Veterans for Common Sense

February 21, 2008 – If Americans want to continue the Iraq War, then Sen. John McCain — the apparent Republican presidential candidate and relentless hawk — is their man.

It seems McCain was not kidding when he said the U.S. might have to remain in Iraq for 100 years.

At a town meeting in New Hampshire, McCain was told that President Bush had indicated the possibility of U.S. forces staying in Iraq for 50 years.

“Make it a hundred,” McCain responded.

Presumably McCain means that still would be with a volunteer U.S. Army because even the “straight talking” senator would not dare to suggest that a military draft would be needed to carry out his grand imperialist plan for Iraq. Not if he wants to get elected.

Meantime, Bush is no longer keeping up his charade of party neutrality. In an interview last Sunday with Fox News, Bush described McCain as a “true conservative,” who is in lockstep with him on a strong defense, against abortion rights and in favor of making Bush’s tax cuts permanent, with the biggest cuts for the richest.

While apparently endorsing McCain as his successor, Bush also cautioned that McCain needed to shore up his standing with GOP conservatives. In other words, Bush is hoping for a third term through a proxy.

McCain has shown some heresy with the conservative wing of the GOP by displaying leniency toward illegal immigrants. He also went against the conservative grain by sponsoring legislation intended to reform campaign finance.

The right-wingers in the party — especially the hard-line radio talk-show commentators like Rush Limbaugh — have lashed out harshly against McCain for his apostasy. But these critics have no other place to go.

After losing the nomination to Bush in the 2000 race for the presidential nomination, McCain has devoted a lot of time to wooing evangelicals and pandering to the far right in his party. Early on, he made amends with the late Jerry Falwell and delivered a commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University.

In his earlier campaign for the presidency, he had denounced the evangelicals as “agents of intolerance.”

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” seems to be the motto of the ambitious McCain.

Citing McCain’s statement that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for 100 years, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has indicated that if she is elected she would seek a much quicker withdrawal. Both Clinton and her rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., are all over the place when it comes to their preferred timing to pullout U.S. forces from Iraq.

Clinton’s Senate votes to attack Iraq and to fund the war have become her albatross. She needs to clarify her position.

McCain is on the same page with Bush in foreign policy. He supported the “surge” of sending 30,000 more troops to reinforce the occupation of Iraq.

And he has denounced colleagues who want to bring the troops home as raising the “white flag” of surrender.

He also supports the total U.S. commitment to Israel and proposes to intensify U.S. aid and technology to give Israel a “qualitative edge” over the beleaguered occupied Palestinians.

He also warns that Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons clearly poses an unacceptable risk.”

He parts company with Bush on torture, having suffered for five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi during the Vietnam War.

Stressing his conservative credentials, McCain says he is against federal farm subsidies and against “big-government-mandated health care.”

He also opposed the new Medicare prescription-drug law, claiming it saddles the taxpayers with hugely expensive entitlement programs.

McCain is trying to bend over backward to prove to the GOP that he is the leader who can win the independent vote and continue the party’s occupancy of the White House.

But with Bush’s unpopularity in the polls, is the president a help or a hindrance to McCain’s bid for the White House?

February 21, 2008 – FRANKLIN, New Hampshire – For Mikell Cousineau Delisle, 43, and her husband Dennis Delisle, 42, it’s been a long journey into a dark night. And even though today they are jobless, in bankruptcy, and  about to be evicted from their house, they believe they are beginning to get their lives turned around and want to help others who walk in their shoes. If you need attorneys for chapter 13 bankruptcy then visit to Benner and Weinkauf webpage.

They do so because the past has been even darker. They share the nightmare of Iraq.

Dennis spent 18 months there with the Army National Guard and retuned home in late 2005. With their daughter, she spent the time he was gone in their former Berkshire home.

Before he was sent to Iraq with the New Hampshire 744 Transportation Company, the Delisles worked at Lucille Foods in Swanton. When he left, she lost herself in her work and came home exhausted.

She refused to watch the war news but was buoyed by their daughter who said, “Well, if Dad can go to Iraq, I can go to college.” She did – and recently graduated.

But the Dennis who went to Iraq wasn’t the Dennis who came home. He had joined the regular Army out of high school (Missisquoi Valley Union High School, Class of 1984), trained in the U.S., spent four years in Germany, and then mustered out in 1990.

For the next 11 years he held down various jobs, the longest at Lucille Foods, which closed soon after his return.

His latest tour of duty with the Guard was the life-changer.

When he first returned home, Mikell simply noted the changes in her husband, and kept silent. There were times when his restlessness woke her in the middle of the night.

“You could tell he was on a mission in his sleep. You could tell he was driving a truck in his sleep. I mean the arms were going like he had a steering wheel, he was shifting, the whole nine yards. He even one time had his hand up and you could tell he was out the window with his gun because his finger was going. Shooting,” she says.

Dennis had told Mikell about the intensity of his experiences in Iraq. He revealed an incident to her during one of the weekends with the National Guard after his return home. Wearing his uniform again intensified his connection to the battlefield and what happened on one particularly harrowing day.

“My armory is close by the quarry where there was an explosion,” he recalls, as though still there. “I jumped off the end of a truck and grabbed a fellow soldier by his head and I had my knife out, ready to slit his throat before I realized it was an American uniform and saw his face.”

What followed were bouts with depression and thoughts of taking his life.

Mikell explains that her husband would “shut himself in a room with a computer and from the time I’d leave for work and come home, he’d still be in that same spot.”

And there were his continuing bursts of anger.

He had conducted many 40-truck convoy trips through Ramadi, a hotbed of insurgents and roadside bombs. In the third truck back, and in command, he talked to headquarters, and made split-second decisions. He constantly rehearsed the dozens of deadly situations that might arise and what was needed to keep the convoy going, to keep his men from harm.

He was good at it. But it carried a cost.

Remembering that he said, “After a while your emotions do get the best of you. Like one day I felt like I was fine, but I was angry with everybody. My emotions had gotten the better of me. But after somebody pulled me aside, and said, ‘Hey, Sarge, what’s wrong today? You’re not yourself. You’re tearing everybody up.’ I calmed down.”

When he displayed growing anger at home, Mikell took action. “I told him, ‘There is something going on. We’ve got to find you some help.’”

There were other signs as well, she said, talking about how at first “he would just kind of chuckle, more worried about what he had said, something I shouldn’t hear, when mumbling in his sleep.”

There is worry written on Dennis’ face even now, even when he smiles.

“At first I kind of got upset with her. Told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. She kept persisting, kept arguing with me about it. And then she started showing me other things, like I would get angry over nothing.”

Visits to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Hospital in White River Junction got to the heart of the trouble. Dennis suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) with suicidal and homicidal symptoms.

Now he’s been through counseling and takes medication.

Things are getting better, slowly. The home eviction hangs over their heads. The $1,000 he gets a month from half disability payments doesn’t go far, when fuel costs $400 and rent can be as high as $700. But they both work at getting him back on his feet and he has held several jobs.

The situation has changed the woman of the house, too.

“I’m more vocal than I used to be,” Mikell said. “If I see something, I tell him. But now, he’s also learned to catch them for himself. Because we’ve got to work, I can’t stay here, every day, twenty-four/seven. He knows he’s got to be on his own. He knows he’s in that transition space. I don’t worry, because I know he can come through this.”

Mikell’s health has held up through the ordeal, though she suffers from alopecia, hair loss from a number of different causes, including stress.

“My anxiety builds up and builds up and builds up, my hair falls out. I hadn’t lost any since I was a little kid. And a year after he was home, I lost it all. Never lost any the time he was gone. It’s like the hair follicles have gone to sleep,” she says.

She’s brave about her life and about hair: she doesn’t hide her baldness.

Dennis’ smile relaxes when he looks at his wife and he pats the top of her head affectionately. His voice is clear and precise when he speaks of his PTSD, “Now I’m just learning to control. I try to recognize the early signs of it and think of things you can do to take you out of that position, that place.

“Like when I have a flashback, I tell myself, ‘I’m at home, I’m not in Iraq.’ I identify that I’m at home.”

He actually says those words, “‘I am at home.’” When he drives his truck, he says, “I identify that I’m in a civilian vehicle. Things to identify that I’m not in a war zone. That I’m home.”

After Mikell convinced him he needed help, he went to a counselor.

“I didn’t want to, because it made me feel like I was weak. And I was afraid that if they diagnosed me with PTSD, my military career would be over. And – it almost was. They wanted to medical board me out (of the National Guard) and I don’t have enough time to retire yet. So I would have lost all my benefits.

“That was one of the drawbacks to why I didn’t want to get help. But I went and got the help anyway and found out that the help is what I needed.”

He answered his counselor’s questions and talked about missions he had been on in Iraq. The sessions continued a couple times a week for three or four months.

Then the VA diagnosed him as having PTSD and, he says, a doctor “prescribed medication to help me control the emotions and that’s been working and I’m still seeing her once a month and I have an on-call counselor.”

The calls for help have been necessary.

“I almost shot somebody at my house,” Dennis said. “They were trying to break in and my first reaction was to try to protect my family. But I was in a military mind-frame. I wasn’t in a civilian mind-frame. So I grabbed a gun. My counselor was able to get me into a VA hospital before anything happened. I was able to get treatment for it. Get my medication straightened out to help me. And they’ve now diagnosed it that I have PTSD with suicidal and homicidal attempts.

Jobs have been hard to hold down.

“I’ve been though several jobs. One job was at Century Arms (a local weapons distributor) and they were test-firing AK-47s one day and the guy beside me dropped with a heart attack and I had a flashback and I thought he had been hit by a bullet.

“I got down underneath the table, and I couldn’t help the guy because I was taking a defensive fighting position. I was in a military frame of mind; I was back in war.”

Leaving the war behind has been difficult, but with good reason.

Dennis speaks of another experience in Iraq. “We were taking small arms fire and my buddy was pinned in his truck that was on fire and we heard his screams and couldn’t do anything about it.”

He saw many of his buddies die. And there are even worse scenes he won’t talk about.

None of this stopped the foreclosure on the Delisle home, however. A running battle to save their house was exasperating and ultimately futile. They  sought legal counsel, but the system – which placed their loan within a pool of mortgages – complicated matters.

It hadn’t help when in May of 2006, Dennis was hospitalized and fell behind in his $754 monthly house payment.

A grant from Military One Source Fund of $7,800 almost helped him catch up. Then the mortgage holder increased the monthly payment to $900, sent back several payments, and demanded $18,000 to put the mortgage back on track.

On his last call to the lender, he was told to call an attorney in Burlington who he said told him he had two hours to file bankruptcy in order to beat the public auction of the house.

Dennis and Mikell got a taxi and raced to their lawyer’s office. He frantically made efforts to reach the auctioneer. The call was five minutes too late and the property was lost.

Two weeks ago, Dennis received a notice of eviction telling him that the property is now owned by Wells Fargo, acting as trustee for the certificate holders.

“The Delisles believed that they were working in good faith with the lender for a period of months and then unexpectedly the lender switched gears and pulled the rug out from under them, too late for them to prevent the house being auctioned off,” said their lawyer Todd Taylor.

He added, “If they had called me earlier, I could have saved the house.”

Dennis said the financial entities involved in his case “don’t care one way or another” that he is an Iraq veteran suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

With all this weight on their shoulders, the Delisles look out from their own troubles, to the pain of military families that are going through what they’ve experienced. With the knowledge they’ve gained, Dennis wants to help other soldiers and Mikell wants to help other wives.

“Wives need support, too,” she says decisively. “Wives don’t get that much support at all. The guys do have somewhere they can go for counseling. Us wives don’t. It hasn’t been recognized.”

She adds, “I want to start a woman’s group where the wives can come to my home, and sit down, and say, ‘OK, this is what happens, this is what we’re going through.’ And the next wife says, ‘O.K., this is what I did, this is what we did.’ Their own kind of support, through each other, because it’s the only way they’re going to get it.”

Meanwhile, Dennis and Mikell look for work, a new place to live, and work together to bring Dennis back to a healthy and safe place.

“If he can make it over there in Iraq, he can make it here. That’s exactly like I look at it. Like I have to look at it,” Mikell says.

February 16, 2008 – Hundreds of U.S. Marines have been killed or injured by roadside bombs in Iraq because Marine Corps bureaucrats refused an urgent request in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles, an internal military study concludes.

The study, written by a civilian Marine Corps official and obtained by The Associated Press, accuses the service of “gross mismanagement” that delayed deliveries of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks for more than two years.

Cost was a driving factor in the decision to turn down the request for the so-called MRAPs, according to the study. Stateside authorities saw the hulking vehicles, which can cost as much as a $1 million each, as a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years from being fielded.

After Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared the MRAP (pronounced M-rap) the Pentagon’s No. 1 acquisition priority in May 2007, the trucks began to be shipped to Iraq in large quantities.

The vehicles weigh as much as 40 tons and have been effective at protecting American forces from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the weapon of choice for Iraqi insurgents. Only four U.S. troops have been killed by such bombs while riding in MRAPs; three of those deaths occurred in older versions of the vehicles.

The study’s author, Franz J. Gayl, catalogs what he says were flawed decisions and missteps by midlevel managers in Marine Corps offices that occurred well before Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld in December 2006.

Among the findings in the Jan. 22 study:

_ Budget and procurement managers failed to recognize the damage being done by IEDs in late 2004 and early 2005 and were convinced the best solution was adding more armor to the less-sturdy Humvees the Marines were using. Humvees, even those with extra layers of steel, proved incapable of blunting the increasingly powerful explosives planted by insurgents.

_ An urgent February 2005 request for MRAPs got lost in bureaucracy. It was signed by then-Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, who asked for 1,169 of the vehicles. The Marines could not continue to take “serious and grave casualties” caused by IEDs when a solution was commercially available, wrote Hejlik, who was a commander in western Iraq from June 2004 to February 2005.

Gayl cites documents showing Hejlik’s request was shuttled to a civilian logistics official at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in suburban Washington who had little experience with military vehicles. As a result, there was more concern over how the MRAP would upset the Marine Corps’ supply and maintenance chains than there was in getting the troops a truck that would keep them alive, the study contends.

_ The Marine Corps’ acquisition staff didn’t give top leaders correct information. Gen. James Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, was not told of the gravity of Hejlik’s MRAP request and the real reasons it was shelved, Gayl writes. That resulted in Conway giving “inaccurate and incomplete” information to Congress about why buying MRAPs was not hotly pursued.

_ The Combat Development Command, which decides what gear to buy, treated the MRAP as an expensive obstacle to long-range plans for equipment that was more mobile and fit into the Marines Corps’ vision as a rapid reaction force. Those projects included a Humvee replacement called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and a new vehicle for reconnaissance and surveillance missions.

The MRAPs didn’t meet this fast-moving standard and so the Combat Development Command didn’t want to buy them, according to Gayl. The study calls this approach a “Cold War orientation” that suffocates the ability to react to emergency situations.

_ The Combat Development Command has managers _ some of whom are retired Marines _ who lack adequate technical credentials. They have outdated views of what works on the battlefield and how the defense industry operates, Gayl says. Yet they are in position to ignore or overrule calls from deployed commanders.

An inquiry should be conducted by the Marine Corps inspector general to determine if any military or government employees are culpable for failing to rush critical gear to the troops, recommends Gayl, who prepared the study for the Marine Corps’ plans, policies and operations department.

The study was obtained by the AP from a nongovernment source.

“If the mass procurement and fielding of MRAPs had begun in 2005 in response to the known and acknowledged threats at that time, as the (Marine Corps) is doing today, hundreds of deaths and injuries could have been prevented,” writes Gayl, the science and technology adviser to Lt. Gen. Richard Natonski, who heads the department. “While the possibility of individual corruption remains undetermined, the existence of corrupted MRAP processes is likely, and worthy of (inspector general) investigation.”

Gayl, who has clashed with his superiors in the past and filed for whistle-blower protection last year, uses official Marine Corps documents, e-mails, briefing charts, memos, congressional testimony, and news articles to make his case.

He was not allowed to interview or correspond with any employees connected to the Combat Development Command. The study’s cover page says the views in the study are his own.

Maj. Manuel Delarosa, a Marine Corps spokesman, called Gayl’s study “predecisional staff work” and said it would be inappropriate to comment on it. Delarosa said, “It would be inaccurate to state that Lt. Gen. Natonski has seen or is even aware of” the study.

Last year, the service defended the decision to not buy MRAPs after receiving the 2005 request. There were too few companies able to make the vehicles, and armored Humvees were adequate, officials said then.

Hejlik, who is now a major general and heads Marine Corps Special Operations Command, has cast his 2005 statement as more of a recommendation than a demand for a specific system.

The term mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle “was very generic” and intended to guide a broader discussion of what type of truck would be needed to defend against the changing threats troops in the field faced, Hejlik told reporters in May 2007. “I don’t think there was any intent by anybody to do anything but the right thing.”

The study does not say precisely how many Marine casualties Gayl thinks occurred due to the lack of MRAPs, which have V-shaped hulls that deflect blasts out and away from the vehicles.

Gayl cites a March 1, 2007, memo from Conway to Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which Conway said 150 service members were killed and an additional 1,500 were seriously injured in the prior nine months by IEDs while traveling in vehicles.

The MRAP, Conway told Pace, could reduce IED casualties in vehicles by 80 percent. He told Pace an urgent request for the vehicles was submitted by a Marine commander in May 2006. No mention is made of Hejlik’s call more than a year before.

Delivering MRAPs to Marines in Iraq, Conway wrote, was his “number one unfilled warfighting requirement at this time.” Overall, he added, the Marine Corps needed 3,700 of the trucks _ more than three times the number requested by Hejlik in 2005.

More than 3,200 U.S. troops, including 824 Marines, have been killed in action in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. An additional 29,000 have been wounded, nearly 8,400 of them Marines. The majority of the deaths and injuries have been caused by explosive devices, according to the Defense Department.

Congress has provided more than $22 billion for 15,000 MRAPs the Defense Department plans to acquire, mostly for the Army. Depending on the size of the vehicle and how it is equipped, the trucks can cost between $450,000 and $1 million.

As of May 2007, roughly 120 MRAPs were being used by troops from all the military services, Pentagon records show. Now, more than 2,150 are in the hands of personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Marines have 900 of those.

One section of Gayl’s study analyzes a letter Conway sent in late July 2007 to Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Kit Bond, R-Mo., two critics of delays in sending equipment to Iraq.

More heavily armored Humvees were determined to be the best response to the 2005 MRAP request, the commandant told the senators. He also said the industrial capacity to build MRAPs in large numbers “did not exist” when the request was submitted. Additionally, although the trucks had been fielded in small numbers, they were not adequately tested and exhibited reliability problems, the letter said.

The letter to the senators is evidence of the “bad advice” senior Marine Corps leaders receive, Gayl contends. The letter, he says, portions of which were probably drafted by the Combat Development Command, omitted that the urgent 2005 request from the Iraq battlefield specifically asked for MRAPs _ and not more heavily armored Humvees. It also ignored the Marines’ own findings that armored Humvees wouldn’t stop IEDs.

Conway’s assertion there was a lack of manufacturing capacity to build MRAPs is “inexplicable,” Gayl says. Manufacturers would have hurried production if they knew the Marines wanted them and any reliability issues would have been resolved, he says.

In late November, the Marine Corps announced it would buy 2,300 MRAPs _ 1,400 fewer than planned. Improved security in Iraq, changes in tactics, and decreasing troop levels allowed for the cut. But Marine officials also listed several downsides to the MRAP: The vehicles are too tall and heavy to pursue the enemy down narrow streets, on rough terrain or across many bridges.

If MRAPs arrived to Iraq late, or proved too bulky for certain missions, the Marine Corps should have come up with different and better solutions several years ago when the IED crisis was growing, Gayl contends.

A former Marine officer, Gayl spent nearly six months in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 as an adviser to leaders of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

His stinging indictment of the Marine Corps’ system for fielding gear is not a first. He has been an outspoken advocate for non-lethal weapons, such as a beam gun that stings but doesn’t kill and “dazzlers” that use a powerful light beam to steer unwelcome vehicles and people from checkpoints and convoys.

The failure to send these alternative weapons to Iraq has led to U.S. casualties and the deaths of Iraqi civilians, Gayl has said.

Gayl filed for whistle-blower protection in May with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. He said he was threatened with disciplinary action after meeting with congressional staff on Capitol Hill.

Biden and Bond rebuked the Marine Corps in September for “apparent retaliation” against Gayl.

Associated Press researcher Monika Mathur contributed to this report.

February 17, 2008 – All of a sudden — but still too late for some people — the spotlight of media, government and mental health agencies is shining brightly on the issue of providing emotional support for veterans returning from the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two weeks ago, Illinois became the first state to set up a 24-hour hot line for veterans. Operated by Magellan Health Services through a state contract, the hot line is designed to help returning vets with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder find services that can help them.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs released statistics last week showing that more than half the suicides of returning warriors from Afghanistan and Iraq have been among members of the National Guard and Reserves. The VA reported that between the start of the Afghanistan war in October 2001 and the end of 2005, 144 veterans took their own lives.

One of them was 23-year-old Guardsman Spc. Timothy Bowman of Forreston, who committed suicide on Thanksgiving Day 2005 at his family’s home, eight months after he returned to the United States. His parents testified before Congress late last year about how troubled their son was when he returned from war. The father, Mike Bowman, said his son belongs in the “KBA” category — “killed because of action.”

Locally, Dick Kunnert, president of the Mental Health Association of the Rock River Valley and former director of Singer Mental Health Center, said the need for support services for veterans of the war is clear.

“Mental illness and problems with emotions are showing up at a much higher rate with this group of people than in previous wars,” Kunnert said.

He said he recently visited with a woman whose son came back from the war not long ago. She picked him up at the airport, and he wanted to drive home.

“She was scared to death,” Kunnert said. “Every little thing along the road bothered him. Noises bothered him. When he got home, anything that was going on, he went into defensive mode. It is bizarre what they are going through.”

Kunnert and other local mental health professionals and people familiar with veterans issues have started a support group that will hold its first meeting from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Feb. 26 in the community meeting room at ABC Crash Collision Auto Repair, 4141 Morsay Drive, Rockford. The group, which will meet at the same time every Tuesday, is open to any veteran who’s served in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Bruce Jacobsen, a Vietnam veteran who is active in VietNow, has been particularly concerned about the services available to troops returning from the war.

“There’s absolutely been a shift in understanding PTSD and TBI (traumatic brain injury) that was not there before, that they are actual physical injuries,” Jacobsen said. “We actually understand that there has been an injury that needs to be dealt with.”

As a society, we can’t repeat the mistake of earlier generations by expecting military personnel to come home after traumatic battle experiences and proceed with life as if nothing had happened.

This is the number for the state’s help hot line: 866-554-4927. For information, visit illinoiswarrior.com.

For information about the support group in Rockford, call 815-398-9628 or 815-226-4770.

February 14, 2008 – Last month, the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism released a study finding that the Bush administration made “at least 935 false statements” preceding the invasion of Iraq. Condoleezza Rice, who served as National Security Adviser at the time, made 56 false statements.

During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing yesterday, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) pressed Rice to explain the inconsistencies, asking “isn’t it true that you had intelligence that cast doubt on your repeated claims?”

“No, it’s not true,” replied Rice tersely.

Wexler then pointed out that Rice was lying when she said it was “not true” and that there had been “intelligence that cast doubt” on the administration’s pre-war claims:

WEXLER: I simply asked if you had intelligence that was contrary to the intelligence that you reported repeatedly to the American people…

RICE: Congressman, I would…

WEXLER: … that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction.

RICE: Congressman, I would suggest that you go back and read the key judgments of 2002. I think that will answer your question.

WEXLER: Yes. And the answer to the question, Madam Secretary, is that, in fact, there were contrary reports. You chose to weigh the reports.

In 2001, Rice argued, “We are able to keep arms from [Saddam]. His military forces have not been rebuilt.” In the lead-up to war, she began making the opposite case.  In her response yesterday, Rice conceded that there was “disagreement” in the intelligence community about “whether or not” Iraq “had reconstituted their nuclear weapons program.” But in 2002, Rice emphatically stated there was no doubt about the intelligence:

RICE: We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance — into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to — high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.

In fact, the potential use of the aluminum tubes was one of the main points of disagreement within the intelligence community. According to the New York Times, “almost a year before” Rice made her statement on the tubes, her “staff had been told that the government’s foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons.” “Ms. Rice knew about the debate,” the paper reported.

Matt Corley is a Research Associate for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress.

February 13, 2008 – “The annual exercise of debating the merits of the President’s proposed budget is flawed,” said John Rowan, National President of Vietnam Veterans  of America, before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.  “Medical Center directors should not be held in limbo as Congress adjusts this budget and misses, yet again, the start of the fiscal year.

“These public servants can be more effective and efficient managers if they are able to properly plan for the funding needed to care for their patients. We ask that you consider an immediate alternative to the broken system we currently have,” Rowan said.

Rowan characterized as “inadequate” the FY’09 request for $2.34 billion more than the FY’08 appropriation. This “barely keeps up with inflation” and “will not allow the Department of Veterans Affairs to continue enhancing its physical and mental health care services for returning veterans, restore needed long-term care programs for aging veterans, or allow working-class veterans to return to their health care system.”

To accommodate these goals, Rowan said, VVA recommends an increase of $5.24 billion over FY’08.  Of this amount, $1.3 billion should be dedicated to restoring access to Priority 8 veterans who were “temporarily” barred from entering the system five years ago.

Rowan condemned the proposed budget for again attempting to tax “higher income” veterans with an annual fee and for nearly doubling the co-payment for prescription drugs. “This is further evidence,” Rowan said, “of the attempt to rid the system of as many “higher income” veterans as possible.”

Rowan was skeptical that the President’s budget will provide resources “to virtually eliminate the patient waiting list by the end of 2009.”  He voiced concern that the budget will provide adequate resources “to deal with the flood of troops and veterans returning to our shores and presenting with a range of mental health issues.”

February 18, 2008 – The Veterans Affairs Department has dumped a policy requiring combat vets to verify in writing that they have witnessed or experienced a traumatic event before filing a claim for post-traumatic stress disorder, said the chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. [VCS Clarification: This applies only to veterans diagnosd with PTSD while in the military.  VCS is awaiting further details of this new VA policy.]

“This change provides a fairer process for veterans with service-connected PTSD,” Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, said in a written statement. It “leaves claim adjudicators more time to devote to reducing the staggering backlog of veterans’ claims.”

In the past, a veteran has had to provide written verification — a statement from a commander or doctor, or testimony from co-workers — that he or she was involved in a traumatic situation in order to receive disability compensation for PTSD from VA. The Defense Department uses the same rules in evaluating PTSD for disability retirement pay.

In Iraq, troops joke about keeping a pen and paper on hand in case they witness a shooting or explosion or are injured themselves. That way, they can run around and have all their buddies sign a quick statement saying it really happened. The joke loses steam when a Marine has to prove he was involved in a traumatizing event when he had a hand blown off in that event, or when a soldier has to prove he watched his friends die to qualify for benefits.

The rule also slows the process as veterans wait for yet more documentation before their claims may be processed.

Akaka said he asked VA Secretary James Peake if the rule was necessary, and asked that it be removed. Peake agreed.

“I am pleased that the secretary took quick action to reverse this requirement after it was brought to his attention,” Akaka said.

In the future, veterans will be diagnosed with PTSD through a medical examination with no further proof necessary, Akaka said, adding that he’s been told that Peake has already informed VA regional offices of the decision.

VA officials were not immediately available for comment Monday, a federal holiday.

February 15, 2008 – Since his last combat deployment in Iraq, Jeremy Hall has had a rough time, getting shoved and threatened by his fellow soldiers. The trouble started there when he would not pray in the mess hall.

“A senior ranking staff sergeant told me to leave and sit somewhere else because I refused to pray,” Hall, a 23-year-old US army specialist, told AFP.

Later, Hall was confronted by a major for holding an authorized meeting of “atheists and freethinkers” on his base. The officer threatened to discipline him and block his re-enlistment.

“He said: ‘You guys are being a problem and problems can be removed,'” Hall said. “He was yelling at us and stuff and at the very end he says, ‘I really love you guys, I want you to see the light.'”

Now Hall is suing the major and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, accusing them of breaching his constitutional rights. A campaign group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is waiting for the Pentagon to respond to a lawsuit filed in a Kansas federal court on Hall’s behalf.

It alleges a “pernicious pattern and practice” of infringement of religious liberties in the military.

The group’s founder, former Air Force lawyer Mikey Weinstein, said he has documented 6,800 testimonies by military personnel — nearly all of them Christians — of sometimes punitive or humiliating attempts to make them accept a fundamentalist evangelical interpretation of Christianity.

“I am at war with those people who would create a fundamentalist Christian theocracy in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by our species, which is the United States armed forces,” he said.

He plans to add extra charges and possibly other lawsuits this month.

“It violates title seven of the US code for an employer to push their Biblical world view on an employee,” he said. “But it’s a trillion times worse when that is not just your shift manager at Starbucks but that is your military superior.”

He singles out one of the major Christian groups in the military, the Officers Christian Fellowship (OCF).

The group represents 15,000 US military personnel around the world, according to its director, retired Air Force general Bruce Fister.

“It is not the position of OCF to try and coerce people to believe what we believe,” Fister told AFP.

OCF’s aim, as stated on its website, is to achieve “a spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

It professes belief in “the eternal blessedness of the saved; and the everlasting, conscious punishment of the lost.”

Fister emphasized the group’s work to support families of soldiers deployed in the “global war on terror.”

“People make mistakes. There’s probably been some instances where people have wrongly spoken,” he added. “We’d like them not to, but that’s life.”

“Our checks within our equal opportunity channels identified fewer than 100 formal complaints over a two-year period,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez.

Army spokesman Paul Boyce told AFP: “The Army places a high value on the rights of its soldiers to observe tenets of their respective religious faiths.”

The MRFF’s constitutional complaint “is a matter of the courts system to address and resolve,” he added.

“The joint standards of conduct for the Armed Forces and military equal opportunity policies address the freedom of religion, avoiding discrimination because of religion.”

But Weinstein argued that most personnel are “too terrified” to speak out.

“When you actually fight against them, they make your life hell,” said Hall, adding he has been passed over for promotion since launching his lawsuit. “I can’t get a leg up no matter what I do.”

A former military chaplain of a prestigious US military college reported being prevented from leading worship after disagreeing with the fundamentalist stance of other officials.

“I am not ready to say that if someone does not profess Christ as their savior that they are going to hell … That got a lot of people angered,” the minister told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation against a spouse who is a senior officer.

“The leader of the youth group that ministered to the teens (at the academy) said that Catholics were not Christians and that Muslims hated Christians, and that created a lot of tension,” the ex-chaplain added.

“As a soldier, many times you want to believe you’re fighting on the right side. It’s easy to kill someone if you believe that they’re going to hell and that they are religiously opposed to you.”

February 15, 2008 – A pilot project intended to speed the process of evaluating and rating service members’ disabilities will do little more than turn a bad process into “a fast bad process,” the Army’s top medical official said Friday.

Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker’s comments came at a hearing at which the services’ surgeons general had their chance to brag about what they have done in the year since the outpatient scandal at Walter Reed broke — standing up units specially designed to take care of wounded troops, asking for and receiving money to house those service members, ombudsmen, internal checks and toll-free numbers for reporting problems – before the House Armed Services Subcommittee.

Schoomaker also spent some time talking about continued problems, including his view that the pilot project designed to streamline the disability system will not prove to be the answer.

Under the test, taking place at three military medical facilities and one VA medical center in the Washington, D.C., area, service members will receive a single medical examination and a single disability rating issued by VA, an effort to eliminate duplication in the separate military and VA systems and speed up the process.

But Schoomaker said both the military and VA systems for dealing with service members’ disabilities is based on an “outdated” model from the 1940s, when most of the force consisted of single soldiers with no health care. “When you speed up a bad process, all you have is a fast bad process,” Schoomaker said of the ongoing pilot project.

On other issues, Schoomaker said mental health descriptors used by military medical professionals need to be updated to fit today’s ideas about post-traumatic brain injury and depression.

He also said the Army found a new “trend” as it grouped all of its wounded soldiers into one system where they could be carefully monitored: 11 deaths in that population due to suicide, accidental overdose by prescription medications, and in motor vehicle accidents. Schoomaker said the combination of multiple prescription drugs — usually pain medication — mental health issues, alcohol and no supervision on the weekends are contributing to the problem.

The Army is creating a policy to ensure only one medical provider prescribes medication for each soldier, he said, adding that officials are looking into the possibility of having squad leaders monitor medication for soldiers who may need additional help.

Officials also are considering alcohol-free zones in barracks, he said.

February 14, 2008 – Washington, D.C. – On Thursday, the House Veterans’ Affairs Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs Subcommittee, led by Chairman John Hall (D-NY), conducted the second in a series of hearings on the benefits claims backlog at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).  The hearing examined the disability claims processing system at the Regional Office (RO) level at the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) which receives all initial claims for benefits filed by veterans and explored the problems and solutions for eliminating the current unprecedented claims backlog. 

There are 57 Regional Offices throughout the country that serve America’s veterans.  There are nearly 650,000 compensation and pension claims pending in these offices and the average processing time of these claims is 183 days. 

In 2007, the VA failed to meet its performance goals in major compensation-related  actions.  The target for disability compensation claims was 145 days, yet the actual length of time was 183 days.  Additionally, the VBA consistently misses customer satisfaction and quality assurance targets.  By its own numbers, 1 in 10 claims is processed incorrectly.  Independent reviews conducted by VSOs places this error rate closer to three in 10, many of whom vocalized their concerns with VA’s claims accuracy and workflow processes during presentation of their testimonies in the hearing.

Chairman Hall expressed concern with the sufficiency of the VBA’s accountability measures.  He also questioned the suitability of VBA’s current Claims Improvement Processing (CPI) model to ensure that meaningful accountability and quality parameters exist to reduce the claims backlog and accurately process claims.  “Thus far, none of VA’s own benchmarks have improved since its implementation.  I find this fact disturbing,” Hall said. 

In testimony before the full House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, VA Secretary Peake stated that he wants to reduce processing times from roughly 180 days to 145 days by the start of 2009.  He cited aggressive efforts to hire staff, noting that VA will have hired the 3,100 new staff authorized by Congress in recent funding cycles by 2009.  

During the hearing, VA Deputy Under Secretary for Benefits, Michael Walcoff testified that based on the recommendations of IBM Global Business Services, which was contracted by VA in October 2007 to provide an independent study of VBA’s claims processing system, it plans to transition to a paperless processing environment both internally and externally to help reduce the claims backlog and process claims more efficiently.  VA’s current system is heavily paper-based, overly complex and relies on WWII paradigms to develop and adjudicate disability claims.

“VBA’s long-range IT plans will not end the current backlog, but are clearly critical to the solution of updating and improving VA’s antiquated claims processing system and to providing VBA employees with 21st century tools to deliver the most accurate outcomes when adjudicating our veterans’ disability claims.  These changes are long overdue.”  Hall said.

Hall continued, “I believe that just like the VHA experienced a revolutionary transformation, it is well-time to think of devoting the same type of resources into transforming the VBA.  It is time for a paradigm shift.”  

“Our veterans deserve the benefit of our collective resources to ensure this process becomes a world-class, 21st century model that reflects their priceless sacrifice to our nation.”

Bob Filner (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, concurred.  “We cannot wait any longer to make solid improvements in the claims processing system at the VBA,” he said.  “Veterans have earned these benefits by serving our country.  As a grateful nation, it is time we grant these claims in a timely fashion.” 
 
Witnesses:
 
Panel 1
*       Joyce McMahon, Health Care Operations and Policy Research Center, CNA Corporation
*       Michael McGeary, Senior Program Officer and Study Director, Committee on Medical Evaluation of Veterans for Disability, Benefits Board on Military and Veterans Health, Institute of Medicine
*       Daniel Bertoni, Government Accountability Office

Panel 2
*       Richard Cohen, President, National Organization of Veterans Advocates, Inc.
*       Ronald Abrams, Joint Executive Director, National Veterans Legal Services Program
*       J. David Cox, National Secretary Treasurer,  AFGE
*       Gordon Erspamer, Claims Attorney, California
*       John Roberts, Wounded Warrior Project

Panel 3
*       Adrian Atizado, Disabled American Veterans
*       Paul Sullivan, Executive Director, Veterans for Common Sense
*       Steve Smithson, American Legion
*       Gerald Manar, Veterans of Foreign Wars

Panel 4
*       Michael Walcoff, Deputy Under Secretary for Benefits, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
*       Bradley G. Mayes, Director, Compensation & Pension Service, Veterans Benefits Administration, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
*       Diana Rubens, Associate Deputy Under Secretary for Field Operations, Veterans Benefits Administration, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Prepared testimony for the hearing and an audio recording of the hearing is available on the internet at this link:   http://veterans.house.gov/hearings/hearing.aspx?newsid=189.