Veterans for Common Sense

January 24, 2008 – Grand Rapids, Michigan – With the problems in the housing market around the country, foreclosures are on the rise. That includes some homes financed with loans through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. But, one activist organization doesn’t think the VA is properly managing those properties.

The Department of Veterans Affairs guarantees some home loans for veterans and members of the military. But if a veteran’s home is foreclosed, the VA is left with the house.

The VA contracts with a private company to manage and sell those houses. A report by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, or GAO, is critical of how the company manages the properties.

Members of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, showed up at a Grand Rapids office of the Department of Veterans Affairs to let them know that they’re not happy. ACORN members said, “This is in reference to the housing stock that the VA owns.”

The Grand Rapids office offers counseling. But ACORN members are upset about a VA contract with a company called Ocwen to maintain and sell foreclosed houses.

The GAO report found the homes were not sold as fast, or for the prices the VA wanted. The report also shows 32{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} to 46{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of properties were not maintained to VA standards for a period of time from 2005 to 2007.

ACORN member Adrianna Jones says she is concerned about the lack of maintenance because, “it tears up our neighborhoods because they’re not fixed up. And they’re torn down. And it brings a lot of blight in the community.”

In the GAO report, Ocwen countered that the VA sometimes focuses on trivial repair items, and that some VA financial calculations are not consistent with industry standards.

ACORN member George Wilson is a Vietnam veteran and knows it can be difficult to adjust to life after the military. He says, “you go there and fight the Vietnam War, and when you come back to the United States you don’t get an equal quality that you served for your country.” He hopes the VA can spend its money on helping veterans, instead of paying to try to maintain houses.

The VA’s contract with Ocwen is up for renewal this year. The GAO report makes some suggestions about possible improvements to the contract.

A statement by VA spokesman Matt Smith says, “…the Department of Veterans Affairs generally agreed with the findings of the Government Accountability Office report regarding actions needed to strengthen VA’s foreclosed property management contractor oversight.”

The statement goes on to say the VA plans to make changes to a new property management contract that will likely be awarded in the next few months. That contract will likely include real time property management data, incentives for good performance, and penalties for poor performance.

WZZM 13 News called Ocwen to get a response, but we have not heard back from the company.

The Department of Veterans affairs issued this statement:

Statement by VA Spokesperson Matt Smith On Property Management Services Contract

In October of last year, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)generally agreed with the findings of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report regarding actions needed to strengthen VA’s foreclosed property management contractor oversight.

As we stated at the time, VA is developing the next solicitation for a new property management services contract. Using a performance-based acquisition strategy, the new solicitation will include the requirement for real-time property management data as well as incentives for good performance and disincentives for poor performance. The VA expects to award the new contract in the next few months.

The VA has aggressively managed the Ocwen contract and is examining poor performance relating to return-on-sale requirements.

The VA needs to point out some serious inaccuracies in ACORN’s statements. Ocwen does not service or foreclose on VA loans. Under Ocwen’s current contract with VA, they only manage and sell VA-owned properties.

January 27, 2008 – When it came time to sentence James Allen Gregg for his conviction on murder charges, the judge in South Dakota took a moment to reflect on the defendant as an Iraq combat veteran who suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

“This is a terrible case, as all here have observed,” said Judge Charles B. Kornmann of United States District Court. “Obviously not all the casualties coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan come home in body bags.”

Judge Kornmann noted that Mr. Gregg, a fresh-faced young man who grew up on a cattle ranch, led “an exemplary life until that day, that terrible morning.” With no criminal record or psychiatric history, Mr. Gregg had started unraveling in Iraq, growing disillusioned with the war and volunteering for dangerous missions in the hope of getting killed, he testified.

Nonetheless, the judge found that Mr. Gregg’s combat trauma had not rendered him incapable of comprehending his actions when he shot an acquaintance in the back, fled the scene, and then pointed the gun at himself as a SWAT team approached — the helmeted officers “low crawling,” Mr. Gregg testified, and looking “like my own soldiers turning on me.”

When combat veterans like Mr. Gregg stand accused of killings and other offenses on their return from Iraq and Afghanistan, prosecutors, judges and juries are increasingly prodded to assess the role of combat trauma in their crimes and whether they deserve special treatment because of it.

That idea has met with considerable resistance from prosecutors and judges leery of creating any class of offenders with distinct privileges. In Mr. Gregg’s case, for instance, Judge Kornmann cautioned the jury that nobody got “a free pass to shoot somebody” because they “went to Iraq or Afghanistan or the moon.”

Still, more and more, with the troops’ mental health a rising concern, these defendants are succeeding in at least raising the issue of psychological war injuries. Aggressive defense lawyers, many in the military bar, are insisting that Iraq or Afghanistan be factored into the calculus of justice in these cases. They are arguing that war be seen as the backdrop for these crimes, most of which are committed by individuals without criminal records.

“I think they should always receive some kind of consideration for the fact that their mind has been broken by war,” said Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, Western regional defense counsel for the Marines.

Last year, California became the first state to pass legislation dealing with the small fraction of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who end up entangled with the law. Updating a Vietnam-era statute, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger quietly signed a bill that permitted judges to divert troubled veterans into treatment programs.

“This is going to be on my tombstone, this bill,” said Pete Conaty, a Vietnam veteran who lobbied for it. “It has been a personal crusade of mine to make sure we don’t make the same mistake with Iraqi vets as we did with my generation.”

But the California law applies only to lesser crimes, as, in all likelihood, will any bills that it inspires, like one being debated in Minnesota.

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans facing homicide charges must defend themselves without the benefit of such laws. And in so doing, they often provoke intense moral and legal wrangling, turning local courthouses into unlikely forums for debate on the effects of the war.

Generally that debate takes place behind closed doors during plea negotiations. In cases that go to trial, however, the scene can be surreal, with Iraq commanding center stage as testimony about fingerprints and blood spatter alternates with questioning about mortar attacks in Baquba and civilian casualties in Baghdad.

Service members, sometimes wearing dress uniforms and spit-shined shoes, introduce their psychiatric evaluations into evidence and put their military colleagues on the stand to argue that the crime in question was completely out of character.

Tim Long, for instance, a company first sergeant with the South Dakota National Guard, testified about Mr. Gregg, whom he had nominated for a Bronze Star. “He’s a young farm boy, you know?” he said. “Competent young man. My friend.”

A Disorder Is Recognized

Born during the Vietnam War era, the combat version of what became known as the PTSD defense is being dusted off for a new generation of war veterans.

“I’m seeing it all the time now,” said David P. Sheldon, a civilian lawyer in Washington who represents military personnel. “And I will not be surprised to see this resonate as a consistent theme over the next few decades when people will be committing crimes after suffering repeated traumas in Iraq.”

It was in 1980, five years after the Vietnam War ended, that the psychiatric establishment first recognized post-traumatic stress disorder. Vietnam veterans quickly summoned it as a primary legal defense. In many cases, the veterans argued that they had been rendered temporarily insane as a result of flashbacks to the war while committing their crimes.

One of the first murder defendants to do so successfully was Charles G. Heads, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity for killing his brother-in-law a decade after he left Vietnam. Medical experts contended that Mr. Heads believed he was “cleaning out a hooch,” or hut, in Vietnam when he kicked in a door and shot his victim.

As time went on, the PTSD defense met increasing resistance just as the use of the insanity defense was limited by many states.

Taking a more cautious approach, the current generation of war-era defendants is most often using combat trauma not to escape culpability but to explain state of mind.

Were it not for their deployment to Iraq, they argue, they probably never would have committed the crime. Before Iraq, they claim, they were not paranoid, aggressive, jumpy or suicidal; they did not carry around loaded weapons, drink to excess, misread threats or explode in anger.

“In many of these cases, you have a nasty mix: a gun, intoxication and someone inaccurately assessing their environment and the consequences of their behavior,” said Thomas Grieger, a recently retired Navy forensic psychiatrist.

In general, the veterans raise their combat trauma during plea negotiations or in the sentencing phase of trials, hoping for reduced charges or a lesser sentence.

Occasionally it works.

Anthony J. Klecker, a former marine, pleaded guilty to criminal vehicular homicide for a drunken crash that killed a high school cheerleader, Deanna Casey, in Minnesota in 2006. But his lawyer argued that Mr. Klecker, 29, who had already spent a year in jail, should be sentenced to six months of inpatient treatment instead of the 48 months in prison called for by sentencing guidelines.

“Tony would never, ever claim his war experiences, associated psychological injuries and alcoholism should excuse him from responsibility for Ms. Casey’s death,” his lawyer, Brockton D. Hunter, wrote the judge. But, he said, Mr. Klecker was a “psychological casualty of the war in Iraq who unsuccessfully sought treatment from an overstrained [VA].”

The state judge agreed to impose the alternative sentence, and Mr. Klecker was admitted to a dual program for substance abuse and PTSD at the Veterans Affairs hospital in St. Cloud, Minn.

But then things got complicated. After getting into a verbal fight with another veteran, Mr. Klecker lost his residency privileges. He was returned to jail; the prosecutor is seeking once more to send him to prison.

‘A Tale of Two Places’

“This is really a tale of two places,” James Gregg’s lawyer said during his opening statement in 2005 in the federal courthouse in Pierre, S.D.: the Crow Creek Indian Reservation where the killing took place and “a very, very faraway” place, “a place called Iraq.”

By framing the case this way from the start, the lawyer, Timothy J. Rensch, made it clear that Mr. Gregg’s explanation for the “murder in Indian country,” as the charge read, would be inextricably bound to his year as a National Guardsman in Iraq.

That approach rankled the prosecutor, who referred to it as “waving the flag,” although Mr. Rensch stated that he was not trying to use Iraq “as an excuse” since Mr. Gregg was arguing self-defense.

“But you need to understand about Iraq and what happened to Jim over there for you to be able to see things from his point of view, and understand his thinking, and especially understand, really, his desperation at the end,” Mr. Rensch said.

On the evening of July 3, 2004, Mr. Gregg, then 22, spent the night with friends in a roving pre-Independence Day celebration on the reservation where he grew up, part of a small non-Indian population. They drank at a Quonset hut bar called the Pit Stop, in a trailer community and finally at a mint farm where they built a bonfire, roasted marshmallows and made s’mores.

According to the prosecutor, Mr. Gregg got upset because a young woman accompanying him gravitated to another man. This, the prosecutor said, led to Mr. Gregg spinning the wheels of his truck and spraying gravel on a car belonging to James Fallis, 26, a former high school football lineman who grew up performing American Indian dances on what is called the powwow circuit.

Some time later, a confrontation ensued. Mr. Gregg was severely beaten by Mr. Fallis and, primarily, by another man, suffering facial fractures. Later that night, with one eye swollen shut and a fat lip, he drove to Mr. Fallis’s neighborhood.

Mr. Fallis emerged from a trailer, removed his jacket, asked Mr. Gregg if he had come back for more and opened the door to Mr. Gregg’s pickup truck. Mr. Gregg then reached for the pistol that he carried with him after his return from Iraq. He pointed it at Mr. Fallis and warned him to back away.

Mr. Fallis moved toward the trunk of his car, and Mr. Gregg testified that he believed Mr. Fallis was going to get a weapon. He started shooting to stop him, he said, and then Mr. Fallis veered toward his house. Mr. Gregg fired nine times, and struck Mr. Fallis with five bullets.

Mr. Gregg drove quickly away, ending up in a pasture near his parents’ house. From there, he spoke on the phone to his best friend, Jacob Big Eagle, who told him that Mr. Fallis was dead.

According to Mr. Gregg’s testimony, he then put a magazine of more bullets in his gun, chambered a round and pointed it at his chest.

“Jim, why were you going to kill yourself?” his lawyer asked in court, seeking to rebut the prosecutor’s contention that guilt had driven him to suicidal despair.

“Because it felt like Iraq had come back,” Mr. Gregg said. “I felt hopeless. All that happened, no one would believe me. That I didn’t want this to happen. I never wanted to shoot him. Never wanted to hurt him. Never. Everything happened just so fast. I mean, it was almost instinct that I had to protect myself.”

Tense Courtroom Atmosphere

The atmosphere in the courtroom was tense throughout the trial, with American Indians on one side of the aisle and white ranchers on the other. Complicating matters, the participants in Mr. Gregg’s case traveled, in a sense, back and forth between the bluffs of the Missouri River and those of the Tigris as they grappled with the relevancy of his military experience.

Mr. Gregg joined the National Guard at 18. He was studying at a technical school, with the goal of becoming a diesel mechanic, when his combat engineering company, whose expertise resided in bridge building, was shipped to Iraq in the spring of 2003.

“He left for Iraq enthusiastic and energetic and eager to serve his country,” wrote one of four mental health professionals, including two government officials, who diagnosed PTSD in Mr. Gregg. He “returned impaired by PTSD complicated by his disillusionment with the military operation in Iraq.”

After building a bridge across the Tigris River, his National Guard company effectively became an infantry unit. Mr. Gregg estimated that he searched well over 10,000 vehicles and fired over 1,000 rounds.

Mr. Gregg found checkpoint duty unbearable, said Michael Furois, a Department of Veterans Affairs psychologist who treated him after his arrest. According to Mr. Furois’s testimony, Mr. Gregg disliked “standing guard at a gate when the Iraq civilians would bring in their dead or wounded and would be yelling and crying and blaming those at the gate for that occurring.”

After many months in Iraq, Mr. Gregg testified, he began to think about suicide, hoping that his “chance” at death would come if he volunteered for dangerous missions. His superior officer, Sergeant Long, testified that he selected him for a nighttime patrol team, instructing them never to hesitate when they perceived a threat because “if you hesitate, you’re dead.”

Cross-examining Sergeant Long, Mikal G. Hanson, an assistant United States attorney, asked him if he were implying that his instruction about hesitating had caused Mr. Gregg, on his return to the United States, to shoot “an unarmed civilian.”

“I hope not,” Sergeant Long said.

When Mr. Gregg’s tour of duty ended in March 2004, he started drinking heavily to ease his stress and expressed the wish that he had died in Iraq.

Mental health experts for the defense said, as one psychiatrist testified, that “PTSD was the driving force behind Mr. Gregg’s actions” when he shot his victim. Having suffered a severe beating, they said, he experienced an exaggerated “startle reaction” — a characteristic of PTSD — when Mr. Fallis reached for his car door, and responded instinctively.

Mr. Gregg’s trial lawyer put it theatrically: When Mr. Fallis rushed at Mr. Gregg, he said, Mr. Gregg switched into military mode. “What does he think?” the lawyer said. “Lethal threat, lethal threat, lethal threat, neutralize threat, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, continues to shoot.”

The prosecutor, reflecting his skepticism about this explanation, asked Mr. Gregg if he had been a “walking time bomb” since Iraq. “You’re not telling this jury,” Mr. Hanson said, “that National Guard members like yourself that went through that experience are a threat to kill people?”

Mr. Gregg: “I wouldn’t know.”

The prosecutor also referred to Mr. Gregg’s military experiences for his own purposes, asking whether military trainers tried to strengthen soldiers’ minds as well as bodies.

“Not really,” Mr. Gregg said. “They actually break down your mind.”

“Break down your mind,” Mr. Hanson said. “Explain that to the jury.”

“They break down your mind, and then they try to build you back up,” Mr. Gregg said.

“Into a killer?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Gregg said.

The jury found Mr. Gregg guilty of second-degree but not first-degree murder. The judge later referred to this as having “dodged a bullet, so to speak.”

The Sentence: 21 Years

Judge Kornmann also said in court that he found the case troubling, calling the sentencing hearing “one of those days” when he wondered whether he should have declined the offer by Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader from South Dakota, to nominate him for a federal judgeship.

“I see these stickers that people have on their vehicles saying, ‘Support the troops,’ ” Judge Kornmann said. “I don’t see much support for the troops as years go on when these people come back injured and maimed.”

Nonetheless, the judge said that Mr. Gregg did not deserve any of the “downward departures” from sentencing guidelines that his lawyers had requested in consideration of his military service, his PTSD and his crime-free record. The mandatory minimum for a federal offense involving a gun is 10 years, and Mr. Gregg’s lawyers indicated that they hoped he would be sentenced to no more than 12.

Judge Kornmann handed down a 21-year sentence.

Through a relative who works for the prominent law firm of WilmerHale, Mr. Gregg secured the company’s services; his case was taken pro bono.

In late June, Mr. Gregg’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition, seeing to vacate his conviction on the basis of ineffective assistance of trial counsel. Mr. Rensch, they argue, did not demonstrate that Mr. Gregg’s state of mind was heavily influenced by being “vividly aware of specific, dramatic instances of past violent acts” by his victim.

While Mr. Gregg awaits the outcome, he is locked in a federal medical prison in Rochester, Minn., where he tried to kill himself on one occasion and has been placed on suicide watch episodically. If all efforts to free him fail, he is projected to be released on July 22, 2023, a few weeks shy of his 42nd birthday.

January 25, 2008 – The US has suffered more than 72,000 battlefield casualties since the start of the war on terror in 2001, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

VCS Note: Read our Fact Sheets Here: http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/articleid/9179

The query by the campaigning Veterans for Common Sense organisation shows that 4,372 American soldiers have died and another 67,671 have been wounded in action, injured in accidents or succumbed to illness in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The veterans’ group had to force the US Defence Department to release the figures by persuading judges to uphold their FoI rights.

A second request to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the government-funded body responsible for taking care of ex-servicemen and women, showed 263,909 soldiers with experience of the two 21st-century wars have so far received treatment for everything from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the aftermath of amputated limbs.

It also showed 52,375 veterans had been diagnosed with PTSD and 34,138 have received approval for disability claims for the psychological disorder. As of October 31 last year, 1.6 million Americans have been deployed overseas since 2001.

Harvard University estimates the cost of caring for Iraq and Afghan veterans over the next 40 years will amount to between £125bn and £350bn, depending on the long-term effects of trauma.

More than 240,000 of those deployed have received some form of counselling at veterans’ centres.

British military losses in the two conflicts are 261 dead and more than 600 wounded in action. Another 3000 have been hospitalised as a result of road accidents or disease.

In central Afghanistan yesterday, nine Afghan policemen, including a district police chief, were killed in an anti-Taliban operation by US-led coalition troops, officials said. Several insurgents also died.

Also yesterday, a Nato soldier was killed and two others wounded when an explosion struck their patrol in the south of the country. The nationalities of the soldiers and the exact location of the blast were not given.

[VCS Note: VCS wrote Freedom of Information Act requests to the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs to obtain the data.  Although at one point VA was threatened with legal action, our requests have not yet gone to court or a judge for review.  For more information, please see this VCS Update – http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/articleid/9179

January 25, 2008 – A report out of the state of Oregon reinforces the results of a CBS News investigation from last November that found high rates of suicides among those who served in the military.

The state health report, “Violent Deaths in Oregon: 2005” found 18 to 24-year-old male veterans had the highest rate of suicide than any other demographic in the state from 2000 to 2005 – almost 5 times higher than non-veteran males the same age.

“We were shocked [by the results],” Lisa Millet, Project Manager for Oregon’s Violent Death Reporting System which conducted the study, told CBS News. View the new report here: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/ViolentDeathinOregon2005.pdf

Data for the report was collected from local medical examiners, police reports and death certificates. In 2005, veterans accounted for 28 percent of all suicides in Oregon. The majority of the veteran suicides (97 percent) were committed by males. And overall, in the years 2000 to 2005, male veterans died of self-inflicted wounds in Oregon at more than double the rate of male non-veterans.

Here are the rates of suicide per 100,000 males (statistically adjusted for age) from the report:

2000-2005 Oregon Male Rates of Suicide
Veterans = 46.05 per 100,000
Non-Veterans = 22.09 per 100,000

Millet says when Oregon state researchers broken down the veteran suicide data (from the years 2000 to 2005) by age, three groups had “significantly” higher rates. She provided CBS News those rates:

(Note: Millet says the following rates of suicide are statistically adjusted for age and by year to weed out any random factors so the comparison between veterans and non-veterans is an “oranges to oranges” match.)

Oregon Males Ages: 18-24
Veterans = 134 per 100,000
Non-Veterans = 27 per 100,000

Oregon Males Ages: 35-44
Veterans = 47 per 100,000
Non-Veterans = 26 per 100,000

Oregon Males Ages: 45-54
Veterans = 48 per 100,000
Non-Veterans = 28 per 100,000

“These statistics are deeply troubling,” says Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the advocate group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “This study should serve as a wake up call for Oregon’s governor, lawmakers and all of our nation’s leaders.”

The Oregon findings are consistent with what Chief Investigative Correspondent Armen Keteyian reported two-months ago in an exclusive investigation. After collecting death record data from states across the country, CBS News discovered that the (adjusted) rate of suicide for veterans nationwide is more than twice that of non-veterans. And, like the state of Oregon, CBS also found that the veterans most at risk for suicide nationwide are those aged 20 through 24.

Researchers with Oregon’s Violent Death Reporting System are now digging deeper into the issue of veteran suicides as a result of their recent findings. According to Millet, they plan to team up with the Oregon National Guard and the Portland Department of Veterans Affairs to gain more information about the individuals who died of suicide. Millet says “we need to see what can be done to reduce the problem.”

January 22, 2008 – Compelling evidence that Canadian-transferred detainees are still being tortured in Afghan prisons emerged yesterday from the government’s own follow-up inspection reports, documents it has long tried to keep secret.

In one harrowing account, an Afghan turned over by Canadian soldiers told of being beaten unconscious and tortured in the secret police prison in Kandahar. He showed Canadian diplomats fresh welts and then backed up his story by revealing where the electrical cable and the rubber hose that had been used on him were hidden.

“Under the chair we found a large piece of braided electrical cable as well as a rubber hose,” reads the subsequent diplomatic cable marked “secret” and distributed to some of the most senior officials in the Canadian government and officers in the Canadian military.

The Globe and Mail has established that the report of the case is recent, written after a Nov. 5, 2007, inspection of the National Directorate of Security prison in Kandahar. That was six months after a supposedly improved transfer agreement was put in place to monitor detainee treatment. The agreement was designed to address problems raised by critics about the ill treatment of prisoners taken by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and handed over to Afghan authorities with insufficient follow-up.

The documents were made available yesterday by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, which, along with Amnesty International Canada, is seeking a Federal Court injunction to stop further prisoner transfers. Both rights groups have filed a Federal Court action contending that international law and Canada’s own Constitution bar the government from transferring prisoners to those likely to torture or abuse them.

“The denial of torture is no longer a plausible position” for the Harper government to take, Jason Gratl, president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said yesterday. (Previous allegations of abuse and torture by transferred detainees have been dismissed by senior ministers as Taliban propaganda.) “It’s impossible to turn a blind eye to the discovery of the instruments of torture in the very interrogation room where the interview was being conducted.” Mr. Gratl said yesterday in a telephone interview from Vancouver.

In Ottawa, under cross-examination before the parties are to appear in court Thursday, Nicholas Gosselin, Canada’s human-rights officer stationed in Kandahar, confirmed that he was the diplomat who picked up, examined and then carefully returned the cable and hose to beneath the chair in the secret police prison interrogation room.

It is impossible to know whether the latest documents – delivered to the court, Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association only days before the parties are due in court – actually include the full range of the government’s knowledge about ill treatment and abuse of transferred detainees. Even if they do, most of it is blacked out, including dates and other key information.

The following excerpt is typical. In other instances, entire pages are blacked out.

“Of the XXX detainees interviewed, XXX said XXX had been whipped with cables, shocked with electricity and/or otherwise ‘hurt’ while in NDS custody in Kandahar. This period of alleged abuse lasted from between XXX days and XXX days and was carried out in XXX and XXX and detainees still had XXX on XXX body; XXX traumatized.” Some of the allegations describe abuse and torture as occurring in Kandahar, others in Kabul. In some, the secret police accuse the regular police of the beatings. One transferred detainee, apparently confused, incoherent and seemingly suffering from mental problems, had no toenails. Others reported beatings and ill treatment. Many said they had never seen a lawyer. Some apparently had never been visited by international monitoring groups.

Canadian soldiers are being ordered by the government to turn over prisoners that the government knows face torture, Mr. Gratl said. The government has tried to deflect criticism of its detainee-transfer program in the past by suggesting that while there is torture in some Afghan prisons, there was no proof that it applied to detainees handed over by Canadian soldiers. However, the new documents provide specific evidence of torture and abuse of specific detainees known to have been handed over by Canadians and subsequently interviewed by Canadians.No agreements or assurances or inspections “will remove the risk in the foreseeable future” that Canadian soldiers are turning over prisoners that the government knows will be tortured, Mr. Gratl said.

Another document, with the date blacked out, underscored the shoddy record-keeping, the inability to keep track of transferred detainees, and the difficulty in asking the secret police to investigate allegations that they had been torturing prisoners.

In numerous instances, detainees who described torture or abuse asked Canadian interviewers conducting the follow-up inspections not to divulge their names, apparently fearing retribution. It remains unclear how the subsequent investigations reportedly launched by Afghan authorities, all but one of which apparently have concluded that allegations of abuse or torture are unfounded, can have proceeded without knowing the identity of the victim.

Yet in an affidavit, sworn last Dec. 14 and confirmed in cross-examination on Jan. 4, Kerry Buck, director-general of the Afghanistan Task Force of the Department of Foreign Affairs, confirmed that after conducting investigations into all of alleged instances of torture and abuse, all of them save one were found to be groundless, and one was still under investigation.

Mr. Gratl said the Harper government’s continued refusal to cease transfers was besmirching the reputation of Canadian soldiers, who in some instances have refused to turn over detainees in the field fearing Afghan security forces would kill them. The conclusions of all of the investigations had been delivered at the same time, orally, and with no details to the Canadian ambassador in Kabul, Ms. Buck testified. “The reputation of the Canadian Forces is a reputation of a compassionate, careful and respectful organization that complies with international standards,” including the Geneva Conventions that govern the humane treatment of prisoners and specifically prohibit transfers to torture, Mr. Gratl said. Continuing the transfers tars Canadian soldiers “with a reputation of callous indifference,” he said.

January 23, 2008- Every war produces casualties that American society refuses to recognize. I remember the tales of lobotomized WWII veterans and remember watching “strange” zombie-like men wandering the neighborhoods as I grew up. I remember returning from the Vietnam War and seeing the horrendous waste of people as the country refused to help its veterans to actually “return home.” Why was there no outrage? Why has there never been outrage? Yet, we tolerate individuals who deny that the badly damaged people who served the needs of the nation are filling our homeless shelters and our prisoners.

I returned home from the Vietnam War and was extremely lucky. A local college provided a very warm welcome to veterans. As I remember it, no matter what our high school academics looked like, we were provisionally admitted into a program with limited class load and careful but almost unnoticed counseling. We thrived. Our little group of 10 or 12 veterans produced local community leaders like a bank president, a Chamber of Commerce president and a carpenter/artist to mention just a few. To the best of my knowledge, none of us became homeless or spent years in prison. What that college provided was a community and a reality check for all of us in a safe environment. Mixing veterans and the outside world, barely noticed we transitioned. We need similar programs now.

While attending college, I worked as a city policeman and saw the human toll building up as returning veterans tried desperately to cope. My fellow officers, many veterans of WWII and Korea, tried to stem the flow to “give a break” where they could but in so many cases it was hopeless — a mere finger in the dike of agony. Well, I will no longer stand for it. I urge you not to either.

Demand programs like the one I attended. Demand new and innovative programs for another generation at risk. What worked for me and my cohorts won’t necessarily work for today’s soldier. Do not allow ANY politician to claim a program is too expensive – we started this war; we better pay for it.

The hurting soldiers and veterans in our midst are a cost of war. They deserve better than my generation and so many past veteran generations often received: homelessness and prison. It is WAY past time to brake the chain of human waste and abuse. I don’t want any right or left wing propagandist saying hurting veterans don’t exist or calling them phony soldiers. Everyone of us, not just veterans but all proud American citizens of every political stripe, should demand accountability and change. None, not one, of our troops should be abandoned anywhere because they were too expensive.

January 22, 2008 – Less than a week after holding a listening session with veterans at the VA Hospital at Fort Harrison, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., announced that the VA’s top leader will visit the state as early as next month.

On Tuesday, Tester said Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peake will tour the state to observe firsthand the challenges of providing health care to veterans in rural and frontier parts of the country.

After a Tuesday meeting, Tester said Peake will also relocate and expand the VA clinic in Billings from 10,000 to 16,000 square feet. The new location has yet to be determined.

“It was a good meeting that will ultimately help a lot of veterans and their families here in Montana,” Tester said. “Secretary Peake and I checked politics at the door and worked together to do what’s right for the folks who served our country.”

Tester said Peake’s approval of the new clinic in Billings, the state’s largest city, brings the project one step closer to reality. Due the size of the new clinic, Tester said, Congress must give final approval, which is expected in 30 days.

Tester and Peake spoke about the concerns the senator has heard over the past year during listening sessions held around the state. Tester has held 12 such sessions, the last taking place at Fort Harrison last week.

There, Tester heard requests from improved dental care to an expanded vet-to-vet program. Improved record keeping was an issue raised by several in attendance, along with better post-deployment care.

With nearly 80 people in attendance, some praised the Montana VA, saying it provided superior care to that received at other facilities. Others, however, criticized the VA for shortcomings they called an affront to veterans.

“I told Secretary Peake what I’m hearing in Montana,” Tester said. “I told him about the issues we need to put on the front burner. He listened and he’s taking action.”

Thousands of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical injuries and mental-health issues are encountering an overburdened VA system, which is scrambling to meet the rising demand.

Tester, who sits on the Veterans Affairs Committee, has said at various points over his first year in office that even more veterans are likely to turn to the VA for help as the war in Iraq and action in Afghanistan rolls on.

“Meeting with Secretary Peake was a good chance to take what I’ve heard over the last couple of weeks and bring it to the highest level of the VA,” Tester said.

January 23, 2008 – When I tell people I’m an investigative reporter, I secretly hope that it sounds sexy and mysterious. I imagine that they might think of me like Bob Woodward, eclipsed by a dark column deep inside a Washington parking garage, waiting for Deep Throat to impart a haiku of wisdom — “follow the money” — that will lead me to the noblest of reporting revelations.

The real work, of course, is miraculously less glamorous. I pore endlessly through documents, wait long hours for phone calls to be returned, and type up tedious Freedom of Information Act requests. Occasionally I even follow a mysterious man up a snow-covered mountain in a rental car made to fit a Pygmy.

Recently I got a hot tip about a Marine who was fresh back from Iraq and was now out of the military. His unit, I was told, had committed war crimes, and this Marine wanted to unburden himself by sharing information about the atrocities. “War crime” — two words that are news, and even more so when taken together. And there was more: This source was said to have video evidence.

Before a reporter goes off chasing some great white whale and burning up thousands of dollars of his editor’s budget in airfare and hotel bills, it is good to have some idea of whether the story is authentic. This can be a tricky balance, however; when a particular lead starts to smell funny or takes a weird turn, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going nowhere. A shocking truth might yet be waiting around the next bend in the road. An investigative reporter’s charge is persistence.

I’ve done a lot of reporting on veterans’ issues, and I got information about this Marine from other veterans who wanted to expose war crimes if indeed they had been committed. This Marine was for real, I was told. So I started talking to this Marine on the phone. We will call him Joe.

In recent years I have talked with many dozens, if not hundreds of veterans. Joe immediately seemed atypical — on the phone he sounded more like Jeff Spicoli than Chesty Puller. He said “dude” a lot. He told me that he lived in Burlington, Vt., which, if true, would have meant that there was at least one Marine in the Green Mountain State.

Joe talked a pretty good game, though he was a bit vague about, well, everything. The more I made it clear that I was prepared to jump on a plane to Burlington to meet with him, the worse Joe got at returning my phone calls. His cellphone was apparently on the fritz, the battery dead. He suddenly got busy. Still, it’s much harder to assess a source on the phone than in person. Sometimes a face-to-face meeting can make all the difference.

In my efforts to track down Joe, I ended up talking to Joe’s roommate. We’ll call him Hank. Hank confided that, among other things, busy Joe was actually unemployed. Hank also called me “dude.”

Finally, after days of phone calls, I succeeded in getting Hank to physically hand his cellphone over to Joe. Joe then agreed to meet me the next night in Burlington, even though he said that would be tough, because the day after our scheduled meeting he would have to wake up at the crack of dawn and drive four hours to Connecticut to see a V.A. doctor.

Meanwhile, Vermont had just been struck by a blizzard. There was at least a foot of snow on the ground, and air traffic was almost at a standstill. But reporters are supposed to be as intrepid as postal workers in such situations. The next day I left Washington, sweated out a long delay at JFK airport, and after many, many hours landed in snowy, frigid Burlington. When I tuned in to a local radio station inside my rental car, the announcer said it was zero degrees outside.

I proceeded to the Courtyard Marriott. Joe’s phone apparently was on the fritz again. No answer for hours. I paced the checkered carpet of my room. It was too early to hit the minibar. On the tube, MacGyver was powering his alarm clock using some old wires, a russet potato and a glass of water. I wasn’t quite desperate enough to crack open the Gideons Bible.

Eventually, I tried the cellphone of Joe’s roommate Hank. Hank answered. Apparently, despite my appointment with Joe — and Joe’s early morning visit to the V.A. doctor in Connecticut the next day — Hank, Joe and a bunch of their friends had developed other plans. “Yeah dude, Joe’s right here,” Hank said. “We’re skiing, dude.” What better thing to do in a snowstorm, after all? They were at Sugarbush, some 40 miles south of Burlington. Some young lady in their retinue apparently had a wealthy father who had an empty house “right on the slopes, dude.”

So I pressed Hank to give me directions to the mountainside chalet. The trail leading to Joe was getting more treacherous: “OK, dude,” Hank said, “you take a hairpin turn and then another hairpin turn, and then …”

Back at the Burlington airport the perky young man at the Enterprise rental counter had offered me a four-wheel-drive SUV. “There’s a foot of snow out there,” he’d chirped — but at the time I thought I would simply be driving to the hotel, and Joe was going to be right there in Burlington. So I rented the “mini” or “micro” or whatever they call the cheapest car on the lot. It was a Nissan Crapola or something. Red. Almost toylike. It looked like something you’d rent in the Balkans. It had tires the size of doughnuts. As I walked up to it, keys in hand, I was half expecting circus midgets to pile out.

It was long past dark by the time I was on the roads snaking up to Sugarbush. They were twisting, dark and impossibly steep. Wind gusts from the black woods blew snow from roadside drifts across my windshield. The Crapola careened like an amusement park ride. I imagined swerving into an embankment and waking up in Stephen King’s “Misery.” I white-knuckled the wheel. I thought of my kids.

I could not find the chalet, which was nestled somewhere among the dark trees. My cellphone had long ago lost all connection to the civilized world. After one particularly hairy hairpin, the Crapola’s wheels spun to a halt on a hill and I began sliding slowly backward on the ice.

At that moment, exposing crimes in U.S.-occupied Iraq somehow didn’t seem so important, public service be damned. I turned the toy car around, preparing to limp back down the mountain in low gear.

Just then a figure appeared out of the darkness by the side of the road. It was lanky roommate Hank, peering out from under a coat hood and looking like Shaggy from “Scooby-Doo.” He was worried and on the lookout — not for me, but for some girls he was expecting, who might be lost. The chalet turned out to be just ahead. Hank sent me inside with instructions to take off my wet shoes.

It was an oversize A-frame, with exposed wood beams, sweeping ceilings and a giant stone fireplace. Two scruffy-looking young men and a woman sat by dimmed lights at a coffee table in front of a gently burning fire. Beer bottles and half-empty wine glasses were scattered about. A small boombox pumped out bad reggae. I’d gone to Ithaca College as an undergraduate, so I knew this scene — all that was missing was the patchouli and hacky sack.

I introduced myself to another scruffy character, whom I’ll call Dave. Dave was crouched over an impressive mound of marijuana piled on the coffee table, busily rolling a large joint. The young woman, a thinner version of Mama Cass, was weaving in her chair to the reggae.

And there was Joe: young, and looking more like he was fresh back from a Phish tour than a Fallujah one. He wore a funny hat that looked like it came from a Renaissance festival and a necklace from which hung a bone or tooth or some sort of fossilized material. And he had that record-store-clerk facial hair — you know, the kind that’s shaved in all kinds of funny places so that the sideburns jut down at sharp, odd angles, with a carefully crafted tuft jutting out again at the chin.

Of course, I knew by this point that interviewing a stoned, drunken hippie-looking dude about alleged war crimes in Iraq was not likely to be very fruitful. And glancing around the room I didn’t see any computer, so I doubted we’d be looking at any video evidence. War can affect people in unlikely ways, but despite the references from other veterans, I was starting to doubt whether Joe was even a Marine.

But I’d come this far, and I’ve found that it’s almost always worth sitting and talking with a potential source. And in my experience, it is best to talk with a veteran alone.

“Joe, can we go somewhere and talk?” I asked.

“First, sit and chill,” he said slowly, motioning toward a sofa.

I planted myself on the sofa, facing the fire.

Scruffy Dave looked up from his coffee table labors. “Where are you from?” he asked laconically.

“D.C.”

He nodded. “So how does it feel to be in the mountains?” he asked.

It felt awful to be in the mountains. In addition to the fact that I had not seen a Starbucks for hours, several times along the way I’d almost veered to an icy demise.

“Good,” I answered.

And now Joe was apparently ready to talk. He lifted a small pipe, took a long drag, and began to pepper me with questions, each delivered in an increasingly confrontational tone.

“So, you write about veterans?” he growled.

“Yes,” I said. It seemed that Joe did not like this answer.

“Why?”

I said something about the importance of the work.

“Why do you do what you do?” he pressed, scowling.

I continued on about public service, and about how journalism can uncover the truth, et cetera. I did not mention that like a lot of reporters, I also do what I do because I don’t know how to fix cars, or do anything else very well for that matter.

“Does any of it make any difference?” he huffed. I felt the conversation drifting toward the existential, which for an investigative reporter is like wandering out onto a vast tundra, thousands of miles from a parking garage harboring any secretive, vital source.

Maybe Joe was just some random stoner, and everything he knew about semper fidelis he’d learned in a high school Latin class. Or maybe Joe was a real Marine but didn’t know a damn thing about any war crimes. Or maybe he did know about war crimes, but had decided late in the game that he wasn’t going to talk about them. War is often destructive to the soul, even the toughest ones, and it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d met a veteran drowning his post-traumatic stress disorder in a river of booze and drugs. Whatever the real story here, there was clearly a reason, aside from the fresh powder at Sugarbush, that Joe had chosen not to meet me in Burlington.

It was also becoming painfully clear that Joe did not want our chat to end on amicable terms, and that he was intent on making it seem like my fault. My profession was indeed going to be the foil in this swift, harsh counterinterrogation.

At some point in my hurried explanation of my job I’d mentioned to Joe that I’d worked hard to expose some of the brutal interrogation tactics employed by the CIA in the so-called war on terror. “You talk to the CIA?” he now asked with a hint of menace in his voice. He’d seized on something.

Many reporters talk to the CIA — and the Energy Department and the Justice Department and so on. We call CIA spokespeople on the phone regularly. We ask them questions about CIA activity that’s been in the news, or that maybe should be in the news more.

“Sure, I talk to the CIA,” I said.

I could tell instantly that this was a pivotal moment in our brief relationship. By the look on Joe’s face, clearly I’d just revealed a crucial fact, even if the import of this fact was lost on me.

“You need to leave,” Joe said flatly.

“Leave?” I asked, genuinely surprised, but also hardly surprised at all.

“You need to leave,” he repeated, staring, pipe held in midair. Then he angrily took a drag and gazed at me as if I were a spy — like maybe I was a spy and didn’t even know that I was a spy. But if the CIA had secretly implanted a microchip in my ass, Joe sure knew about it.

I realized by now, of course, that in this case all was lost. Alas, in some ways it was just an investigative reporter’s stock in trade: For every Watergate — or Walter Reed or Abu Ghraib — there are a zillion leads that turn out to be duds. Admittedly, though, few crash and burn as spectacularly as this one had.

Still, I could not help pointing out how the situation seemed a tad unfair. “You know, Joe, I did come here all the way from D.C …”

This prompted Joe to raise his voice. He shot back loudly, with a slight stammer: “You came here all the way from D.C.!”

While I’ve experienced my share of them, this was a truly curious moment. Joe didn’t say anything else. In that frozen silence, it seemed that I was supposed to grasp the meaning of him shouting this pitiful fact back at me without any particular inflection to it. I still have no idea what he meant.

“Good luck, Joe,” I said, and turned to find my shoes.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose “Duelfer Report” established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq’s nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:

On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney’s assertions went well beyond his agency’s assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, “Our reaction was, ‘Where is he getting this stuff from?’ ”

In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: “The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.” A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn’t been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn’t requested it.

In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: “Sure.” In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of “compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda.” What’s more, an earlier DIA assessment said that “the nature of the regime’s relationship with  Al Qaeda is unclear.”

On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories.” But as journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons. The team’s final report, completed the following month, concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons.

On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement “probably is a hoax.”

On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: “What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.” As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named “Curveball,” whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had “decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government].”

The false statements dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion.

It was during those critical weeks in early 2003 that the president delivered his State of the Union address and Powell delivered his memorable U.N. presentation. For all 935 false statements, including when and where they occurred, go to the search page for this project; the methodology used for this analysis is explained here.

In addition to their patently false pronouncements, Bush and these seven top officials also made hundreds of other statements in the two years after 9/11 in which they implied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or links to Al Qaeda. Other administration higher-ups, joined by Pentagon officials and Republican leaders in Congress, also routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.

The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, “independent” validation of the Bush administration’s false statements about Iraq.

The “ground truth” of the Iraq war itself eventually forced the president to backpedal, albeit grudgingly. In a 2004 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, for example, Bush acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And on December 18, 2005, with his approval ratings on the decline, Bush told the nation in a Sunday-night address from the Oval Office: “It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.”

Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual “ground truth” regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who’s Who of domestic agencies.

On the other hand, a growing number of critics, including a parade of former government officials, have publicly — and in some cases vociferously — accused the president and his inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence. In the end, these critics say, it was the calculated drumbeat of false information and public pronouncements that ultimately misled the American people and this nation’s allies on their way to war.

Bush and the top officials of his administration have so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. There has been no congressional investigation, for example, into what exactly was going on inside the Bush White House in that period. Congressional oversight has focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government’s pre-war intelligence — not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability of its highest officials. And, of course, only four of the officials — Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz — have testified before Congress about Iraq.

Short of such review, this project provides a heretofore unavailable framework for examining how the U.S. war in Iraq came to pass. Clearly, it calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were the unwitting victims of bad intelligence.

Above all, the 935 false statements painstakingly presented here finally help to answer two all-too-familiar questions as they apply to Bush and his top advisers: What did they know, and when did they know it?

The Full House Veterans’ Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on the VA Budget Request for FY 2009 on February 7, 2008, at 1:00 p.m. in room 334 Cannon.  Veterans for Common Sense was asked to testify, and we will have between three and five minutes to speak.  Because we are a grassroots organization, VCS wants your valuable input: What problems and solutions about VA’s budget would you share with Congress?  Please send your comments via e-mail to our Executive Director at Paul@VeteransForCommonSense.org by Friday, February 1, 2008.