attack on Iraq.” Looking back at those interviewed for the story, one finds many “ouch” quotes. George Will called the coverage of the run-up “amazingly thorough.” Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, claimed that readers had “a pretty good idea what is going on,” and agreed it was “very good coverage.”

Bill Keller, then a columnist for The New York Times (which had fallen down badly in much of its handling of the Iraqi WMD) said that the paper’s overall coverage had been “as aggressive as you can be on a subject that is complicated and closely held.” He claimed that newspapers had “learned their lesson” from the spinning during the Gulf War. Howell Raines, then the paper’s executive editor, added, “We approach this story with the full knowledge that the military is not always forthcoming.”

Unlike many other publications, we gave ample space to the skeptics. Richard Reeves called coverage “generally pro-war.” David Halberstam said he felt “uneasy about this war.” Phil Bronstein, then editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, declared that a lot of questions had not been answered at all. “Where is the debate?” asked Orville Schell. Arianna Huffington questioned the lack of discussion of American casualties.

Norman Solomon concluded the feature with this: “Experience tells us that once the Pentagon’s missiles start to fly, the space for critical assessments and dissent in U.S. news media quickly contracts. Journalists get caught up in the war fever — their careers may benefit, but journalism suffers.”

Other stories in that issue looked at the often weak treatment of the anti-war movement and how editorial pages were deeply conflicted in their views of the coming invasion. One highlight was my lengthy interview with famed Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Like many other “anti-war” types he had been scoffed at during this period, but his comments in the interview proved amazingly prescient (unlike, say, those expressed by the editorial writers and numerous columnists at The Washington Post).

Ellsberg said, flatly, “The government, like in Vietnam, is lying us into war. Like Vietnam, it’s a reckless, unnecessary war, where the risks greatly outweigh any possible benefits.” He listed three things the press was getting wrong about Iraq: that Saddam “represents the No. 1 danger to U.S. security in the world,” that “we are reducing the threat of the use of weapons of mass destruction by attacking Iraq,” and “the reasons we are singling out Saddam is that he cannot be contained or deterred, unlike other leaders in the world.” (For all of this and much more, see my book on the media and Iraq, “So Wrong for So Long,” coming next week.)

Jim Moscou, an E&P contributing editor, wrote a brilliant column about war fever, which he had identified after he signed up as one of the first U.S. reporters to undergo “bio/chem hazardous duty” training in England in advance of the invasion. He finished his piece with this haunting graf: “A young reporter for a Denver newspaper said to me that he thought war reporting was ‘the highest calling’ for a journalist. He’s preparing for Iraq. He’s a nice guy, enthusiastic about his job. But the comment gnawed at me. Weeks later, I realized he was dead wrong. The highest calling in journalism is not war reporting. It’s finding the story that would help prevent a war. Along the road to Baghdad, we seem to have lost that idea.”

Two weeks later, I wrote a column based on an interview with Sydney Schanberg, the former New York Times war reporter best known for experience in Vietnam and Cambodia dramatized in the Oscar-winning film, “The Killing Fields.” We chatted about his hopes and fears for the “embed” process. It is reprinted below.
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“Em-bed-ded,” said Sydney H. Schanberg, savoring the word’s many ambiguities and connotations. “Embedded means, ‘You’re there.’ It also means, ‘You’re stuck.'” Schanberg is one of the media’s leading authorities on hazardous duty.

A decorated correspondent for The New York Times, his adventures in Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1970s — and the plight of his former aide, Dith Pran — were dramatized in the Oscar-winning 1984 film, “The Killing Fields.” An Army veteran himself, Schanberg, 68, left the Times in 1986 and now writes for The Village Voice in New York.

Last week, after E&P received a copy of the “ground rules” for embedded reporters who will give up certain press freedoms for the chance to travel with U.S. combat troops attacking Iraq, we forwarded a copy to Schanberg. His reaction? He’s impressed by the Pentagon’s promise of media access and long list of what will be “releasable.” It appears to be a “big leap forward” from the military’s shutting off (or jerking around) reporters in the country’s most recent armed conflicts. And, in any case, “anything’s better than covering the war from a briefing room, where you are always the stupidest person in the room.”

But, on closer inspection, doubts grew. “If I were an editor and I received this document,” he said, “I’d be on the phone to the Pentagon for clarification within 10 minutes. I’d be saying, ‘What do you mean by that?'”

This is critical because the embedding concept is clearly aimed at getting “good P.R.” for the military, he added. “It’s hard for any reporter to be aggressively critical of someone you’re bonding with,” Schanberg pointed out. Perhaps that’s why he has “never been embedded” and in Vietnam insisted on being “self-governed.” In fact, he urged editors now to request fewer embedded slots or at least allow their best reporters to roam freely.

“You’d rather not be hampered at all,” he admitted, “but as a journalist, and a realist, I don’t expect to walk into the military’s shop and break all the china. You’re a fool if you believe that. But the military, on the other hand, must recognize you are a professional.” Indeed, he found in Vietnam that only one in a thousand reporters would ever knowingly jeopardize a military operation, and no doubt that remains true today.

Many of the new ground rules Schanberg finds sensible or benign. The rule forbidding journalists from carrying firearms seems like a good one, although a few gonzos did pack pistols in Vietnam, he recalled. “Anything that makes you look like a combatant,” he said, “is bad.” That’s also why he (unlike Chris Hedges) is against reporters speeding off in jeeps. The new rules, in fact, ban breaking away in any vehicle.

Schanberg is also impressed that the rules seem to carry no requirement for submitting copy to authorities — i.e., no opportunity for censorship. That doesn’t mean self-censorship will not arise. And the more he studied the rules, the more he found vague language, restrictions, and situations where copy can be held, if not sanitized. For example, Rule 4F7 says that the date, time, or location of completed missions and actions, as well as results, are “releasable” — but “only if described in general terms.”

He’s also concerned about Rule 4A: “All interviews with service members will be on the record.” Sounds fine, right? The problem is, if soldiers fear their names may be in papers, it “has the possibility of shutting people up,” Schanberg declared. If they say anything negative about an operation or living conditions, their superior “may have their ass.” In Vietnam, he recalled, “most things guys really wanted to tell you were not on the record.” Also, will reporters always have a military escort — or “baby sitter,” as he put it — to listen in as they interview troops or visit local hospitals?

Even what he initially saw as a big plus — not having to submit stories for approval — came to look like a double-edged sword when he considered the strongly worded language about expelling “embeds” who get out of line. “You might be able to file what you want,” he explained, “but you will always have to worry about the penalty if you are on the edge of the rules. That’s certainly designed to make you pull your punches if you have any doubts. They’re saying, ‘Here are the rules: If you don’t follow them, you get thrown out.'”

This made him reflect on a war reporter’s higher calling. “Civil disobedience,” he said, “is needed sometimes, and you just have to accept the possible consequences.” He offered the example of rushing off on your own, against orders, to the scene of a rumored massacre of civilians (a scene, one recalls, from “The Killing Fields”).

“The only way we will know anything for sure,” Schanberg advised, “is when the rules go into practice. That’s the test, and until then we need to say — we’ll believe it when we see it.”

Editor’s note: Chellie Pingree, from North Haven, is a Democratic candidate for Congress in Maine’s First Congressional District. James E. N. Bachelder from Acton is Maine state commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

It was just about a year ago that the nation was shocked by a Washington Post story that revealed the dismal conditions inside the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Over 700 active duty soldiers with serious physical and psychological issues were being warehoused in rundown buildings, neglected and lost in a tangle of bureaucracy without access to the care they desperately needed.

Once again, America was caught not living up to the promise we have made to the men and women who serve — that we will take care of you when you come home.

Some progress has been made, but there is much more that needs to be done, especially for veterans who have completed their service and are ready to come home. They’ve fought for us; now it’s our turn to stand up and fight for them.

Maine has one of the highest percentages of veterans of any state in the country. Over 140,000 Mainers have worn a uniform. Nearly 90 percent of the Maine National Guard has been deployed to Iraq, and too many of them have come home bearing the scars of combat.

According to a new government study, the rate of suicide among those returning from Iraq or Afghanistan has increased substantially. And over half of those who took their own lives were members of the Guard or Reserves.

Better and faster emergency care on the battlefield means more and more servicemen and servicewomen are surviving, but improvements in the availability of mental health treatment have not kept pace.

It’s estimated that 30 percent to 40 percent of all Iraq veterans will face some sort of mental health issue when they come home, and although the VA provides some of the best care in the world, it simply doesn’t have the resources to adequately address those problems. In the current system, less than 40 percent of vets with psychological conditions are getting the treatment they need.

The first step to address this need is a thorough and confidential health-care assessment for all returning veterans. And those who need help making the transition back home should get it. The Maine National Guard has taken this step, but the VA should be able to make it available to all returning servicemen and women. Too often the health care and benefits that veterans have earned are buried under a mountain of paperwork and kept out of reach by bureaucratic delays. Too often, when a vet comes home from war unable to work because of disabilities, a long delay in awarding disability leads to homelessness.

Sometimes the wounds inflicted in a combat zone aren’t very visible. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are real injuries that affect tens of thousands of veterans. The diagnosis isn’t always easy, but rules and regulations shouldn’t make it more difficult.

Congressman Tom Allen has introduced a bill that would remove certain requirements that have been keeping veterans suffering from PTSD from getting the treatment they needed. Simply put, if a health-care professional determines a veteran returning from war is suffering from PTSD, that diagnosis will be enough, without requiring documentation that is often difficult or impossible to obtain.

Because the VA budget is discretionary, not mandatory, reliable funding is hard to come by, which leads to delays and cutbacks. Injured veterans are denied the benefits they deserve and they end up paying the price. Complicated forms and a difficult-to-navigate application and appeals process make it worse. The VA budget should be made mandatory and the treatment and benefits process streamlined. Veterans should be able get the help they need without having to fight for it.

Congressman Mike Michaud has been an effective and outspoken advocate for veterans and in addition to cosponsoring Congressman Allen’s proposal. Last summer, he introduced a bill that would start to fix some of the problems that vets face. The Veterans Health Care Improvement Act would not only improve access to care and benefits, but it would also commit significant resources to helping those who have slipped through the cracks — like the 200,000 veterans around this country who will sleep on the street tonight.

Both of us have friends and neighbors who have come home from war only to find they have to fight another battle to get the care and benefits they need. We can and must do a better job taking care of these men and women. They deserve it.

It’s been nearly five years since former White House political adviser Karl Rove sent an incriminating email to then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley indicating that Rove had a candid conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration’s prewar Iraq intelligence.

Rove had insisted publicly and privately that he was not the source for a story Cooper wrote that unmasked Plame’s affiliation with the CIA in July 2003 nor, Rove said, was he the source who provided syndicated columnist with the same information for a column that was published a few days before Cooper’s. The email Rove sent to Hadley on July 11, 2003, just three months before the start of a federal probe into the leak clearly contradicted Rove’s account.

Questions about Rove’s email to Hadley resurfaced after the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) revealed last April that thousands of emails Rove sent over a four-year period via an email account maintained by the Republican National Committee might have been destroyed. Many of the emails Rove sent using his RNC account pertained to White House business and the fact that it was not archived is said to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

Additionally, CREW said it conducted an investigation that discovered the White House lost as many as 10 million emails. The White House said in a court document that it erased backup tapes containing the email archives, some of which relate to a wide-range of administration scandals, including the role of White House officials in the Plame leak.

In late September 2003, three months after he told Hadley in an email that he spoke with Cooper, Rove and about 1,000 other White House staffers were ordered to turn over all email correspondence that contained references to Plame and Wilson to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales when the leak of Plame’s undercover status was referred to federal investigators.

But the Hadley email was never turned over to Gonzales during the early stages of the Plame investigation.

Robert Luskin, Rove’s attorney, had long maintained that the email was never found during the initial search because the right “search words” weren’t used. Some reporters and bloggers have opined the Rove/Hadley email did not turn up because Rove sent it using his Republican National Committee account. But according to a little known story published in The Washington Post in December 2005, Rove used his government account click here when he sent Hadley an email describing his conversation with Time’s Matthew Cooper.

Luskin stated several years ago during an interview with Newsweek that the email did not surface because “right search words weren’t used.”

In an email exchange a couple of weeks ago requesting that he clarify his position, Luskin said he “speculated that the [Hadley] email was overlooked because of a gap in search terms, but I have no direct knowledge.” That contradicts his previous statements to Newsweek in which Luskin stated unequivocally that the email was not found because the wrong search terms were used.

“Neither Mr. Rove nor I was involved in any manner in the collection of emails or other electronic documents in response to subpoenas from the Special Counsel [Patrick Fitzgerald],” Luskin said. “Mr. Fitzgerald’s staff worked directly with the White House counsel and the IT folks from the White House. However, Mr. Fitzgerald did advise me that Mr. Rove had absolutely no responsibility for the oversight and that he has never regarded the failure to turn over the [Hadley] email as ‘culpable’ by anyone.”

That statement, or at least part of it, does not appear to be entirely accurate. In a May 10, 2007 deposition before investigators working for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rove’s former assistant, Susan Ralston, testified that during the leak investigation she and Rove were instructed “to go and do keyword searches based on the subpoena that we got, and search all of his folders for keywords.” Ralston said during her deposition that there were “six or seven” subpoenas Rove received from Fitzgerald for documents in Plame leak. Any documents that were found were turned over to Gonzales. Yet the email Rove sent to Hadley was never turned over to Fitzgerald.

Luskin would not provide a copy of that email, which has never been released publicly. He said the contents of the exchange have been “widely reported.” Luskin added that he had no interest in providing either the Hadley email “or any other documents,” including a copy of a letter Fitzgerald sent Luskin that purportedly cleared Rove of criminal exposure in the leak case, to me because of a story I reported two years ago that stated Rove was indicted by Fitzgerald. Luskin added that I “played a despicable role in circulating false allegations concerning an indictment of Mr. Rove and persisted with the story even after it was demonstrated to be false” and he therefore would not provide documentary evidence that could demonstrate his client’s innocence.

Fair enough. But Luskin also refused to voluntarily provide Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the Hadley email and other electronic messages that Rove and Luskin turned over to Fitzgerald. Last May, Leahy issued a subpoena to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for the documents.

The subpoena covered a wide range of emails Rove sent over four years, some of which related to Congressional investigations into the firings of nine US attorneys two years ago that Rove is widely believed to have played a hands-on role in.

Gonzales never met Leahy’s May 15, 2007 deadline to turn over the emails. So on May 24, 2007, Leahy wrote to Luskin asking if he would forfeit the emails to his committee Luskin and Rove turned over to Fitzgerald. Luskin politely refused, according to a copy of a June 4, 2007 letter he sent to Leahy, obtained by this reporter.

“As you are aware, Mr. Rove cooperated fully with the investigation by the Special Counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, into the disclosure of the identity of a CIA employee. As part of that cooperation, in April 2004, Mr. Rove made available to Mr. Fitzgerald two personal computers, a Blackberry, and a computer furnished to Mr. Rove by the Republican National Committee,” Luskin wrote. “Mr. Fitzgerald arranged for the FBI to image all of the data on these computers. Without any constraint by Mr. Rove, Mr. Fitzgerald reviewed all of this data and made and retained copies of any information relevant to his investigation. Because the computers also contained confidential personal information and attorney client communications, Mr. Fitzgerald returned to me for safekeeping the imaged copies made by the FBI.”

“The electronic copies made by the FBI, which I retain in their sealed form, only contain information created before early April 2004, when the FBI made the copies,” Luskin added. “I have reviewed the documents and testimony made publicly available by this and other congressional committees investigating the termination of the United States Attorneys. I am unaware of any evidence suggesting that Mr. Rove may have played any role whatsoever in this matter before April 2004. Accordingly, I have no reason to believe that the materials in my possession contain any information relevant to this Committee’s inquiry.”

So what happened? And why didn’t investigators, who searched Rove’s emails and computers during the early days of the leak probe, find a copy of the email Rove sent Hadley?

A fascinating new book provides some possible answers.

David Gewirtz, a former computer science professor, a former product management director for Symantec who also held the title of “Godfather” at Apple Computer, Inc., and has written more than 600 articles about email, is the author of “Where Have All the Emails Gone?” (at www.http://emailsgone.com <http://www.http://emailsgone.com> ), the definitive account about the circumstances that led to the loss of administration emails. A detective story that reads like a “Dummies” book for the technically challenged, “Where Have All The Emails Gone” relied upon good old fashioned shoe-leather reporting to tell the story of the missing emails and using the public record in attempting to solve the mystery.

In an interview, Gewirtz said the one possibility that the Rove/Hadley email never surfaced was that it was sent during a time when the White House had switched its email over from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange, an issue in and of itself the author finds suspicious. The Rove/Hadley email may have been lost during the transition to the new email system.

“Why did they migrate at this time? The country was getting ready for war.” Gewirtz, who said he has been speaking with Senate and Congressional staffers probing the loss of White House emails. “It doesn’t make sense that you would want to yank out your communications structure when you’re building up toward war. It’s crucial for our government to have qualified communications at a critical juncture. It’s just mind bogglingly questionable that the White House would change its communication structure at that time period. Why did they need to do it then? It certainly provides a lot of plausible deniability for when emails are scrutinized.”

“Another plausible reason, and this is the conspiracy theory, if you yank out an email system there goes your compliance with the Presidential Records act and there’s the “my dog ate it” excuse,” Gewirtz said. “There’s really no net loss other than a PR loss.”

Gewirtz said his biggest concern about the loss of White House emails is the national security implications.

“There’s a separate server for political activity. The server is not located or managed by security experts,” Gewirtz said. “Emails are sent by White House staffers using an unsecured server. Hundreds of millions of emails are sent through the open Internet. An email message sent by a low level political employee says where the president is traveling. That can be seen by anyone and can put the president at risk. It’s something of a disturbing experience talking to Washington politicians Technical issue takes a back seat based on what the political goal is. The potential loss through homeland security is pretty profound.”

In addressing Luskin’s explanation that the Hadley email did not turn up because the wrong search terms were used, Gewirtz said that it’s a possibility, but a poor excuse for not locating an email.

“You can type search terms that should but won’t pick things up directly,” he said. “You can choose to spell something wrong. Especially if there is no record of what you are searching.”

Congressman Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been trying to unravel these complicated technical issues for the past seven months. Last July, Waxman wrote Fitzgerald seeking “transcripts, reports, notes, and other documents relating to any interviews outside the presence of the grand jury of” Rove, Hadley, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other former White House officials.

In addition to his search for documents and questions surrounding the Plame leak, Waxman is also investigating how the White House lost millions of emails and why steps were not taken to preserve the electronic messages earlier. His committee is scheduled to hold a hearing Tuesday morning on the matter.

Gewirtz says that if Congressional investigators are serious about tracking down missing White House emails, particularly emails related to the US attorney purge, then they need to start looking in the right place.

“There is a vast amount of email has gone through the Republican National Committee,” Gewirtz said. “If they’re looking for a smoking gun on the firing of US attorneys then its most likely [White House officials who played a role in the dismissals] sent the emails through the RNC system and not the EOP [Executive Office of the President] system. Meanwhile, everyone is looking for emails on the EOP sever because its sexier. I think they are looking in the wrong place. If i were a betting man I would say its in the RNC system.”

Still, Waxman said in an interview at his office in late December that he is determined to get answers to some of the lingering questions about Rove’s role in the Plame leak, why the Hadley email never turned up, and whether there is a direct connection between that and the loss of millions of White House emails.

In the first of two letters Waxman sent Attorney General Michael Mukasey in December, the congressman said, “Fitzgerald and his staff have cooperated with the Committee’s investigation and have produced a number of responsive documents to the Committee. Among the documents that Mr. Fitzgerald has produced to the Committee are “FBI 302 reports” of interviews with CIA and State Department officials and other individuals. Unfortunately, the White House has been blocking Mr. Fitzgerald from providing key documents to the Committee.”

I met with Waxman in late December during an interview conducted by Truthout executive director Marc Ash at Waxman’s West Los Angeles office. Waxman said two of the key documents his staff had been trying to obtain were a copy of the letter Fitzgerald sent to Luskin that apparently indicated that Rove was no longer under investigation as well as the email Rove sent to Hadley. At the time of our meeting, Waxman had already sent Mukasey a second letter because the attorney general never responded to his first request. Waxman set a deadline of January 8 for the Plame investigation documents to be turned over to his committee.

The documents have yet to be handed over, but an aide to Waxman said the congressman has been “working” with Attorney General Mukasey over the past several weeks in hopes that an agreement may be reached.

Mark your calendars and organize a screening in your community. Let this Winter Soldier gathering March 13-16 in Washington D.C. be the most observed and talked about event this year.

The four-day event will bring together veterans from across the country to testify about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan – and present video and photographic evidence. In addition, there will be panels of scholars, veterans, journalists, and other specialists to give context to the testimony. These panels will cover everything from the history of the GI resistance movement to the fight for veterans’ health benefits and support.

The first Winter Soldier investigation was held in Detroit in 1971 marking the first time Vietnam vets gathered to inform the public of the atrocities and war crimes they witnessed or were ordered to commit. The event was well attended by mainstream media, but they chose to almost completely ignore it. The documentary film Winter Soldier was first released in 1972 but was only screened at two venues. It took over 30 years for the film to resurface and make it’s way around independent cinemas in the U.S.

With participatory media on the rise, the testimonies given at this gathering should not suffer the same prescribed censorship. Though the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are headed into their fifth year, a full-scale national mobilization and cultural upheaval seems unlikely, especially since soldiers today haven’t been drafted. However, one has to maintain hope that gatherings such as this will fuel the public’s fire to hold politicians and generals accountable for destroying countries, cultures, and lives.

For those interested in watching or organizing around the proceedings at Winter Soldier, there will be a number of ways to watch and listen to the event.

    * Live television broadcast via satellite TV, accessible through Dish Network as well as public access stations that choose to carry our broadcast – Friday and Saturday only
    * Live video stream on the web – Thursday through Sunday
    * Live radio broadcast via KPFA in Berkley California and other Pacifica member stations – Friday through Sunday
    * Live audio stream via KPFA’s website – Friday through Sunday

Though the event is closed (invitations are only for testifiers, members, their families, and some media outlets), independent journalists and bloggers can apply to cover the event by filling out this media registration form.

Today John and Elizabeth Edwards were joined by surrogates from MoveOn.org, SEIU, the Center for American Progress, USAction, VoteVets.org and Americans United for Change in a conference call to talk about a new joint project reports CBS News’ Michelle Levi. The new initiative seeks to draw a link between the ongoing war in Iraq with economic concerns at home and the participants pledged to keep the issue at the forefront in the both presidential and congressional campaigns.

The coalition vowed to be a substantial voice this election year by targeting presumptive GOP nominee John McCain as the candidate who will continue Bush’s policies in Iraq and by working on the ground in states and congressional districts where the incumbent is challenged by an anti-war candidate (including Democratic candidates). A surrogate from each entity outlined what their organizations plan to do individually.

Speaking from his home in North Carolina, John Edwards credited Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for continuing to make “clear they will end the war in Iraq” and said he “wants to make sure [voters] know they have a clear choice between a Democratic candidate who will end the war and the other choice … who will continue failed policies.” Elizabeth Edwards reiterated her husbands concern about poverty, saying that the nation has “a limited amount of money, and we are spending too much on the war.”

Vote Vets, an organization founded by military veterans, released a new ad which, according to the release, will have a limited run on cable in the Washington, DC area this week. The ad features an Iraq veteran with her infant son and alludes to McCain’s comments that he’s committed to staying in Iraq for a lengthy period of time. The veteran says, “this is my little boy. He was born a year after I came back from Iraq. What kind of commitment are you making to him? How about a thousand years of affordable health care, or a thousand years of keeping America safe? Can we afford that for my child, Senator McCain? Or have you already promised to spend trillions — in Baghdad?”

February 23, 2008 – The Iraq War must finally change the way Americans support and back their war veterans. How nice it is to wear yellow ribbons and wave American flags in support of our troops; they need all we can give. It’s better than being cussed and spit on! But in my opinion, most people who do these patriotic gestures are only giving cheap, superficial, token, short-term support. I ask a favor of you – take your yellow ribbons and miniature flags and place them in your wallet or purse after the fighting ends. Most Americans have short memories and minds of sheep, a herd mentality that follows a president into war whose cost you cannot calculate. The same Congress and people who support this war and see no problem in spending up to $1 billion a day to kill and destroy will surely do what they have always done in the past.

When this war ends, the dead will be buried and forgotten except by loved ones and on special occasions. Artificial limbs will be made and fitted. Then on with life and goodbye war veterans. If you think I am wrong, just ask any veteran who needs medical help through our VA system.

Living death is another way of dying. The human mind is the most awesome, powerful living thing on earth. But yet, it can be more delicate, fragile and sensitive than the finest crystal. Wounds to the mind are surpassed by nothing else.

Except for the name of the war, this is the same letter I wrote about 19 years ago. It holds true for U.S. veterans today.