Veterans for Common Sense

February 17, 2008 – The Bush administration has spent a lot of money in Iraq since White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was fired in 2002 for daring to predict the war might cost as much as $200 billion. An estimate issued last August by the Congressional Budget Office suggested the war will have cost at least $1 trillion before it’s over. A September report (PDF) by the Democratic staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee pegged the cost at $1.3 trillion. Now a new book by a Harvard professor and a Nobel Prize winner in economics claims the true cost could be more than twice that—as high as $3 trillion dollars. If you wanted to pay that off with a single wad of $1,000 bills, your billfold would have to be almost 240 miles wide.

In The Three Trillion Dollar War, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard’s Linda Bilmes claim to have laid out the “true cost of the Iraq conflict.” Instead of simply including appropriations costs and the estimated costs for the future care of soldiers, as most estimates do, Stiglitz and Bilmes take many other factors into account. They include the costs of paying the interest on the money we’ve borrowed to finance the war; the increased costs of recruiting and retaining soldiers given the fact there is a war on; the macroeconomic costs, like part of the increase in the cost of oil and the lost economic productivity from spending the money overseas instead of reinvesting it at home; and the cost to the economy of the loss of the dead and the seriously wounded and their caretakers, using a metric called a “Valued Statistical Life.”

All this sounds very complicated, and it is. Some will certainly question Bilmes and Stiglitz’s calculations. But arguing over the exact cost of the war won’t change the fact that defense spending is very high in historical terms. In constant 2008 dollars, this year’s military budget is the highest since World War II. And the U.S. military is spending millions of dollars a day in Iraq.

Even so, the financial cost is just one factor that Americans have to consider in deciding whether the war was, and is, worth fighting. The cost in lives and the geopolitical and strategic costs are also serious considerations. The cost in lives is, in some ways, easier to quantify and understand than the cost in dollars. And Americans who read the newspaper (or MotherJones.com) see the geopolitical costs of the war every day. So even if the difference between “an unimaginable amount of money” and “a twice as unimaginable amount of money” seems abstract or silly to you, Bilmes has a point. Speaking at the National Press Club Wednesday, she said: “The bottom line on all of this is if the public is trying to make a decision about whether the benefit of staying in Iraq is worth the money they ought to have an accurate price of what it is costing…. If this war costs significantly more than the administration says it does, then we have a responsibility to say, ‘Well actually, this is the cost.”

February 14, 2008 – Bridgetown, New Jersey – An Iraq war veteran believed by family members to have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder was shot to death by police after repeatedly stabbing his stepfather Wednesday morning, according to authorities.

City police responded to a report of a fight at 365 Atlantic St., at 6:45 a.m., involving U.S. Army veteran German Sanabria, according to Cumberland County Prosecutor Ron Casella.

Officers heard screaming inside the home and forced their way inside.

Police found Sanabria’s mother, Eva Garcia, 53, running down the steps, covered in blood.

After making their way to a back bedroom of the home, police found Sanabria, 26, stabbing his 79-year-old stepfather, Frank Garcia, with what appeared to be a steak knife, Casella said.

Police repeatedly attempted to stop the assault without using deadly force, according to Casella.

“(Police Officer) Elizabeth Rodriguez attempted to pull Sanabria off the victim but was pushed away. (Officer) Anthony Keller yelled for Sanabria to put down his weapon, but Sanabria continued stabbing his stepfather,” he said.

Keller fired one shot, striking Sanabria.

Sanabria died as a result of the shooting.

“From what the investigators are saying, (Keller) saved (Garcia’s) life,” Casella said.

Frank Garcia was listed in stable condition at Cooper University Hospital in Camden as of 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Eva Garcia was taken to South Jersey Healthcare-Regional Medical Center, in Vineland. She was evaluated and released.

Sanabria was living at 365 Atlantic St. with his mother and stepfather.

Casella was uncertain what sparked the violence inside the home Wednesday morning.

Celia Ray, who is Eva Garcia’s cousin, told the News late Wednesday afternoon that Sanabria had been experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including paranoia.

“All the symptoms that he had lately, that’s why we tried to get him help. … He was afraid of everything,” she said. “He thought someone was following him and wanted to kill him.”

Though concerned about his mental state since he returned from Iraq 21 months ago, Sanabria’s family felt he took a turn for the worse earlier this month, after watching the Super Bowl with friends in Vineland on Feb. 3, according to Ray.

Sanabria was observed at the crisis unit at South Jersey Healthcare-Bridgeton Health Center last Friday afternoon after his family, concerned by his recent behavior, sought help from police.

“On Friday, when we took him there, even though he kept telling them that he was OK, they should have kept him there,” Ray said.

Sanabria was accepted for evaluation at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, in Philadelphia, on Monday, according to Ray, but officials there found no reason to keep him against his will.

He left the facility as family members, including Ray, waited for him, not knowing he had left.

“The doctors said that he was OK … that there was nothing they could do (to keep him there) because he was an adult,” Ray said.

After learning that he had left the veterans hospital, Sanabria’s family unsuccessfully searched Philadelphia’s streets for him.

“We knew that he wasn’t right,” Ray said.

They reported him missing to Bridgeton Police around 1 a.m. Tuesday.

Sanabria returned home around noon Tuesday, at which point police removed him from a missing-persons database.

It’s not clear what happened in the home between his return and the call to police Wednesday morning.

Casella said that an autopsy will be conducted on Sanabria’s body on Thursday.

The prosecutor’s office is investigating both the officer-involved shooting and the stabbing.

Sanabria served two tours of duty in Iraq with the U.S. Army.

Casella said he was not aware of Sanabria’s current military status, and the Department of Defense did not respond Wednesday to an inquiry regarding his service history.

Keller and Rodriguez have been put on administrative leave, according to acting Bridgeton Police Chief Mark Ott.

Rodriguez could return to work in approximately two weeks, Ott said, but Keller’s expected return date remained undetermined as of Wednesday afternoon.

Three additional officers who responded to the Garcias’ home will be cleared to return to work on the streets in about a week, “barring any additional recommendations by qualified medical personnel,” Ott said.

After saying that it would be impossible to determine with any degree of certainty how Keller and Rodriguez are dealing with the shooting, Ott indicated they appeared OK when he spoke to them.

“I believe they are holding up well under the stress of the incident,” Ott said.

The five officers were offered help dealing with the stress Wednesday morning.

“Through the PBA (Policemen’s Benevolent Association), psychological counseling was made available through what’s called the CISM (Critical Incident Stress Management) team,” Ott said.

Additional psychological services have been made available to the officers if they feel they need more help.

February 15, 2008 – A few months after Sgt. William Edwards and his wife, Sgt. Erin Edwards, returned to a Texas Army base from separate missions in Iraq, he assaulted her mercilessly. He struck her, choked her, dragged her over a fence and slammed her into the sidewalk.

As far as Erin Edwards was concerned, that would be the last time he beat her.

Unlike many military wives, she knew how to work the system to protect herself. She was an insider, even more so than her husband, since she served as an aide to a brigadier general at Fort Hood.

With the general’s help, she quickly arranged for a future transfer to a base in New York. She pressed charges against her husband and secured an order of protection. She sent her two children to stay with her mother. And she received assurance from her husband’s commanders that he would be barred from leaving the base unless accompanied by an officer.

Yet on the morning of July 22, 2004, William Edwards easily slipped off base, skipping his anger-management class, and drove to his wife’s house in the Texas town of Killeen. He waited for her to step outside and then, after a struggle, shot her point-blank in the head before turning the gun on himself.

During an investigation, Army officers told the local police that they did not realize Erin Edwards had been afraid of her husband. And they acknowledged that despite his restrictions, William Edwards had not been escorted off base “on every occasion,” according to a police report.

That admission troubled the detective handling the case.

“I believe that had he been confined to base and had that confinement been monitored,” said Detective Sharon L. Brank of the local police, “she would not be dead at his hands.”

The killing of Erin Edwards directly echoed an earlier murder of a military wife that drew far more attention. Almost 10 years ago, at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, a different Army sergeant defied a similar restriction to base, driving out the front gate on his way to a murder almost foretold.

That 1998 homicide, one of several featured in a “60 Minutes” exposé on domestic violence in the military, galvanized a public outcry, Congressional demands for action and the Pentagon’s pledge to do everything possible to prevent such violence from claiming more lives.

Yet just as the Defense Department undertook substantial changes, guided by a Congressionally chartered task force on domestic violence that decried a system more adept at protecting offenders than victims, the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq began.

Pentagon officials say that wartime has not derailed their efforts to make substantive improvements in the way that the military tackles domestic violence.

They say they have, for example, offered more parenting and couples classes, provided additional victims advocates and afforded victims greater confidentiality in reporting abuses.

But interviews with members of the task force, as well as an examination of cases of fatal domestic violence and child abuse, indicate that wartime pressures on military families and on the military itself have complicated the Pentagon’s efforts.

“I don’t think there is any question about that,” said Peter C. McDonald, a retired district court judge in Kentucky and a member of the Pentagon’s now disbanded domestic violence task force. “The war could only make things much worse than even before, and here we had a system that was not too good to begin with.”

Connie Sponsler-Garcia, another task force member, who now works on domestic violence projects with the Pentagon, agreed.

“Whereas something was a high priority before, now it’s: ‘Oh, dear, we have a war. Well get back to you in a few months,’ ” she said.

The fatalities examined by The New York Times show a military system that tries and sometimes fails to balance the demands of fighting a war with those of eradicating domestic violence.

According to interviews with law enforcement officials and court documents, the military has sent to war service members who had been charged with and even convicted of domestic violence crimes.

Deploying such convicted service members to a war zone violates military regulations and, in some cases, federal law.

Take the case of Sgt. Jared Terrasas. The first time that he was deployed to Iraq, his prosecution for domestic violence was delayed. Then, after pleading guilty, he was pulled out of a 16-week batterers intervention program run by the Marine Corps and sent to Iraq again.

Several months after Sergeant Terrasas returned home, his 7-month-old son died of a brain injury, and the marine was charged with his murder.

Deployment to war, with its long separations, can put serious stress on military families. And studies have shown that recurrent deployments heighten the likelihood of combat trauma, which, in turn, increases the risk of domestic violence.

“The more trauma out there, the more likely domestic violence is,” said Dr. Jacquelyn C. Campbell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing who also was a member of the Pentagon task force.

The Times examined several cases in which mental health problems caused or exacerbated by war pushed already troubled families to a deadly breaking point.

In one instance, the Air Force repeatedly deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere Sgt. Jon Trevino, a medic with a history of psychological problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

Multiple deployments eroded Sergeant Trevino’s marriage and worsened his mental health problems until, in 2006, he killed his wife, Carol, and then himself.

The military declared his suicide “service related.”

A Call to Action

Within a six-week period in 2002, three Special Forces sergeants returned from Afghanistan and murdered their wives at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Two immediately turned their guns on themselves; the third hanged himself in a jail cell. A fourth soldier at the same Army base also killed his wife during those six weeks.

At the beginning of this wartime period, the cluster of murder-suicides set off alarms about the possible link between combat tours and domestic violence, a link supported by a study published that year in the journal Military Medicine. The killings also reinvigorated the concerns about military domestic violence that had led to the formation of the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence two years earlier.

National attention to the subject was short-lived. But an examination by The Times found more than 150 cases of fatal domestic violence or child abuse in the United States involving service members and new veterans during the wartime period that began in October 2001 with the invasion of Afghanistan.

In more than a third of the cases, The Times determined that the offenders had deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq or to the regions in support of those missions. In another third, it determined that the offenders never deployed to war. And the deployment history of the final third could not be ascertained.

The military tracks only homicides that it prosecutes, and a majority of killings involving service members are handled by civilian authorities. To track these cases, The Times used records from the Army, Air Force and Navy — the Marines did not provide any information —and local news reports.

It is difficult to know how complete The Times’s findings are. What is clear, though, is that these homicides occurred at a time when the military was trying to improve its handling of domestic violence.

The Pentagon’s domestic violence task force, appointed in April 2000 and comprising 24 military and civilian experts, met regularly for three years to examine a system where, they found, soldiers rarely faced punishment or prosecution for battering their wives and where they often found shelter from civilian orders of protection.

When the moment arrived to explain their findings and recommendations to Congress, however, the timing could not have been poorer. Deborah D. Tucker and Lt. Gen. Garry L. Parks of the Marines, the leaders of the task force, presented their final report to the House Armed Services Committee on the very day that the Iraq war began, March 20, 2003. Ms. Tucker called it “one of the more surreal experiences of my life.”

“Periodically, members of the committee would call for a break and there would be some updated information provided on the status of our troops’ entry into Iraq and how far they’d gotten,” she said. “There was a map on an easel to the side.”

“I knew that while we were at war all other considerations would push back,” she added, “and I hoped that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be a quick matter on the order of Desert Storm.”

The task force was disbanded, and its request to reconvene after two years to evaluate progress was rejected. But the Defense Department embraced most of its 200 recommendations and gradually made many changes, from the increase in advocates to domestic violence training for commanding officers.

“The services have taken huge strides to implement the recommendations,” said David Lloyd, director of the Pentagon’s Family Advocacy Program, starting with sending out “a strong message across the department that domestic violence is not acceptable.”

Further, after the killings at Fort Bragg, Congress passed a law that made civilian orders of protection binding on military bases, and the Army gradually slowed the transition from war to home to help soldiers adjust.

Mr. Lloyd said he could not verify or comment on The Times’s findings on domestic killings. But, he said, domestic fatalities do not provide a complete picture of the incidence of domestic violence in the military.

“You have a pie, a nine-inch shell, and you have a slice of that pie, but there are other slices: verbal abuse and psychological control and assault that didn’t result in a homicide,” Mr. Lloyd said. “Even if the fatality slice has increased and it would look larger, the other numbers have gone down.”

According to the military, the number of general spouse and child abuse incidents reported to on-base family advocacy programs began declining in 1998, before the special effort to address the issue began, and continued to decline significantly through 2006. But whether those numbers reflect a genuine decline is a matter of debate, given that large numbers of service members have spent considerable time away on deployments and that the strengthening of sanctions for domestic violence has made some women more reluctant to report abuse.

The accuracy of the military’s domestic violence data has also been questioned, by advocates, the Government Accountability Office and military officials themselves.

Last fall, in a statement released during domestic violence awareness month, Mike Hoskins, a Pentagon official, said, “We shouldn’t necessarily take comfort in reduced rates of violence.” He said they probably reflected “good news” but urged caution in interpreting the numbers.

Dr. Campbell, the former task force member, said the task force had recommended periodic anonymous surveys to ascertain the full extent of domestic violence. She also said that she believed the “true incidence” of domestic violence had probably increased as a result of service members returning from Iraq with combat trauma, which can exacerbate family violence.

“It’s sort of like, on the one hand, they’re improving the system, and on the other hand, they’re stressing it,” she said.

Others agree, noting that wartime places a burden on the military as a whole, even on those who do not deploy to combat zones but absorb additional duties at home.

Christine Hansen, executive director of the Miles Foundation, which provides domestic violence assistance mostly to the wives of officers and senior enlisted men, said the organization’s caseload had tripled since the war in Iraq began.

And John P. Galligan, a retired Army colonel who served as a military judge at Fort Hood and now represents military clients in private practice, said he, too, had seen a “substantial” increase in military domestic violence cases in his area.

“Sometimes I just sit and scratch my head,” he said.

The separation of deployment, in and of itself, often causes marital strains.

“Even with a healthy marriage, there is a massive adjustment,” said Anita Gorecki, a lawyer and former Army captain who represents soldiers near Fort Bragg and is married to an officer currently in Iraq. “Add on to that combat stress and injuries and sometimes it can create the perfect storm.”

Some researchers draw a fairly firm connection between post-traumatic stress disorder and domestic violence. A 2006 study in The Journal of Marital and Family Therapy looked at veterans who sought marital counseling at a Veterans Affairs medical center in the Midwest between 1997 and 2003. Those given a diagnosis of PTSD were “significantly more likely to perpetrate violence toward their partners,” the study found, with more than 80 percent committing at least one act of violence in the previous year, and almost half at least one severe act.

Pamela Iles, a superior court judge who was permitted by the Marines to set up a privately financed domestic violence education program at Camp Pendleton in California, views much of the domestic abuse on the base as “collateral” from the war. She sees the domestic violence committed by marines, many of them young, as a reaction to jumping back and forth between the dangers of war and the trouble at home.

“One minute you are in Baghdad waiting for a bomb to go off and the next minute you are in Burger King,” Judge Iles said. “There is a lot of disorientation.”

A 9-Year-Old Witness

It was a little before dawn on Feb. 20, 2006, in a bedroom in Edwardsville, Ill. Carol Trevino and her 9-year-old son, sleeping deeply after watching “Wayne’s World,” were startled awake by a series of booms. “What was that?” Carol Trevino asked her son.

In seconds, Sgt. Jon Trevino, her estranged husband, barged through the door, according to a police report. Mrs. Trevino had just enough time to reach for her pepper spray before he shot her five times, the last time in the head. Then he shot himself.

Their son, wide-eyed, sat in bed watching his life explode, bullet by bullet.

Few details escaped the boy’s notice. His father used a silver gun and it “didn’t have a wheel on it, like the cowboys used,” he told the Edwardsville police. The boy could even name the precise time of his mother’s death: 4:32 a.m., as the glowing clock read.

Outside in Mr. Trevino’s car was the immediate motive for the murder-suicide: divorce papers, evidence of a marriage destabilized by multiple deployments to war zones and by Sergeant Trevino’s own increasing instability.

T. Robert Cook, his brother-in-law, said he believed Sergeant Trevino’s domestic violence was triggered by his combat trauma. “I’m 100 percent sure it was the war,” said Mr. Cook, who is raising the Trevinos’ son along with his wife, Cheryl Lee, who is Carol’s sister. “I don’t have any doubt their marital problems placed a burden on him, but I am quite sure that, but for the war, he would have taken a different approach. When you see people being shot every day, death is not a big thing.”

Sergeant Trevino, who had endured childhood sexual abuse and a difficult first marriage, suffered psychiatric problems long before he was dispatched to war zones to perform the highly stressful job of evacuating the wounded.

And the Air Force knew it.

Air Force mental health records show that Sergeant Trevino, who was 36, had been treated twice for mental health problems before the war: once in 1995 for serious depression as his first marriage crumbled, and then in 1999 for post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the childhood abuse and marital problems with his new wife, Carol. He was counseled and treated with medication both times.

As a result of these problems, the Air Force insisted that he secure a medical waiver for a promotion that he sought to become an aeromedical evacuation technician. And military doctors certified that he could handle the job, despite research that shows that pre-existing post-traumatic stress disorder is exacerbated in a war zone.

Col. Steven Pflanz, a senior psychiatrist in the Air Force, who was not involved in the Trevino case, said the Air Force considered the stress disorder to be treatable and therefore was willing to deploy an airman with a history of it. But the decision is not taken lightly, he said.

“It’s not an exact science,” he said. “You try to make your best prediction. We spend a lot of time with our customers.”

In Sergeant Trevino’s case, the prediction was wrong. He had trouble shaking off the carnage that he experienced so viscerally while evacuating injured service members. After one deployment to Afghanistan and two to Iraq, his mental health and his marriage deteriorated. When he returned from his second tour in Iraq, Sergeant Trevino acknowledged in a health assessment that he had “serious problems” dealing with the people he loved and that he was feeling “down, helpless, panicky or anxious.”

The Air Force acted quickly. He was abruptly restricted from “special operational duty.” An Air Force doctor diagnosed “acute PTSD,” calling it a reaction to the war and marital problems. Sergeant Trevino began taking a cocktail of antidepressants and underwent therapy. According to doctors’ notes, he did not express thoughts of homicide or suicide. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, he was considered well enough to be deployed domestically.

But his wife’s family, which had taken him under its wing, found the once affable, quick-witted sergeant to be profoundly altered. His temper flashed unpredictably, white-hot. He acted threatened and paranoid, his behavior so erratic that he frightened his son. One late night, he took his son on a rambling drive to nowhere, ranting to the boy about his mother.

At least one time, he struck his wife. A friend gave Carol Trevino the pepper spray that she reached for the night of her murder. But she never considered his abuse serious enough to report him to the authorities.

Four days before the murder-suicide, Sergeant Trevino bought a gun.

“This is just one of those things that unfortunately happens,” he wrote to his son in a suicide note. “I love you, and I know I let you down.”

Justice Delayed

The Pentagon task force had one overarching recommendation: that the military work hard to effect a “culture shift” to zero tolerance for domestic violence by holding offenders accountable and by punishing criminal behavior.

There was, members believed, a core credo that needed to be attacked frontally: “this notion that the good soldier either can’t be a wife beater or, if they are, that it’s a temporary aberration that shouldn’t interfere with them doing military service,” as Dr. Campbell put it.

The way the military handled several cases involving the deaths of babies and toddlers indicates that this kind of thinking has been difficult to demolish at a time of war.

In October 2003, four months after Jose Aguilar, 24, a Marine Corps sergeant, returned from the initial invasion of Iraq, his infant son, Damien, wound up in the intensive care unit of a local hospital with bleeding in his brain and eyes.

Sergeant Aguilar, a mechanic based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, acknowledged to the local police that he had been rough with the 2-month-old baby, shaking Damien to stop him from squirming during a diaper change. He said that he had been abused himself as a child and that he did not mean to hurt the baby.

After the marine was charged with felony child abuse, he and his wife completed a parenting program.

The following summer, while the felony charge was pending, Sergeant Aguilar was deployed once more to Iraq, this time for nine months. His court case was delayed, which did not surprise local prosecutors.

Michael Maultsby, the assistant district attorney in Onslow County, N.C., who prosecuted Sergeant Aguilar, said that such frustrating delays in justice sometimes occur in his county, home to Camp Lejeune.

“It depends on the needs of the unit,” Mr. Maultsby said. “We can’t overrule them.”

In April 2006, a year after Sergeant Aguilar returned from Iraq but before his felony case was resolved, Damien, who by then was 2, died of a brain injury. His father claimed that the boy had been injured by a fall in the bathtub. The medical examiner disputed that explanation. The marine was arrested, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and felony child abuse, and was sentenced last fall to 28 to 35 years in prison.

Marine officials would not comment on individual cases. Elaine Woodhouse, a Marine Corps social services program specialist, said that “the family advocacy program does not recommend or advise deployment of a marine when domestic or felony child abuse charges are pending.” Still, that decision, she said, is left to the discretion of the commanders.

A conviction for domestic violence, unlike pending charges, almost always renders a service member ineligible to go to war, but that restriction has not always been considered binding, as is clear in the case of Sergeant Terrasas, who was stationed at Camp Pendleton.

One night in late December 2002, Sergeant Terrasas, drunk and angry over a telephone conversation about the looming war in Iraq, vented his anger by punching his wife, Lucia, in the face.

“He seemed to just lose it,” Mrs. Terrasas told the police in Oceanside, Calif., who arrested him on misdemeanor charges.

But Sergeant Terrasas was deployed to Iraq before his case was heard. It was not until his return seven months later that he pleaded guilty, was placed on probation and was ordered to complete a 16-week batterers intervention program run by the Marine Corps.

Sergeant Terrasas attended a few classes. But the Marine Corps, facing a runaway insurgency in Iraq, pulled him out of the batterers program and shipped him off to war for a second time in early 2004.

This deployment was illegal. A 1996 law bans offenders who are convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from carrying firearms, with no special exception for military personnel. The ban is referred to as the Lautenberg amendment after its sponsor, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey.

Army and Marine regulations, formulated in response to the weapons ban, explicitly prohibit deployments for missions that require firearms, and extend the policy to felony domestic violence offenders, too. The Marine Corps would not comment on Sergeant Terrasas’s deployment, citing confidentiality rules.

When Sergeant Terrasas returned from war, he completed his batterers program, said his lawyer, Philip De Massa. But his anger, tested by two tours in Iraq, still surfaced. In September 2005, when the police responded to a domestic argument, he broke down crying and told one officer that he suffered from “postwar traumatic syndrome.” There is no record that he sought or received mental health help.

Nearly two weeks later, the Terrasases’ 7-month-old son, Alexander, died from a powerful blow to the head. Mr. Terrasas was charged with murder. Last August, after a deal with prosecutors, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for felony child endangerment.

He never admitted to abusing his child.

Broken Promises

Sgt. Erin Edwards, emboldened by a year in Iraq, returned to Texas with the courage to end her troubled marriage.

“Being apart for such a long period of time enabled her to realize she could survive without him,” said Sgt. Jami Howell, 28, who was her best friend.

When Erin Edwards told her husband that she wanted a divorce after four years of marriage, he responded as she had long feared.

On June 19, 2004, he followed her to their baby sitter’s house to hand her a written proposal for a custody arrangement. When she did not immediately respond, he beat her so badly that she wound up in the emergency room.

Even before the assault, William Edwards’s troubles had so badly affected his performance at work that his commanding officer, Capt. Brian Novoselich, took the time to meet with him weekly to check on his welfare. After the assault, it was the captain who confined him to the base.

But William Edwards repeatedly left unescorted and often stayed with his brother, who lived across the street from Erin Edwards in Killeen. On several occasions, she alerted the police and his superiors that he was lurking.

On July 21, 2004, Erin Edwards went to court to make the temporary protection order permanent. At the hearing, William Edwards told the judge that he had enrolled in alcohol and domestic violence classes after the June assault, according to a transcript.

“I had hit rock bottom when I touched my wife, man,” he said in court. “That was the worst day ever in my life. I had always told my wife that I would never touch her, ever, physically.”

William Edwards also acknowledged that when the police showed up that day, he begged his wife not to press charges, saying: “Don’t do this to my career. Don’t do this.”

Erin Edwards spoke of the effect on their children, who witnessed the assault. “Since the incident happened, all my son talks about is how his father hurt his mother, and that ‘Daddy is going to kill Mommy,’” she said.

She also stated, and her husband learned for the first time, that she was transferring and moving with the children. William Edwards was “visibly upset” by this, according to Army documents turned over to the police.

The following morning, after reporting to an exercise session with other soldiers, William Edwards left the base alone one final time. After the murder-suicide, local police officers securing the scene noted that both bodies were dressed in military camouflage clothing with nameplates that said Edwards. Both were 24.

At Erin Edwards’s funeral, her boss, Brig. Gen. Charles Benjamin Allen, who was killed in a helicopter crash in late 2004, eulogized the soldier with a cracking voice. More than three years later, her relatives note that not even he, with his high rank, was able to ensure that the military was doing more than taking a troubled soldier “at his word,” as Mary Lou Taylor, Erin’s aunt, said.

“He couldn’t or failed to help her be safe,” Ms. Taylor said.

William Edwards’s former commanding officer, Major Novoselich, said in a recent interview that he was “shocked by the end result.” Now a professor at West Point, he said he had assumed that William Edwards’s immediate supervisors were monitoring him.

Near Fort Hood, Detective Brank of the Killeen police said soldiers continued to defy restrictions to the base.

“I am surprised,” she said. “Fort Hood is not enforcing these orders.”

The Army examined Erin Edwards’s death as part of a fatality review program recommended by the Pentagon task force “to ensure no victim dies in vain.”

A one-paragraph summary of the review seemed to discount the findings of the civilian police investigation. The summary noted that Erin Edwards had refused the assistance of the base’s family advocacy program, while William Edwards had enrolled in it. It added that William Edwards had “appeared to comply” with his restrictions. Until the day he “eluded his military escort” and killed his wife.

Alain Delaquérière and Margot Williams contributed research.

February 13, 2008 – Jackson Heights, NY – Lawyers from the Department of Justice have filed papers in a federal court in San Francisco arguing that American veterans have no legal right to specific types of medical care. The government’s defense comes in response to a lawsuit filed by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Truth.

The lawsuit accuses the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) of illegally denying mental health treatment to troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, asserting that the VA arbitrarily denies care and benefits to wounded veterans, forcing them to wait months for treatment and years for benefits. The plaintiffs cite the VA’s backlog of more than 600,000 disability claims and that 120 veterans a week commit suicide to support their position.

In response, Justice Department lawyers argue that Congress left decisions about who should get medical care, and what typeofcare, to the VA, and not to veterans or the courts. Even though a federal law requires the VA to provide five years of health care for veterans when they leave military service, the government asserts that the law does not create an entitlement to any particular medical service. They say thatthe law entitles veterans only to “medical care which the . . . [VA] determines is needed, and only to the extent funds … are available.”

“The Administration should be ashamed of delaying essential services to veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Paul Tobin, President and CEO of United Spinal Association. “A benefit delayed is a benefit denied. In the case of mental health services, it could literally be a matter of life and death to these veterans. That we find veterans in this situation is unconscionable.”

Despite the judge’s recent denial of the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit and rejection of the argument that the VA need only provide as much care as the VA’s budget allows, the Justice Department is now arguing that Congress had intended “to authorize, but not require, medical care for veterans.”

“As if the mental and physical wounds of war were not tragic enough, the government’s position in the lawsuit is an insult to the sacrifice of these brave men and women. Support for our troops must not end when they leave the military. Healing wounded veterans is a cost of war. The government cannot shirk from this responsibility, especially when the law requires it,” Tobin said.

A court hearing on the arguments is scheduled for March 7, 2008.

February 13, 2008 – On a sunny afternoon in Baqubah, a convoy of Iraqi troops and U.S. soldiers depart the small base they share on a mission to bring blankets and heating oil to a nearby village. They drive down an empty road, passing packs of dogs and curbs scarred by weeks of steady roadside bombs. Suddenly, the team’s humanitarian operation turns deadly as an explosion rips into the lead humvee. Sgt. Chester Jones and Sgt. Maj. Eddie Del Valle help rush a critically injured young sergeant to the field hospital. Jones, a medic, cradles the soldier’s injured head as he vomits, while another helps change bandages soaked through with blood.

It is twilight as troops from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, tow the blasted humvee back to base. They cover it with a tarp, then get the news that they fear: The young soldier, Sgt. Jay Gauthreaux, has died from his wounds.

That was just over one year ago. Today, Del Valle and Jones are back home at Fort Hood, Texas, after their second Iraq deployments. Like tens of thousands of this war’s veterans, they look back on their time in the country with a complex mixture of pride, frustration, satisfaction, and sadness. Del Valle recalls, for instance, the emotional task of cleaning out Gauthreaux’s room the morning after the attack, packing up photos of the fallen soldier’s 4-year-old son. “He’s the same age as my little daughter,” says Del Valle, “so you put yourself in that situation.” Jones saw war’s human toll every day while training Iraqi Army medics, but that didn’t lessen the shock of losing his good friend. “I didn’t realize it was G until I ran to the truck and pulled his body back,” Jones says. “With training, you learn to try and push that stuff aside,” he adds, “but it’s tough.”

Just as wars leave a lasting mark on soldiers, they tend to change the culture of the armies that fight them. As the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approaches, American troops are reflecting on their experiences even as they await how their mission will be judged. So, too, the institution of the military is wrestling over its own narrative for this war, assessing how well America and its commanders have used one of the most powerful tools available to any nation. The lessons it takes away from the experience of its soldiers and marines will influence how it adapts and organizes itself—and how it cares for those sent to do the nation’s fighting.

What is immediately clear is that this conflict has put enormous demands on American troops. They are warriors on some days, diplomats on others, in a conflict with no clear front lines and a changing cast of adversaries. And while they are grateful that the American public has steadfastly supported them, regardless of feelings about the war itself, many soldiers report a sense of disconnection, too. America as a nation is not waging this war, many tell you—its military is.

Recent security gains in Iraq, particularly the sharp declines in combat deaths, have come as a welcome development. But there remains a heavy burden on America’s fighting men and women. Commanders express grave concerns for troops shouldering wars on two fronts with no end in sight, particularly the half million who have served more than one combat tour since 2002. Soldiers in Iraq, who have seen the duration of their deployments extended as a result of an inadequate post-invasion plan, work seven days a week for 15 months straight, minus two weeks for a trip home to visit family. And they do it all, they joke, without beer (American troops today are forbidden to drink while at war). More than 60,000 troops have been subjected to controversial stop-loss measures—meaning those who have completed service commitments are forbidden to leave the military until their units return from war.

Sacrifice. The news that their yearlong tour was lengthened by three months hit the team hard, says Del Valle. “That was the worst. It’s like when you’re real thirsty, and you’re about to reach for the bottle—and somebody pulls it far away from you.” Midway through medic Jones’s tour, his wife called to ask for a divorce. “I’m not mad at her, because I can’t blame her,” he says. “She was tired of being alone.” Jones has been deployed to Iraq two of the past five years, which has left him little time to see his children, now ages 4 and 2, grow up.

The sacrifices are great, and sometimes soldiers wonder why they keep making them. On the night that Gauthreaux died, Del Valle and Capt. Christopher Whitten, the gunner that day, talked about their career choice over a game of chess at a small shop on their base as the Iraqi owner served them tea and warm bread. They express a brief moment of doubt about the extent to which what they do is really understood by most Americans. “You get in a humvee every day because that’s the job that is feeding your family. I also believe in what we’re doing here,” says Del Valle. “Our soldiers here are giving 100 percent for every American guy back in the States.” Whitten nods, adding, “It makes you wonder, does anybody really appreciate what that guy gave up today?”

It is not an uncommon question in this combat zone. Historians will tell you that wars throughout the ages, whatever their outcome, tend to wreck armies and wear out soldiers. Troops hasten to add that the belief that they are making a difference in their jobs helps mitigate the immense strain of being a soldier today. “I would argue that you haven’t seen an army like this since the demise of the Roman legion—such a small number of forces able to influence the world,” says Clinton Ancker III, a retired Army colonel and director of the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate. When the 3rd Brigade Combat Team arrived in Baqubah, there was widespread corruption and heartbreaking violence against civilians. During the tour of Del Valle, Whitten, and Jones’s brigade, they drove out terrorists and saw some life return to the markets, children to soccer fields. It is the sort of impact that makes a military career attractive, they say.

But the desire to make a difference can lead to even greater frustration when troops return after previous tours in Iraq to find what they consider to be little change or even backsliding during a counterinsurgency campaign in which the very definition of victory is still a lively topic of debate. That frustration can be compounded, too. Ancker argues that soldiers are under “a lot more stress” now than they were in Vietnam. “The atmosphere is more physically demanding. And in Vietnam, we were guaranteed at least a year between deployments,” he says. When soldiers are injured—physically and psychologically—they are at the mercy of a deeply overburdened system that they cannot always count on to take care of them.

Camaraderie. The military has drawn lessons from past wars, notably Vietnam, reorganizing the Army into brigade combat teams in part to encourage unit cohesion and camaraderie. This has promoted the sort of psychological bonding that gives troops a sense of support in the face of the enormous demands, says Jeffrey LaFace, the division chief of the Army’s Combined Armed Center.

That camaraderie is clear on forward operating bases throughout Baghdad, where troops organize flag football matches and barbecues and decompress in coffee shops and Internet cafes with fellow soldiers and marines who have become close friends over the years. “Soldiers go in as units, with the same group of guys that they have known since they were privates in Kosovo and Bosnia,” says LaFace. These “adopted families,” he adds, help to stem “some of the weirdness that we had coming out of Vietnam.” That weirdness included soldiers who shot officers when they didn’t want to do a mission and riots in U.S. military prisons overcrowded with deserters.

It is another notable legacy of the troubled Vietnam-era Army that many of today’s volunteer soldiers have little desire to see the nation return to the draft. “It’s the only thing that would make me get out of the Army,” says Capt. Scott Hubbard, who recently returned from a tour in Iraq. The last thing you want to do, he adds, is fight next to someone who doesn’t want to be next to you.

Despite the strains, the retention rate for troops in Iraq remains high, commanders point out. Their concern, though, is whether it will stay that way. “The entire Army leadership—and rightfully—we get a little nervous,” says Peter Chiarelli, the military assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and until 2006 the widely admired No. 2 commander in Iraq. “All of us are extremely concerned that we could cross a line without even knowing it.”

Some commanders in Iraq worry that they are flirting with those lines now as demands on soldiers show little sign of letting up. There is growing evidence that post-traumatic stress is taking a toll: The number of troops who tried to commit suicide or injure themselves increased from 350 in 2002 to 2,100 last year. So, too, can the simple fear and fatigue that accompany daily patrols. One active duty commander recalls a unit that had gone months without a serious casualty, only to have a soldier hit by a sniper weeks before the unit was scheduled to head home. The commander was approached by an officer carrying a spreadsheet that charted out the number of times company commanders had gone out on patrol or operations over a two-week period. “I had cases where I had officers who by their job nature should be going out all the time, who’d only gone out two or three times,” he says. “It was probably related directly to losing soldiers, personal fear, and the fact that you’re only a month or two out from going home,” he continues. “I asked them, ‘Have you considered the effect this has had on your soldiers?’ I remember what a leadership challenge it was, and I imagine that a lot of similar things are occurring in other battalions.”

Changes, challenges. Today, troops discuss such leadership challenges at countless outposts in Iraq and at the premier centers of military learning. These chats are not always pretty. Some note, for example, that Congress has fewer military veterans than in the past and, perhaps as a result, shows too much deference to the military leaders who testify on Capitol Hill. “Congress doesn’t ask the tough questions they should be asking, because they’re afraid that they’re going to be accused of not supporting the troops,” says one captain on patrol in East Baghdad. His buddy agrees. “Debates in Congress don’t hurt our feelings. That’s what we’re here for, freedom of speech.”

There is little doubt within the military itself, particularly among more junior officers, that this freedom of speech includes a growing willingness to question the decisions of commanders leading the war. That is driven in large part by the experience they are getting in the field: In today’s military, the average captain has spent more time in combat than most World War II veterans—and more than some senior officers now in the military.

Indeed, military leaders acknowledge this change. “We’ve got to listen to the young folks—they have lived this conflict in a different way—and make sure their lessons are incorporated into this Army,” Chiarelli says. “In order to do that, you’ve got to be willing to accept a dialogue in which many of the things that old guys like me thought are challenged.”

Those challenges include new ways of thinking about how decisions are made. The Army has recently launched its own “Red Team University” to train officers to be, in essence, the opposite of yes men. Graduates of this program are then placed in brigades to question the assumptions behind decisions in hopes of averting tactical and strategic missteps. And though many argue that soldiers’ grumbling about their commanders’ decision is a tradition as old as the Army itself, Richard Kohn, a war historian at the University of North Carolina, believes one thing is clear: “I think that coming out of the war, you’re going to have a much more candid military.”

Informed support. That candor, too, must include presenting a realistic picture of the war effort to the American public, say the students at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Not doing so in advance of the Iraq war was a mistake, they add—one that should not be repeated. “We should now consider whether we can ever successfully go to war for an extended period of time without the informed support of the American people,” writes Chiarelli in a recent article for the journal Military Review.

But garnering that informed consent presents a dilemma: How does a military defined by its can-do culture paint a more realistic portrait of war? It might begin, troops say, with managing expectations—of the American people and of the soldiers themselves. “We expected to come in and throw another 3-pointer and everyone stand up and cheer,” says Hubbard. “There was a lot of emotion, a lot of rhetoric, all the country music songs getting everybody fired up,” he adds. “I think a lot of folks screaming for war—on both sides, political, civilians, military—just don’t understand what it takes.”

And that remains a cause of concern for troops today. Maj. Kareem Montague, an Iraq veteran and Harvard graduate, wonders too about the war’s impact on a country in which only a small slice of its citizens are serving in the military, and how it may affect the civil-military relationship. “It’s not that it’s unhealthy, but it’s becoming more and more separate,” observes Montague, now a master’s student in the prestigious School of Advanced Military Studies at the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth. “If you have fewer and fewer people who have served, you have to worry about whether you can have an intelligent conversation about how the military can best serve the country.”

Ask soldiers here why they signed up, and many will say for duty, an instinctive feeling they have that you cannot be a citizen without doing this. Many others say the money is a big incentive—specifically, money for an education that they couldn’t otherwise afford. “I did it for college, and because I had nowhere else to go,” says one Baghdad-based soldier. Another confides that he sometimes feels like a mercenary and a “walking advertisement for one of Cheney’s defense companies—like they just want us to be on TV all geared up in products.” The conversation leads another soldier to privately comment later that, “The burden of this war falls disproportionately on the poor.”

Faye Crawford, the mother of Sergeant Gauthreaux, wrestles with that point. She is now raising her son’s 4-year-old son—he was a single father—and she says that sometimes in her darkest moments she has blamed herself for not having enough money to send her son to college. “If I could have sent him to college…” she begins, and her voice trails off as she chokes back tears. She knows, too, that her son loved what he did, and he believed that he was helping people in Iraq. “He would say, ‘Mama, you should see their faces. They’re so grateful.'” But Crawford wrestles with her son’s sacrifice as the war fades from the front pages. “You hear that the economy is more important in the election than the war is,” she says. “Sometimes I worry that people are already forgetting.”

Strains. The evening that the team learned Gauthreaux had died, Del Valle contemplated getting out of the Army, imagining what his own death would do to his wife and daughter. Now home at Fort Hood since December, Del Valle, a native of Puerto Rico, has been promoted to the rank of command sergeant major. During his time in Iraq, he helped his own soldiers through some rough times and grew close to his Iraqi Army counterpart. Today, Del Valle is prepared to deploy again. “I think it would be kind of selfish for me to walk away from the Army now,” he says.

The family strains on U.S. soldiers are immense, but Jones says troops are also helping another country rebuild itself and its families as well. “That matters a lot,” he says. “I went over and trained a medical platoon. Those guys are really proficient now, and I’m proud about that,” adds Jones, whose next assignment will be as a recruiter.

That will not be an easy job, he knows, meeting his numbers in the middle of a war. And he has wrestled with what he will tell potential recruits—how to encapsulate the experience of a soldier in the Army today. But he has settled on an answer. “The truth,” he says. “All I can do is tell them the truth.”

February 12, 2008 – President Bush has been to Las Vegas nine times since he was first inaugurated, but last Wednesday was the first time he ever stayed overnight in Sin City. He and his aides (and the traveling press corps) did so in luxury, staying at the Venetian, the palatial dominoqq casino resort run by Sheldon Adelson, the chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp. and a big force in GOP and philanthropic circles. (He is part of the money behind Freedom’s Watch, the conservative foreign policy group formed as a kind of counterpoint to liberal groups like MoveOn.org.) Adelson and his wife, Miriam, were in the loading dock near the slots at the Venetian Thursday to greet Bush and jumped into his limousine to ride with him to his speech sponsored by a conservative think tank. You can enjoy online betting , online casino.

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After the speech, Adelson — who was at the White House in November for the official dinner for French President Nicolas Sarkozy — hosted Bush at a Nevada GOP fundraiser at his home in the Tournament Hills gated community. A Nevada GOP official would not provide figures for the total take. — Michael Abramowitz, in the Washington Post, February 4, 2008.

In early December, Freedom’s Watch, the well-funded conservative lobbying group founded by former White House staffers and extremely wealthy longtime Republican donors, fired its first shot in Election 2008. Founded last year, and making its public debut with a $15 million dollar advertising campaign in support of Bush’s “surge” in mid-August, the group recently funded a series of ads in a northern Ohio special congressional election.

The advertisements, called “aggressively negative” by the Washington Post, branded the Democratic Party candidate as being soft on illegal immigration. According to the Washington Post, “Behind a blood-red foreground, the group’s ad showed Latinos hurrying under fences and being frisked by police as a narrator accused Democratic candidate Robin Weirauch and ‘liberals in Congress’ of supporting free health care for illegal immigrants.”

Republican Robert Latta won the House seat representing the district around Bowling Green, Ohio.

Freedom’s Watch (website) was founded by Bradley Blakeman, the organization’s president and a former assistant to President George W. Bush and presidential appointee to the US Holocaust Museum; Mel Sembler, a millionaire former Bush ambassador to Italy, and Ari Fleischer, a former Bush press secretary. Much of its financial support so far has come from Sembler and billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino executive who is one of the richest people in the world. Many people use to do gambling from platform like qq39bet. You will see that many people earn good cash on สล็อต xo which is most popular platform among the casino players. Sbobet is the most prefer platform by casino players.

According to Congresspedia, a joint project of Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Media and Democracy, Freedom’s Watch ” . . . is organized under section 501(c)4 of the tax code, meaning that it can lobby on issues but cannot expressly advocate for specific candidates.”

On September 17, 2007, it registered with the Secretary of the U.S. Senate as a non-profit lobbying organization. The organization lists Blakeman, Michael Leavitt, identifed as having served within the past two years as “Staff Asst & Regional Rep, [NC State] Senator [John] Snow,” and Matt David, identified as having served within the past two years as “Director of Rapid Response; White House Special Asst. to Director of Policy, Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance” as lobbyists.

The idea for Freedom’s Watch was “hatched,” according to Congresspedia, in March 2007 at the “winter meeting” of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) in Manalapan, Florida, where keynote speaker Vice President Dick Cheney “accused the Democrat-led House of Representatives of not supporting troops in Iraq and of sending a message to terrorists that America will retreat in the face danger.” The RJC was described in 2005 as “a big money pro-Israel lobby group linking Jewish-American neoconservatives to the Christian Right and Israel’s Likud government.”

The organization’s mission is “to promote the common good and general welfare of the American people by supporting mainstream conservative public policies. We engage in grassroots lobbying, education and information campaigns, and issue advocacy to further our goals and objectives. We also seek to create coalitions and collaborate with like-minded groups and individuals to further our common goals. Freedom’s Watch provides a credible conservative voice and strong leadership on pressing domestic and international issues to keep America strong, safe, and prosperous.”

According to its website, the organization’s four “core issue areas” are:

–The dangers of radical Islam and the emerging Iranian threat
–Advancing a conservative agenda and market-based solutions to pressing domestic problems
–Standing up to Big Labor’s radical agenda
–Preventing the degeneration of our society by stopping the legalization of controlled substances.

“While initial reports suggested a budget of $200 million, people who have talked to the group in recent weeks say the figure is closer to $250 million, more than double the amount spent by the largest independent liberal groups in the 2004 election cycle,” the Washington Post reported. “There is a sense among those contributing to Freedom’s Watch that MoveOn powerfully filled a void in the left, that rallied support in the left, that raised money from the left, that mobilized the left,” Fleischer told the Post.

John Stauber, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy recently passed on this e-mail survey/fundraising appeal that he received from Freedom’s Watch’s Bradley Blakemore:

Have you seen our television ads that have the liberal establishment reeling?

For most of last year, the liberals declared Iraq a lost cause and pushed for immediate withdraw of our troops — but then we pushed back. Instead of surrender, victory is now within our grasp!

We are Freedom’s Watch, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving, protecting, and defending conservative principles and promoting a conservative agenda.

In just a few months, John, Freedom’s Watch has helped turn around the public debate and helped ensure that our troops in Iraq had the chance to do what they do best, WIN.

Now Freedom’s Watch is turning its attention to other critical issues that are at the forefront of the debate during this critical and historic national election year.

John, before we launch our next round of ads, we want to gather feedback from grassroots conservatives like you to find out which issues and policies you believe are most important.

So please . . . take a brief online survey that will serve as the basis for Freedom’s Watch’s 2008 campaign for a conservative agenda.

We need to know if illegal immigration, taxes, government spending, national defense, education, health care or some other issue is at the top of your own election year agenda, so that we can move it to the top of ours as well.

In late January, Paul Kiel of TPMMuckraker.com pointed out that Freedom’s Watch had “begun its promised push to recruit membership — to become ‘a conservative answer to MoveOn'”:

In a mailing that the group has sent to an unknown number of people, a four-page fundraising pitch (which is addressed, “Dear Fellow Patriot”) is packaged with a two-page “Citizens Census.” The “CONFIDENTIAL CENSUS DOCUMENT,” as it’s described in the letter, is actually a list of questions about core conservative issues, such as “Should we give our troops everything they need to fight our enemies?” with “Yes,” “No,” or “Undecided” as the offered responses. The questions are under the heading “FREEDOM’S WATCH CITIZENS CENSUS QUESTIONS.”

The letter and census was mailed in an official looking envelope marked “2008 Citizens Census.” FW spokesperson Jake Suski, Sen. John McCain’s former Western finance director, denied the mailing was misleading, telling Kiel that “It doesn’t even have the qualities of an official document.”

Building a powerful infrastructure

Freedom’s Watch is experiencing a growth spurt in both its infrastructure and its projected agenda. “We’re a permanent political operation here in town. We’re not going to be Johnny One Note,” Joe Eule, the group’s executive director told the Washington Post. Helping pave the way to permanency is a projected doubling of its 20 person staff, the creation of an in-house modern studio capable of transmitting advertisements to television and radio stations across the country, and the hiring of a new communications director, Ed Patru, the former spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee who was recently lured “away from Capitol Hill” the Post reported.

Patru, who earlier in his career was the communications director for the American International Automobile Dealers, appears to be an able-bodied spinmeister for Freedom’s Watch’s Swift Boat.

A year ago, Patru, then the House Republican Conference spokesman, attacked Pennsylvania Democrat and Iraq War veteran Patrick Murphy, who had spoken out on the need to end the war in Iraq. According to the blog Brendan Calling, Patru sent out the following quotes (with Patru’s commentary) from freshman Rep. Murphy:

Mr. Murphy said in a speech on the House floor Tuesday: “I served in Baghdad from June of 2003 to January of 2004, walking in my own combat boots, I saw firsthand this administration’s failed policy in Iraq.”

That is true. Mr. Murphy, according to his Web site, served with the 82nd Airborne in Iraq.

However, Republicans dug up a quote from Mr. Murphy in the Widener University School of Law Magazine, Fall 2004 edition.

There, Capt. Murphy said: “We are really making a difference here in Baghdad. These people haven’t had a sense of justice in such a long time. We’re rebuilding schools and parks, and I am working with the Baghdad judiciary on rebuilding their court system . . . For those of us who joined the legal profession to make a difference, this sure is the place.”

In an attempt to find out more about his record of service, Brendan Calling phoned Patru’s office:

No one could connect me to Patru, but a person named Shane spoke to me. Had Patru ever served in the military? Shane wasn’t sure. Had Patru served in Iraq? Shane was pretty sure that wasn’t the case. How old was Ed Patru? Shane didn’t know. Was he over 42, was he past the maximum age of enlistment? Shane didn’t know. Did Patru support the war in Iraq? Shane couldn’t answer for his boss.

Patru seems better equipped for attacking than he is at prognosticating. When asked in a December 2005 interview with The Hotline, the National Journal’s daily briefing on politics, if the Democrats could take back the House, Patru responded:

Patru: Trying to take back the House running on Duke Cunningham or running on Abramoff or any other issue may sound good inside the beltway. But in the real world, House races are local phenoms . . . voters have good relationships with [their members] . . . most of our incumbents are battled tested . . . if the issue is ethics here..it’s a losing issue for Dems b/c we’re more than happy to point the figure at them. Nancy Pelosi is the only leader in Cong. to have been fined by the FEC for having too many PACs. Rahm Emanual went to Chicago to campaign for Richard Daley . . . when ethics are brought up, most voters . . . look at Cong. and the approval level drops as an institution.”

With perhaps as much as $250 million to throw around during the upcoming elections, we will no doubt be hearing a lot more from Freedom’s Watch and Ed Patru.

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement and a frequent writer for Media Transparency. He documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.

VCS asked Congress to automatically approve claims for TBI and PTSD, to expand Benefits Delivery at Discharge, and to remove VBA’s Under Secretary for Benefits due to his track record of catastrophic failure – the number of veterans waiting for a decision doubled in the past five years, and veterans wait more than six months for a claim decision from VA.  Also included in this posting is the attorney for the class action lawsuit filed against VA by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, Gordon Erspamer. 

Prepared Statement of Paul Sullivan, Executive Director, Veterans for Common Sense

Before the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives

Hearing on Regional Office Solutions to Reduce the 650,000 Claim Backlog at the Veterans Benefits Administration

February 14, 2008 – I would like to thank Chairman John Hall and members of the subcommittee for inviting Veterans for Common Sense to offer testimony regarding regional office solutions to eliminate the enormous backlog of 650,000 claims at the Veterans Benefits Administration.  VCS is a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC, founded in 2002, providing advocacy for service members and veterans.

At a recent VCS meeting with veterans, one Iraq war combat veteran asked us, “What would a smooth running VBA regional office look like?”  We said it should be where veterans come first and where claims are decided accurately within 30 days.

VCS fully supports the superb recommendations already made by Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes, Morrison & Foerster’s Gordon Erspamer, and the Veterans Disability Benefits Commission.  In addition, we recognize the tremendous efforts by VBA rank-and-file staff, many of whom are veterans, for their work assisting veterans every day.

Backlog Causes

VCS believes there are five major reasons why VBA remains foundering in an ocean of incomplete claims, doubling from 325,000 claims in 2002 to 650,000 claims today.  Veterans now wait more than six months for an answer from VBA.   Most of the reasons are beyond the control of rank-and-file VBA employees working at regional offices:

1. Staffing: VBA lacks the money to hire enough staff to handle the increased volume or to adequately train existing staff to make accurate, complete and timely decisions.

2. Process: VBA’s complex and adversarial rules, VBA’s 26-page claim form, and VBA’s lack of due process make deciding claims unreasonably complicated.

3. Volume: More claims – with an increase of 17 percent more issues per claim over the past six years – keep flooding into VBA, such as Vietnam War veterans seeking benefits for Agent Orange poisoning and PTSD, as well as other veterans seeking a financial safety net due to a weak economy.

4. The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars: The two wars generated 245,000 unanticipated VBA claims – again, with more issues per claim – with high rates of traumatic brain injury (TBI), post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and hearing loss.

5. Poor Leadership: VBA’s political leadership lacked the vision to become proactive and resolve VBA’s severe claims crisis.

When combined, these five factors created a perfect storm at VBA.  Compounded by institutional inertia and draconian budget restrictions from the Office of Management and Budget and the White House, the result is a catastrophic failure where the backlog and the length of time to process claims continues to grow.   Now hundreds of thousands of veterans go without disability payments and access to VA medical care because VBA remains rudderless, sinking, and far out to sea in a raging hurricane.

Future Challenges

Here are four significant additional challenges VBA faces:

1. The VBA capacity crisis is expected to worsen in the foreseeable future, as VA expects to process nearly one million new and re-opened claims next year.

2. VA regional offices received 245,000 unanticipated disability claims, yet 16 percent, or 39,000 veterans, are still waiting, on average six months, for a VA claim decision.

3. DoD already reports 68,000 non-fatal battlefield casualties from the two wars, and VA expects to treat 333,000 veteran patients during 2009, most of whom can be expected to file VBA disability claims, based on the activity of Gulf War veterans.

4. Veterans who served in the National Guard and Reserves are nearly three times as likely to have their claim denied than veterans from regular Active Duty (14{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} v. 5{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}).  VCS believes this discrepancy warrants an investigation by VA, the Department of Justice, and Congress because last year the difference was only two times as likely.

Solutions

VBA should use two avenues to fix problems: an incremental approach and an overhaul approach.  VBA must make immediate reforms while keeping its eyes focused on creating a robust system where VA can, in fact, produce prompt, complete, and accurate VA disability claim decisions with 30 days.  In the long-term, VCS suggests using the recommendations provided by the Veterans Disability Benefits Commission as a blueprint for the start of a desperately needed overhaul of VA, especially VBA.

In the short term, in addition to recommendations made by Bilmes, Erspamer, and the VDBC, we ask Congress to change the law and thus provide VBA regional office employees the tools to put our veterans first:

1. Automatically approve disability claims for TBI.  Congress should pass legislation to automatically approve disability benefits for deployed veterans who are diagnosed with TBI.  Such a law would simplify and expedite claims processing at regional offices.  According to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, up to 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are at risk for TBI due to roadside bomb blasts.  One VA physician estimates up to 30 percent, or between 320,000 and 500,000 TBI cases.  However, the military does not document all bomb blasts, thus making it hard for VA to verify and to process TBI claims.  This new law would establish that a deployment to the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones means VBA concedes there was a concussive blast incident strong enough to cause the TBI, unless there is evidence to the contrary. Coupled with this recommendation is a requirement for mandatory full funding for VA to provide proper TBI screening for all 1.6 million of our service members sent to war zones since September 11, 2001.

2. Automatically approve disability claims for PTSD.  In July 2007, VCS asked Congress to pass legislation designed to automatically approve disability claims for veterans who are diagnosed with PTSD.  VCS believes such a law would simplify and expedite claims processing at regional offices.  Estimates range from 20 percent to 36 percent for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans returning home with PTSD, or between 320,000 and 600,000 PTSD cases.  In a July 2004 Army study, the military documented 93 percent of soldiers and 97 percent of Marines experienced “being shot at or receiving small arms fire,” indicating that nearly all soldiers are now involved in combat.  Congress should investigate why VA diagnosed 56,246 veterans with PTSD, yet approved only 34,138 PTSD disability claims, or only 61 percent.  Are the 22,000+ claims pending, denied, or under appeal?  Do veterans receiving free VHA healthcare know about VBA?  A major problem facing veterans and regional office staff is the military’s lack of records for all combat engagements.  PTSD claims should be automatically approved with the understanding that deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan means VBA concedes there was at least one stressor sufficient enough to cause PTSD, unless there is evidence to the contrary.

3. Expand Benefits Delivery at Discharge.  One of VBA’s biggest hurdles at regional offices is obtaining military service and medical records.  With a complete forward deployment of VBA staff at military bases, including all National Guard and Reserve armory and demobilization sites, VBA would have immediate and full access to records before they are shipped off to storage, misplaced, or destroyed.  Congress should change the law so that all service members can file claims while still in the military.  Currently, this is not available at all military installations, and is noticeably absent for our Reserve and National Guard.  Congress should require any VBA employee stationed at a military facility to be trained and authorized to assist with both military and VA healthcare and claims paperwork.  Coupled with this suggestion is the need for DoD to comply with 38 USC Section 5106 and provide military service records and military medical records to VA and to the veteran at discharge and for VHA to automatically enroll all new service members upon enlistment.

4. Hold VBA Accountable.  In the end, VCS believes there must be accountability at VBA.  At present, VCS is aware of only a very small number of VBA employees who have faced adverse consequences for incomplete, incorrect, negligent, or criminal activities involving veterans’ claims.  VCS asks Congress to request statistics from VBA that show the number of VBA employees who faced personnel actions (counseling, reprimands, demotion, transfer, or termination) as a result of a poor performance evaluation associated with developing or approving claims – and this should include all VBA staff, from rating specialists to supervisors to executives.

VCS believes accountability for VBA must rest with the highest official at VBA, the Under Secretary for Benefits, Daniel Cooper.  After six years, he provided only small incremental changes rather than both incremental change and a massive overhaul.  Congress must hold the entire Administration – VBA, VA, OMB, and the White House – accountable for this systemic failure to assist our disabled veterans, lest this problem continue indefinitely even if a new Under Secretary were confirmed.

Here is a chronology showing the Under Secretary was fully aware of VBA’s crisis before he became Under Secretary, yet he failed to deliver for our veterans:

• In early 2001, then-Secretary Anthony Principi recognized challenges at VBA, and he created the “Claims Processing Task Force,” naming Cooper to lead it, even though he had no experience with VA.  He was a retired Navy Vice Admiral who served on the board of directors for Exelon, a nuclear power company, and USAA, an insurance and banking company.

• In October 2001, Cooper issued his Task Force report, which made dozens of thoughtful incremental recommendations, including holding VBA employees accountable.  In November 2001, the full Committee held a hearing to discuss the work of the Task Force.  After 9/11 and after the invasion of Afghanistan, Cooper told the full Committee, “In my opinion, today, there are enough resources in VBA to do the job that has to be done” (page 16).

• In December 2001, with more troops pouring into Afghanistan and with plans on the table to invade Iraq, Cooper provided additional written answers to the full Committee’s questions about staffing resources.  Cooper wrote, “At the hearing, I specifically stated that new resources (i.e., FTE) should not be provided” (page 166).  Given that there were hundreds of thousands of claims from half of our Gulf War conflict veterans, why did he not plan for nor act on the needs of a new generation of war veterans when he became Under Secretary in 2002?

Ethics Cloud for VBA Under Secretary

VCS believes the Under Secretary for Benefits remains under an ethics cloud due to his alleged illegal activity proselytizing and raising money using his official government position.  VCS is a staunch defender of civil liberties, including religious liberty.  Therefore, VCS joined with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and filed an ethics complaint with the Department of Justice for his participation in the Christian Embassy video.  For the record, VCS has provided the Subcommittee with a copy of our joint VCS-MRFF ethics complaint, and we note that DoJ has not contacted VCS or MRFF, and VA has not turned over their investigative report about Daniel Cooper that VCS requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

Conclusion

A failure to address VBA’s claims catastrophe has needlessly increased suffering among our veterans and their families.  According to published government and news reports, the number of broken homes, unemployed veterans, drug and alcohol abuse, suicides, and homelessness all rose – problems expected to worsen without immediate action to resolve VBA’s claims crisis.  VCS believes VA, VBA, and Congressional leaders should work closely with VBA employees and advocates to find solutions.  VCS respectfully requests our ethics complaint against the Under Secretary for Benefits sent to DoJ on September 4, 2007, be entered into the hearing record.
Biography of Paul Sullivan

Paul Sullivan serves at the Executive Director of Veterans for Common Sense, a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC, focusing on issues related to national security, civil liberties, and veterans’ benefits.

He served in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq as a Cavalry Scout with the Army’s 1st Armored Division during the 1991 Gulf War.

Paul served on the board of directors of the National Gulf War Resource Center from 1995 to 1997, and as NGWRC’s executive director from 1997 to 2000.   He was instrumental in providing advocacy for the passage of the “Persian Gulf Veterans Act of 1998,” a new law expanding healthcare and disability benefits for Gulf War veterans.

From 2000 to 2006, Paul worked as a project manager at VA, where he led a team of analysts and computer programmers who produced the quarterly Gulf War Veterans Information System report as well as many other statistical and analytical reports related to the Gulf War, Iraq War, Afghanistan War, and PTSD.

While at VA, he provided staff support for then-VA Secretary Anthony Principi’s “Task Force for Seamless Transition,” and he wrote the 2004 Task Force report.

He graduated from the University of West Georgia with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science, and he received a Master’s Certificate in Project Management from George Washington University.

Paul lives near Austin, Texas with his wife and two daughters.  He is a life member of both the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Disabled American Veterans.

Federal Funding Statement

Veterans for Common Sense is a non-profit corporation recognized by the Internal Revenue Service under Section 501(c)(3) as a non-profit charity in the District of Columbia, and VCS has not received any Federal grant or contract in the past two years.

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Testimony of Gordon P. Erspamer

February 14, 2008

 . . . Law has reached its finest moments when it has freed man from the unlimited discretion of some ruler, some civil or military official, some bureaucrat. Where discretion is absolute, man has always suffered. At times it has been his property that has been invaded; at times, his privacy; at times, his liberty of movement; at times, his freedom of thought; at times, his life. Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man’s other inventions.  – Justice William O. Douglas in United States v. Wunderlich, 342 U.S. 98, 101 (1951).

A. Personal Background:

1. I have been representing individual veterans on service-connected disability and death and disability compensation claims and appeals for over 25 years, all on a pro bono basis.  I also acted as counsel for my mother and late father in the first case ever argued in the newly created Court of Veterans Appeals, since renamed the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims) “CAVC”).  See Erspamer v. Derwinski, 1 Vet. App. 3 (1990).  In addition, I have represented veterans’ organizations and veterans in two major constitutional actions against the DVA (“VA”), each of which Morrison & Foerster has also handled pro bono, including the following:

a. National Association of Radiation Survivors, et al. v. Walters, Administrator of Veterans’ Affairs, et al., 589 F. Supp. 1302 (N.D. Cal. 1984); 473 U.S. 305 (1985); 111 F.R.D. 595 (N.D. Cal. 1986); 111 F.R.D. 543 (N.D. Cal. 1987); 782 F. Supp. 1392 (N.D. Cal. 1992); 994 F.2d 583 (1992); and

b. Veterans for Common Sense, et al. v. James B. Peake, M.D., Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, et al., USDC-N. Cal. Case No. 07-3758-SC (filed July 23, 2007).  See www.veteransptsdclassaction.org (reproducing copies of complaint and other major pleadings and decisions).

B. Major Regional Office Problems:

1. The Hollowness of the VA’s Motto:  “For Him That Hath Borne the Battle . . .”  The VA’s motto is not only inscribed outside its headquarters here in Washington, D.C., but it also is widely publicized elsewhere.  The inconsistency between the VA’s motto and the positions or actions it adopts in court in cases brought by veterans is steeped in irony.  Instead of seeking to extol the contributions made by veterans and recognize veterans’ rights, in my experience the opposite has been true.  For example, the VA argues that disabled veterans do not possess an enforceable “entitlement” to any medical care, that all veterans’ benefits are “mere gratuities,” that the Secretary has total discretion whether or not to provide medical care, that veterans lack a 5th Amendment property interest in the receipt of disability or death compensation, or that the VA is insulated from court challenges by sovereign immunity, the outdated doctrine that “The King Can Do No Wrong.”  Given its stated mission, it is telling that the VA actually labors to urge courts to minimize or restrict the scope of veterans’ rights.

2. Perpetuation of Myths:  A series of characterizations about the adjudication process have received wide circulation for many years.  For example, Congress has frequently been told that the VA process is “non-adversarial,” that lawyers are unnecessary, and that the VA’s procedures are “informal.”  In my opinion, these characterizations have always been myths, but they are even more mythical in today’s world.  The Federal Circuit itself has recognized that the claims process has become adversarial.  See Bailey v. West, 160 F.3d 1360, 1365 (Fed. Cir. 1998) (“[S]ince the [VJRA] . . . it appears that the system has changed from a nonadversarial, ex parte, paternalistic system for adjudicating claims, to ones in which veterans . . . must satisfy formal legal requirements, often without the benefits of legal counsel, before they are entitled to administrative and judicial review.”)  As to informality, all too often it has been an opportunity for the VA to take shortcuts without the veteran’s knowledge or to “streamline,” and by that I mean ignore, the procedural rights of veterans.

3. Absence of Single Assignment of Claims:  One fundamental regional office problem is that the VA does not assign a person or persons to handle a particular veteran’s claim from “cradle to grave.”  Instead, the Service Center Manager (formerly called “Adjudication Officer”) of each office is listed on correspondence, and the actual decision-makers remain anonymous.  Thus, the veteran never has a specific name to contact, and no VA employee builds experience or expertise on a claim.  There also is no accountability and no incentive for the employees to develop and decide the case correctly.

4. Antiquated Hard Copy System:  Congress should order the VA to scrap its antiquated hard copy claim file system and replace it with an up-to-date database where claim file information can be shared by users at both the VHA and DVB.  The hard copy system leads to delays, lost or misplaced files and enables misconduct to occur without any remedy or detection.  And Congress should force the VA to give a veteran web access to his claim file.

5. Time/Delay, Abandonment of Claims:  Delay has become an endemic feature of the VA adjudication system for decades, raising the venerated principle of jurisprudence that “Justice delayed is justice denied,” as reflected in the following table, prepared in July 2007:

Stage Time Source
1) Initial Decision 196 days* (Department of Veterans Affairs FY 2006 Performance and Accountability Report (2006) at 213)
2) BVA Appeal 971 days BVA Chairman’s Report at 16
3) CAVC Appeal 1286 days:  120 days (notice of appeal) + 254 days (docketing, briefing) + 912 days (judicial consideration) 38 U.S.C. § 7266; Ct. Vet. App. R. 4(c), 10(a), 10(b), 11(a)(2), 31(a)(1), 31(a)(2), 31(a)(3); Testimony of Robert Chisholm
4) Federal Circuit 317 days Review of Federal Circuit docket sheets re veterans’ appeals from CAVC
5) US Supreme Court
386 days Review of Supreme Court docket sheets for 2005 term
TOTAL: 3156 days (8.65 years) */Accuracy is questionable.

The number of claims pending at regional offices in recent years has accelerated rapidly, and the huge backlog is now reaching crisis proportions, as shown on the graph attached as Exhibit A.  Shockingly, there is no deadline for the VA to act on claims or to prepare documents needed for an appeal such as a “Statement of the Case”; ironically, the only deadlines apply to the veteran, who is often unrepresented.  As a result, veterans frequently trip up at the regional office level, resulting in a summary denial of a claim or appeal as reflected in the high percentage of appeals to the BVA and CAVC that are summarily denied on jurisdictional defect grounds, including failure to comply with time deadlines or legal doctrines such as waiver and subsumption.  The VA benefits from delays because some of the veterans die while their claim is pending, and survivors often do not pursue the claim further, and the VA does not award interest on any retroactive award, which is calculated at the historical rates, not current rates that reflect inflation.

The claim abandonment rate at the regional office level is also very high, perhaps as high as 99{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}.  Thus, the appeal system is irrelevant for the vast majority of veterans because their claims never get that far.  In my opinion, many of the abandoned claims likely have at least some merit, and many veterans give up out of frustration.  The VA’s timeliness measures are unreliable because it often manipulates the numbers, e.g., by calculating from the wrong date or by artificially truncating a regional office decision into a number of parts to make the delay numbers look more palatable.  For example, the timeliness of medical care is calculated as the time between a request for an appointment and the date the appointment date is given, not the date the appointment occurs, which may stretch months in the future.  Congress needs to set minimum times for complete action at the regional office level in the absence of which a claim would be provisionally granted.  And it also needs to take a hard look at the BVA and the CAVC, which are experiencing unprecedented delays that only will get worse with time.  See Exh. B.

6. Excessive Remands — The Recycling or “Hamster Wheel” Problem:  If the VA makes a mistake at the regional office level, however egregious, no consequences attach to it.  Instead, the claim is “remanded” and the innocent party — the veteran — has to wait several years for the BVA or CAVC to order the VA to correct the mistake and start all over at the regional office.  Thus, it is the veteran that suffers.  The error rates reflected in the disposition of the appeals of VA regional offices are startlingly high, as reflected on the chart attached as Exhibit B.

7. Incentive Compensation System:  The design of the VA’s incentive compensation system is to give adjudicators a financial incentive to “game” the system at the veteran’s expense.  For example, shredding a medical examination report or another key piece of evidence can make a denial or remand decision easy to write.  The incentive compensation system operates under a “piece work” basis, making it more important to find ways to accomplish a task quickly rather than correctly.  Two BVA attorneys were indicted several years ago for doing exactly this in hundreds or potentially thousands of cases, and both plead guilty (Jill Rygwalski and Lawrence Gottfried).  The VA must do more to detect and correct internal abuses that have plagued the agency for many years.  I would recommend that incentive compensation for adjudicators and caregivers be primarily based on the results of veteran satisfaction surveys.

8. Need for Veterans Civil Rights Legislation — a “Veterans Bill of Rights:”  The veteran is procedurally handicapped at the regional office level by statutory or regulatory restrictions on his or her civil and procedural rights.  Unlike all other citizens, the veteran cannot retain a lawyer at his own expense, leaving him or her vulnerable to sharp practice, procedural missteps or abandonment.  The veteran cannot subpoena any VA employees to testify (e.g., the VA’s own doctor who concluded he was disabled or the anonymous medical person who on the adjudication side that says he is not), and the veteran cannot subpoena documents or other witnesses to testify at a hearing (in most cases).  Our veterans deserve more than a watered-down version of mass justice.  The regional office stage is crucial because that is where the record is developed and upon which the appeal depends.  I also believe that it was a serious error for Congress to set up an Article III court to hear veterans appeals, the limited powers of which play a key role in circumscribing veterans’ civil rights.  It is time for Congress to restore the civil rights of veterans by passing a veterans’ Bill of Rights.  See Exh. C.

9. Remedies for Denial of Health Care:  One of the greatest weaknesses in the veterans’ benefits system at the regional level is that no meaningful or timely remedies exist for a veteran who is denied health care — no form, no established procedure.  Instead, the veteran’s complaint is handled under an informal VHA “directive” that does not have the force of law.  Thus, everything is left to fiat, and the veterans has no enforceable rights and no timely recourse.  The delays inherent in the informal procedure also make it ineffective.  This is contributing to the suicide epidemic amongst returning OIF/OEF veterans, amongst other frustrations that veteran’s experience.

10. Inability of Veterans Court to Enforce its Decisions at the Regional Office Level/Need for Expansion of Powers of Veterans Court:  One of the most serious defects in the VA system is the CAVC’s inability to force regional offices to obey the rule of law.  As former Chief Judge Frank Nebeker of the CAVC pointed out in his “State of the Court” speeches, the CAVC’s inability to force the regional offices to follow its decisions means that the regional offices can violate the CAVC’s decisions with impunity.  The CAVC also needs to be given the power to issue injunctions against the VA and to order relief under the Declaratory Judgments Act.  In addition, the Court should be ordered to adopt a class action procedure whereby relief can be extended beyond the individual veteran to encompass similarly situated veterans.  Finally, the lack of discovery at any stage of the adjudication process has to be addressed, as it hampers veterans’ ability to develop facts to support a claim and/or to challenge adverse evidence, and prevents the veteran from discovering misconduct.

11. The Unofficial Regulation Problem:  For many years the VA has adopted rules by way of “fast letters,” directives or other unofficial means on important issues that in effect may dictate the result in an individual case or entire category of cases.  Put differently, these unofficial rules prescribe substantive standards which properly should have been the subject of rulemaking, and an opportunity for judicial review.  This practice completely circumvents the judicial review process set up by Congress.  Most recently, the VA has set up a special review procedure at the Central Office for “extraordinary awards” made by regional offices that involves extra layers of review and delay and which discourages adjudicators from making retroactive awards.  History is rife with similar examples, such as the “second signature” requirement for PTSD grants (but not denials), the directive not to infer claims based upon individual unemployability, the “courtesy sign-off” system which defeated the whole purpose of having a three-member decision-making team, and a host of others.

12. Absence of Guaranteed VA Budget and Chronic Underfunding:  The VA has been chronically underfunded for years.  Pentagon Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness David Chu’s interview in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 25, 2005 is very revealing as to what has been driving the VA budget constriction — a desire to spend more money on armaments and less money on personnel.  The VA’s chronic underfunding creates a compulsion to ration health care and disability payments, and contributes to lengthy delays as well as to the hiring of marginally qualified workers or medical professionals.

13. Upgrade Quality of Personnel and Leadership:  The VA needs to upgrade the quality of its hiring.  My understanding is that many VA rating specialists have only a high school education and lack any medical training — meaning that unqualified persons are deciding the fates of our veterans.  This may help explain the high error rate and the great frustration felt by our veterans.  At the same time, reports have continued to surface about the VA’s use of unlicensed or unqualified medical personal to treat veterans.  The VA’s management problems are immense and so deeply entrenched that they warrant the hiring of a capable crisis management or turnaround executive to either head the agency or recommend how to address the huge problems that it faces.  Sinecures or political appointments do no one any good.

C. Conclusion.

One litmus test for the VA’s performance that is within the experience of each of you is the frequency with which you receive complaints from your constituents.  If the number of phone calls and e-mails I receive from veterans is any indication, the dissatisfaction levels are very high.  I leave you with one final quote from Marlow v. West, and ask you to consider whether this is the type of experience you want to subject our veterans to:
Although the dispositive law is all too clear, we are constrained to comment on Mrs. Marlow’s twelve-year effort to get her veteran father’s full benefits before he died.  The record is replete with examples of VA’s disingenuous refusal to acknowledge the specific nature of the claim for benefits under section 1114(o) and to deny what is manifestly obvious in the record and was clearly articulated in Mrs. Marlow’s communications to VA.  See, e.g., R. at 38-42, 182-202.  VA ultimately corrected Mr. Mokal’s ratings from the time of his discharge, but only after it was too late, as a matter of law, to pay him.  R. at 336-38.  This is a case that gives credence to those who don’t believe that VA is committed to the spirit expressed in the words of General Omar Bradley, the Administrator of Veterans’ Affairs from 1945 to 1947:  “We are dealing with veterans, not procedures; with their problems, not ours.” Marlow v. West, Decision No. 98-113 (CAVC 1999).

Exhibit C: THE VETERANS BILL OF RIGHTS

Preamble:  It is the intent of Congress to honor the service and personal sacrifices of veterans and their families by ensuring that they have fair and timely access to all the benefits to which they are entitled, including death and disability compensation, medical care, educational assistance, job training, housing and pensions (“VA Benefits”).  To this end,

1. Congress recognizes that all veterans have and have always had a Fifth Amendment property interest in the receipt of all VA Benefits.

2. Veterans shall have an unfettered access to retain attorneys at their own expense, and the Fee Prohibition in 38 U.S.C. § 5904(c)(l) shall be abolished.

3. Veterans should have full rights to judicial review in Article III courts, and the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims should be abolished, with a transition plan for implementation.

4. Veterans shall have the right to subpoena documents or records from all federal agencies, and all federal agencies shall treat veterans’ document or record requests expeditiously and shall produce all responsive documents within 60 days.

5. Veterans shall have the right to call any VA employees as witnesses at any regional office hearings related to veterans’ benefits, including treating physicians or other medical personnel and anyone else who has made any determination in connection with a claim.

6. Congress shall take all necessary measures to insure that the VA delivers on its commitments to provide health care to veterans, and the VA’s practice of denying care to veterans it classifies as having a low priority is disapproved.

7. The VA shall adopt remedies and procedures to timely address cases of alleged denial of or unreasonable delays in providing health care, including notice, an opportunity to call witnesses, and a hearing to any veteran contesting such denial, as well as an expedited procedure in cases of emergency.

8. The VA shall award interest at the federal rate on all retroactive awards of any form of death or disability compensation or pension.

9. Congress shall guarantee and appropriate all funds necessary to provide all veterans benefits in accordance with the VA’s budgets.

February 12, 2008 – The mothers of two teenage soldiers killed in Iraq accused Tony Blair’s government of going to war “on a lie” as they took their fight for a public inquiry into the conflict to the House of Lords.

Beverly Clarke and Rose Gentle argue that ministers breached their duty to Britain’s armed forces by failing to ensure the invasion was lawful.

Trooper David Clarke, from Littleworth, Staffordshire, was killed by “friendly fire” near Basra in 2003, while Fusilier Gordon Gentle, from Glasgow, died in a roadside bomb attack in Basra in 2004. Both were 19.

The law lords yesterday began considering the mothers’ argument that servicemen and women have the right not to have their lives jeopardised in illegal conflicts.

Rabinder Singh QC, who is representing the women, told the court: “That duty is owed to soldiers who are under the unique compulsory control of the state and have to obey orders. They have to put their lives in harm’s way if necessary because their country demands it.”

Mr Singh said the overwhelming body of legal advice received by the Government was that the invasion would not be lawful without a second UN Security Council resolution. “These mothers … have come to court with reluctance. They are proud of their sons, who died with honour serving their country,” he said.

Mrs Clarke and Mrs Gentle base their argument on the legal advice prepared by Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney general, in the run-up to the war. They say 13 pages of “equivocal” advice were reduced to one page of unequivocal advice that military action would be legal in just 10 days.

The women are challenging a Court of Appeal ruling that said the Government was not obliged to order an independent inquiry under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the “right to life”.

Mrs Gentle said: “I think Tony Blair sent our boys to war on a lie. He just agreed with George Bush right away.” Peter Brierley, whose son, L/Cpl Shaun Brierley, was killed in 2006, said: “This was not defending his country. The country was not under any threat of attack.”

Lord Bingham, sitting with eight other law lords, said they were mindful of “the human loss which underlies these proceedings”.

February 11, 2008 – Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani are the three stooges of the Christian right. These self-described former Muslim terrorists are regularly trotted out at Christian colleges—a few days ago they were at the Air Force Academy—to spew racist filth about Islam on behalf of groups such as Focus on the Family. It is a clever tactic. Curly, Larry and Mo, who all say they are born-again Christians, engage in hate speech and assure us it comes from personal experience. They tell their audiences that the only way to deal with one-fifth of the world’s population is by converting or eradicating all Muslims. Their cant is broadcast regularly on Fox News, including the Bill O’Reilly and Neil Cavuto shows, as well as on numerous Christian radio and television programs. Shoebat, who has written a book called “Why We Want to Kill You,” promises in his lectures to explain the numerous similarities between radical Muslims and the Nazis, how “Muslim terrorists” invaded America 30 years ago and how “perseverance, recruitment and hate” have fueled attacks by Muslims. 

These men are frauds, but this is not the point. They are part of a dark and frightening war by the Christian right against tolerance that, in the moment of another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, would make it acceptable to target and persecute all Muslims, including the some 6 million Muslims who live in the United States. These men stoke these irrational fears. They defend the perpetual war unleashed by the Bush administration and championed by Sen. John McCain. McCain frequently reminds listeners that “the greatest danger facing the world is Islamic terrorism,” as does Mike Huckabee, who says that “Islamofascism” is “the greatest threat this country [has] ever faced.” George W. Bush has, in the same vein, assured Americans that terrorists hate us for our freedoms, not, of course, for anything we have done. Bush described the “war on terror” as a war against totalitarian Islamofascism while the Israeli air force was dropping tens of thousands of pounds of iron fragmentation bombs up and down Lebanon, an air campaign that killed 1,300 Lebanese civilians.

The three men tell lurid tales of being recruited as children into Palestinian terrorist organizations, murdering hundreds of civilians and blowing up a bank in Israel. Saleem says that as a child he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs via a network of tunnels underneath the Golan Heights, although no incident of this type was ever reported in Israel. He claims he is descended from the “grand wazir” of Islam, a title and a position that do not exist in the Arab world. They assure audiences that the Palestinians are interested not in a peaceful two-state solution but rather the destruction of Israel, the murder of all Jews and the death of America. Shoebat claims he first came to the United States as part of an extremist “sleeper cell.”

“These three jokers are as much former Islamic terrorists as ‘Star Trek’s’ Capt. James T. Kirk was a real Starship captain,” said Mikey Weinstein, the head of the watchdog group The Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The group has challenged Christian proselytizing in the military and denounced the visit by the men to the Air Force Academy.

The speakers include in their talks the superior virtues of Christianity. Saleem, for example, says his world “turned upside down when he was seriously injured in an automobile accident.”

“A Christian man tended to Kamal at the accident scene, making sure he got the medical treatment he needed,” his Web site says. “Kamal’s orthopedic surgeon and physical therapist were also Christian men whom over a period of several months ministered the unconditional love of Jesus Christ to him as he recovered. The love and sacrificial giving of these men caused Kamal to cry out to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob acknowledging his need for the Savior. Kamal has since become a man on a new mission, as an ambassador for the one true and living God, the great I Am, Jehovah God of the Bible.”

This creeping Christian chauvinism has infected our political and social discourse. It was behind the rumor that Barack Obama was a Muslim. Obama reassured followers that he was a Christian. It apparently did not occur to him, or his questioners, that the proper answer is that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, that persons of great moral probity and courage arise in all cultures and all religions, including Islam. Christians have no exclusive lock on virtue. But this kind of understanding often provokes indignant rage. 

The public denigration of Islam, and by implication all religious belief systems outside Christianity, is part of the triumphalism that has distorted the country since the 9/11 attacks. It makes dialogue with those outside our “Christian” culture impossible. It implicitly condemns all who do not think as we think and believe as we believe as, at best, inferior and usually morally depraved. It blinds us to our own failings. It makes self-reflection and self-criticism a form of treason. It reduces the world to a cartoonish vision of us and them, good and evil. It turns us into children with bombs. 

These three con artists are not the problem. There is enough scum out there to take their place. Rather, they offer a window into a worldview that is destroying the United States. It has corrupted the Republican Party. It has colored the news media. It has entered into the everyday clichés we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. It is ignorant and racist, but it is also deadly. It grossly perverts the Christian religion. It asks us to kill to purify the Earth. It leaves us threatened not only by the terrorists who may come from abroad but the ones who are rising from within our midst.

February 13, 2008

One week before Murray brings Secretary Peake to Walla Walla, she asks for answers on lack of construction dollars and suicide prevention efforts.

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Senator Patty Murray, a senior member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, today questioned VA Secretary James Peake about the President’s deficit of dollars when it comes to caring for our nation’s veterans.  

Peake appeared before Murray’s committee today to defend the President’s VA budget and will accompany her to the Walla Walla VA Facility in Washington state next week.

“We know all too well what happens when the VA gets shortchanged.  The men and women who have served us end up paying the biggest price,” Murray said.  “Our veterans are our heroes, and they deserve the best we can give them.  I believe we can do a lot better than this budget.”

In asking Peake about what the VA is doing to reach out to struggling veterans who may not know about VA resources available to them, Murray referenced a VA study that found that Guard or Reserve members accounted for 53 percent of the veteran suicides from 2001, when the war in Afghanistan began, through the end of 2005.  The study was made public yesterday in an Associated Press story.

Over 10,200 Washington state reserve forces have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to date.

“These statistics raise serious concerns for me because I know that members of the National Guard and Reserve oftentimes don’t think of themselves as veterans, and as a result, do not seek VA services,” Murray said in pushing Peake to increase outreach to all veterans. 

Peake explained that the VA has sent out letters to try and reach out to new veterans and said that an effort was being made to reach out to families because they are often the first to see a change in their loved one’s behavior.

Murray encouraged further outreach and investment in mental health within the VA’s budget.

“A letter from the VA doesn’t mean much to a veteran in a remote community somewhere,” she said.

Murray also expressed concern that the President’s budget cuts funding for construction by nearly 50 percent. 

The President’s budget ranks the VA facilities most in need of construction funds within his budget document – including projects in Seattle, Walla Walla and American Lake – but it then fails to fund anything below the top three projects (none of which are in Washington state).

“It doesn’t make sense for the President to be cutting construction funding at the same time that the list of needed repairs and expanded facilities is stacking up,” Murray said. 

Murray will bring Secretary Peake to the Walla Walla VA next Tuesday, February 19th, to impress upon him the importance of the facility.

Video of today’s hearing will be available on the Committee’s website later today: http://veterans.senate.gov/public/

Senator Murray’s opening statement at today’s hearing follows:

“Chairman Akaka and Senator Burr, thank you for holding today’s hearing to examine the President’s proposed VA Budget for fiscal year 2009.  And thanks to the representatives from the veterans’ service organizations, who put so much work into crafting the Independent Budget, and who are here to testify about the resources our veterans really need.

I would also like to extend a warm welcome to Secretary Peake, who is here for his first Senate hearing as Secretary of the VA.  I’m very much looking forward to your trip to the Walla Walla VA Medical Center next week.  I know you’ll be as impressed as I am by the entire community’s commitment to veterans.  And I was very glad you were able to accept my offer to come out and visit so soon after taking over at the VA.

Secretary Peake, many veterans – and many members of this committee – have placed a tremendous amount of faith in your ability to rise to the unprecedented challenges facing the VA today.  We have an opportunity to change course at the VA.  But we must do it quickly, and we must get it right.  As they say at VISN 20, “business as usual” is not an option. 

Secretary Peake, Congress and our veterans are counting on you, and your first test arrived on February 4th with the release of the President’s budget.  Given your short time on the job, I recognize that you didn’t play a large role in creating the document, but you do have the unenviable job of defending it.

Problems with the President’s Proposed VA budget

Mr. Secretary, I say “unenviable” because at this point, I find this budget unacceptable for a number of reasons – starting with my fear that it would close the VA’s door to thousands of our nation’s veterans.

1. It Would Close the VA’s Door to Thousands of Veterans

The President’s budget includes new fees and increased co-pays that I believe will discourage many veterans from accessing the VA – even as our veterans are turning to the VA in larger numbers than ever before.

The VA doesn’t discuss the likely impact of this policy proposal in this year’s budget submission.  But in previous budgets, the Administration has estimated that these fees and co-pays would result in nearly 200,000 veterans leaving the system, and more than 1 million veterans choosing not to enroll.

I’m also extremely disappointed that this budget continues to bar Priority 8 veterans from enrolling in the VA healthcare system.  It is estimated that more than 1.5 million veterans have already been turned away from the VA since the Priority 8 ban was put into effect in 2003, and many more have been deterred from seeking care.

I’ve made it clear over the last several years that I believe that denying or discouraging veterans from seeking care from the VA system because of their income is morally wrong.  And I believe it will also make it harder to maintain a strong voluntary military.

2. It Under funds Medical Care and Cuts Research

Next, while the President’s budget request does increase funding for VA medical care by $2 billion, it appears that this level won’t meet the real needs of veterans once medical inflation and other factors are considered.  The Independent Budget estimates that the true cost of VA medical care is $1.6 billion more than the President’s request.

I worry that under funding medical care will prevent the VA from being able to provide timely and high-quality health care to the veterans it serves.  And given the Administration’s involvement in covering up previous shortfalls in VA funding, I think this Committee has a good reason to be concerned about a future shortfall.  

Along the same line, I’m also troubled that the President is proposing an 8 percent cut for VA medical and prosthetic research.  As we all know, one of the signature injuries of the war in Iraq is Traumatic Brain Injury.  But there is still a great deal we don’t know about the condition.  Cutting funding for research seems like the wrong thing to do as we attempt to better understand the injuries our veterans are experiencing.

3. It Cuts Construction

Third, I am incredibly concerned that the President’s budget proposes cutting funding for major and minor construction by nearly 50 percent – at a time when the list of needed repairs and expanded facilities is stacking up.  The Administration’s own budget documents detail the numerous projects that won’t receive funding this year.

4. It Cuts the IG Budget

Finally, I object to the President’s proposed funding cut to the VA Inspector General.  I’m concerned about doing anything that might hinder the IG’s ability to be an effective watchdog over this incredibly complex system – at the very time we’re trying to encourage effective oversight.

Closing

Secretary Peake, when I voted for your confirmation in December, I said that while we shouldn’t dwell on the mistakes of the past, we must learn from them.  But I’m afraid that this budget is evidence that the Administration isn’t learning.

In his State of the Union address this year, President Bush said he was dedicated to providing for our nation’s veterans.  But at a time when thousands of new veterans are entering the VA system with serious medical needs as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Administration is underestimating the cost of medical care, and it is cutting funding for construction and medical and prosthetic research.

And at a time when older veterans are seeking care in record numbers, the President is proposing fees and co-pays that will shut the door to thousands of patients.

We know all too well what happens when the VA gets shortchanged.  The men and women who have served us end up paying the biggest price.  Our veterans are our heroes, and they deserve the best we can give them.  I believe we can do a lot better than this budget.

So, Secretary Peake, I have a number of questions for you, and I’m looking forward to your answers.   Thank you, Mr. Chairman.