Veterans for Common Sense

January 29, 2008 – Army officials in upstate New York instructed representatives from the Department of Veterans Affairs not to help disabled soldiers at Fort Drum Army base with their military disability paperwork last year. That paperwork can be crucial because it helps determine whether soldiers will get annual disability payments and health care after they’re discharged.

Now soldiers at Fort Drum say they feel betrayed by the institutions that are supposed to support them. The soldiers want to know why the Army would want to stop them from getting help with their disability paperwork and why the VA— whose mission is to help veterans — would agree to the Army’s request.

‘A Worn Pair of Boots’

One disabled soldier, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears retaliation from the military, says it feels like a slap in the face.

“To be tossed aside like a worn-out pair of boots is pretty disheartening,” the soldier says. “I always believed the Army would take care of me if I did the best I could, and I’ve done that.”

At a restaurant near Fort Drum, the soldier described his first briefing with the VA office on base. According to the soldier, the VA official told a classroom full of injured troops, “We cannot help you review the narrative summaries of your medical problems.” The official said the VA used to help soldiers with the paperwork, but Army officials saw soldiers from Fort Drum getting higher disability ratings with the VA’s help than soldiers from other bases. The Army told the VA to stop helping Fort Drum soldiers describe their army injuries, and the VA did as it was told.

It’s unclear why the Army wanted to stop the soldiers from getting help with the disability paperwork. Cynthia Vaughan, spokeswoman for the Army surgeon general, says the VA was not doing anything wrong by helping soldiers at Fort Drum.

“There is no Army policy on outside help in reviewing and/or assisting soldiers in rewriting their narratives during the 10-day period which they have to review them,” Vaughan says.

She says the officers who asked the VA to stop helping Fort Drum’s soldiers were part of what the Army calls a “Tiger Team”— an ad-hoc group assigned to investigate, in this case, medical disability benefits.

According to Army spokesman George Wright, the Tiger Team thought the VA should not be helping soldiers with their medical documents. The Army delivered that message to VA officials in Buffalo, N.Y., who went along with the request, even though the VA’s assistance complied with Army policy.

The Army declined to provide any information about the Tiger Team members’ identities or their motivations in asking the VA to stop reviewing the soldiers’ paperwork. However, private attorney Mara Hurwitt points out that the Army has a financial incentive to keep soldiers’ disability ratings low.

“The more soldiers you have who get disability retirements, the more retirement pay is coming out of your budget,” Hurwitt says.

Qualified to Help?

Another question is why the VA would go along with the Army’s request.

Tom Pamperin, deputy director of the VA’s compensation and pension service, believes VA officers are not qualified to help with soldiers’ disability paperwork.

“We do not train our employees in the intricacies of the Defense Department’s disability evaluation system, so we would feel that it would be inappropriate for our employees to apply VA standards to a Defense Department process,” Pamperin says.

But Hurwitt argues the VA is more equipped than anyone to help soldiers with their paperwork.

“VA counselors understand the disabilities, what the different kinds of conditions are, how they should be properly described in the paperwork,” Hurwitt says.

She points out that VA officials have to look at a soldier’s medical history anyway to counsel him or her on VA benefits, which are separate from Army benefits.

“Really what it comes down to is you’re just helping the soldier get what he’s entitled to under law,” Hurwitt says.

System ‘Unfair’

This is just the latest in a string of controversies about disability payments for injured veterans.

Former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who co-chaired President Bush’s recent commission on veterans’ care, says stories like this one show how the whole disability rating system is broken and needs to change.

The system is “fundamentally unfair,” according to Shalala, “and that’s the point about the need for reform in the system. It has to be reformed for everyone.”

January 29, 2008 – A growing number of war veterans are returning to their lives in Bucks County with mental health issues, military and mental health officials said Monday.

At a forum in Lower Makefield organized by Congressman Patrick Murphy, D-8, Bucks County law enforcement officials were told that a number of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The disorder is caused by intense, traumatic events such as combat.

One in six veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from the disorder and one in three show symptoms of the disorder, also known as PTSD, according to Murphy, an Iraq war veteran.

Wary of the stigma of mental illness, many veterans ignore the signs of the disorder, which might lead them to hurt themselves or others before they are able to seek treatment, Murphy said.

“There’s a real level of denial,” said Carol Bamford, director of case management and crisis services with the Bucks County Department of Mental Health. “We need to convince these people that it’s not going to hurt just trying to talk to somebody.”

Veterans of all wars have suffered from the effects of PTSD, although the disorder was not recognized by the mental health community until years after the Vietnam War. Officials with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs are screening returning soldiers for this and other mental disorders, however, many veterans slip through the cracks, according to Dan Fraley, county government’s director of veterans affairs.

There are roughly 60,000 veterans living in Bucks, the fourth largest veterans population in the state, Fraley said. Since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan about 15 veterans of those wars have requested help from the county’s veterans services with eight Bucks soldiers filing claims for treatment from PTSD, Fraley said.

“We’re starting to see more of them,” Fraley said.

“It’s something we are all going to deal with,” said James Goss, a manager with the PTSD program at the Coatesville VA Medical Center in Chester County. “The good news is that it’s readily treatable.”

However, the problem addressed by some of the law enforcement officials at Monday’s meeting was that, due to medical privacy laws, it would be almost impossible to know which veteran was suffering from PTSD.

“I’d personally like to see us try to get out at the front of this problem, not at the end,” said Barry Pilla, Northampton chief of police and a Vietnam veteran. “I just don’t see a lot of people coming to us and saying: “I have PTSD.’ ”

Murphy said Monday’s meeting was the “first step” in dealing with the issue.

“You are on the front line of dealing with this and really being aware of it,” Murphy said. “This is just the first step in trying to combat this.”

Murphy represents the residents of Bucks County, some districts of Abington, Upper Dublin and Upper Moreland in Montgomery County and two wards in Philadelphia.

January 29, 2008 – Given the praise President Bush heaped on our troops in his final State of the Union speech Monday night, we were outraged to read two stories Tuesday about how the government continues to let our wounded soldiers down. First, The Associated Press reports that questionable “substandard care” has led to the deaths of 19 veterans over the past two years.

The VA hospital in question, in Marion, Ill., allowed “many surgeries that its staffing or lack of proper surgical expertise made it ill-equipped to handle.” And then there was the issue of hospital administrators being “too slow to respond” once the problems became apparent.

Also, National Public Radio reports that Army officials have asked the VA to cease helping soldiers fill out Defense Department disability forms and crafting the “narrative summaries” necessary to determine their eligibility for health care and disability pay. A Madigan Army Medical Center spokesperson told us that this was not the case there, that there is no army policy against soldiers getting outside help with their narratives and Madigan officials have not asked VA officials to stop doing so. We couldn’t determine if Army officials had told VA officials in other places otherwise. We also can’t figure out what’s worse about what happened in upstate New York — that the Army sent in a “Tiger Team” to make things harder for its own, or that VA officials there agreed to stop helping soldiers fill out forms.

If the reason given to NPR is true, that VA staffers aren’t qualified to help soldiers with the paperwork, then it’s imperative that the DOD makes sure that someone can help them figure out the confusing disability rating system.

January 30, 2008 – A House subcommittee that is considering the use of artificial intelligence to speed the processing of veterans’ disability claims heard compelling evidence Tuesday about the problems facing veterans and their families trying to receive earned benefits.

Marine Gunnery Sgt. Tai Cleveland, paralyzed after an August 2003 training accident in Kuwait, and his wife, Robin, described a five-year battle to get disability, housing and vehicle benefits — a course blocked by confusing rules, lost records and poor communication.

“We filed and refiled, submitted and resubmitted, medical records, claims forms, applications, and so on, but no one seemed to be able to track anything, placing additional burdens on an already overwhelmed family,” Robin Cleveland told the House Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee on disability assistance and memorial affairs.

“In our case, only after the intervention of a congressional office and a nonprofit organization were we able to get the benefits Tai had earned. This process should not be this hard.”

The financial and emotional drains on the family “were crushing,” she said, noting that the couple’s two children had to drop out of college at one point because the family could not afford it.

“If your case was expedited, I would hate to see one that was not expedited,” said Rep. John Hall, D-N.Y., the subcommittee chairman and an advocate of using technology to improve claims processing times.

Hall said VA has responded to the increasing backlog of claims by hiring more claims processors, but it takes two years to hire and train a new employee — who, once fully trained, can handle two or three claims a day. Many new hires leave after five years, forcing VA to recruit and train anew.

“We are going to do everything we can to help you out and to make sure this doesn’t happen to others,” Hall told the Clevelands. “I hope the going gets easier from here on.”

Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado, the subcommittee’s ranking Republican, said some of the Clevelands’ problems could have been solved if Defense Department and VA records were digitized so that complicated claims could be shared by more than one VA office, and could be easily replaced if lost — which seems to be a significant problem for veterans.

Kim Graves, VA’s director of the office of business process integration, said the department “has made significant strides in the use of information technology to improve claims processing in all of our benefit programs.”

Graves said VA is working on a paperless benefits delivery initiative. In a pilot project, a service member’s separate medical records and supporting claim information are digitized at the start of the claims process.

“This allows veterans service representatives to make decisions based solely upon review of the imaged records, without recourse to a paper claims file,” she said.

Hall and Lamborn, however, are talking about an even more sophisticated system in which computers would read key elements of a claim and determine whether VA should approve it.

Hall said this is not exotic; artificial intelligence is already being used in banking and medicine to make or assist with decisions.

January 29, 2008 – Substandard care at a southern Illinois Veterans Affairs hospital may have contributed to 19 deaths over the past two years, a VA official said Monday as he apologized to affected families and pledged reform.

The hospital in Marion, Ill., initially drew scrutiny over deaths connected to a single surgeon, but two federal reports found fault with five other doctors.

The hospital undertook many surgeries that its staffing or lack of proper surgical expertise made it ill-equipped to handle, and hospital administrators were too slow to respond once problems surfaced, said Dr. Michael Kussman, U.S. veterans affairs undersecretary for health.

“I can’t tell you how angry we all are and how frustrated we all are. Nothing angers me more than when we don’t do the right thing,” Kussman told reporters during a conference call after releasing findings of the VA’s investigation and summarizing a separate inspector general’s probe.

Still, Kussman insisted, “what happened in Marion is an exception to what otherwise is a truly quality health-care system” across the VA.

The VA will help affected families file administrative claims under the VA’s disability compensation program, he said. Families also could sue.

The VA investigation found that at least nine deaths between October 2006 and March last year were “directly attributable” to substandard care at the Marion hospital, which serves veterans from southern Illinois, southwestern Indiana and western Kentucky.

Kussman declined to identify those cases by patient or doctor, though Rep. Jerry Costello, an Illinois Democrat, said those nine deaths were linked to two surgeons he did not name.

Of an additional 34 cases the VA investigated, 10 patients who died received questionable care that complicated their health, Kussman said. Investigators could not determine whether the care actually caused the deaths.

Inpatient surgeries have not been performed at the facility since problems first became public last August. They will remain suspended indefinitely, Kussman said.

In pledging reforms, Kussman said the VA has launched an administrative investigatory board to review care problems and matters raised by employee groups.

The VA last September also installed interim administrators to replace the Marion VA’s director, chief of staff, chief of surgery and an anesthesiologist, moving them to other positions or placing them on leave, Kussman said. The anesthesiologist has since quit, Kussman said.

“The previous leadership will not return” to their former jobs, he said.

The VA’s investigation cited by Kussman covered a two-year span, the VA said.

The inspector general’s office blamed three deaths on substandard care at the Marion site, but that review covered only the past fiscal year, which ended in October, the VA said. That report was not immediately available Monday.

Telephone calls on Monday seeking comment from the Marion VA were directed to spokespeople with the agency’s Washington headquarters.

Neither Kussman nor the VA investigation’s 41 pages of findings named surgeons involved in the deaths, though Kussman acknowledged that much of the criticism has focused on Dr. Jose Veizaga-Mendez.

Veizaga-Mendez — identified in Monday’s report as “Surgeon A” — resigned from the hospital Aug. 13, three days after a patient from Kentucky bled to death after gallbladder surgery. All inpatient surgeries stopped a short time later.

Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, has said Veizaga-Mendez is linked to 10 patients’ deaths at the Marion facility, about 120 miles southeast of St. Louis. Kussman declined to discuss that claim Monday, saying he didn’t want to influence additional internal investigations of six of the site’s surgeons he said had “at least one episode of substandard care.”

Veizaga-Mendez and another surgeon no longer practice at the Marion VA. The remaining four surgeons remain on staff but are “only doing minor cases at this time,” Kussman said.

“We don’t think the physicians killed the patients,” he said. “We think the physicians were trying to care for the patients and did so in an inadequate way.”

Costello and fellow Rep. John Shimkus, a Republican from Collinsville, Ill., called Monday’s findings “shocking.” Durbin said the reports “confirm what many of us in Illinois feared” — that the Marion VA’s medical care was substandard and that protocol for protecting patients was ignored.

“As the inspectors who reviewed the Marion hospital put it, the quality of care at Marion was ‘horrible,'” Durbin said.

Veizaga-Mendez’s whereabouts are unclear. He has no listed telephone number and has been unreachable for comment.

The Marion VA hired Veizaga-Mendez in January 2006 after he practiced in Massachusetts, where he was under investigation for substandard care in 2004 and 2005. The claims include allegations that he botched seven cases, two ending in deaths.

Veizaga-Mendez was permanently barred from practicing medicine in Massachusetts last November — a disciplinary move that also requires him to resign other state medical licenses he may hold and withdraw pending license applications. He has also made payouts in two Massachusetts malpractice lawsuits.

January 28, 2008 – An Eight Mile man’s detailed account of being “waterboarded” while undergoing training in a Navy survival school in California in 1975 is so accurate that “only somebody who went through it would know that,” according to a former instructor at the school.

Malcolm Wrightson Nance, now a retired Navy senior chief petty officer living in the Washington, D.C., area, said in an interview that he immediately noted the authentic nature of Arthur McCants III’s story when he read it.

McCants, 60, says he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as the result of the waterboarding, a controversial interrogation procedure that simulates drowning and that some criticize as torture.

The Press-Register wrote about McCants’ difficulties in a front-page article Dec. 2.

VA documents show that McCants successfully completed the Navy survival training, and a VA analyst has diagnosed him as having PTSD. But the agency has rejected efforts to win a full disability for emotional distress, contending that he cannot prove he was waterboarded.

McCants said he will pursue an appeal to a VA board in Washington.

Nance testified Nov. 8 before a House Judiciary subcommittee in Washington that he underwent waterboarding in 1997 while training to become an instructor at the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school. Of waterboarding, he told the subcommittee, “It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts.”

McCants said that he was waterboarded during his SERE training at San Diego in April 1975. He said he has struggled with suicidal thoughts and been haunted by images of drowning. He said he also has problems with alcohol and drugs.

In rejecting his disability claim, VA officials say there are no records of the curriculum at the school in 1975.

Nance — a SERE instructor from 1997-2001– said that the school has long used waterboarding to prepare trainees for abuse if they become prisoners of war. Still, only a small fraction of the SERE students are actually waterboarded, he said, and the practice is little known.

McCants said he and about 30 other military personnel went through the course. He said he was waterboarded during an exercise in which the students pretended to be POWs while the instructors functioned as brutal guards.

McCants, who is black, said he was strapped to a board at a 20-degree angle, with his feet were higher than his head. He said that the instructors began to interrogate a fellow student, who was white.

“They told the other POW that if he didn’t talk, ‘The black one will suffer,'” McCants said. “He just gave his name, rank and serial number, and when he refused to say more, they poured buckets of water over my face.”

The water, he said, “was constantly coming” until he passed out. When he came to, he said, the guards repeated the process, this time with a T-shirt over his face, after the white POW again refused to talk.

Nance said that the use of the ultimatum with the warning that “‘the black one will suffer,'” is “exactly what the phrase would be.” Although it sounds stilted, he said, it’s meant to mimic a POW interrogator speaking English rather than his native language.

After reading McCants’ account published in the Press-Register, Nance said, “It’s pretty clear he knew everything that goes on in a waterboarding.” He said, “I have great sympathy for him. This man served.”

The director of the VA Appeals Management Center in Washington, Arnold Russo, said in a recent interview, “I’m not denying that he has PTSD, but we don’t have the service incident verified.” Russo said the best evidence that McCants could show would be testimony from someone who witnessed his waterboarding.

But McCants said that he and his fellow SERE students hailed from different units and did not know each other. Nance, meanwhile, said there would have few witnesses, because SERE’s waterboardings were not done in front of the whole class.

January 28, 2008 – There’s a cynical old saying that the victors write the history. CBS’s “60 Minutes” demonstrated how that process works on Jan. 27 in airing Scott Pelley’s interview with the FBI agent who de-briefed former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

In a world of objective reality, a reporter might say that the United States launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, under the false pretense that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, even after Iraq had repeatedly – and accurately – announced that its WMD had been destroyed in the 1990s.

On Dec. 7, 2002, Iraq even sent to the United Nations a 12,000-page declaration explaining how its WMD stockpiles had been eliminated. In fall 2002, Hussein’s government also allowed teams of U.N. inspectors into Iraq and gave them free rein to examine any site of their choosing.

Those inspections only ended in March 2003 when President George W. Bush decided to press ahead with war despite the U.N. Security Council’s refusal to authorize the invasion and its desire to give the U.N. inspectors time to finish their work.

But none of that reality is part of the history that Americans are supposed to know. The officially sanctioned U.S. account, as embraced by Bush in speech after speech, is that Saddam Hussein “chose war” by defying the U.N. over the WMD issue and by misleading the world into believing that he still possessed these weapons.

In line with Bush’s version of history, “60 Minutes” correspondent Pelley asked FBI interrogator George Piro why Hussein kept pretending that he had WMD even as U.S. troops massed on Iraq’s borders, when a simple announcement that the WMD was gone would have prevented the war.

“For a man who drew America into two wars and countless military engagements, we never knew what Saddam Hussein was thinking,” Pelley said in introducing the segment on the interrogation of Hussein about his WMD stockpiles. “Why did he choose war with the United States?”

The segment never mentions the fact that Hussein’s government did disclose that it had eliminated its WMD. Instead Pelley presses Piro on the question of why Hussein was hiding that fact.

Piro said Hussein explained to him that “most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ‘90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.”

“So,” Pelley asked, “why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?”

After Piro mentioned Hussein’s lingering fear of neighboring Iran, Pelley felt he was close to an answer to the mystery: “He believed that he couldn’t survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?”

Wanting an Invasion?

But, still, Pelley puzzled over why Hussein’s continued in his miscalculation.

Pelley asked: “As the U.S. marched toward war and we began massing troops on his border, why didn’t he stop it then? And say, ‘Look, I have no weapons of mass destruction,’ I mean, how could he have wanted his country to be invaded?”

It’s Bush World, with Pelley – like other prominent U.S. news correspondents – ignoring the well-established facts of the run-up to war and following the made-up story first presented by Bush four months after he forced the U.N. inspectors out, when he began claiming that Hussein had never let them in.

On July 14, 2003, as the U.S.-led WMD search also was coming up empty, Bush began asserting that it was all Hussein’s fault because he had never let the U.N. inspectors in. Bush told reporters:

“We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”

Facing no challenge from the White House press corps, Bush continued repeating this lie in varied forms over the next four years as part of his public litany for defending the invasion.

On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”

As the months and years went by, Bush’s lie and its constant retelling took on the color of truth.

At a March 21, 2006, news conference, Bush again blamed the war on Hussein’s defiance of U.N. demands for unfettered inspections.

“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said, ‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did.”

At a press conference on May 24, 2007, Bush offered a short-hand version, even inviting the journalists to remember the invented history.

“As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: [U.N. Resolution] 1441 was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. So the choice was his [Hussein’s] to make. And he made a choice that has subsequently caused him to lose his life.”

In the frequent repetition of this claim, Bush never acknowledges the fact that Hussein did comply with Resolution 1441 by declaring accurately that he had disposed of his WMD stockpiles and by permitting U.N. inspectors to examine any site of their choosing.

Journalistic Group Think

Prominent Washington journalists have even repeated Bush’s lie as their own. For instance, in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he – Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.

“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,” Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”

Of course, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But he did so in the real history, not in the faux reality that now governs Washington and pervades America’s top news programs, including “60 Minutes.”

In Pelley’s historical formulation, the question is not why did Bush invade Iraq in violation of international law, causing the deaths of nearly 4,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but rather “How could [Hussein] have wanted his country to be invaded?” 

This strategy of repeating a “big lie” often enough to make it sound true was famously described in the writings of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels during World War II. However, given the relatively free U.S. press, many Americans feel they are protected from “big lie” techniques, counting on journalists to call lying politicians to account.

But that clearly is no longer the case – and hasn’t been for some time. Facing career pressure from well-organized right-wing attack groups, American journalists act more like triangulating politicians, fearful of accusations of “liberal bias” or unpatriotic behavior or softness on terrorism.

To have challenged George W. Bush in July 2003 – when he was near the height of his popularity – or even now with his approval ratings at historic lows would carry career dangers that few American reporters want to risk.

So, discretion – or in this case the acceptance of a lie as truth – is the better part of valor.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Thursday, January 31, 2008 – Army Lieutenant Elizabeth Whiteside, a psychiatric outpatient at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who was waiting for the Army to decide whether to court-martial her for endangering another soldier and turning a gun on herself last year in Iraq, attempted to kill herself Monday evening. In so doing, the 25-year-old Army reservist joined a record number of soldiers who have committed or tried to commit suicide after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“I’m very disappointed with the Army,” Whiteside wrote in a note before swallowing dozens of antidepressants and other pills. “Hopefully this will help other soldiers.” She was taken to the emergency room early Tuesday. Whiteside, who is now in stable physical condition, learned yesterday that the charges against her had been dismissed.

Whiteside’s personal tragedy is part of an alarming phenomenon in the Army’s ranks: Suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according to a draft internal study obtained by The Washington Post. Last year, 121 soldiers took their own lives, nearly 20 percent more than in 2006.

At the same time, the number of attempted suicides or self-inflicted injuries in the Army has jumped sixfold since the Iraq war began. Last year, about 2,100 soldiers injured themselves or attempted suicide, compared with about 350 in 2002, according to the U.S. Army Medical Command Suicide Prevention Action Plan.

The Army was unprepared for the high number of suicides and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have continued far longer than anticipated. Many Army posts still do not offer enough individual counseling and some soldiers suffering psychological problems complain that they are stigmatized by commanders. Over the past year, four high-level commissions have recommended reforms and Congress has given the military hundreds of millions of dollars to improve its mental health care, but critics charge that significant progress has not been made.

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed severe stress on the Army, caused in part by repeated and lengthened deployments. Historically, suicide rates tend to decrease when soldiers are in conflicts overseas, but that trend has reversed in recent years. From a suicide rate of 9.8 per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 — the lowest rate on record — the Army reached an all-time high of 17.5 suicides per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2006.

Last year, twice as many soldier suicides occurred in the United States than in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, the Army’s top psychiatrist and author of the study, said that suicides and attempted suicides “are continuing to rise despite a lot of things we’re doing now and have been doing.” Ritchie added: “We need to improve training and education. We need to improve our capacity to provide behavioral health care.”

Ritchie’s team conducted more than 200 interviews in the United States and overseas and found that the common factors in suicides and attempted suicides include failed personal relationships; legal, financial or occupational problems; and the frequency and length of overseas deployments. She said the Army must do a better job of making sure that soldiers in distress receive mental health services. “We need to know what to do when we’re concerned about one of our fellows.”

The study, which the Army’s top personnel chief ordered six months ago, acknowledges that the Army still does not know how to adequately assess, monitor and treat soldiers with psychological problems. In fact, it says that “the current Army Suicide Prevention Program was not originally designed for a combat/deployment environment.”

Staff Sgt. Gladys Santos, an Army medic who attempted suicide after three tours in Iraq, said the Army urgently needs to hire more psychiatrists and psychologists who have an understanding of war. “They gave me an 800 number to call if I needed help,” she said. “When I come to feeling overwhelmed, I don’t care about the 800 number. I want a one-on-one talk with a trained psychiatrist who’s either been to war or understands war.”

Santos, who is being treated at Walter Reed, said the only effective therapy she has received there in the past year have been the one-on-one sessions with her psychiatrist, not the group sessions in which soldiers are told “Don’t hit your wife, don’t hit your kids” or the other groups where they play bingo or learn how to properly set a table.

Over the past year, the Army has reinvigorated its efforts to understand mental health issues and has instituted new assessment surveys and new online videos and questionnaires to help soldiers recognize problems and become more resilient, Ritchie said. It has also hired more mental health providers. The plan calls for attaching more chaplains to deployed units and assigning “battle buddies” to improve peer support and monitoring.

Increasing suicides raise “real questions about whether you can have an Army this size with multiple deployments,” said David Rudd, a former Army psychologist and chairman of the psychology department at Texas Tech University.

On Monday night, as President Bush delivered his State of the Union address and asked Congress to “improve the system of care for our wounded warriors and help them build lives of hope and promise and dignity,” Whiteside was dozing off from the effects of her drug overdose. Her case highlights the Army’s continuing struggles to remove the stigma surrounding mental illness and to make it easier for soldiers and officers to seek psychological help.

Whiteside, who was the subject of a Washington Post article in December, was a high-achieving University of Virginia graduate, and she earned top scores from her Army raters. But as a medic in charge of a small prison team in Iraq, she was repeatedly harassed by one of her commanders, which disturbed her greatly, according to an Army investigation.

On Jan. 1, 2007, weary from helping to quell riots in the prison after the execution of Saddam Hussein, Whiteside had a mental breakdown, according to an Army sanity board investigation. She pointed a gun at a superior, fired two shots into the ceiling and then turned the weapon on herself, piercing several organs. She has been at Walter Reed ever since.

Whiteside’s two immediate commanders brought charges against her, but Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the only physician in her chain of command and then the commander of Walter Reed, recommended that the charges be dropped, citing her “demonstrably severe depression” and “7 years of credible and honorable service.”

Her case hinged in part on whether her mental illness prompted her actions, as Walter Reed psychiatrists testified last month, or whether it was “an excuse” for her actions, as her company commander wrote when he proffered the original charges against her in April. Those charges included assault on a superior commissioned officer, aggravated assault, kidnapping, reckless endangerment, wrongful discharge of a firearm, communication of a threat and two attempts of intentional self-injury without intent to avoid service.

An Army hearing officer cited “Army values” and the need to do “what is right, legally and morally” when he recommended last month that Whiteside not face court-martial or other administration punishment, but that she be discharged and receive the medical benefits “she will desperately need for the remainder of her life.” Whiteside decided to speak publicly about her case only after a soldier she had befriended at the hospital’s psychiatric ward hanged herself after she was discharged without benefits.

But the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, which has ultimate legal jurisdiction over the case, declined for weeks to tell Whiteside whether others in her chain of command have concurred or differed with the hearing officer, said Matthew MacLean, Whiteside’s civilian attorney and a former military lawyer.

MacLean and Whiteside’s father, Thomas Whiteside, said the uncertainty took its toll on the young officer’s mental state. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s just so far off the page,” said Thomas Whiteside, his voice cracking with emotion. “I told her, ‘If you check out of here, you’re not going to be able to help other soldiers.’ “

Whiteside recently had begun to take prerequisite classes for a nursing degree, and her mental stability seemed to be improving, her father said. Then late last week she told him she was having trouble sleeping, with a possible court-martial weighing on her. On Monday night she asked her father to take her back to her room at Walter Reed so she could study.

She swallowed her pills there. A soldier and his wife, who live next door, came to her room and, after a while, noticed that she was becoming groggy, Thomas Whiteside said. When they returned later and she would not open the door, they called hospital authorities.

Yesterday, after having spent two nights in the intensive care unit, he said, his daughter was transferred to the psychiatric ward.

Whiteside left two notes, one titled “Business,” in which her top concern was the fate of her dog. “Appointment for the Vetenarian is in my blue book. Additional paperwork on Chewy is in the closet at the apartment in a folder.” On her second note, she penned a postscript: “Sorry to do this to my family + friends. I love you.”

January 26, 2008 – Legend has it that two thousand years ago President Bush’s favorite philosopher dodged the treason bullet by giving a group of Pharisees his honest opinion on the separation of church and state. Appreciating the wisdom in keeping heavenly and earthly concerns separate, Jesus advised them to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.”

Regrettably, the 2008 presidential frontrunners of both parties are ignoring Jesus’ advice regarding the preferred relationship between church and state by professing—ad nauseam—their undying fidelity to the Christian Right’s version of morality and its vision of our nation as their exclusive fiefdom.

Consider the statements of two Republican candidates. Senator John McCain said he believes the “Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.” Mike Huckabee said we should “amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards . . ..” McCain is pandering. Huckabee is deadly earnest. But keep in mind, many a democratic nation has been trampled because politicians were outsmarted by those whose boots they licked.

At least one sitting Supreme Court Justice shares Huckabee’s “deadly earnest” regarding God’s standards. In a 2005 Supreme Court case considering whether a monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments sitting near the entrance of the Texas State Capital was unconstitutional and tantamount to government endorsed religion, Justice Scalia lectured the plaintiffs, “It is a symbol that the government derives its authority from God. That’s what it is about. Our laws are derived from God.”

It is of no little consequence when a Supreme Court justice pronounces that our laws are based on ancient biblical commands rather than on the “godless” Constitution. In essence, Scalia is saying that the secular democracy envisioned by the Founding Fathers should be a Christian theocracy as envisioned by a determined sect of fundamentalists.

Not only do the folks who share Huckabee and Scalia’s “deadly earnest” want to change our nation’s Constitution, they want to change its history as well.

Rep. James Forbes (R-VA), backed by thirty-one other Representatives, has proposed House Resolution 888 designating the first week in May as “American Religious History Week.” The purpose of the bill is to affirm “the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history . . . and for the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.

If passed, this Resolution will be as divisive and detrimental to the study of American history in public schools and public squares as intelligent design creationism has been to the study of evolution. It will—as it is meant to—bolster the Christian Right’s claim to both our nation’s past and its present.

Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and former White House counsel during the Reagan administration, said that “House Resolution 888 is perhaps the most disgraceful, shocking and tragic example yet of the pernicious and pervasive pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of our bedrock American citizens’ religious freedom by the fundamentalist Christian right.” Mikey is not known to mince words.

That a good number of the Framers of the Constitution were Christians is undeniable. But it is this fact that speaks strongly in defense of their decision to build the “wall of separation” between church and state that keeps government out of the business of religion. Their concern was not necessarily for the rights of the nonbeliever, but for the believer’s freedom to choose which creed he or she will embrace.

The particular genius of the Founding Fathers was their understanding that a Christian nation can be a dangerous place for both believers and nonbelievers. They knew that government prescribed religion—usually that of the most politically connected sect—invariably leads to intolerance and tyranny.

James Madison, writing in defense of this notion, asked the question, “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”

If there is any doubt as to the salience of Madison’s question for a secular democracy, one need only consider a promise made by Pat Robertson, the fundamentalist voice of the Christian Right and 1988 presidential candidate. In a stump speech Robertson assured his audience that “after the Christian majority takes over this country, pluralism (non-fundamentalist beliefs) will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anyone to practice it.” If Robertson or Huckabee or Scalia or Forbes have their way, our national motto will be modified accordingly, “E Pluribus Fides Unum”—Out of Many Beliefs, Only One.

It is a small thing for people of faith to allow religion to creep onto the public square. What harm is there in something as seemingly innocuous as a reference to God in the national pledge or motto, a moment of prayerful silence in the classroom or in a nondenominational prayer at a high school graduation? Why not give equal time to creationism in public schools or support faith-based organizations with tax dollars?

And what person of the “true” faith will object to their child’s daily recitation of the Christian pledge of allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior for whose Kingdom it stands, One Savior, crucified, risen and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.” And for those of us who do not believe or who believe a little differently?

In 1817 John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical strife in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy these people cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could, they would.”

Both believer and nonbeliever have a vested interest in the secular nation envisioned by the Founding Fathers; a nation whose “godless” Constitution and social pluralism ensures the kind of democracy in which the practice of any religion, or none, is an inalienable right.

January 26, 2008 – Hawaii Sen. Daniel Akaka and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are calling for $2 million in additional funding for the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The Hawaii senator says many of the servicemen and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will be suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, increasing demand on the center.

In a letter to the secretary of veterans affairs requesting the additional funding, the Hawaii Democrat notes that the center’s budget has dropped from a 2005 high of just over $10 million. He says the center has seen its staff levels decline steadily since 1999.

Akaka is chairman of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee.