Veterans for Common Sense

House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Media Advisory

Two Hearings Scheduled for Wednesday, December 12, 2007:  

Hearing #1: 10:00 a.m. in 345 Cannon House Office Building. Full Committee Hearing on “Stopping Suicides: Mental Health Challenges Within the Department of Veterans Affairs.”  Immediately after hearing, Media Availability with HVAC Members and Hearing Witnesses 

Hearing #2: 2:00 p.m. in 345 Cannon House Office Building. Joint Subcommittee Hearing by the Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee and the Health Subcommittee on “Outpatient Waiting Times.”

December 9, 2007 – The informer was growing terrified about the prospect of testifying against Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, he feared, would get to him or his family. Allah, he suspected, was already punishing him; his father was sick and his infant child had died. “Anything I touch, I don’t feel happy,” he said.

But the United States prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who had been hiding him in witness protection since his defection from Al Qaeda reassured him over and over: Think positive. He was probably the safest man in America. Allah would surely support his decision to turn on his fellow terrorists.

Their soothing counsel veered into theology and philosophy and even psychiatry. “Jamal, just look at it this way,” one official explained. “We’re part of the giant therapy group that you’re now going to be involved with, O.K.?”

That exchange in 2000 — disclosed in transcripts that have been filed publicly for the first time — was part of two years’ worth of videotaped talks between federal authorities and Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a former payroll manager for Osama bin Laden who became the first and most important Qaeda member to cooperate with the government as it began investigating the organization.

Mr. Fadl’s riveting testimony was critical in the 2001 trial in which four men were convicted of conspiracy in the bombings of two United States Embassies in Africa. An appeal of the verdict is to be argued tomorrow, and the videotaped conversations are expected to be part of that debate.

But the 900 pages of videotape transcripts offer much more than material for a legal dispute. They provide an extraordinary glimpse into a little-known, continuing process — the delicate care and management of a cooperative former terrorist — that can seem oddly nuanced and even gentle in the era of Guantánamo and debates over torture. On Thursday, for example, the C.I.A. acknowledged that it had destroyed videotapes showing its use of harsh interrogation methods on captured Qaeda operatives.

These pages, on the other hand, reveal how differently the government has treated terrorists who volunteer information. And they show how messy and improvised the negotiations with Mr. Fadl turned out to be, as federal prosecutors labored in unfamiliar territory, building a case not against a mob family, but against a mysterious terrorist group with international reach.

The government officials — led by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who would later become the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case — can be seen trying to tamp down Mr. Fadl’s, and his wife’s, growing fear about his testifying against one of the world’s most dangerous men. That fear turns to panic after prosecutors lure another Qaeda operative, a relative of Mr. Fadl’s, into custody and he refuses to cooperate.

Mr. Fadl, a Sudanese who is still in hiding and may be called to testify in future trials, can be seen pressing officials to protect and provide for numerous relatives in Africa, where the authorities admit their ability to help is limited.

As a Muslim, he challenges his American handlers with perplexing religious questions. As a foreigner, he becomes frustrated when the government, for all its powers, cannot get him the papers he needs to get a job.

The transcripts show a complicated friendship between Mr. Fadl and the Americans that lurches from tearful counseling sessions to playful humor. Prosecutors and agents refer to Mr. Fadl as Junior, and chide him about his fondness for fast food.

Mr. Fitzgerald, speaking to Mr. Fadl on a videotelephone, compares the marshal guarding him to the unseen crime-fighting boss in the television series “Charlie’s Angels.”

But, Mr. Fitzgerald points out, “Jamal is not quite Farrah Fawcett.”

“Not even close,” the marshal adds.

The transcripts themselves emerged from a messy process: The videotapes they detail were made by mistake, from 2000 to 2002, by federal marshals who had set up the videophone hookup so prosecutors in New York could keep in close touch with Mr. Fadl. Prosecutors and the F.B.I. had not authorized the taping, and when prosecutors learned of it in 2002 they were shocked, knowing they would have to share the tapes with defense lawyers who were appealing the embassy bombings verdict.

The taped conversations continued for several months after Sept. 11, 2001, but the transcripts give no indication that the attacks changed Mr. Fadl’s treatment, or his willingness to assist. A former federal official said Mr. Fadl helped identify former associates who had been captured in Afghanistan.

Deflecting His Demands

Mr. Fadl’s cooperation began in 1996, after he walked into a United States embassy in Africa and offered his help, only later revealing that he had embezzled money from Mr. bin Laden. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy for activities in Al Qaeda, and is not expected to go to prison.

In return for information about the organization’s history and leadership, the government brought over more than a dozen of his relatives from Sudan, and spent nearly $1 million for his family’s housing, protection and medical bills.

But by the time the videotaping began in early 2000, Mr. Fadl was feeling bored and isolated in his new American life, sequestered with his wife and several children in an undisclosed location.

In Sudan, he pointed out, he had once run a factory. Now, there was little to fill his day besides playing soccer, smoking cigarettes and watching television. Even his children were frustrated with him. “They ask me, ‘Why you don’t work? Dad never all day work.’”

He said he loved helping the authorities, but felt badly undercompensated.

“I’ve been doing all kinds of things, including giving information to protect the American citizens, and I feel I’m from here,” he said. “And I hear in the newspapers every day that the United States is giving money to Egypt, one billion to Jordan.”

The Americans diplomatically parried his demands, pointing out that their agreement did not allow them to pay for his information, and that they had already spent large sums on the family’s behalf.

“The more things you pile on,” one official told him, “the more people will look at it and say, ‘You know, we can only do so much.’”

The officials — the transcripts usually do not identify the prosecutor or agent speaking — promised to get him immigration papers, yet conceded they could not speed citizenship for a protected witness. “Not even God can get citizenship in the program very, very quickly,” one official said.

All the same, an official assured Mr. Fadl that “if there’s any witness in the world we will not forget, it will be you.”

He added, “It’s not like you’re going to testify on Friday, and you never hear from us again, O.K.?”

God and the Devil

As the moment for that testimony approached — the embassy bombings trial, which began in January 2001 — Mr. Fadl began to focus on a more pressing fear: that after years of private preparation, he would soon have to enter a public courtroom and speak against Al Qaeda. And if Mr. bin Laden were captured, Mr. Fadl could face his old boss from the witness stand.

He worried about his family, at home and overseas. “They try hurt someone I love very much,” he said.

Mr. Fadl floated a suggestion: If the Americans found another informer, could that witness testify in his place?

An official responded bluntly: “Jamal, as a friend, I’ll tell you this: I don’t think — I don’t think there is any chance.”

“I’m just so worried,” Mr. Fadl said later.

The official noted that some of Mr. Fadl’s closest friends in the F.B.I. would also testify.

“You got gun all the time with you, though,” Mr. Fadl replied.

Violence was not his only fear. Mr. Fadl wondered aloud whether his family’s run of misfortune — including his baby’s death and his father’s illness — sprang from some supernatural source. He had once heard a bin Laden adviser condemn a dissident and predict that his life would be a disaster.

Mr. Fadl said he was reading the Koran and praying. “We have special prayers to chase the devil,” he said. “I don’t know if you have this in Christianity.”

The Americans tried patiently to convince him that his recent troubles were unconnected to one another, and urged him to see the bright side: His children, for example, were getting a good education and a great future.

“I know everything great,” Mr. Fadl agreed.

Still, he had been doing some math: Even if Al Qaeda had the support of only 5 or 10 percent of the people in Arab countries, millions would be praying for his demise. “This what I believe,” he said. “They’re going to pray against me.”

“Jamal,” one official interjected, “if what you’re doing is right, and it is —— ”

“I believe that,” Mr. Fadl said.

“And Allah knows that, O.K.? So, God isn’t going to listen to 90 million people who are wrong. He’ll listen to the 210 million that are right, including yourself. That’s why God is God.”

There was still another force working on Mr. Fadl. “It’s my wife,” he said. “I love her.”

His wife, Nadia, had long been unhappy with their life in hiding. She did not speak English or drive, had no friends and was nervous when he was away. When he came home late one night after playing billiards, she locked him out and ordered him to sleep in the garage.

“Wait until your clothes come flying out the window,” one official remarked, to much laughter. “Welcome to America.”

Yet the officials sympathized. One said it had to be hard for a spouse to be “just dragged into a situation” like this.

As the trial loomed, Mr. Fadl said his wife was terrified that Mr. bin Laden would retaliate. “This guy, he got people everywhere,” she told him.

One day he broke the news that she wanted him to refuse to testify, even if that meant prison. She later declared that she would return to Sudan, despite the risks.

The officials had no answer for that. “We can’t make her stay here,” one said. “You know that.”

Finally, she showed up for a videoconference, where they faced her fury. Speaking through an interpreter, she suggested she had been tricked into joining her husband in the United States, claiming she was told he was working for a company, not fighting Al Qaeda.

“Well, we’re going to have a difference of opinion on that, Nadia,” one American told her. “I was there, and I’m the one who spoke to you.”

At the next conference, she insisted that Mr. Fadl should not have to testify more than once. “I don’t agree with this,” she said, turning to him. “Do you agree with this?”

There was talk about who would keep the children if she left. “The uncertainty drives me insane,” she said. “You guys are not concerned with him like I am.”

Ultimately, she remained, and in February 2001, her husband testified for four days in Manhattan federal court. The judge ordered the sketch artists not to draw him.

‘A Hard Path’

Before the trial began, however, Mr. Fadl and his American friends had another difficult issue to discuss: how to persuade his niece’s husband in Sudan to defect and join him as an informer.

Mr. Fadl said the relative, Mohamed Suleiman al Nalfi, had worked with Mr. bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, and would have fresh information.

They agreed on a sting operation. Mr. Fadl, pretending to be somewhere overseas, would call Mr. Nalfi and invite him to meet him. Once he arrived, American officials would confront Mr. Nalfi and make their pitch.

They worked out what Mr. Fadl would say on the phone. “Follow your script,” an official told him. “Let him talk so you don’t seem like you’re anxious.”

There was a risk: If Mr. Nalfi refused to cooperate, he would be arrested. Mr. Fadl seemed to accept that possibility. “This is the best chance for him to do the right thing,” Mr. Fadl said.

“He’ll thank you,” one official said later.

Mr. Fadl succeeded in luring his relative out of Sudan, but Mr. Nalfi refused to cooperate and was imprisoned.

When told the news, Mr. Fadl panicked and began to sob. He had a new fear — that Mr. Nalfi’s family might retaliate against his relatives in Sudan. Mr. Nalfi, he said, would tell everyone he had been betrayed: “Jamal, he sold me to American government.”

The suggestion of a family vendetta put the Americans back on familiar ground.

“If you were involved in, like, organized crime or something,” one official said, “and you were testifying against Cousin Vinny or something, you know, that’s always a problem.” The government, he said, could bring over more family members and place them in witness protection. “It’s something that the marshals deal with all the time.”

But Mr. Fadl was still distraught. And in the end, the Americans ran out of reassurances.

“You’ve chosen a hard path for yourself,” one official told him. “It’s not easy. The whole thing is not easy. You know, things don’t happen the way we plan them to happen.”

December 9, 2007 – Last May, Tim Chapman was sitting in his car on the edge of a cliff, weeping. If he took his foot off the brake, he would go over the edge – to silence, to peace, and to death.

“It was a truck stop in Truckee,” Chapman said. “I was driving to Reno. I was literally going to kill myself. I kept thinking: I should have stayed in Iraq. I should have died over there.”

The 23-year-old National Guardsman, just six months back from a tour in the combat zone, sat on the brink for two hours. Even today, he isn’t sure why he didn’t launch himself over the side.

Instead, he backed off the cliff and drove himself to a hospital in Roseville. Within three days, he was in the psych ward at a Veterans Affairs hospital. Today, after extensive therapy, he thinks his life is beginning to make sense again.

It’s a wrenching story. But this isn’t the end of it. It is just the beginning.

First a few facts. Bobby Rosenthal, regional manager for homeless programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, estimates that one third of the more than 6,000 homeless people – about 2,100 – in San Francisco are veterans.

And no wonder the number is so high. California leads the nation in homeless veterans by a mile, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. The 2006 numbers showed 49,724 homeless vets in California. The next nearest state was New York with 21,147.

Now here’s the scary part. Compared with what’s coming, that’s nothing.

Roughly 750,000 troops served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, often with multiple tours of duty. Many are only now returning home. But unlike Vietnam veterans, who didn’t begin to demonstrate post-war trauma until five or 10 years after they left the war, this group seems to be on a fast track.

“Everything is speeded up,” said Michael Blecker, executive director of San Francisco’s Swords to Ploughshares program. “What we’re seeing in San Francisco is guys in their 20s with the kind of stress and trauma that makes it impossible to go on with their lives.”

It’s been called a health care tsunami. Because not only are the Iraq vets prone to post-traumatic stress disorder (something Chapman has battled) but with improved battlefield health care, far more are surviving traumatic injury. On one hand, that’s good news, but it also means many more vets who are severely disabled, having lost arms and legs. Both factors increase the chances that the returning troops will join the sad ranks of homeless veterans.

Cities all over the country are bracing themselves, although some, like San Francisco, are bound to be hit harder. Mayor Gavin Newsom says that at a recent conference of mayors, the group passed a resolution asking the VA “to tell us what you are going to do.”

“It’s great lip service,” Newsom said, “but show me the money.”

If history holds, the mayors shouldn’t hold their breath. If anything, benefits for veterans have been restricted. To take one example, many of us think of the World War II G.I. Bill as a shining example of a reward for service, paying for college for vets. But Blecker, of Swords for Ploughshares, says the current version “is in no way, shape, or form near enough” to pay for a degree.

As Newsom says, “Yeah, support the troops – as long as they are young, healthy and a great photo op.”

For San Francisco, the potential impact could be huge. An influx of traumatized, battle-scarred veterans presents a scary future. Consider the case of Scott Kehler, a veteran of the first Gulf War, who needed years to work through his demons. He recalls passing burned bodies and the constant fear that an explosion would suddenly erupt in the street.

“It was the things I didn’t want to see at night when I closed my eyes,” Kehler said. “I didn’t know what PTSD was. I only knew my dreams, my shame, my guilt, was all coming together.”

Kehler spent almost 16 years kicking around the country. He lived in shelters in San Francisco and ate in free kitchens until a friend suggested he get in contact with Ploughshares. He checked into the group’s transitional housing, a 60-person unit on Treasure Island, and began to find himself.

Today he has been hired by the organization as a residence manager. He’s lived there 18 months, which doesn’t sound like much until you hear him say, “This is the longest I have lived in one place since 1990.”

Kehler, who is mentoring Chapman, is testimony to the effectiveness of the Ploughshares slogan – “veterans helping veterans.”

“Especially now that we’ve got our veterans coming home from Iraq,” said Ploughshares counselor Tyrone Boyd, “we’re going to need people that have been in combat so they know what they are talking about.”

The challenges are unique. Wanda Heffernon, a program and clinical counselor for Ploughshares, said they had a new inductee who slept in the closet. It was the only place he felt safe.

It’s the sudden transition that gets them.

“One day they are fighting in a war,” said Kehler. “The next day they are sitting at their mother’s kitchen table.”

Is it any wonder they end up on the street? Kehler battled alcohol abuse, but Chapman is part of the new breed, who turn to methamphetamine. Married when he returned, he lost his wife and all contact with his parents. Eventually he ended up sleeping in an alley. Now drug-free, living at Treasure Island housing, holding down a full-time job, and reconnected with his mother, he is testimony to the idea that peer counseling seems to work. Ploughshares has earned support from Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Imagine the impact it would have on the San Francisco homeless problem if one third of those on street were able to get help and housing.

But what the vets don’t have is funding.

“Why isn’t the federal government doing something about this? Why isn’t the [VA] doing something?” Blecker asks. “The irresponsibility of our leaders, not to address this, makes me want to tear my hair out.”

The VA’s Rosenthal – who gets high marks from local leaders – says the problem is not being ignored.

“It’s a whole new set of challenges,” she said. “The VA is looking at it. Let’s hope we’ve learned our lesson from Vietnam.”

We can only hope.

“You know what scares me?” asks Boyd. “I haven’t heard a plan (from the federal government) about what they are going to do when the troops come home. What’s the plan?”

Well?

C.W. Nevius’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. His blog C.W. Nevius.blog can be found at SFGate.com. E-mail him at cwnevius@sfchronicle.com.

December 11, 2007 – Back in February of this year, writing about the history of turning-point elections, Steve Fraser asked a question, but didn’t answer it: Would campaign 2008, he wondered, turn out to be a rare presidential election of historic proportions? After all, the Democrats had recaptured the House and Senate only months before — and mightn’t that have been “a signal” on the horizon of such an upcoming electoral turning point? Just ten months later, in a new economic moment, he’s ready to answer his question, definitively.

Even in an American culture notorious for its loss of memory, there are certain happenings no one forgets, and the Great Depression of the 1930s is one of those. Yet, in the media, just about no one dares to utter the “D” word because of its terrifying and toxic associations. And yet, Fraser argues, the onrushing economic crisis, now apparent to all, could indeed be hightailing in exactly that direction, while the Bush administration and leading Republican presidential candidates say virtually nothing about the economic storm clouds gathering. At the same time — as the recent headlines about the new National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear program indicate — the politics of fear on which this administration has maintained so much of its power, and on which Republican presidential candidates seem to depend so completely, is eroding all around us.

Every week, almost every day, another clue suggests that we may be entering a new political environment. Only last week, for instance, the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center released a new poll, indicating that Republican gains of recent years among Hispanic voters have been more than wiped out. In July 2006, only 49{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of such voters favored Democrats, while 28{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} favored Republicans, a gap of 21{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}. Less than a year and a half later, that gap is 34{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} and undoubtedly rising — no small matter in potential swing states like Colorado, New Mexico, and even Florida. So consider, with Fraser, who has written a striking history of Wall Street, Every Man a Speculator, just what kinds of political and economic storms may lie ahead in 2008. Tom

The Perfect Storm of Campaign 2008
War, Depression, and Turning-Point Elections
By Steve Fraser

Will the presidential election of 2008 mark a turning point in American political history? Will it terminate with extreme prejudice the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the country for the last generation? No matter the haplessness of the Democratic opposition, the answer is yes.

With Richard Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential election, a new political order first triumphed over New Deal liberalism. It was an historic victory that one-time Republican strategist and now political critic Kevin Phillips memorably anointed the “emerging Republican majority.” Now, that Republican “majority” finds itself in a systemic crisis from which there is no escape.

Only at moments of profound shock to the old order of things — the Great Depression of the 1930s or the coming together of imperial war, racial confrontation, and de-industrialization in the late 1960s and 1970s — does this kind of upheaval become possible in a political universe renowned for its stability, banality, and extraordinary capacity to duck things that matter. The trauma must be real and it must be perceived by people as traumatic. Both conditions now apply.

War, economic collapse, and the political implosion of the Republican Party will make 2008 a year to remember.

The Politics of Fear in Reverse

Iraq is an albatross that, all by itself, could sink the ship of state. At this point, there’s no need to rehearse the polling numbers that register the no-looking-back abandonment of this colossal misadventure by most Americans. No cosmetic fix, like the “surge,” can, in the end, make a difference — because large majorities decided long ago that the invasion was a fiasco, and because the geopolitical and geo-economic objectives of the Bush administration leave no room for a genuine Iraqi nationalism which would be the only way out of this mess.

The fatal impact of the President’s adventure in Iraq, however, runs far deeper than that. It has undermined the politics of fear which, above all else, had sustained the Bush administration. According to the latest polls, the Democrats who rate national security a key concern has shrunk to a percentage bordering on the statistically irrelevant. Independents display a similar “been there, done that” attitude. Republicans do express significantly greater levels of alarm, but far lower than a year or two ago.

In fact, the politics of fear may now be operating in reverse. The chronic belligerence of the Bush administration, especially in the last year with respect to Iran, and the cartoonish saber-rattling of Republican presidential candidates (whether genuine or because they believe themselves captives of the Bush legacy) is scary. Its only promise seems to be endless war for purposes few understand or are ready to salute. To paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for many people now, the only thing to fear is the politics of fear itself.

And then there is the war on the Constitution. Randolph Bourne, a public intellectual writing around the time of World War I, is remembered today for one trenchant observation: that war is the health of the state. Mobilizing for war invites the cancerous growth of the bureaucratic state apparatus and its power over everyday life. Like some over-ripe fruit this kind of war-borne “healthiness” is today visibly morphing into its opposite — what we might call the “sickness of the state.”

The constitutional transgressions of the executive branch and its abrogation of the powers reserved to the other two branches of government are, by now, reasonably well known. Most of this aggressive over-reaching has been encouraged by the imperial hubris exemplified by the invasion of Iraq. It would be short-sighted to think that this only disturbs the equanimity of a small circle of civil libertarians. There is a long-lived and robust tradition in American political life always resentful of this kind of statism. In part, this helps account for wholesale defections from the Republican Party by those who believe it has been kidnapped by political elites masquerading as down-home, “live free or die” conservatives.

Now, add potential economic collapse to this witches’ brew. Even the soberest economy watchers, pundits with PhDs — whose dismal record in predicting anything tempts me not to mention this — are prophesying dark times ahead. Depression — or a slump so deep it’s not worth quibbling about the difference — is evidently on the way; indeed is already underway. The economics of militarism have been a mainstay of business stability for more than half century; but now, as in the Vietnam era, deficits incurred to finance invasion only exacerbate a much more embracing dilemma.

Start with the confidence game being run out of Wall Street; after all, the subprime mortgage debacle now occupies newspaper front pages day after outrageous day. Certainly, these tales of greed and financial malfeasance are numbingly familiar. Yet, precisely that sense of déjà vu all over again, of Enron revisited, of an endless cascade of scandalous, irrational behavior affecting the central financial institutions of our world suggests just how dire things have become.

Enronization as Normal Life

Once upon a time, all through the nineteenth century, financial panics — often precipitating more widespread economic slumps — were a commonly accepted, if dreaded, part of “normal” economic life. Then the Crash of 1929, followed by the New Deal Keynesian regulatory state called into being to prevent its recurrence, made these cyclical extremes rare.

Beginning with the stock market crash of 1987, however, they have become ever more common again, most notoriously — until now, that is — with the dot.com implosion of 2000 and the Enronization that followed. Enron seems like only yesterday because, in fact, it was only yesterday, which strongly suggests that the financial sector is now increasingly out of control. At least three factors lurk behind this new reality.

Thanks to the Reagan counterrevolution, there is precious little left of the regulatory state — and what remains is effectively run by those who most need to be regulated. (Despite bitter complaints in the business community, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed after the dot.com bubble burst, has proven weak tea indeed when it comes to preventing financial high jinks, as the current financial meltdown indicates.)

More significantly, for at least the last quarter-century, the whole U.S. economic system has lived off the speculations generated by the financial sector — sometimes given the acronym FIRE for finance, insurance, and real estate). It has grown exponentially while, in the country’s industrial heartland in particular, much of the rest of the economy has withered away. FIRE carries enormous weight and the capacity to do great harm. Its growth, moreover, has fed a proliferation of financial activities and assets so complex and arcane that even their designers don’t fully understand how they operate.

One might call this the sorcerer’s apprentice effect. In such an environment, the likelihood and frequency of financial panics grows, so much so that they become “normal accidents” — an oxymoron first applied to highly sophisticated technological systems like nuclear power plants by the sociologist Charles Perrow. Such systems are inherently subject to breakdowns for reasons those operating them can’t fully anticipate, or correctly respond to, once they’re underway. This is so precisely because they never fully understood the labyrinthine intricacies and ramifying effects of the way they worked in the first place.

Likening the current subprime implosion to such a “normal accident” is more than metaphorical. Today’s Wall Street fabricators of avant-garde financial instruments are actually called “financial engineers.” They got their training in “labs,” much like Dr. Frankenstein’s, located at Wharton, Princeton, Harvard, and Berkeley. Each time one of their confections goes south, they scratch their heads in bewilderment — always making sure, of course, that they have financial life-rafts handy, while investors, employees, suppliers, and whole communities go down with the ship.

What makes Wall Street’s latest “normal accident” so portentous, however, is the way it is interacting with, and infecting, healthier parts of the economy. When the dot.com bubble burst, many innocents were hurt, not just denizens of the Street. Still, its impact turned out to be limited. Now, via the subprime mortgage meltdown, Main Street is under the gun.

It is not only a matter of mass foreclosures. It is not merely a question of collapsing home prices. It is not simply the shutting down of large portions of the construction industry (inspiring some of those doom-and-gloom prognostications). It is not just the born-again skittishness of financial institutions which have, all of sudden, gotten religion, rediscovered the word “prudence,” and won’t lend to anybody. It is all of this, taken together, which points ominously to a general collapse of the credit structure that has shored up consumer capitalism for decades.

Campaigning Through a Perfect Storm of Economic Disaster

The equity built up during the long housing boom has been the main resource for ordinary people financing their big-ticket-item expenses — from college educations to consumer durables, from trading-up on the housing market to vacationing abroad. Much of that equity, that consumer wherewithal, has suddenly vanished, and more of it soon will. So, too, the life-lines of credit that allow all sorts of small and medium-sized businesses to function and hire people are drying up fast. Whole communities, industries, and regional economies are in jeopardy.

All of that might be considered enough, but there’s more. Oil, of course. Here, the connection to Iraq is clear; but, arguably, the wild escalation of petroleum prices might have happened anyway. Certainly, the energy price explosion exacerbates the general economic crisis, in part by raising the costs of production all across the economy, and so abetting the forces of economic contraction. In the same way, each increase in the price of oil further contributes to what most now agree is a nearly insupportable level in the U.S. balance of payments deficit. That, in turn, is contributing to the steady withering away of the value of the dollar, a devaluation which then further ratchets up the price of oil (partially to compensate holders of those petrodollars who find themselves in possession of an increasingly worthless currency). As strategic countries in the Middle East and Asia grow increasingly more comfortable converting their holdings into euros or other more reliable — which is to say, more profitable — currencies, a speculative run on the dollar becomes a real, if scary, possibility for everyone.

Finally, it is vital to recall that this tsunami of bad business is about to wash over an already very sick economy. While the old regime, the Reagan-Bush counterrevolution, has lived off the heady vapors of the FIRE sector, it has left in its wake a de-industrialized nation, full of super-exploited immigrants and millions of families whose earnings have suffered steady erosion. Two wage-earners, working longer hours, are now needed to (barely) sustain a standard of living once earned by one. And that doesn’t count the melting away of health insurance, pensions, and other forms of protection against the vicissitudes of the free market or natural calamities. This, too, is the enduring hallmark of a political economy about to go belly-up.

This perfect storm will be upon us just as the election season heats up. It will inevitably hasten the already well-advanced implosion of the Republican Party, which is the definitive reason 2008 will indeed qualify as a turning-point election. Reports of defections from the conservative ascendancy have been emerging from all points on the political compass. The Congressional elections of 2006 registered the first seismic shock of this change. Since then, independents and moderate Republicans continue to indicate, in growing numbers in the polls, that they are leaving the Grand Old Party. The Wall Street Journal reports on a growing loss of faith among important circles of business and finance. Hard core religious right-wingers are airing their doubts in public. Libertarians delight in the apostate candidacy of Ron Paul. Conservative populist resentment of immigration runs head on into corporate elite determination to enlarge a sizeable pool of cheap labor, while Hispanics head back to the Democratic Party in droves. Even the Republican Party’s own elected officials are engaged in a mass movement to retire.

All signs are ominous. The credibility and legitimacy of the old order operate now at a steep discount. Most telling and fatal perhaps is the paralysis spreading into the inner councils at the top. Faced with dire predicaments both at home and abroad, they essentially do nothing except rattle those sabers, captives of their own now-bankrupt ideology. Anything, many will decide, is better than this.

Or will they? What if the opposition is vacillating, incoherent, and weak-willed — labels critics have reasonably pinned on the Democrats? Bad as that undoubtedly is, I don’t think it will matter, not in the short run at least.

Take the presidential campaign of 1932 as an instructive example. The crisis of the Great Depression was systemic, but the response of the Democratic Party and its candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt — though few remember this now — was hardly daring. In many ways, it was not very different from that of Republican President Herbert Hoover; nor was there a great deal of militant opposition in the streets, not in 1932 anyway, hardly more than the woeful degree of organized mass resistance we see today despite all the Bush administration’s provocations.

Yet the New Deal followed. And not only the New Deal, but an era of social protest, including labor, racial, and farmer insurgencies, without which there would have been no New Deal or Great Society. May something analogous happen in the years ahead? No one can know. But a door is about to open.

Steve Fraser is a writer and editor, as well as the co-founder of the American Empire Project. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. His latest book, Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, will be published by Yale University Press in March 2008.

December 5, 2007 – Federal employees who work for the Army may get layoff notices before Christmas if Congress and the White House do not reach an accord on funding for the Iraq war, the Pentagon said yesterday.

The warning, posted near the top of the Defense Department’s Web site, was the latest in a series from Pentagon officials in recent weeks.

About 100,000 federal employees and an additional 100,000 contract workers are at risk of being sent home without pay in February and March if the Army and Marine Corps run short of money and have to reduce operations at their bases, according to the Pentagon.

Under federal rules, the department must give 60 days’ advance notice of layoffs to employees — which, in this case, would make for a less-than-glad tiding for the holidays.

Longtime federal employees usually scoff at such warnings, viewing them as part of the political posturing that pops up from time to time. Still, such warnings cannot be entirely dismissed. The 1995-96 budget impasse led to a shutdown of the government and, at one point, sent 800,000 federal employees home for three weeks during the December-January holiday season.

Yesterday, Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said “facts are the facts” and that military bases will have to cease operations, terminate contracts and send employees home without pay if a war-funding deal is not reached.

“Anyone who thinks that this is not a serious situation is simply misinformed or is ignoring the facts,” he said in an interview with the American Forces Press Service.

Whitman’s warning came a day after Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) released a letter, signed by seven other Washington area House members, calling on the Pentagon to shift money around in the department’s many budget accounts to stave off furloughs.

“This is an old budget showdown tactic — and they’re using federal employees’ livelihoods as leverage in a turf battle with Congress,” Moran said.

Asked for his views on the furloughs, John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents thousands of Defense workers, yesterday said Secretary Robert M. Gates should “reconsider plans to lay off civilian employees in the midst of this political debate. The Defense Department should have alternatives for funding the war without laying off civilian employees — one alternative is to request authority from Congress to reprogram operation funds.”

Federal employees, Gage said, are vital to the Iraq and Afghanistan war efforts, and many Defense civilian employees are military veterans who have volunteered for jobs in the combat zones. “They are the ones who care for wounded war fighters in DoD hospitals, and they are the ones who tend to the families of troops waiting at home for their loved ones,” he said.

Defense officials said last month that they have limited authority to reprogram money for the combat zones. Yesterday, Whitman said the Pentagon is using the fiscal 2008 budget to finance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan because $178 billion in emergency war funding has not been approved by Congress. The regular budget money usually pays for training, supplies and maintenance of equipment and weapons.

Last month, Gates requested permission to shift $3.7 billion from the Navy and Air Force and $800 million from a working capital fund to Army and Marine Corps operations.

But Moran’s letter said that request “does not account for additional budgetary tools” that officials can use to push “the need for furloughs farther into the next calendar year, by which time supplemental funds may be enacted.”

In addition to Moran, the letter was signed by Virginia Republican Reps. Thomas M. Davis III and Frank R. Wolf, Maryland Democratic Reps. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, John P. Sarbanes, Elijah E. Cummings and Chris Van Hollen, and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.).

Sending layoff notices before the holidays could undermine morale and cause some Defense employees to file early for retirement, the letter suggested.

“Experienced employees are not likely to return after their furlough,” the letter said. “Any loss of experienced employees threatens the effectiveness of the Department of Defense, which already faces shortfalls within some of its most vital workforce needs.”

December 7, 2007 – While the Navy is facing challenges in recruiting and retaining doctors and other medical personnel, it has no problem meeting medical demands in the Central Command theater, where it treats the wounded, injured and sick coming out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, says the Navy’s top doctor.

Instead, Vice Adm. Adam Robinson Jr., chief of the Navy Medical Corps, said in a telephone interview Dec. 6, the challenge in theater is to identify service members who may be dealing with combat stress.

“I don’t have any gaps in which I can’t treat service men and women coming back from theater, for whatever [wounds or injuries] they may have,” he said during a Bloggers Roundtable via telecon. “Some of the challenges is to make sure that we screen these men and women appropriately [for combat stress].”

This, he said, would provide the Navy with a basic health information on service members, including those who may suffer mental problems after leaving the AOR, he said.

“So we have a baseline and some data to make sure that if they’re suffering from combat stress of any sort, we can identify that,” Robinson said, “or at least have a baseline for where they were when they came out of theater, and to make sure we can get them to the care they need in case this becomes a problem in the future.”

Navy-wide, there is and has been a shortage of physicians, Robinson said, and the Navy has made recruiting and retaining doctors a priority.

“I think we’re going to do okay this year … comparable to the last one or two years, meaning we won’t make up our full quota [for fiscal 2008] but we’re working on it,” he said. Robinson did not have the staffing figures available.

December 6, 2007 – The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said.

In a statement to employees on Thursday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said that the decision to destroy the tapes was made “within the C.I.A.” and that they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value.

The destruction of the tapes raises questions about whether agency officials withheld information from Congress, the courts and the Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program.

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which was appointed by President Bush and Congress, and which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.

The disclosures about the tapes are likely to reignite the debate over laws that allow the C.I.A. to use interrogation practices more severe than those allowed to other agencies. A Congressional conference committee voted late Wednesday to outlaw those interrogation practices, but the measure has yet to pass the full House and Senate and is likely to face a veto from Mr. Bush.

The New York Times informed the intelligence agency on Wednesday evening that it was preparing to publish an article about the destruction of the tapes. In his statement to employees on Thursday, General Hayden said that the agency had acted “in line with the law” and that he was informing C.I.A. employees “because the press has learned” about the matter.

General Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk” and that if they had become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials “and their families to retaliation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers.”

Current and former intelligence officials said that the decision to destroy the tapes was made by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who was the head of the Directorate of Operations, the agency’s clandestine service. Mr. Rodriguez could not be reached Thursday for comment.

Two former intelligence officials said that Porter J. Goss, the director of the agency at the time, was not told that the tapes would be destroyed and was angered to learn that they had been.

Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined to comment on the matter.

In his statement, General Hayden said leaders of Congressional oversight committees had been fully briefed about the existence of the tapes and told in advance of the decision to destroy them. But the two top members of the House Intelligence Committee in 2005 said Thursday that they had not been notified in advance of the decision to destroy the tapes.

A spokesman for Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, who was the committee’s chairman between 2004 and 2006, said that Mr. Hoekstra was “never briefed or advised that these tapes existed, or that they were going to be destroyed.”

The spokesman, Jamal Ware, also said that Mr. Hoekstra “absolutely believes that the full committee should have been informed and consulted before the C.I.A. did anything with the tapes.”

Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the committee between 2002 and 2006, said that she told C.I.A. officials several years ago that destroying any interrogation tapes would be a “bad idea.”

“How in the world could the C.I.A. claim that these tapes were not relevant to a legislative inquiry?” she said. “This episode reinforces my view that the C.I.A. should not be conducting a separate interrogations program.”

In both 2003 and 2005 C.I.A. lawyers told prosecutors in the Moussaoui case that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge. Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui, showing that the Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said that the court had sought tapes of “specific, named terrorists whose comments might have a bearing on the Moussaoui case” and that the videotapes destroyed were not of those individuals. Intelligence officials identified Abu Zubaydah as one of the detainees whose interrogation tape was destroyed, but the other detainee’s name was not disclosed.

General Hayden has said publicly that information obtained through the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program has been the best source of intelligence for operations against Al Qaeda. In a speech last year, President Bush said that information from Mr. Zubaydah had helped lead to the capture in 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission, which completed its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told that interrogation videotapes had existed until 2005.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said.

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

Mr. Gimigliano, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency “went to great lengths to meet the requests of the 9/11 commission,” and that the C.I.A. had preserved the tapes until the commission ended its work in case members requested the tapes.

Several current and former intelligence officials were interviewed for this article over a period of several weeks. All requested anonymity because information about the tapes had been classified until General Hayden issued his statement on Thursday acknowledging that they had been destroyed.

The C.I.A. program that included the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects began after the capture of Mr. Zubaydah in March 2002. The C.I.A. has said that the Justice Department and other elements of the executive branch reviewed and approved the use of a set of harsh techniques before they were used on any prisoners, and that the Justice Department issued a classified legal opinion in August 2002 that provided explicit authorization for their use.

Some members of Congress have since sought to ban some of the techniques, saying that they amounted to torture, which is prohibited under American law. But President Bush, who revealed the existence of the C.I.A. program in September 2006, has defended the techniques as legal, and has said they have proven beneficial in obtaining critical intelligence information.

Some of the harshest techniques, including waterboarding, which induces a feeling of drowning and near-suffocation, were used on several of the first Qaeda operatives captured by the C.I.A., including Abu Zubaydah. But intelligence officials have said that waterboarding is no longer on an approved list spelled out in a classified executive order that was issued by the White House this year.

In his statement, General Hayden said the tapes were originally made to ensure that agency employees acted in accordance with “established legal and policy guidelines.” He said the agency stopped videotaping interrogations in 2002.

“The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal check on the program in its early stages,” he said. He said they were destroyed only after the agency’s Office of the General Counsel and Office of the Inspector General had examined them and determined that they showed lawful methods of questioning.

Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said General Hayden’s claim that the tapes were destroyed to protect C.I.A. officers “is not credible.”

“Millions of documents in C.I.A. archives, if leaked, would identify C.I.A. officers,” Mr. Malinowski said. “The only difference here is that these tapes portray potentially criminal activity. They must have understood that if people saw these tapes, they would consider them to show acts of torture, which is a felony offense.”

It has been widely reported that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to several tough physical tactics. But the current and former intelligence officials who described the decision to destroy the videotapes said that C.I.A. officers had judged that the release of photos or videos depicting his interrogation would provoke a strong reaction.

In exchanges involving the Moussaoui case, the C.I.A. notified the United States attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., in September that it had discovered two videotapes and one audio tape that it had not previously acknowledged to the court, but made no mention of any tapes destroyed in 2005.

The acknowledgment was spelled out in a letter sent in October by federal prosecutors that amended the C.I.A.’s previous declarations involving videotapes. The letter is heavily redacted, with sentences identifying the detainees blacked out.

Signed by the United States attorney, Chuck Rosenberg, the letter states that the C.I.A.’s search for interrogation tapes “appears to be complete.”

Mr. Moussaoui was convicted last year and sentenced to life in prison.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been pushing legislation in Congress to have all detainee interrogations videotaped so officials can refer to the tapes multiple times to glean better information.

Mr. Holt said he had been told many times that the C.I.A. did not record the interrogation of detainees. “When I would ask them whether they had reviewed the tapes to better understand the intelligence, they said, ‘What tapes?’,” he said.

Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane contributed reporting.

Correction: December 8, 2007

Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about the C.I.A.’s destruction of two videotapes documenting the interrogations of agents of Al Qaeda rendered incorrectly a quotation from Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of intelligence, in which he explained to C.I.A. employees why he was informing them of the destruction. General Hayden said, “The press has learned that back in 2002, during the initial stage of our terrorist detention program, C.I.A. videotaped interrogations, and destroyed the tapes in 2005.” He did not say he was informing them “because” the press has learned about the episode.

November 13, 2007 – Two days before a 10-mile race here, Army 1st Lt. Ivan Castro is explaining how he will run tethered to another soldier — one who can see.

As he speaks, his wife lovingly extends her right hand to Castro’s face, fingers outstretched. But Evelyn Galvis pauses inches away.

“I used to be able to reach out and touch him, caress him, without telling him first, ‘I’m going to touch your face,’ ” she says. Now, “if I just reach out and touch him, he’ll startle.”

Castro, 40, a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, is one of more than 1,100 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan — 13{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of all seriously wounded casualties — to undergo surgery for damaged eyes. That is the highest percentage for eye wounds in any major conflict dating to World War I, according to research published in the Survey of Ophthalmology. The best decision by performing an eye check up to determine the degree of presbyopia before recommending reading glasses that suit your eye condition.

It’s a reflection of how eye injuries have become one of the most devastating consequences of a war in which roadside bombs, mortars and grenades are the most commonly used weapons against U.S. troops. Brain injuries and amputations have long been the focus of the damage such weapons are inflicting, but the Army has acknowledged in recent weeks that serious eye wounds have accumulated at almost twice the rate as wounds requiring amputations.

Body armor that protects vital organs and the skull is saving lives. But troops’ eyes and limbs remain particularly vulnerable to the blizzard of shrapnel from such explosions.

Each explosion unleashes large metal shards and thousands of fragments, says Army Col. Robert Mazzoli, an ophthalmological consultant to the Army surgeon general. “Those small missiles are generally innocuous if they hit the (protected) forehead, face (or) chest but are devastating when they hit the eye,” he says.

Surgical facilities are kept close to the fighting, so troops can be treated in minutes. Partial or total vision has been restored in most cases involving eye injuries, military statistics show. But hundreds of troops have been left with impaired vision, and dozens have been blinded.

Troops in Iraq routinely wear protective eyewear, but it doesn’t always work. When a roadside bomb in Baghdad blew a hole through the heavily armored vehicle carrying Army Sgt. Luis Martinez last April, the force from the blast stripped off his helmet, headset and goggles. After the dust settled, Martinez, 38, could see nothing out of his left eye and only streaks of blood in his right. He waited for help, terrified about the damage to his eyes.

“That was the first thing I asked” hospital personnel, the National Guard soldier recalls. ” ‘Am I going to be blind?’ ”

Surgeons later restored vision to his right eye, although bits of glass are embedded there. He remains blind in his left.

“At least God was kind enough to protect me, to keep my right eye and see my family,” says Martinez, of Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, who is married and the father of three.

Formidable challenges await troops who return home blind or with serious eye injuries. In the most severe cases, they will struggle to cope emotionally and financially.

About 70{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of all sensory perception is through vision, says R. Cameron VanRoekel, an Army major and staff optometrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. As a result, the families of visually impaired soldiers wrestle with a contradiction: The wounded often have hard-driving personalities that have helped them succeed in the military. Now dependent on others, they find it difficult to accept help.

Because the Pentagon has no rehabilitation services for the blind, the path to recovery often leads directly to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA operates 10 centers across the country for blind rehabilitation that teach visually impaired veterans how to function in society. The centers have 241 beds, and it takes an average of nearly three months to get in. Iraq and Afghanistan casualties go to the front of the line, says Stan Poel, VA director of rehabilitation services for the blind. So far, 53 have enrolled in the blind rehabilitation programs, the VA says.

The department plans to open three more centers beginning in 2010, Poel says.

‘He has no light in his life’

Even now, more than a year after her husband’s return from Iraq, Connie Acosta is taken aback to find her home dark after sunset, the lights off as if no one is there.

Then she finds him — sitting in a recliner in their Santa Fe Springs, Calif., house, listening to classic rock. Sgt. Maj. Jesse Acosta was blinded in a mortar attack 22 months ago. He doesn’t need the lights.

That realization often makes Connie cry. “You kind of never get used to the fact that he really can’t see,” she says. “He has no light in his life at all.”

The tiny piece of shrapnel that blinded Acosta, 50, an Army reservist, father of four and grandfather of three, was precise in its destruction.

On the morning of Jan. 16 last year, Acosta led soldiers on a 3-mile fitness run across Camp Anaconda in Balad, Iraq. Suddenly, insurgents attacked the camp with mortars.

Acosta remembers that he stopped, turned to yell at his soldiers and then dived for cover.

“Bam! That was it,” he recalls. “Lights out.”

An explosion about 60 feet away sent a piece of shrapnel — perhaps three-quarters of an inch long — through his left eye. It struck his brain and came out his right eye.

“It was a perfect hit,” Acosta says.

Rushed to the Air Force Hospital at Anaconda, he spent seven hours in surgery. Army Maj. Raymond Cho, an ophthalmologist, removed Acosta’s right eye and carefully reassembled his left one.

“I didn’t want him waking up missing both eyes and wondering for the rest of his life, ‘Gosh, could they have saved at least one?’ ” Cho says. “So he knows that we did everything we could.”

Acosta regained consciousness as he was being returned to the USA. In Germany, a doctor told him that his right eye was gone and his left eye, although stitched together, likely would never see light.

“He said, ‘You’re going to have to start a whole new life from here on,’ ” Acosta recalls.

“I go, ‘So I won’t be able to see my kids? My grandkids? Nobody? I won’t be able to see blue skies?’

“He said, ‘Nope.’

“I just sat there. What could I do?

“A lot of things went through my mind,” Acosta says. “Am I going to be accepted this way? Am I going to be rejected? I was pretty independent all my life, and I did everything. So it was pretty tough.”

VA plans more clinics

Pentagon doctors can rebuild eyes, reconstruct eye sockets and nurse casualties back to health, but soldiers with serious vision problems who want to learn how to adapt into civilian life must rely on VA centers that also serve the elderly and other veterans.

The VA plans to invest $40 million this fiscal year to create 55 outpatient clinics across the nation, providing rehabilitation for veterans learning to cope with partial vision, says James Orcutt, the VA’s director for ophthalmology.

The department also is taking part in two clinical trials focusing on artificial vision, says Ronald Schuchard, director of the Atlanta VA rehabilitation research and development center. The trials involve implanting silicon chips in eyes. The chips act as receptors that can transform light into electrical signals that can be transmitted to the brain. It is cutting-edge research, Schuchard says.

However, Orcutt says, “I think we’re a long way from a practical use of some of these.”

At the VA’s rehab centers for the blind, specialists teach orientation and mobility skills. Visually impaired veterans learn to use a white cane, public transportation and perform daily routines. They also are offered computer instruction and the use of special scanners for reading text. They are assessed and treated, if necessary, for psychological readjustment to their sight loss.

The VA does not provide guide dogs, but it helps link veterans with guide-dog schools that commonly provide a dog and training virtually free to veterans, Poel says.

Iraq veterans sometimes find the VA blind rehab programs, which cater largely to elderly veterans, to be a poor fit for a younger generation. Army 1st Lt. Castro says he felt somewhat out of place during rehab at a VA facility in Augusta, Ga.

After the Army sent Jesse Acosta to a VA center for the blind in Palo Alto, Calif., for rehabilitation in January 2006, he and his wife became unhappy with the facility, describing it as having a “nursing home” atmosphere. It is a five-hour drive from his home.

“It did not fit my needs,” Acosta says.

He left the VA after a few months and was accepted, free of charge, into the Junior Blind of America rehab program near his home in Santa Fe Springs. Last month, he completed training with his new guide dog at The Seeing Eye school in Morristown, N.J., and now has Charlie, a German shepherd.

All that is left, Acosta says, is figuring out the rest of his life.

He has fought a medical discharge from the Army until his medical care is complete. Ultimately, he will earn disability income for his wounds. Acosta was an energy technician with Southern California Gas before he was called to active duty.

He is still with the company, though unpaid, and a different job awaits him — one tailored to his disability, Connie Acosta says. It’s unclear whether Jesse will want it, she says.

“We’re hoping for the best,” she says. “He’s the type that constantly has to be kept busy. We always have an agenda. I have a calendar going constantly with things happening.”

It begins when they wake, and he wants to know the weather and the color of the sky, she says. Nothing in the house can be moved; he’s memorized the location of every chair and table.

He has his routines and chores, including weightlifting in the backyard or fiddling with the fuel pump on the 1969 Dodge Dart. (He fixed it.) Daughter Brittany, 14, is mustered into duty to operate the computer for her father until she pleads for a break.

“Taking care of Jesse has been an experience,” Connie Acosta says. “He’s a sergeant major in the Army, and they’re tough people. He’s a tough person to live with and then, worse, being blind.

“Sometimes, he can be demanding. And I deal with it. I’m used to making sure that everything’s in line. That he’s got everything. And that’s basically all I’ve got to do.”

‘I want to feel productive’

Castro thought he knew how his life would play out.

A former Army Ranger who had worked his way out of the enlisted ranks to earn an officer’s commission, Castro commanded a scout reconnaissance platoon and dreamed of becoming a Special Forces team leader.

Instead, the last thing he would ever see was the colorless expanse of an Iraqi roof in Youssifiyah, Iraq.

A mortar round landed a few feet away from him there on Sept. 2, 2006. The blast killed two other soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division and sent shrapnel tearing into Castro’s left side. The explosion damaged a shoulder, broke an arm, fractured facial bones and collapsed his lungs. Doctors amputated part of a finger.

The blast also drove the frame of his protective eyewear into his face. When Castro regained consciousness days later at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., his wife, Evelyn, sat at his bedside. She told him his right eye was gone, but doctors hoped to salvage vision in his left.

The surgeons later removed one last piece of shrapnel from that eye. When they took off his bandages and flashed a light for Castro to see, he thought the eye was still covered. “That’s when he told me, ‘Ivan, you’re not going to be able to see again,’ ” Castro recalls. “I swore (it was like) I was standing between the World Trade Center and the two towers had just come down on my shoulders.”

From that moment on, through convalescence and rehabilitation, Castro would struggle to regain a measure of independence.

Castro has become an advocate of rehabilitation funding for the blind, visiting members of Congress. After the 10-mile race in October, he ran the Marine Corps Marathon three weeks later, finishing in 4 hours and 14 minutes.

He concedes that he needs his wife’s help. Evelyn Galvis gave up her career as a bilingual speech pathologist in Fayetteville, N.C., to help her husband. She supervises his medical care and drives him around.

She guides him through crowds, keeping him aware of raised edges in the walkway and steps. She reads his menu in restaurants and tells him where the food sits on the table. She watches him memorize his hotel room, starting from the doorway and circling within the four walls to keep account of beds, the tables, the wastebasket, the bathroom.

“My husband used to be a very independent individual,” she says.

Castro hopes to stay in the military.

The Army has let several amputees stay in the ranks as well as one blind captain, who will be an instructor at West Point Military Academy after completing post-graduate education. Castro awaits word on his future; the Pentagon won’t comment on his situation.

“There’s a world in front of me I can’t predict or envision because I haven’t been there yet. I haven’t lived this yet. I haven’t lived blind,” he says. “All I ask is to stay in the Army and finish out my years … I want to feel productive.”

The only good news for now is when he sleeps, Castro says.

“I’ve had dreams where I know I’m blind and, guess what? I’ve regained my vision,” he says. Reality floods back each morning.

“There’s not a night that I don’t pray and ask God, when I wake up, that I wake up seeing.”

December 2, 2007 – Arthur McCants III has drowned many times in his dreams, by his account.

The lanky 60-year-old from Eight Mile said he is haunted by “waterboarding” — an experience some decry as torture — that he endured in Navy survival training more than 30 years ago.

Now, he and his sister accuse the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) of ducking its obligation to provide him with needed disability help.

The VA has reported that it can find no proof that waterboarding occurred during such Navy training, although a former survival instructor said this year in congressional testimony that it did.

McCants, a former teacher and mail carrier who has fallen on hard times, traces his emotional struggles back to events of April 1975 in San Diego.

He was in the Navy, undergoing Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training with about 30 others, he said, when they began a role-playing exercise. The students were cast as POWs, while their instructors became harsh guards.

Black and white

While the instructors strapped McCants, who is black, to a board, they began to interrogate a fellow student, who was white.

“They told another 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 board was slanted at a 20-degree angle. Your feet are higher and your head is lower.”

The water, he added, “was constantly coming.”

McCants said he passed out.

He was still strapped to the board by his arms and feet when he regained consciousness moments later, he said.

An instructor resumed the interrogation. He told the other POW, “If you don’t talk, the black one will suffer more.”

When the other POW again refused to comply, McCants was waterboarded again, he said. This time, it was even worse: “They put a T-shirt over my face and began pouring water over it. I was now sucking water through the T-shirt. I was trying to break the straps, and my whole body was arcing. My whole body was trying to break the straps.”

He said he was taken off the board after he regained consciousness.

The next day, McCants said, an instructor threatened to subject him to more waterboarding. “I broke into tears. My knees buckled. I knew I couldn’t handle it again,” he said. “I would have lost my mind.”

McCants completed the course but felt scarred by the waterboarding experience, he said, and eventually sought to leave the Navy. He received a general discharge under honorable conditions in June 1977.

Downward spiral

McCants said he moved to Oklahoma City but was drinking and using drugs. He said he got into scuffles with police officers while under the influence, and his marriage fell apart.

He said he returned to Mobile shortly after Hurricane Frederic struck the city on Sept. 12, 1979, and — having earned a college degree in physical education before joining the Navy — landed a job teaching driver’s education at Blount High School.

He said he quit drinking and drugs and worked for about four years at Blount, until he left for higher pay with the postal service. He said he worked as a mail carrier for some 12 years until he was partially disabled after being struck by a pickup truck.

McCants said he now must live on $1,500 a month: $1,300 in disability from the Postal Service and $200 from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

He said he has asked VA officials to declare him 100 percent disabled for post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the waterboarding.

The agency notified him last month that his claim had been denied, although he was given 60 days to appeal.

In a document dated Aug. 2, 2007 — which McCants said he did not receive until early November — the VA noted that it had confirmation that he graduated from the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape course on April 21, 1975.

The letter also said that a VA examiner “diagnosed the veteran is with PTSD” earlier this year “based on the veteran’s reported stressors during active duty, which consisted of his report of abuse with waterboard while training.”

Benefits denied

But the VA said that it was denying McCants’ request for full benefits because no information was available on the “curriculum used at that time” at the survival school.

The Press-Register sought over two days last week to obtain comment from the VA about McCants’ claims.

A VA representative in Washington, D.C., responded with an e-mail indicating that he could not discuss the case unless McCants completed and returned a VA document agreeing to disclosure of his records.

A controversy over waterboarding by the U.S. military in interrogating suspected terrorists has become a national news subject in the past year.

A Nov. 9 story in The Washington Post told of a former Navy survival class instructor testifying before Congress that waterboarding is “torture” and that he had undergone it himself in survival training.

The article said Malcolm Wrightson Nance, who taught at a Navy school in California, said of waterboarding, “It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts.”

Meredith Sartin of Mobile, McCants’ sister, said her brother “has worked hard and tried to take care of his family for so many years.” She said he has two children in law school and another one who is a registered nurse.

She said her husband, Jay Sartin, was a VA counselor for her brother for many years and tried to get help for him. But her husband has retired and is dealing with cancer, she said, so she has stepped in to represent her brother’s case.

She said she is frightened by her brother’s suicidal tendencies and that he desperately needs VA assistance and treatment. “I don’t want to lose my brother,” she said. “I’ve been praying over all of this.”

McCants said he holds tight to the belief that he can win his case on appeal and maybe even return to teaching.

As for now, “I just want to have a good Christmas,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes as he spoke.

December 5, 2007 – The American Civil Liberties Union is in court today calling for the release of three documents issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that are believed to have authorized the CIA to use extremely harsh interrogation methods. The government failed to identify or provide the memos, which were issued in May of 2005, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the ACLU requesting information on U.S. treatment and interrogation of detainees.

“This is yet another example of the government’s attempt to bypass legal prohibitions on torture and while engaging in a cover-up of its illegal conduct,” said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.  “These memos must immediately be released to the public and high level officials must be held accountable for their role in spawning torture and prisoner abuse.”

The New York Times disclosed the existence of the first two memos in a front-page article on October 4, 2007. The Times reported that the first memo explicitly authorized interrogators to use combinations of harsh interrogation methods including waterboarding, head slapping, and exposure to freezing temperatures. The second memo, issued by OLC as Congress prepared to enact legislation prohibiting “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” declared that none of the CIA’s interrogation methods violated that standard.    

“Through these memos, the Office of Legal Counsel created a legal framework that was specifically intended to allow the CIA to violate both U.S. and international law,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “It’s clear that these documents are being kept secret not for national security reasons but for political ones.”

The memos, which were authored in May of 2005,  were not included in the government’s response to the ACLU’s FOIA request for all documents pertaining to the treatment and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody. The government also withheld the documents from key senators during a congressional inquiry. 

The ACLU filed legal papers on October 24 objecting to the omission of the two memos and requesting their release. In response, the government filed papers that revealed the existence of a third memo issued by the OLC pertaining to the treatment of detainees by the CIA. The ACLU is in court today requesting the release of all three OLC documents.  Melanca Clark of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons P.C., which is co-counsel with the ACLU on the FOIA lawsuit, will argue the motion before U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York. 

The ACLU’s brief requesting production of outstanding documents is online at: www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/32572lgl20071024.html

The government’s response to the ACLU’s brief is online at:
www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/32573lgl20071105.html

The ACLU’s reply in support of the request for production is online at: www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/32950lgl20071108.html

More information on the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody and an index of documents received by the ACLU in its FOIA lawsuit is online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia

Many of these documents are also contained and summarized in Administration of Torture, a recently published book by Jaffer and Singh. More information is available online at:
www.aclu.org/administrationoftorture

Attorneys in the FOIA case are Lawrence S. Lustberg and Melanca D. Clark of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons P.C.; Jaffer, Singh and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the New York Civil Liberties Union; and Shayana Kadidal and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights.