February 7, 2008 – WASHINGTON (AP) — New Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake pledged Thursday to trim more than five weeks off the time it now takes to get the first check to a war veteran who files a disability claim.

In his first appearance before Congress since becoming secretary, Peake also sought to assure lawmakers that President Bush’s proposed 2009 VA budget of $91 billion would be sufficient to meet the growing demands of veterans of a protracted Iraq war. The proposal is a 3.7 percent increase from the previous year, but several lawmakers have criticized it as inadequate after factoring in inflation.

Peake wants to reduce wait times from roughly 180 days to 145 days by the start of next year. He cited aggressive efforts to hire staff, noting the VA will have 3,100 new staff by 2009. The VA also is working to get greater online access to Pentagon medical information that he says will allow staff to process claims faster and move toward a system of electronic filing of claims.

Peake promised to “virtually eliminate” the current list of 69,000 veterans who have waited more than 30 days for an appointment to get VA medical care. Such long waits runs counter to department policy, and a group of Iraq war veterans have filed a lawsuit alleging undue delays. He said the VA plans to open 64 new community-based outpatient clinics this year and 51 next year to improve access to health care in rural areas.

“We will take all measures necessary to provide them with timely benefits and services, to give them complete information about the benefits they have earned through their courageous service, and to implement streamlined processes free of bureaucratic red tape,” Peake said in testimony prepared for a House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing Thursday.

Peake took over the agency amid criticism the VA was not doing enough to meet the growing needs of war veterans, particularly the thousands returning home injured from Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent months, Bush has released, at the request of Congress, $3.7 billion in emergency money for additional services for injured veterans.

“I am concerned that this budget proposal contains cuts to veterans’ programs,” said Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., who chairs the House panel. “Although the request includes an increase for health care, it does not fully fund the needs of America’s veterans.”

February 7, 2008 – SALEM, Oregon – President Bush says veterans have no legal right to specific types of medical care. The information is coming from documents related to a civil lawsuit filed by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan war who claim the government is illegally denying mental health treatment to some troops.

The arguments, filed Wednesday in a San Francisco federal court, “strike at the heart of a lawsuit filed on behalf of veterans that claims the health care system for returning troops provides little recourse when the government rejects their medical claims,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported today.

Justice Department lawyers countered the accusations, claiming that the Veterans Affairs administration is working to increase staffing and screening veterans for combat-related stress.

But that isn’t their main point.

What they really have to say about it is that their agency, and not Congress, will decide which veterans should get health care and they reserve the right to cut people off if they elect to do so internally. They contend that the discretion is purely theirs, not veterans or the courts.

Veterans are fuming over the announcement and over the fact that the commander in chief loves to commend the troops for their efforts while in reality, denying them the most basic rights when it comes to healthcare.

In fact, government lawyers compare some veterans’ desires to attain healthcare to a desire for an “entitlement” and most veterans scoff at the notion that expecting the government to care for the health problems that the government itself created would be viewed as an entitlement rather than as a simple right of decency.

Justice Department lawyers say a federal law that provides five years of care for veterans from the date of their discharge establishes eligibility for a veteran to receive health care, “but it does not create an entitlement to any particular medical service,” government lawyers said.

The lawyers say the law only authorizes veterans “medical care which the secretary (of Veterans Affairs) determines is needed, and only to the extent funds … are available.”

One lawyer represneting these veterans, Gordon Erspamer, says the suit is a proposed class action on behalf of 320,000 to 800,000 veterans or their survivors. He sued the government in July.

“Veterans need to know in this country that the government thinks all their benefits are mere gratuities,” attorney Gordon Erspamer said. “They’re saying it’s completely discretionary, that even if Congress appropriates money for veterans’ health care, we can do anything we want with it.”

The matter will come up again on March 7th at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti. This is the same judge who denied the Bush Administration’s request last month to dismiss the suit.

The case is still up in the air, but the plaintiffs are not hesitating in asking Conti to order the government to provide immediate mental health treatment for veterans who say they are thinking of killing themselves and to spend another $60 million on health care.

In the lawsuit, the VA is accused of arbitrarily denying care and benefits to wounded veterans, of forcing them to wait months for treatment and years for benefits, and of failing to provide fair procedures for appealing decisions against them.

The plaintiffs reference the department’s backlog of over 600,000 disability claims and cited the fact that 120 veterans a week commit suicide.

Conti ruled January 10th that federal law entitles veterans to health care for a specific period after leaving the service. He rejected the government’s argument that it was required to provide only as much care as the VA’s budget allowed in a given year.

A law that President Bush signed last week extended the period from two to five years.

In its latest filing, however, the Justice Department reiterated that Congress had intended “to authorize, but not require, medical care for veterans.”

“This court should not interfere with the political branches’ design, oversight and modification of VA programs,” the government lawyers argued.

They also said the VA “is making great progress in addressing the mental health care needs of combat veterans.” Among other things, they cited a law passed in November that required the department to establish a suicide-prevention program that includes making mental health care available around the clock.

In their own defense, the attorneys for the VA argues that they have hired nearly 3,800 mental health professionals over the last two years and has at least one specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder at each of its medical centers, the government said. They did not comment on the public pressure that has led to those increased numbers.

They say the VA implemented a policy in June stating that all veterans who seek or are referred for mental health care should be screened within 24 hours, that those found to be at risk of suicide should be treated immediately, and that others should be scheduled for full diagnosis and treatment planning within two weeks.

The attorneys also touted a new suicide-prevention hot line that they say has led to “more than 380 rescues.”

But the lawyer for the military veterans who seek healthcare says he was not impressed.

“Nowhere do I see any explanation of what kind of systems they have in place that deal with suicidal veterans,” he said.

“There’s no excuse for not spending the money Congress told them to spend on mental health care and leaving $60 million on the table when people are going out and killing themselves.”

Special thanks to Bob Egelko and the San Francisco Chronicle for information contained in this article.

February 7, 2008 – Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter’s calls had been erased.

A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. “This laptop doesn’t belong to me,” he remembers protesting. “It belongs to my company.” Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself.

Maria Udy, a marketing executive with a global travel management firm in Bethesda, said her company laptop was seized by a federal agent as she was flying from Dulles International Airport to London in December 2006. Udy, a British citizen, said the agent told her he had “a security concern” with her. “I was basically given the option of handing over my laptop or not getting on that flight,” she said.

The seizure of electronics at U.S. borders has prompted protests from travelers who say they now weigh the risk of traveling with sensitive or personal information on their laptops, cameras or cellphones. In some cases, companies have altered their policies to require employees to safeguard corporate secrets by clearing laptop hard drives before international travel.

Right to search?

Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Asian Law Caucus, two civil liberties groups in San Francisco, are filing a lawsuit to force the government to disclose its policies on border searches, including which rules govern the seizing and copying of the contents of electronic devices. They also want to know the boundaries for asking travelers about their political views, religious practices and other activities potentially protected by the First Amendment. The question of whether border agents have a right to search electronic devices at all without suspicion of a crime is already under review in the federal courts.

The lawsuit was inspired by some two dozen cases, 15 of which involved searches of cellphones, laptops, MP3 players and other electronics. Almost all involved travelers of Muslim, Middle Eastern or South Asian background, many of whom, including Mango and the tech engineer, said they are concerned they were singled out because of racial or religious profiling.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman, Lynn Hollinger, said officers do not engage in racial profiling “in any way, shape or form.” She said that “it is not CBP’s intent to subject travelers to unwarranted scrutiny” and that a laptop may be seized if it contains information possibly tied to terrorism, narcotics smuggling, child pornography or other criminal activity.

The reason for a search is not always made clear. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives, which represents 2,500 business executives in the United States and abroad, said it has tracked complaints from several members, including Udy, whose laptops have been seized and their contents copied before usually being returned days later, said Susan Gurley, executive director of ACTE. Gurley said none of the travelers in the ACTE suit raised concerns about racial or ethnic profiling. And Gurley said none of the travelers were charged with a crime.

Copied log-on, password

“I was assured that my laptop would be given back to me in 10 or 15 days,” said Udy, who continues to fly into and out of the United States. She said the federal agent copied her log-on and password, and asked her to show him a recent document and how she gains access to Microsoft Word. She was asked to pull up her e-mail but could not because of lack of Internet access. With ACTE’s help, she pressed for relief. More than a year later, Udy has received neither her laptop nor an explanation.

ACTE last year filed a Freedom of Information Act request to press the government for information on what happens to data seized from laptops and other electronic devices. “Is it destroyed right then and there if the person is in fact just a regular business traveler?” Gurley asked. “People are quite concerned. They don’t want proprietary business information floating, not knowing where it has landed or where it is going. It increases the anxiety level.”

Udy has changed all her work passwords and no longer banks online. Her company, Radius, has tightened its data policies so that traveling employees must access company information remotely via an encrypted channel, and their laptops must contain no company information.

At least two major global corporations, one American and one Dutch, have told their executives not to carry confidential business material on laptops on overseas trips, Gurley said. In Canada, one law firm has instructed its lawyers to travel to the United States with “blank laptops” whose hard drives contain no data. “We just access our information through the Internet,” said Lou Brzezinski, a partner at Blaney McMurtry, a major Toronto law firm. That approach also holds risks, but “those are hacking risks as opposed to search risks,” he said.

The U.S. government has argued in a pending court case that its authority to protect the country’s border extends to looking at information stored in electronic devices such as a laptop without any suspicion of a crime. In border searches, it regards a laptop the same as a suitcase.

“It should not matter . . . whether documents and pictures are kept in ‘hard copy’ form in an executive’s briefcase or stored digitally in a computer. The authority of customs officials to search the former should extend equally to searches of the latter,” the government argued in the child pornography case being heard by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.

As more and more people travel with laptops, BlackBerrys and cellphones, the government’s laptop-equals-suitcase position is raising red flags.

“It’s one thing to say it’s reasonable for government agents to open your luggage,” said David D. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University. “It’s another thing to say it’s reasonable for them to read your mind and everything you have thought over the last year. What a laptop records is as personal as a diary but much more extensive. It records every Web site you have searched. Every e-mail you have sent. It’s as if you’re crossing the border with your home in your suitcase.”

If the government’s position on searches of electronic files is upheld, new risks will confront anyone who crosses the border with a laptop or other device, warned Mark Rasch, a technology security expert with FTI Consulting and a former federal prosecutor. “Your kid can be arrested because they can’t prove the songs they downloaded to their iPod were legally downloaded,” he said. “Lawyers run the risk of exposing sensitive information about their client. Trade secrets can be exposed to customs agents with no limit on what they can do with it. Journalists can expose sources, all because they have the audacity to cross an invisible line.”

Hollinger said customs officers “are trained to protect confidential information.”

‘Content of people’s thoughts’

Shirin Sinnar, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, said that by scrutinizing the Web sites people search and the phone numbers they’ve stored on their cellphones, “the government is going well beyond its traditional role of looking for contraband and really is looking into the content of people’s thoughts and ideas and their lawful political activities.”

If conducted inside the country, such searches would require a warrant and probable cause, legal experts said.

Customs sometimes singles out passengers for extensive questioning and searches based on “information from various systems and specific techniques for selecting passengers,” including the Interagency Border Inspection System, according to a Customs statement. “CBP officers may, unfortunately, inconvenience law-abiding citizens in order to detect those involved in illicit activities,” the statement said. But the factors agents use to single out passengers are not transparent, and travelers generally have little access to the data to see whether there are errors.

Although Customs said it does not profile by race or ethnicity, an officers’ training guide states that “it is permissible and indeed advisable to consider an individual’s connections to countries that are associated with significant terrorist activity.”

“What’s the difference between that and targeting people because they are Arab or Muslim?” Cole said, noting that the countries the government focuses on are generally predominantly Arab or Muslim.

It is the lack of clarity about the rules that has confounded travelers and raised concerns from groups such as the Asian Law Caucus, which said that as a result, their lawyers cannot fully advise people how they may exercise their rights during a border search. The lawsuit says a Freedom of Information Act request was filed with Customs last fall but that no information has been received.

Kamran Habib, a software engineer with Cisco Systems, has had his laptop and cellphone searched three times in the past year. Once, in San Francisco, an officer “went through every number and text message on my cellphone and took out my SIM card in the back,” said Habib, a permanent U.S. resident. “So now, every time I travel, I basically clean out my phone. It’s better for me to keep my colleagues and friends safe than to get them on the list as well.”

Udy’s company, Radius, organizes business trips for 100,000 travelers a day, from companies around the world. She says her firm supports strong security measures. “Where we get angry is when we don’t know what they’re for.”

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.

February 6, 2008 – The Pentagon’s budget request for the next fiscal year is about as squishy as a pair of combat boots full of Jell-O. Make that one boot, not a pair, because so much is missing from the numbers released last week that everyone will be waiting for the next boot to drop — in the form of a supplemental appropriation for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That’s right, the Bush administration’s disingenuous fiscal shell game is back, despite a commitment last year to include detailed spending estimates for Iraq and Afghanistan in the Pentagon budget.

President Bush has returned to the deceptive practice of hiding the real cost of the Iraq war from the American public.

Here’s how he’s gaming the system in the 2009 defense budget, which is for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2008:

There’s nothing in the budget but a “placeholder” for war funding, penciled in at just $70 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States is burning through more than $12 billion every month in its combat operations, so $70 million will be about enough to get the next president to April Fool’s Day before the bucks stop — right in the Oval Office.

Congress has tried to force Bush to be more accountable in his war spending, passing legislation requiring war appropriations to be included with the regular Pentagon budget. But Bush, master of the “I don’t care what Congress says” signing statement, has simply ignored the requirement, and there’s no enforcement mechanism built into the law.

The amount of money Bush has tried to keep off the books is staggering. The Congressional Budget Office reported last October that the United States had already spent $368 billion on its military operations in Iraq, $45 billion more in related services such as veterans care and training, and nearly $200 billion on top of that in Afghanistan. Most of that astounding total has been appropriated outside the normal budget process. The CBO now projects that the costs of the Iraq war through 2017 might exceed $1 trillion, and says the total cost of Iraq and Afghanistan combined could reach $2.4 trillion.

The $515.4 billion request for the 2009 defense budget arrives with seeming decimal-point precision, but it is far from a true picture of U.S. defense spending.

The Office of Management and Budget says the real Pentagon budget is $518.3 billion, because retirement and nonhardware spending must be included. But the Pentagon budget doesn’t account for nuclear weapons programs, which fall under the Department of Energy, or the $91 billion Department of Veterans Affairs, or the $40 billion Department of Homeland Security.

The Pentagon budget has never been an accurate measure of the nation’s investment in national security, but few presidents have manipulated its numbers as brazenly as Bush. Given his refusal to be honest with the American people about the terrible cost of the war in Iraq, it will be left to his successor to restore integrity to the budget process.

February 7, 2008 – Kathy Dobie has a very troubling–but very important– article about PTSD in the February 18 issue of The Nation.  It centers on the high rate of post-traumatic stress within the Marine Corps, along with anecdotal evidence that suggests both the Corps and the Defense Department are handling the problem much like the Bush administration handles problems: By pretending it’s not there.

Dobie interviewed VoteVets.org Senior Advisor Dr. Katherine Scheirman and former Senior Advisor (and current U.S. Senate candidate) Andrew Horne for the piece:

“The funding has just been awful, the worst I’ve ever seen in my twenty years in the military,” says Dr. Katherine Scheirman, a retired Air Force colonel who served as chief of medical operations in the Air Force’s Europe headquarters from July 2004 to September 2006. Scheirman says the current political environment has made it “impossible” to give wounded soldiers proper care. “It’s all about money,” she says. “Every kid that gets kicked out with PTSD is gonna be a lifetime of disability payments for the government. Every kid who gives up and kills himself, nothing.” Scheirman’s unit was in charge of evacuating the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan and transporting them to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and on to the United States. She says politics infused every aspect of care. When she tried to beef up the hospital staff at Landstuhl, she was told, “No, we can’t put more doctors or nurses in there because it will look like we expect more casualties.” She was not allowed to send the visibly wounded home on commercial planes. “The rule,” she says, “was they couldn’t fly commercial if they had injuries that showed because it would upset the American people.” The military planes were so cold the Air Force ended up running clothing drives for hats, scarves and mittens–a situation that continues today. In one e-mail requesting donations, a lieutenant colonel wrote, “Mittens are preferred because they often fit better over wounded hands/fingers.”

“What kind of Army doesn’t provide mittens for its wounded soldiers?” Scheirman asks. “What’s sad is this isn’t the way it’s ever been before. I came into the military under Reagan, and George Bush’s dad–they treated people well. The Clintons treated people really, really well. It’s only this Administration that acts like the lives of these soldiers are expendable.”

Scheirman’s last paragraph sums up the sentiments of many in this community.  Horne’s experience, while different, still highlights a systemic problem:  

Before Lt. Col. Andrew Horne left Iraq in 2005, where he was the civil military operations officer for western Anbar province, he and every marine under him above the rank of staff sergeant attended a briefing on PTSD given by the division psychiatrist, a Navy officer. “They said it’s been determined that it comes from a feeling of helplessness, and elite units like Marines don’t get it,” Horne says. “And the ones who do get it have usually been discipline problems before or have a pre-existing problem. So it was really designed to, one, make you not report it yourself and, two, be suspicious of anyone who was reporting it.”

I’m well aware that many in the veteran and active duty communities aren’t comfortable with the abundance of articles in the media that they see as portraying combat vets as broken down, volatile lunatics.  Either way, the fact is there’s a problem.  And it needs to be addressed by the leadership of all branches of the military.  People are failing to realize that it isn’t just exposure to violence, and prolonged, stressful periods away from home that cause PTSD.  It is the combination.  It’s the repeated exposure that’s causing all the problems.  

So in the end, I think it’s up in the air as to whether this article in The Nation reflects poorly on the military.  Perhaps it does.  But will the military become stronger or weaker if we don’t address this problem?  To me, the answer is an obvious “weaker.”  Because, as I see it, only unenlightened cowards refuse to recognize their own weaknesses.  And in doing so, they never conquer them.  

As members of the military, we must recognize these failings within the system so that we may correct them.  We will get no help from the Bush administration, so we must do it ourselves.

VA care in spotlight after Iraq war veteran’s suicide.  Jonathan Schulze commits suicide after being turned away three times by VA hospitals when pleading for assistance due to his Iraq War PTSD.  Across the country, there are stories of veterans suffering with combat stress and PTSD, who are struggling to find help at VA facilities to deal with the problems they face, according to Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs for the Washington-based Veterans for America, an advocacy group.  “Sadly, there are a lot of Jonathan Schulzes out there,” said Robinson, a veteran of the Gulf War who investigates cases all over the country of service members suffering from mental illness and other injuries who are struggling to get the care they deserve. 

STEWART, Minnesota — It took two years of hell to convince him, but finally Jonathan Schulze was ready.

On the morning of Jan. 11, Jonathan, an Iraq war veteran with two Purple Hearts, neatly packed his US Marine Corps duffel bag with his sharply creased clothes, a framed photo of his new baby girl, and a leather-bound Bible and headed out from the family farm for a 75-mile drive to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Cloud, Minn.

Family and friends had convinced him at last that the devastating mental wounds he brought home from war, wounds that triggered severe depression, violent outbursts, and eventually an uncontrollable desire to kill himself, could not be drowned in alcohol or treated with the array of antianxiety drugs he’d been prescribed.

And so, with his father and stepmother at his side, he confessed to an intake counselor that he was suicidal. He wanted to be admitted to a psychiatric ward.

But, instead, he was told that the clinician who prescreened cases like his was unavailable. Go home and wait for a phone call tomorrow, the counselor said, as Marianne Schulze, his stepmother, describes it.

When a clinical social worker called the next day, Jonathan, 25, told again of his suicidal thoughts and other symptoms. And then, with his stepmother listening in, he learned that he was 26th on the waiting list for one of the 12 beds in the center’s ward for post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers.

Four days later, on Jan. 16, he wrapped a household extension cord around his neck, tied it to a beam in the basement, and hanged himself.

In life, Jonathan Schulze didn’t get nearly what he needed. But in death, this tough and troubled Marine may help get something critical done.

The apparent failure of the Department of Veterans Affairs to offer him timely and necessary care has electrified the debate on the blogs and websites that connect an increasingly networked and angry veterans community. It has triggered an internal investigation by the VA into how a serviceman with such obvious symptoms faced a wait for hospital care.

And it is being cited by veterans’ advocates and their allies in Congress as a searing symbol of a system that they say is vastly unprepared and under funded to handle the onslaught of 1.5 million veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are returning home, an estimated one in five of them with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. One in three Iraq war veterans is seeking mental health services, according to a report by an Army panel of experts last year.

The death of Jonathan also raises questions, among veterans and in Washington, about how far the military culture still has to go in dealing with the stigma often attached to cases of mental illness. Marines, especially, just aren’t supposed to cry out for help.

“My feeling is no veteran should be turned away, and definitely not a veteran who is openly saying he needs help and that he feels like taking his life,” said Jonathan ‘s father, James, who is a Vietnam War veteran and comes from a family with a long tradition of military service.

“My son did his duty, he risked his life for his country, and he came home a broken person. And then the VA failed in its duty to care for him,” he said, sitting in the family home in front of a coffee table transformed into a shrine for his son, with framed photos and, folded in a neat triangle, the flag that draped his coffin.

Across the country, there are stories of veterans suffering with combat stress and PTSD, who are struggling to find help at VA facilities to deal with the problems they face, according to Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs for the Washington-based Veterans for America, an advocacy group.

“Sadly, there are a lot of Jonathan Schulzes out there,” said Robinson, a veteran of the Gulf War who investigates cases all over the country of service members suffering from mental illness and other injuries who are struggling to get the care they deserve.

A plea for help

Jonathan’s case has prompted the US Department of Veterans Affairs , with 235,000 employees at a network of medical centers for servicemen and women, to launch an ongoing internal investigation into the details surrounding Jonathan’s death, according to Phil Budahn , a VA spokesman in Washington.

But beyond that, Budahn could say little. All patient files are confidential, he said, declining comment on any of the specifics of Jonathan’s case.

But VA officials have released 400 pages of documents on the case to the Schulze family. One document from that file showed that the VA clinical social worker, Daniel Ludderman, with whom Jonathan spoke by phone on Jan. 12 did not indicate in his notes that Jonathan had expressed suicidal thoughts.

A VA spokesman told local news organizations that there were emergency beds available in a psychiatric hold unit throughout January. But the VA has not responded to questions about why, if that was the case, Jonathan was not placed in one. Another looming question in the VA investigation is why there are only 12 beds for in-patient PTSD treatment in Minnesota. That number has remained unchanged for a decade, former state VA officials say, even as the nation has engaged in two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the past five years.

James and Marianne insist they both heard Jonathan clearly state that he was suicidal on Jan. 11. Marianne says she heard it again when Jonathan was speaking with the VA’s Ludderman on the phone the next day.

James believes the VA response thus far indicates that officials are worried more about protecting the VA’s image than in meeting the overwhelming need for more and better PTSD counseling for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I heard what Jon said. They can doctor the records all they want; it is not going to change what I heard,” he said.

Major Cynthia Rasmussen, who worked for 18 years as a psychiatric nurse at the VA and who now runs the Army Reserve Combat Operational Stress Control Program at Minnesota’s Fort Snelling, said, “Jonathan’s case is classic and classically tragic.”

Rasmussen said that there are many excellent programs and treatment centers within the VA, but that effective delivery of service is spotty and inconsistent and that problems of poor communication between the military and the VA are thwarting attempts by service providers to treat those veterans who need help.

“That is what happened to Jonathan, and there are just hundreds of cases like this across the country. We are seeing them every day,” she added.

Descent into mental illness

Behind the stark details of the case is a more complex and nuanced picture of Jonathan’s descent into mental illness.

He arrived home last fall after a hellish tour of duty with Second Battalion, Fourth Marines in the Ramadi/Fallujah area of Iraq, where fighting was particularly intense in the spring of 2004. In letters home, Jonathan had described the combat deaths of 16 men he called friends. He himself was wounded by shrapnel twice.

In his neat grammar-school cursive, Jonathan described the death and danger that confronted his unit daily. He made it very clear: He was terrified.

“My heart is filled with sadness. And I ask God why,” he wrote on May 13, 2004, the day after two close friends were killed. “I pray so much and ask God to keep me out of harm’s way and get me back in one piece.”

One of his fellow Marines in the Fallujah area was 25-year-old Eric Satersmoen, who knew Jonathan from local bars in the Minneapolis area where Jonathan had worked as a bouncer. They traded news about mutual friends and the Vikings and the Minnesota Wild hockey team, and they vowed to stay in touch when they got back home.

When they did return, in the winter of 2005, they found they shared some other things: persistent nightmares, sleeplessness, anxiety, anger, and a tendency to use alcohol to numb themselves to all that.

But their experiences diverged in a critical way that underscores how the VA system sometimes succeeds and why it so often falls devastatingly short — right from the moment demobilized troops get ready to go home.

Returning Marines and soldiers are routinely asked to fill out a form in which they are told to self-evaluate their own mental health on a questionnaire about nightmares, anxiety, aggression, and suicidal thoughts.

The military says the forms are a way to highlight problems early. But veterans advocates say that all too often servicemen, eager to reunite with family and friends, give the forms short shrift . They simply check “no” to every question because they do not want to be delayed at the base with mental health appointments.

That’s what Jonathan told friends and family he did. And that’s also what his close friend Eric had done after his first tour, but was determined not to repeat this second time around.

This time he knew he had a problem. He checked “yes” to the boxes that asked about nightmares, anxiety, and violent outbursts. He was given a schedule of appointments and began to enter a long process of counseling that has allowed him to slowly heal and eventually to have in-patient treatment at the Minneapolis VA where he was given a bed in the PTSD ward.

Jonathan, meanwhile, returned home for 30 days’ leave. His family immediately saw that he was depressed and anxious. They heard him thrashing and yelling in his sleep. He was not the big, fun-loving young man he was before he went off to war, they said.

The family doctor, William Phillips, saw him and wrote a report that Jonathan appeared to be suffering classic symptoms of PTS D . He prescribed Valium and encouraged Jonathan to seek help when he returned to Camp Pendleton.

“I told him that when I came home from Vietnam, I just closed up and hardened my shell. It hurt me in life. I was a pole cat to live with, and I wanted to be sure he didn’t make the same mistake,” said his father.

After his 30 days’ home leave, Jonathan returned to Pendleton for 90 days before his final discharge notice would be given. That was when he really went off the rails. He was drinking heavily and getting in violent confrontations at local bars off the base and even with his own Marines. He had nightmares of firefights in which comrades died and civilians were caught in the crossfire. He refused to admit he suffered mental problems

“Marines don’t do weakness,” said his older brother Travis, 27, a Marine who also joined up straight out of high school. Travis served in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 during the US-led military response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “That’s the attitude, and Jon was caught up in that world,” said Travis.

Jonathan was completely out of control. In the fall of 2004, he brutally beat a fellow Marine. He also threw a 200-pound potted tree through a plate glass window during a bar fight. He ended up spending one month in the brig. Military Police searched his locker and found steroids — he was an obsessive body builder. He was busted in rank from lance corporal to private and given a “general” rather than an “honorable” discharge.

Drinking and self-loathing

These kinds of discharges are on the rise among returning veterans, particularly among those suffering from mental trauma who veer into violence and substance abuse, according to Lieutenant Colonel Colby Vokey, who supervises the legal defense of Marines at Camp Pendleton.

For Jonathan, the “general” discharge status meant that he was ineligible for GI Bill benefits, including assistance for college tuition, and it was technically up to the discretion of the VA whether he would receive medical treatment.

The VA did accept Jonathan for treatment of his shrapnel wounds and back pain. Eric, his Marine buddy, tried to help him get assistance for his mental health issues as well. They sometimes waited the entire day for appointments and group counseling.

Through it all, Jonathan never stopped drinking. Friends and family say that every night he drank his trusted Wild Turkey by the shot glass and one beer after another to chase it down. When he was tired, he drank “Jager-bombs,” a mix of the potent German liqueur Jagermeister mixed with the energy drink Red Bull.

His friend Eric drank with him. It was not easy for either one of them when they talked about the war. Eric lost control sometimes, but nothing compared with the bouts of anger and depression and violence that he watched Jonathan go through. “Crazy Jonny,” as he called him, was on a different path.

Jonathan was wracked with feelings of self-loathing about his demotion in rank, his tainted discharge, and what he felt was a failure on his part to save his friends, several of whom were killed right by his side in Iraq. The obsession with lifting and steroids, Eric believes, were an expression of low self-esteem.

“He just never could be big enough and bad enough . . . It was like he was going to drink and lift his way through the mess,” Eric said.

Then at 8:35 p.m. on Jan. 16, Eric, who was in Florida on business, received a phone call from Jonathan, who was staying in an apartment in New Prague, Minn., that Eric owned and where he gave Jonathan a room.

Jonathan told Eric he was in the basement standing on a stool and tying a noose around his neck with an extension cord. A bottle of Captain Morgan rum, three-quarters’ full, was at his side, and he was slurring .

“I tried to stall him by being nice, and then I tried getting mad at him, telling him he was taking the easy way out. I told him, ‘What about your faith?’ I was doing everything I could,” said Eric.

“He said: ‘ The hell with it all, the Marines, the VA, the hell with religion. The hell with it all. I am doing it,’ ” said Eric.

Then, Eric said, he heard the phone fall to the floor.

A family mourns
 
Last week, it was 10 below zero with the windchill factor in the farming town of Stewart . Before his shift at a nearby dairy plant, Jonathan’s father crunched through dry, drifting snow toward the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church cemetery to visit his son’s grave .

Dead flowers from the funeral and a small American flag that marked the grave were disappearing beneath the drifting snow.

“This never should have happened,” said James, tears welling behind a pair of sunglasses.

“This country should have taken better care of one of its sons. They owed that to Jon.”

Charles Sennott can be reached at sennott@globe.com
 
  

February 5, 2008 – Conservatives opposed to redeployment in Iraq have consistently claimed that U.S. troops are on their side:

President Bush: The [military] families gathered here understand that our troops want to finish the job. [Link]

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ): I want to — and I want to tell you something, sir. I just finished having Thanksgiving with the troops, and their message to you is — the message of these brave men and women who are serving over there is: Let us win. Let us win. [Link]

Yet U.S. troops disagree. Yesterday, the Center for Responsive Politics reported that members of the military donated the most not to McCain, but to two anti-war candidates:

Individuals in the Army, Navy and Air Force made those branches of the armed services among the top contributors in the 4th Quarter, ranking No. 13, No. 18 and No. 21, respectively. In 2007, Republican Ron Paul, who opposes U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the top recipient of money from donors in the military, collecting at least $212,000 from them. Barack Obama, another war opponent, was second with about $94,000.

These donations reflect the military’s disapproval with the Iraq war and President Bush’s handling of it. A recent Military Times poll found that just 46 percent of U.S. troops now believe that the country should have invaded Iraq, and only 40 percent approve of Bush’s handling of the war.

February 5, 2008 – The Bush administration on Wednesday filed arguments in a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of San Francisco stating that veterans have no legal right to specific types of medical care, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The arguments were filed in response to a class-action lawsuit brought by veterans who claim they were illegally denied mental health treatment by the Department of Veterans Affairs (Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle, 2/5).

Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth filed the suit in July 2007, alleging that VA is responsible for a “systemwide pattern of abusive and illegal administrative practices.” The lawsuit claims VA failed to deliver the mandatory two years of disability benefits for veterans, failed to address staff problems that led to long wait times for care and provided insufficient care for post-traumatic stress disorder. The lawsuit also claims VA deliberately reclassified PTSD claims as pre-existing disorders as a way to avoid paying out benefits.

In January, U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti rejected the government’s attempt to have the case dismissed, ruling that federal law entitles veterans to health care for a period of two years after leaving the service (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 1/11). A bill signed by President Bush last week extends the period from two to five years.

According to government lawyers, federal law establishes “veterans’ eligibility for health care, but it does not create an entitlement to any particular medical service.” The lawyers said the law entitles veterans only to “medical care which the secretary (of Veterans Affairs) determines is needed, and only to the extent funds … are available.” The government attorneys also said VA “is making great progress in addressing the mental health care needs of combat veterans,” citing a law passed in November 2007 that established a suicide-prevention program that makes mental health care available around the clock. A hearing will be held March 7 before Conti.

Gordon Erspamer, the attorney representing about 320,000 to 800,000 veterans in the class-action lawsuit, said, “Veterans need to know in this country that the government thinks all their benefits are mere gratuities.” According to Erspamer, “They’re saying it’s completely discretionary, that even if Congress appropriates money for veterans’ health care, we can do anything we want with it” (San Francisco Chronicle, 2/5).

February 6, 2008 – Yesterday was a difficult day for Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. It was hard to celebrate the fifth anniversary of our first corporate memorandum, a same-day critique of Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2002 UN address, when we could not escape the reality that this speech greased the skids for death and destruction in Iraq and brought unprecedented shame on our country.  We found no solace in the realization that those who saw our analysis should have seen disaster coming.

A handful of former CIA intelligence officers joined me in forming the VIPS movement in Jan. 2002, after we concluded that our profession had been corrupted to “justify” what was, pure and simple, a war of aggression.  Little did we know at the time that a month later Colin Powell, with then-CIA Director George Tenet plumped down conspicuously behind him, would provide the world with a textbook example of careerism and cowardice in cooking intelligence to the recipe of his master.

Powell’s Prior Practice

It was hardly Powell’s first display of such behavior.

Those able to look past the medals and ribbons have been able to trace a pattern of malleability back to Powell’s early days as a young Army officer in Vietnam , and then in the 1980s as an Iran-Contra accomplice together with his boss Casper Weinberger, then secretary of defense.  Weinberger was indicted for perjury but escaped trial when pardoned by George H. W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.  [See Chapter 8 of Robert Parry’s new book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, for more on Powell’s proclivity to pander.]

A year before his UN speech Powell winked at the introduction of torture into the Army’s repertoire, rather than confront President George W. Bush personally on the pressure that Vice President Dick Cheney was exerting to conjure up legal wiggle-room for torture.  Instead, Powell merely asked State Department lawyers to engage White House lawyers Alberto Gonzales and Cheney-favorite David Addington, in what Powell knew would be—absent his personal involvement— a quixotic effort.

Powell’s lawyers put in writing his concern that making an end-run around the Geneva protections for prisoners of war “could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries.”  Well, he got that right.

But when Gonzales and Addington simply declared parts of Geneva “quaint” and “obsolete,” Powell caved, acquiescing in the corruption of the Army to which he owed so much.  We know the next chapters of that story— Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.  Powell’s instincts were right, but he lacked the strength of his convictions.  It turns out that this key instance of abject obeisance—important as it was in its own right—was just practice for the super bowl at the UN.

VIPS’ Maiden Effort

When those of us in our fledgling VIPS movement learned that Powell would address the UN on Feb. 5, 2003, we decided to do a same-day analytic assessment—the kind we used to do when someone like Khrushchev, or Gorbachev, or Gromyko, or Mao Tse-dung, or Castro gave a major address.  We were well accustomed to the imperative to beat the media with our commentary.  Coordinating our Powell draft via email, at 5:15 p.m. we issued VIPS’ first Memorandum for the President: “Subject: Today’s Speech by Secretary Powell at the UN.”

Our understanding at that time was far from perfect.  It was not yet completely clear to us, for example, that Saddam Hussein had for the most part been abiding by, rather than flouting, UN resolutions.  We stressed, though, that the key question was whether any of this justified war:

“This is the question the world is asking.  Secretary Powell’s presentation does not come close to answering it.”

We warned the president of the “politicization of intelligence” and the deep analytical flaws that inevitably follow, for example:

“Intelligence community analysts are finding it hard to make themselves heard above the drumbeat for war…”

“Your Pentagon advisers draw a connection between war with Iraq and terrorism, but for the wrong reasons.  The connection takes on much more reality in a post-US invasion scenario. (bold in original)  Indeed, it is our view that an invasion of Iraq would ensure overflowing recruitment centers for terrorists into the indefinite future.  Far from eliminating the threat it would enhance it exponentially.”

Dissociating VIPS from Powell’s bravado claim that the evidence he presented was “irrefutable,” we noted that no one has a corner on the truth and ended our memo for President Bush with this observation:

“…after watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond violations of Resolution 1441, and beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

Senator Clinton Knew

Five years later, we take no pleasure at having been right; we take considerable pain at having been ignored.  The impending debacle was a no-brainer, and serious specialists like former UN inspector Scott Ritter, to his credit, were shouting it from the rooftops.

What follows is more than a mere footnote.  It is not widely known that our Feb. 5, 2003 memorandum analyzing Powell’s speech was shared with the junior senator from New York .  Thus, she still had plenty of time to raise her voice before the Bush administration launched the fateful attack on Iraq on March 19.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC.  A former Army officer and veteran of 27 years in the analytic ranks of CIA, he is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  VIPS’ issuances are listed below; complete texts of all 16 can be found at afterdowningstreet.org/vips.