Veterans for Common Sense

November 6, 2007 – Just last Thursday, President Bush spoke of his Freedom Agenda spreading democracy across the globe: “We are standing with those who yearn for liberty.”

Yesterday, the Bush administration unveiled a pragmatic new foreign policy: The Stand by Your Man Agenda.

In the intervening period, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally, had suspended his country’s constitution, arrested Supreme Court judges, closed media outlets, and beat or imprisoned demonstrators by the hundreds — using some of his billions of dollars in American military aid to impose martial law.

Bush’s Freedom Agenda frowns upon these activities — and yet Bush and his aides acted yesterday as if Musharraf had made an illegal right on red, or perhaps parked in a handicapped space.

“What we think we ought to be doing is using our various forms of influence at this point in time to help a friend, who we think has done something ill-advised,” one of Bush’s top aides declared from the podium in the White House briefing room.

“The question is, what do you do when someone makes a mistake that is a close ally?” the official argued. “The president’s guidance to us is see if we can work with them to get back on track.”

So would there be consequences for Musharraf’s misbehavior? “That’s going to depend heavily on what we hear, obviously, from the Pakistani government,” he said, making sure to add: “And that is not a threat in any way.”

It didn’t even rise to a diplomatic slap on the wrist — and Bush aides must have realized this was not something to be proud of. Before the official briefed reporters from behind the microphone, an aide removed the oval White House seal from the lectern. And the White House ordered that the official, though he has appeared on the Sunday television talk shows, speak anonymously.

“Can we make it on the record?” the Associated Press’s Terry Hunt asked at the start of the briefing.

“No,” replied White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe. “The president has spoken on the record.”

Indeed he had — no more forcefully than Mr. Anonymous.

“With respect to Pakistan, it is also our desire to see a return to democracy in the shortest time possible,” Bush announced in the Oval Office. “I hope now that he hurry back to elections,” he added.

And what happens if Musharraf ignores Bush’s hopes and desires? “Hypothetical question,” Bush replied.

Did Bush misjudge Musharraf? No answer.

It has been a humbling few days for the administration and its attempts to exercise American power. Last week, Bush aides begged Musharraf not to suspend the constitution — and he ignored them. Similarly, Bush met in the Oval Office yesterday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, urging him not to send troops into Iraq to fight Kurdish militants — and Erdogan evidently gave him no commitment.

“In an environment where international support and cooperation does not exist, Turkey, quite naturally, will exercise its own right to protect itself and its people against terrorism,” the prime minister, echoing some of Bush’s own “war on terror” language, told the National Press Club after his meeting with the president.

The defiance by Musharraf and, to a lesser extent, Erdogan, left Bush and his aides sounding like representatives of a pitiful giant.

“We made it clear to [Musharraf] that we would hope he wouldn’t have declared the emergency powers he declared,” said Bush.

White House press secretary Dana Perino voiced her “hope” that Pakistan will proceed with elections.

And Mr. Anonymous mentioned his hopes eight times in his 40 minutes with reporters. “We hope that we’ll get some clarification on the intentions of the government in the next few days. . . . We are hopeful that we will see some clarification. . . . We hope they will do that.”

Missing were the serious diplomatic words such as “outrageous” and “unacceptable.” In their place were gentle sentiments such as “unfortunate” and “disappointed” and, two dozen times, “concern.” The concern was so slight, though, that the official admitted that Bush hadn’t even spoken directly with Musharraf.

Elaine Quijano of CNN asked about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s charge that Bush had sacrificed democracy for Musharraf’s help against terrorists.

The official replied that Pakistan was “emblematic of the president’s strategy generally.”

USA Today’s David Jackson asked if this might be termed “a setback for the Freedom Agenda.”

“We don’t know, because we don’t know how this story comes out,” Mr. Anonymous said.

Cox News’s Ken Herman asked if Bush was giving Musharraf a deadline for action.

“No,” the official replied.

Steven Myers of the New York Times said that the administration seemed “to have had very little influence” on Musharraf.”

“We have a lot of influence,” the official replied, “but we don’t dictate.”

Speak softly and carry a slender reed: It’s a key component of the Stand by Your Man Agenda.

November 5, 2007 – It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists…

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

“Waterboarding is torture,” Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking politician. He was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.

Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday, with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora’s box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism “Enhanced Interrogation,” Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them … was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be waterboarded.

Mr. Bush, ever done anything that personally courageous?

Perhaps when you’ve gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?

Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you’ve spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody who disagreed with you, whether they were your own generals, or Max Cleland, or Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, or Daniel Levin?

Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.

Instead, he was forced out as acting assistant attorney general nearly three years ago because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn’t do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.

And they waterboarded him. And he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die — still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his being that he wasn’t drowning.

Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture! Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he wrote it down.

Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country’s 43rd president: “The United States of America … does not torture.”

Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.

Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.

Waterboarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about except for the one detail you’d forgotten — that there are rules. And even if we just make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because we’re Americans and we’re better than that.

We’re better than you.

And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not waterboarding was torture had decided, and not in some phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire of flight suit and helmet.

He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.

So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn’t black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines.

And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous, Daniel Levin was branded “too independent” and “someone who could (not) be counted on.”

In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn’t count on to lie for you.

So, Levin was fired.

Because if it ever got out what he’d concluded, and the lengths to which he went to validate that conclusion, anybody who had sanctioned waterboarding and who-knows-what-else on anybody, you yourself, you would have been screwed.

And screwed you are.

It can’t be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should emerge from the black hole of this secret society of a presidency just at the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the newest attorney general nominee.

Another patriot somewhere listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like he’d never heard of waterboarding and refused to answer in words … that which Daniel Levin answered on a waterboard somewhere in Maryland or Virginia three years ago.

And this someone also heard George Bush say, “The United States of America does not torture,” and realized either he was lying or this wasn’t the United States of America anymore, and either way, he needed to do something about it.

Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a brave way nonetheless.

We have U.S. senators who need to do something about it, too.

Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what it is and said “enough.”

Sen. Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece in the New York political patronage system, and he has failed.

What Sen. Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.

It is obvious that both those senators should look to the meaning of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support for Mukasey’s confirmation.

And they should look into their own committee’s history and recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard Nixon a guarantee of a special prosecutor (ultimately a special prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of his new attorney general, Elliott Richardson.

If they could get that out of Nixon, before you confirm the president’s latest human echo on Tuesday, you had better be able to get a “yes” or a “no” out of Michael Mukasey.

Ideally you should lock this government down financially until a special prosecutor is appointed, or 50 of them, but I’m not holding my breath. The “yes” or the “no” on waterboarding will have to suffice.

Because, remember, if you can’t get it, or you won’t with the time between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all of us, to the waterboards, symbolic and otherwise, of George W. Bush.

Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn’t who approved the waterboarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.

It is: Why were they waterboarded?

Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn’t a problem if you don’t care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared.

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn’t interrupt.

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution,

Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist?

He’ll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you “flew” onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you’d won in Iraq.

Now if that’s what this is all about, you tortured not because you’re so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you’re smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction — well, then, you’re going to need all the lawyers you can find … because that crime wouldn’t just mean impeachment, would it?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.

Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in their exact progressions.

Daniel Levin’s eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding has to vanish, and him with it.

Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old car trying to start on a freezing morning to undo eight centuries of the forward march of law and government.

Thus Dick Cheney has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do or do not use any particular interrogation technique would somehow help the terrorists.

Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of waterboarding as torture.

Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed.

From its beginning as the most neglectful protection ever of the lives and safety of the American people … into the most efficient and cynical exploitation of tragedy for political gain in this country’s history … and, then, to the giddying prospect that you could do what the military fanatics did in Japan in the 1930s and remake a nation into a fascist state so efficient and so self-sustaining that the fascism would be nearly invisible.

But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected crash, the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you might try to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true freedom, where we are better, not because of schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals.

And ultimately these men, these patriots, will defeat you and they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its rightful owners, the people.

Murray Calls On President to Ensure Veterans Get the Care They Deserve
 
Senator Patty Murray of Washington delivers this week’s Democratic Radio Address. After years of this Administration under-funding our veterans, and as Veterans Day approaches, Murray calls on the President to enact Democrats’ effort to provide the largest-ever increase in veterans funding.

The text of the radio address, as delivered, is below:

“Good morning, this is U.S. Senator Patty Murray from the state of Washington. I want to talk to you about something that my Democratic colleagues and I have made a priority – our nation’s veterans.

“On Thursday, President Bush gave a speech to a group of conservatives at the Heritage Foundation. In that speech, he told us not to forget September 11th. He reminded us that we are at war. And he attacked Democrats for not falling in line with his policies. I think you will agree that not a single American needs George Bush to remind them of September 11th. We all lived through that tragedy together. Not a single American needs George Bush to remind us that we are still at war. In fact, if it were up to us, we would already be bringing an end to the war that the President started.

“We all know that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched our military to the breaking point. More than 3,800 service members have died, thousands upon thousands have suffered physical and mental wounds at war. Yet for all of President Bush’s hollow talk of ‘supporting the troops,’ he has not done nearly enough to provide our veterans with the care and support they need. And that is simply outrageous.

“The President can call on Democrats to follow him in lockstep all he wants, but when it comes to caring for our veterans, we are not about to start taking advice from George Bush. Because he has under-funded and ignored the VA system, thousands of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare and aren’t getting the health care they need. Under President Bush, the number of uninsured veterans has skyrocketed. The personal data of millions of vets was lost. And yet, the President let three months go by before even nominating a new secretary of veterans’ affairs.

“The crisis at Walter Reed Medical Center was just one visible product of this categorical neglect for our veterans. In spite of all these failures, the President continues to offer little more than speeches and scare tactics. But we all know that it’s not enough to just oppose him. Democrats must deliver on the priorities that he has neglected – and that is exactly what we’re doing.

“Next week we will send a bill to the President’s desk that does two things: provides funding and support to our veterans, and funds other crucial American priorities, like education and Alzheimer’s’ research. Our bill provides thousands of new VA case workers to help reduce the unconscionable delays that separate vets from the care they need. It improves conditions at VA facilities like Walter Reed, invests in new ways to treat military ailments like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and funds better prosthetics for our thousands of troops who have lost limbs in battle. Unfortunately, President Bush says this bill costs too much.

“Well, that’s just not true. The priorities that we fund are ones that he has neglected for far too long. It’s wrong to ignore these needs and neglect our veterans. Our troops have sacrificed so much. They deserve better than to have the President block this bill to make a political point.

“With Veterans Day right around the corner, we must reject President Bush’s politics of fear – and stand united as we make America safer, proudly support our veterans, and set the right priorities for all Americans. This is Senator Patty Murray from Washington State. Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend.”

Dear Senators Feinstein and Schumer:
 
Florida Veterans for Common Sense, a non-partisan veterans’ group with members who have served in every major conflict from WWII to the Iraq, ask you to reconsider your decision to vote to confirm Judge Michael Muskasey as Attorney General.
 
Judge Mukasey is disingenuous when he says that he doesn’t know if waterboarding is torture. We know. It is an humiliating and demeaning coercive interrogation technique violative of Common Article 3 of The Geneva Conventions, a war crime. After WWII, America prosecuted Japanese soldiers for war crimes who used waterboarding to terrorize American soldiers. Domestic Courts have described “the water cure” and “water torture” as a human rights violations and a means to coerce confessions. The Pentagon’s new interrogation manual prohibits coercive techniques like waterboarding. American law and precedent confirms waterboarding amounts to torture.
 
Torture is a terror technique and those who employ, condone, or authorize it are terrorists.  They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. President Bush should not be reluctant to appoint an Attorney General who will prosecute such crimes unless President Bush himself is complicit in authorizing torture.
 
In the opinion of Florida Veterans for Common Sense, you shame yourself and America by voting to confirm as Attorney General a person who claims not to know if waterboarding is torture. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrote legal memoranda condoning torture. Congress nevertheless confirmed him as Attorney General, a tragic mistake. Please don’t make a similar mistake by voting to confirm Judge Muskasey.
 
Sincerely,
 
Gene Jones,
President Florida Veterans for Common Sense

Senator Feinstein’s Washington Office: (202) 224-3841, www.feinstein.senate.gov

Senator Schumer’s Washington Office: (202) 224-6542, www.schumer.senate.gov

In the summer of 1972, a 22-year-old Washington State University student named Patty Murray reported to the Seattle veterans hospital for an internship in physical rehabilitation.

She was assigned to the psychiatric ward on the seventh floor of the orange brick monolith on Beacon Hill.

“Every morning when I arrived, they locked me in with the patients,” Murray recalled recently. “I heard the big doors close behind me.”

Her charges were young men who had returned from Vietnam. As Murray exercised their arms and legs, they described buddies blown apart and children, mistaken for guerrillas, shot and killed. Some stared vacantly; others shouted in anger.

Murray saw some of these same patients slip through cracks in the veterans-care network, left jobless, homeless and unable to find help.

“We didn’t have a name for what they were suffering,” Murray said of what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Thirty-six years later, Murray is still working in rehab, trying to fix what’s broken in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, she’s become the leading voice for veteran care in Congress.

Veterans Affairs officials declined to comment about Murray’s work on veterans issues, as did Republican leaders.

But other politicians and veterans say she has made quantifiable changes in the quality of life for veterans, both in Washington state and nationally.

She has helped make the VA face the spiraling costs of long-term care for disabled Iraq veterans and the aging Vietnam generation. She has publicized the growing crises of PTSD and brain damage among many who served in Iraq.

Her staff boasts decades of experience on veterans’ issues and casework. She is the only senator with a full-time psychiatrist on a fellowship in her office, working on PTSD legislation.

And she is likely to be the toughest hurdle for the former military doctor nominated by President Bush last week to run the VA.

Murray said the nominee, retired Army Gen. James Peake, will have to prove “he can be the honest, independent advocate we need to turn the VA around.”

Key appointments

In 1995, Murray became the first woman named to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. She also serves on the Appropriations subcommittee for military construction and veterans affairs.

She’s received high marks from the Disabled American Veterans over the years, working to make it easier for veterans to get disability benefits, pushing for counseling clinics in Bellingham and Yakima, and helping get aid for homeless vets.

“She’s done good for health care, and a lot for local vets,” said Harry Brownell, an Air Force retiree and a regular at the Redmond lodge of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

But since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she’s focused on beefing up a VA system that could soon be overwhelmed.

During the Vietnam War, only three wounded U.S. soldiers survived for every one who died. In Iraq, with better equipment and advances in battlefield medicine, 17 wounded troops survive for every one killed, according to a former VA Health Administration director.

That’s created a logjam of veterans coping with lost limbs, brain injuries and psychiatric disorders. The real crisis, Murray said, will be the enormous and unplanned costs to care for these veterans in the coming decades.

“Places like Spokane don’t have the facilities to handle them in the long term,” she said.

For example, many Vietnam veterans who suffered penetrating brain injuries have developed epilepsy. Murray just offered a bill to create six epilepsy centers to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans returning with similar conditions.

Like all senators, Murray has capitalized on her veterans work, touting her efforts in a tidal wave of press releases and taking credit for dozens of pro-veteran initiatives in recent years.

The issue of veterans’ care became more urgent this past spring when The Washington Post reported on poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where many injured soldiers are treated.

The news shocked Congress and the president, who immediately set up a commission to suggest improvement in the care of wounded troops.

But Murray had been clamoring for attention on such issues for more than a year.

“Even before me, she went to Madigan [Army Hospital, near Tacoma] to ensure they didn’t have the awful problems that they had here at Walter Reed,” said U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Bremerton, a member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

Murray’s father, noted Dicks, was a disabled veteran who had served in World War II.

“Her passion is very personal,” he said.

Fighting clinic closures

It was a hot July day in 2003 when Murray learned that the administration and the VA had decided to begin closing some clinics to save money.

Among the clinics targeted for closure were those in American Lake, Vancouver and Walla Walla.

“I think it was 27 minutes from when we heard that to when she was on the phone with Principi,” said her former chief of staff, Rick Desimone.

Anthony Principi was the VA secretary at the time.

“She told him, ‘You’re not going to do this. I’m going to fight you every step of the way,’ ” Desimone said. Murray held hearings in the communities targeted for closures.

American Lake quickly came off the list, followed by Vancouver. Walla Walla’s fate was up in the air until spring 2004.

Murray learned that a top Democratic senator had called a meeting with Principi and she asked to come, Desimone said. When Principi entered the senator’s office, there sat Murray, asking, “What’s up with Walla Walla?”

Although some of its services are being cut, the Walla Walla clinic remains open.

Her clinic crusade shows how Murray has become more aggressive since the war began.

She’s held up Senate confirmation of VA nominees to get her issues heard; introduced funding amendments and, when they were blocked, reintroduced them; and packaged her position on such a high road that to question it is almost unpatriotic.

One of her nemeses has been Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, who serves with Murray on the Veterans Affairs Committee.

In June, Craig opposed Murray’s move to increase the number of veterans eligible for care by more than 200,000, on the grounds that adding those patients would overwhelm the system.

“It appears that the majority’s answer to long lines at VA medical centers is simply to get more people standing in line,” he said in a statement.

But Craig’s power has been crippled by the scandal over his guilty plea to disorderly conduct in a bathroom sex sting this summer in a Minneapolis airport.

“Told you so” moment

Murray’s best “I told you so” moment came in 2005.

She claimed that the 2006 budget proposed by President Bush low-balled the amount the VA needed by about $1 billion.

Jim Nicholson, then-secretary of the VA, testified before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee and casually dismissed Murray’s concerns.

Murray didn’t buy it. Over the next three months she pummeled Republican leaders in speeches and forums and introduced four separate emergency-funding proposals. They all lost.

Then in mid-June, the administration abruptly announced it needed another $1.5 billion for the VA budget.

Republican senators commended Murray on the Senate floor. Meanwhile, Nicholson became Murray’s target whenever any problem cropped up at the VA.

He resigned in July and has declined to comment about Murray.

The day of Nicholson’s resignation, Murray accepted an invitation for a social chat at the White House, a standard reception for top Democrats to meet with Bush informally.

“I said to the president that it was astonishing to me what an opportunity he has to do the right things for veterans,” Murray said, “and he’s not taking advantage of it.

“I said that to his face. I went on purpose to do that,” she said. “I haven’t been invited back.”

Alicia Mundy: 202-662-7457 or amundy@seattletimes.com

FOCUS: VETERANS’ SUICIDES
Suicides are the tragic consequences of war
Scarred by military trauma and with damaged pysches,four area soldiers took their own lives

November 4, 2007 – Add these four local men to the military’s list of casualties. Matthew A. Proulx. Andrew L. Norlund. Justin C. Reyes. Gary M. Underhill. They didn’t die in combat. They didn’t die from friendly fire. They died by their own hands.

No comprehensive studies are available on the reasons for suicides connected to the ongoing military actions, but Army officials say the suicide rate among its personnel is now the highest it has been since the first Gulf War.

Ninety-nine soldiers killed themselves last year. A third of those deaths involved individuals who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to the Army.

The rate of suicide since the Iraq War began in 2003 has increased from 12.4 per 100,000 soldiers to 17.3 per 100,000 last year, and that does not include veterans who served in the two war zones and later returned to civilian life.

With the four Erie County men, it would be difficult to argue that the war did not affect their mental conditions before they killed themselves.

One died after returning home from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder. Another returned from Iraq with posttraumatic stress disorder and began drinking heavily.

A third Iraq veteran knew he needed help but would not seek it. The fourth was in mental anguish and headed to Iraq.

Their families and friends say they are as much casualties of war as the soldiers who die on the battlefield.

“Men and women who serve in a war zone have a unique experience with violence and death. They bring this experience home with them, and for these individuals suicidal thoughts can be especially lethal,” said Houston Crum, a Veterans Affairs counselor who works with returning veterans and their families in the Buffalo Niagara region.

Military officials blame the increased number of suicides on problems that often involve love and marriage. Family members of the dead say it goes way beyond failing relationships.

In addition to the flashbacks and nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder, relatives and soldier advocates cite extended combat deployments and redeployments, combat stress — once known as shell shock — and shortened periods of leave as reasons for the higher number of suicides.

“It’s always handy to blame the spouse in these things, but I think it really comes down to extended fear, situations where the fear doesn’t go away,” said Roger Proulx, commenting on the daily anxiety his son Matthew faced escorting truck convoys in Iraq. “You may be in a compound, but you have to go outside, and you don’t know where the danger lurks.”

Wouldn’t seek help  Sgt. Matthew A. Proulx, 40, carried out his final mission in life with military precision.

The National Guardsman had been wounded twice in the Iraq War and awarded the Purple Heart.

Proulx also suffered from a third injury — mental illness brought on by the war. But he decided to handle the matter in his own way. To seek outside help would make him a marked man, and he did not want to be seen as a weakling in the military’s warrior culture.

Just before he killed himself April 4, Proulx made one quick phone call to the Buffalo Police Department’s 911 operator.

“I’m going to commit suicide. I have a gun. I want you to come right now because I don’t want anyone else to get this gun.”

He ended his cell phone call inside his parked car, put the muzzle of his military assault rifle to his mouth and “blew his brains away,” his family said.

Police rushed to Proulx’s home next to Schiller Park and found him dead in his 2007 Honda Civic.

Nancy Proulx said her son’s concern that no one else get hold of his high-powered rifle was right in line with his soldierly ways.

“Being a soldier right to the last minute. He was taking care of business. He called the police and told them about the gun,” his mother said.

Proulx had given up a promising photography career in New York City to join the military after his first wife, an employee in the World Trade Center, narrowly escaped death Sept. 11, 2001, because she had arrived late to work.

He told his mother he felt helpless and needed to do something. Two weeks later, Proulx joined the state’s Army National Guard.

After his deployment in 2004-05, Proulx moved here with his second wife, Colleen Grzelewski, a fellow Guard member from Buffalo who also had served in Iraq.

Proulx had not seen the last of death. He was assigned full time to a color guard at military funeral services.

It was a job he loved, according to Grzelewski. But as for his inner turmoil, the widow said, he had no interest in seeking help.

“To ask for help within the military system, the Army, is to admit weakness and failure, and then you’re screwed,” she said. “That is the truth. Soldiers will run around with a broken ankle, and it’s the same with a mental problem.

“You’re taught in the military to be strong. The whole military culture creates this problem,” Grzelewski said.

Grzelewski’s description is eerily accurate in the case of Justin Reyes, who, despite two damaged ankles, continued fighting in Iraq. When he did return home, he required extensive reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation, a family member said.

In addition to worries about reaching out for help, seeking assistance for a mental health issue raises fears about what peers and supervisors in the military will think.

Airman’s worries Airman 1st Class Andrew L. Norlund, 23, of Elma, ended his life with a shotgun, fed up with ridicule he had endured from fellow members of the Air Force, according to entries in his journal.

In one of the more disturbing entries, he wrote:

“My superior does not respect me, he makes fun of me as do most of the people I work with on mid-shift. Now everyone sees what’s been going on in my head because I wear it on my face.

“Now they are asking me if I am OK, and I say ‘Sure man, I’m cool.’ Because if I tell them what is going on my career will be over because suicidal people eventually get discharged, get no respect if they are kept in, and treated differently, and some of that is because you can’t go to war/deploy if you are suicidal.

“And even though they don’t respect me, I have to respect them because they have more stripes on their arm.”

At the same time, Norlund’s personal life was falling apart. His marriage, little more than two months old, appeared to be unraveling.

Even if he wanted to try to save the relationship, Norlund knew he was scheduled to leave soon for Iraq.

So with no apparent way to solve his dilemma, the young airman left Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina on July 6, 2004, and purchased a 12-gauge shotgun.

Before loading the weapon, he drank heavily, then put the barrel of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

“He probably felt as though he was trapped in a life situation that he did not want to be a part of,” said Dr. John D. Norlund, the airman’s father. “He knew he was going to be sent to Iraq and put in harm’s way. That knowledge certainly contributed to the angst.”

Norlund’s journey to the Air Force began after he gave up a promising academic future at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he had been awarded a major scholarship.

The Air Force offered him a chance to change course. Growing up, he had suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder but that did not prove an obstacle to entering the service.

He progressed quickly as a munitions system specialist and was well regarded for his attention to detail and work ethic. Those glowing assessments, in fact, were written about him in a memorial program the Air Force prepared and distributed at a chapel service after he had killed himself.

Yet, his journal reveals frustration and anger toward those with whom he worked in the Air Force. Something was out of whack. His father learned that he was planning to seek help but never made an appointment.

The doctor says he does not blame the military for his son’s demise. The Air Force, he points out, has a program that works with suicidal airmen. But some individuals in the military, he says, lack a sense of awareness and skills to help distressed service members.

“To say there is something wrong with the institution is a misallocation,” said Norlund, a radiation oncologist.

Other families and friends of service members who have committed suicide are not as philosophical as the doctor.

They contend that the welldocumented experiences of Vietnam veterans should have made the government better prepared to deal with mental health issues.

Trying to catch up?

Congress has just passed a bill to try to curtail suicides among veterans, and the military says it is working on several fronts that include:

• Efforts to eliminate longheld opinions that lead to denigrating emotional and mental problems among members of the armed forces.

• Education on the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder so that family members and friends of returning war veterans can get help for their loved ones.

• A campaign to raise overall awareness that suicide is a public health issue, much like heart disease, and needs to be handled openly.

No direct correlation has been found between deployments and suicides, says Col. Elspeth C. Ritchie, a top Army psychiatrist, but she acknowledges frequent deployments lead to problems.

“We know that those factors put a strain on relationships,” Ritchie said. “Other related studies have found that longer and more frequent deployments have increased the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression.”

The mental health of Army Staff Sgt. Justin C. Reyes, 26, of East Amherst, after returning home from a tour of duty in Iraq, included some of the symptoms Ritchie cited.

Reyes left the Army last May after he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. About a month later, he hanged himself.

Those who were close to the 1998 Williamsville East High School graduate say the military’s inability to provide adequate treatment for returning combat veterans represents a national tragedy.

Like Airman Norlund, Reyes was having difficulties in a relationship. When his girlfriend left him shortly after they moved to Kansas, Reyes called her and threatened to harm himself if she did not return, according to authorities.

On June 21, 12 days after his desperate phone call, police checked his Wichita apartment because friends had been unable to reach him. In a bedroom, they found him hanging from an orange extension cord slung over a door.

A relative told investigators that Reyes had been drinking heavily and was having troubles since returning from Iraq.

In Iraq, Reyes proved himself a leader and was promoted to staff sergeant. He also earned a number of medals and commendations for his service, which — at least in part — cost him his mental well-being.

“I was frozen. I was in complete shock,” Mark Bonanno said of his longtime friend’s suicide. “I would never have expected this. That’s why it was so shocking.”

The military, Bonanno said, “is responsible” for combat veterans and owes them improved treatment to prevent these types of tragedies.

To honor their son, the Reyes family has asked for contributions to the Medina Memorial Hospital Foundation at 200 Ohio St., Medina, NY, 14103.

Underhill loved Army Reyes’ story, in some ways, matches that of Army Sgt. Gary M. Underhill and his experiences upon returning from the war.

Underhill, 21, of Lancaster, had done one tour in Iraq and had been scheduled to return for a second deployment in September.

But he died July 30 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Watertown, near Fort Drum, where he was stationed with the 10th Mountain Division, authorities said.

Underhill’s family said he had sought counseling after returning in July 2006 from a year in Iraq. He attended one session, but because of long hours training soldiers for deployment, he kept missing follow- up sessions.

Nicki Underhill, the sergeant’s widow, refused to say the stress of war played a part in her husband’s death. She said he loved the military and loved training the members of his infantry squad.

Although she will not blame his death on war experiences, she says her husband changed gradually after his return from Iraq, refusing to let down his guard and experiencing nightmares, anxiety and depression — signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

His death, like that of Reyes, brought similar reactions toward the military and the need to do a better job addressing mental health issues.

“People are going to come back damaged. You can’t forget them when they come home,” said Jessica Pitingolo, a friend of Reyes and fellow 2003 Lancaster High School graduate.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says it is trying hard to work with troubled soldiers.

Attempting to change Veterans should not consider reaching out for help as a sign of weakness, according to Joan M. Chipps, the suicide prevention coordinator at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Buffalo.

“We have a poster that says ‘It takes the courage and strength of a soldier to ask for help,’ ” she said of the effort to change attitudes.

The mother of Matthew Proulx, the National Guard sergeant, says that, while too late for her son, other distressed combat veterans need to seek treatment to save themselves and spare their families untold grief.

“I don’t think Matthew felt he could reach out for help. That’s just what I think,” she said. “He had told me that it was considered a weakness in the military, and he was not a weak person.”

Soldiers who seek help, she said, are not weaklings.

She says she hopes the other soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan will come to believe that before making the long journey home.

Lou Michel E-Mail: lmichel@buffnews.com

Legal Loopholes in Iraq
 
November 5, 2007 – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refers to the lack of legal accountability that allows mercenaries working for the American government to kill Iraqis without fear of prosecution as “a lacuna” in our law.

Ms. Rice is correct, if disingenuous. The gap was created by the very administration she serves — in a decree issued three years ago by its occupation administrator, Paul Bremer, who granted legal immunity to foreign private contractors. And the Iraqi government is understandably in a hurry to correct the mistake. On Tuesday, the cabinet agreed on draft legislation to revoke the decree.

Washington, however, also needs to address the problem. The administration should withdraw all of these private armies from Iraq, and while it does that, Congress must act swiftly to ensure that American justice applies to all those who remain.  [VCS agrees.]

Baghdad’s attempt to prosecute United States mercenaries for crimes against Iraqis is not unreasonable. Fuming after Blackwater agents contracted by the State Department mowed down 17 Iraqis in Baghdad on Sept. 16, Iraqis were incensed when they found out that State Department agents investigating the incident offered the guards a form of immunity from prosecution under American law.

Beyond corroborating the State Department’s incompetence, the spectacle of Washington letting its trigger-happy bodyguards off the hook wiped out whatever residual sense of legitimacy Iraqis may have still attached to the United States’ mission.

The fallout over Washington’s careless mishandling of the contractors ultimately reinforces the argument for an orderly exit of all American forces, returning to Iraqis the power and responsibility to build their nation.

But Washington also has other lessons to draw. It is folly to outsource the tasks of combat to private contractors with no commitment to the nation’s broader goals in Iraq, undermining the already hard job of gaining Iraqis’ trust. It underscores how farming out these jobs to divert the money to expensive weapons that enrich weapons makers and their lobbyists undercuts America’s armed forces, adding little to American national security or the nation’s ability to fight 21st-century wars.

That folly was compounded by the decision to allow gun-toting mercenaries to run around Iraq without any clear legal tether holding them accountable to Iraqi law, American criminal law or military law.

The killings in Baghdad last September were not the first crimes involving private contractors working for the American government. Still, four years after the start of the war, not one contractor has been prosecuted for crimes committed against an Iraqi.

That is no way for a nation to behave if it prides itself on following the rule of law.

November 4, 2007 – George Bush’s nominee to replace disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, retired Federal Judge Michael B. Mukasey, must be rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the same reason that Gonzales should have been rejected in 2005.

Like Gonzales, Mukasey refuses to accept that the president of the United States must abide by the laws of the land, beginning with the Constitution. In fact, the nominee to replace the worst Attorney General since Calvin Coolidge forced Harry Micajah Daugherty to quit rather than face impeachment is actually takes a more extreme position in defense of an imperial presidency than did Gonzales.

When questioned by Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont and Constitution sub-committee chair Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, during the key hearing on his nomination, Mukasey embraces an interpretation of presidential authority so radical that it virtually guarantees more serious abuses of power by the executive branch.

There is no question that one of the ugliest manifestations of that expansion of authority involves the Bush-Cheney administration’s embrace of extraordinary rendition and torture as tools for achieving its ends. But those who focus too intensely on Mukasey’s troubling dance around the waterboarding question make a mistake. Even if the nominee were to embrace the Geneva Conventions — not to mention the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — and condemn all forms of torture as the cruel and unusual punishment that they are, he would still be an entirely unacceptable choice to serve as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer.

And while some Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have made their peace with Mukasey — shame on New York’s Chuck Schumer and California’s Dianne Feinstein — the fight to block this nomination cannot be abandoned. Mukasey’s critics on the committee, led by Leahy and Feingold, should do everything in their power to re-frame the debate to focus on the broader question of whether a president can break the law — and on the nominee’s entirely unacceptable answers to it. They should pressure Schumer and Feinstein to reconsider, and they should reach out, aggressively, to “Republicans who know better” such as Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter.

Mukasey has made the case against his confirmation more convincingly than any of his critics.

The former judge has defended the administration’s attempts to dramatically expand the definition of executive privilege, telling the Judiciary Committee that it would be inappropriate for a U.S. attorney to press for contempt charges against a White House official who claimed to be protected by a grant of executive privilege. Under this reading of the law, U.S. attorneys would cease to be independent defenders of the rule of law and become mere extensions of the White House.

As such, Mukasey accepts a politicization of U.S. Attorneys far more extreme than that attempted by Gonzales and former White House political czar Karl Rove when they sought to remove U.S. Attorneys who failed to fully embrace the administration’s electoral and ideological goals.

But Mukasey does not stop there.

Under questioning from Feingold, Mukasey endorsed the administration’s argument that congressional attempts to define appropriate surveillance strategies and techniques could infringe inappropriately on presidential authority.

When pressed by Feingold, Mukasey refused to say whether he thought the president could order a violation of federal wiretapping rules. Feingold’s response was measured. “I find your equivocation here somewhat troubling,” said the senator.

In fact, everything about Mukasey’s testimony suggested that he would as Attorney General be more of a threat to Constitutional governance than the inept and frequently inarticulate Gonzales. Mukasey gives every indication that he is as enthusiastic as was Gonzales about helping the president to bend and break they law. The scary thing is that Mukasey appears to be a good deal abler when it comes to cloaking lawlessness in a veneer of legal uncertainty.

Consider the nominee’s suggestion that the president can ignore any law, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, if he and his lawyers determine that the law impinges on his authority as commander in chief during wartime.

“The president is not putting somebody above the law; the president is putting somebody within the law,” Mukasey explained, with a response that employed legalese at levels not heard in Washington since Richard Nixon boarded that last plane for San Clemente. “The president doesn’t stand above the law. But the law emphatically includes the Constitution.”

Leahy said after that “troubling” statement by the man who would be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer: “I see a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.”

The Judiciary Committee chair is right. It’s the truck carrying the trappings of an imperial presidency. And Mukasey should not be handed the keys.

November 5, 2007 – Taliban militants have taken control of a third district in western Afghanistan.

Local officials say the militants captured the Khaki Safed district in the western Farah province late Sunday, with police and government officials fleeing without a fight.

One police official told the French News Agency that Afghan police, army and NATO troops were able to retake control of the area just hours later.

This is the third district in the region to be captured by Taliban insurgents. Last week, militants overran the Bakwa and Gulistan districts in Farah province. Local officials say Afghan police often withdraw and do not put up a fight when being overrun by militants.

Taliban rebels have previously seized control of villages in remote parts of Afghanistan but are usually forced out by NATO troops. They have, however, maintained control of Musa Qala in southern Helmand province since early this year.

This year has been the deadliest in Afghanistan since a U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban government in 2001. Taliban militants have established strongholds in the south and east, attacking U.S. and NATO troops and Afghan soldiers in ambushes and suicide bombings.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.

November 5, 2007 – Do you know a soldier who just isn’t acting like himself these days?

If so, he could be suffering from post traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury as a result of serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Recognizing the symptoms associated with PTSD and TBI should now be easier for soldiers and civilian employees thanks to a new mandatory awareness program the Army launched this summer. The one- to two-hour “chain-teaching” program should have been delivered to all units by their command in mid-October.

“I think the biggest thing with the chain teaching is that it kind of identifies symptoms that aren’t very apparent otherwise,” said Jeri Chappelle, spokeswoman for Europe Regional Medical Command. “Soldiers may be experiencing these symptoms and don’t know why they have them.”

Coupled with other efforts — such as Landstuhl Regional Medical Center’s new proposal to establish a TBI center — the awareness program shows military officials are devoting more resources to the two conditions, which affect up to 30 percent of downrange troops.

Furthering the cause is the $900 million Congress allocated earlier this year for PTSD and TBI, now considered among the war’s hallmark injuries.

“It’s coming from the recognition of the magnitude of the problem,” said Army Dr. (Col.) Stephen Flaherty, chief of Lanstuhl’s trauma center. “Education is important. We know this is happening.”

Though they can afflict someone simultaneously, the combat-related conditions manifest themselves in distinct ways.

Signs of PTSD can surface after experiencing an incident resulting in intense fear, hopelessness or horror. They can include reliving the episode over and over again, avoiding reminders of the event and constantly feeling on edge.

Mild TBI is caused by blows to the head and exposure to blasts and explosions that result in concussion, which when suffered multiple times can complicate the condition. Signs include blurred vision, headaches, aggressive behavior, depression and cognitive issues such as trouble concentrating.

But perhaps as important as recognizing the signs of PTSD and TBI is overcoming the negative connotations attached to the conditions, say military officials.

“There is a stigma is associated with soldiers seeking mental help, but I think that’s changing,” said Chappelle, the ERMC spokeswoman.

“I think everybody is trying to get the word out to soldiers that if they have problems they should get help,” she said.

And experts agree, the sooner help is sought, the better. While some can suffer lifelong effects from TBI and PTSD, doctors and researchers say treatment can help troops fully recover.

A version of the PTSD/TBI awareness program designed specifically for Family Readiness Groups also is available.

Both versions can be accessed at www.army.mil. Look for “PTSD/TBI Chain Teaching Program” under “Strategic Messages” on the right side of the page.

Resources On The Web

PTSD

• National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
• National Institute of Mental Health
• American Psychological Association
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

TBI

• Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center
• Brain Injury Association of America
• National Brain Injury Research Treatment and Training Foundation
• National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke