Veterans for Common Sense

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

Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime

As a JAG in the Nevada National Guard, I used to lecture the soldiers of the 72nd Military Police Company every year about their legal obligations when they guarded prisoners. I’d always conclude by saying, “I know you won’t remember everything I told you today, but just remember what your mom told you: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” That’s a pretty good standard for life and for the law, and even though I left the unit in 1995, I like to think that some of my teaching had carried over when the 72nd refused to participate in misconduct at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Sometimes, though, the questions we face about detainees and interrogation get more specific. One such set of questions relates to “waterboarding.”

That term is used to describe several interrogation techniques. The victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the practice as “simulated drowning.” That’s incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death.

That is, the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. According to those who have studied waterboarding’s effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years.

The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government — whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community — has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.

After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: “I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure.” He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. “Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning,” he replied, “just gasping between life and death.”

Nielsen’s experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan’s military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.

In this case from the tribunal’s records, the victim was a prisoner in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies:

A towel was fixed under the chin and down over the face. Then many buckets of water were poured into the towel so that the water gradually reached the mouth and rising further eventually also the nostrils, which resulted in his becoming unconscious and collapsing like a person drowned. This procedure was sometimes repeated 5-6 times in succession.

The United States (like Britain, Australia and other Allies) pursued lower-ranking Japanese war criminals in trials before their own tribunals. As a general rule, the testimony was similar to Nielsen’s. Consider this account from a Filipino waterboarding victim:

Q: Was it painful?

A: Not so painful, but one becomes unconscious. Like drowning in the water.

Q: Like you were drowning?

A: Drowning — you could hardly breathe.

Here’s the testimony of two Americans imprisoned by the Japanese: They would lash me to a stretcher then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about two gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness.

And from the second prisoner: They laid me out on a stretcher and strapped me on. The stretcher was then stood on end with my head almost touching the floor and my feet in the air. . . . They then began pouring water over my face and at times it was almost impossible for me to breathe without sucking in water.

As a result of such accounts, a number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war. They were not the only defendants convicted in such cases. As far back as the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers were court-martialed for using the “water cure” to question Filipino guerrillas.

More recently, waterboarding cases have appeared in U.S. district courts. One was a civil action brought by several Filipinos seeking damages against the estate of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. The plaintiffs claimed they had been subjected to torture, including water torture. The court awarded $766 million in damages, noting in its findings that “the plaintiffs experienced human rights violations including, but not limited to . . . the water cure, where a cloth was placed over the detainee’s mouth and nose, and water producing a drowning sensation.”

In 1983, federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies with violating prisoners’ civil rights by forcing confessions. The complaint alleged that the officers conspired to “subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning.”

The four defendants were convicted, and the sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

We know that U.S. military tribunals and U.S. judges have examined certain types of water-based interrogation and found that they constituted torture. That’s a lesson worth learning. The study of law is, after all, largely the study of history. The law of war is no different. This history should be of value to those who seek to understand what the law is — as well as what it ought to be.

Evan Wallach, a judge at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York, teaches the law of war as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School.

It’s time to change of count of American war dead upward.

The Associated Press has got hold of a preliminary government study on suicides by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. According to the VA, at least 283 combat veterans who left the military between the start of the war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 and the end of 2005 took their own lives. In addition, 147 troops have killed themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan since the wars began bringing the government count to 430.

The VA’s count is not a complete one, however. It does not include members of the military who returned from Iraq and then killed themselves before being discharged from the service – people like Sgt Brian Rand who shot himself in the head after returning home from his second tour.

It also doesn’t include the deaths of people like Sgt. James Dean who was shot by Maryland state troopers after he barricaded himself in his father’s farmhouse. Observers call those deaths “suicide by cop.”

And it doesn’t include the deaths of people like Sgt. Gerald Cassidy, a 32 year old Indiana National Guardsman, who died at Fort Knox five months after returning from Iraq with brain damage from a roadside bomb.

How many more American deaths continue to go uncounted?

Regardless, it’s clear is that we need to change our count of casualties upward from 4,229 US military deaths (3,842 in Iraq and 387 in Afghanistan) to closer to 5,000 – possibly more when you consider those deaths that still haven’t been counted.

State to Blackwater: Nothing You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You in a Court of Law

October 30, 2007 – Apparently there is one set of rights for Blackwater mercenaries and another for the rest of us. Normally when a group of people alleged to have gunned down 17 civilians in a lawless shooting spree are questioned, investigators will tell them something along the lines of: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” But that is not what the Blackwater operatives involved in the September 16 Nisour Square shooting in Iraq were told. Most of the Blackwater shooters were questioned by State Department Diplomatic Security investigators with the understanding that their statements and information gleaned from them could not be used to bring criminal charges against them, nor could they be introduced as evidence. In other words, “Anything you say can’t and won’t be used against you in a court of law.”
 
ABC News obtained copies of sworn statements given by Blackwater guards in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, all of which begin, “I understand this statement is being given in furtherance of an official administrative inquiry,” and that, “I further understand that neither my statements nor any information or evidence gained by reason of my statements can be used against me in a criminal proceeding.” Constitutional law expert Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says the offering of so-called “use immunity” agreements by the State Department is “very irregular,” adding he could not recall a precedent for it. In normal circumstances, Ratner said, such immunity is only granted after a Grand Jury or Congressional committee has been convened and the party has invoked their 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination. It would then be authorized by either a judge or the committee.

Military law expert Scott Horton of Human Rights First says, “What the State Department has done in this case is inconsistent with proper law enforcement standards. It is likely to undermine an ultimate prosecution, if not make it impossible. In this sense, the objective of the State Department in doing this is exposed to question. It seems less to be to collect the facts than to immunize Blackwater and its employees. By purporting to grant immunity, the State Department draws itself more deeply into the wrongdoing and adopts a posture vis-a-vis Blackwater that appears downright conspiratorial. This will make the fruits of its investigation a tough sell.”

Ratner says that while what was offered the Blackwater operatives is not immunity from prosecution, prosecutors would need to prove they did not use the sworn statements as part of their investigation. “Even though the person can be prosecuted if independent evidence is relied upon, often this is hard to demonstrate,” he says. As an example of the problems such immunity can pose, Ratner points to the case of Oliver North. “He had been granted ‘use immunity’ and was then prosecuted, supposedly on the basis of independent evidence,” Ratner says. “However, his conviction was reversed in the court of appeals because it could not be demonstrated that all of the evidence against him had an independent source outside of his own testimony.”

Aside from the fundamental problem that there is quite possibly no legal framework for charging the Blackwater shooters under any legal system–US civilian law, military law or Iraqi law–legal analysts and a former federal prosecutor say the State Department has already tainted the Nisour Square criminal investigation in several ways. The FBI was not dispatched to investigate the case until two weeks after the shootings occurred, meaning that the initial investigation was in the hands of a non-law enforcement agency that just happens to be Blackwater’s employer. By the time actual law enforcement, the FBI, was sent to Baghdad, the crime scene had been tainted and some of the perpetrators questioned with the alleged immunity provision. “To rely on non-law enforcement to conduct sensitive law enforcement activities makes no sense if you want impartial justice,” says Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who currently serves as Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “This investigation has already taken so long and it looks like the State Department has impeded the possibility of a successful criminal investigation.” The Washington Post reported that “Some of the Blackwater guards have subsequently refused to be interviewed by the FBI, citing promises of immunity from State.”

This is hardly the first indication that the government’s investigation of the Nisour Square shootings was lacking in integrity and impartiality. The State Department’s initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor on official US government stationary. The FBI team initially dispatched to Baghdad to investigate Blackwater was to be guarded by Blackwater until Sen. Patrick Leahy raised questions about the arrangement forcing the Bureau to announce it would be guarded by official personnel and not personnel from the same company it was investigating.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this story (aside from the loss of Iraqi civilian life) is that even if Blackwater was not so politically connected to the White House and even if there was a truly independent US Justice Department and even if immunity had not been offered and even if there was an aggressive investigation, it may all be totally irrelevant. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently dispatched a team to Baghdad led by veteran diplomat Patrick Kennedy to review the department’s private security force, the team returned with the conclusion that it “is unaware of any basis for holding non-Department of Defense contractors accountable under US law.”

While there are currently moves afoot in the US Congress to adjust language in the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act to allow for prosecutions of State Department contractor crimes in US civilian courts and although there is a debate over whether the court martial system could be applied, the reality is that the political will to prosecute contractors has been totally absent since day one of the Iraq occupation. Not a single armed contractor has ever been prosecuted for crimes committed in Iraq–not under US civilian law, not under military law and certainly not in Iraqi courts, which have been banned by the US occupation authorities from going after private contractors.

What is so often lost in this new debate on accountability and oversight is this fact: private contractors now outnumber regular soldiers on the Iraq battlefield. The military–with its massive bureaucracy–has been unable or unwilling to effectively monitor the actions of its soldiers and prosecute them for crimes. Who will effectively oversee the 180,000-strong shadow corporate army? Will FBI teams really be running around Iraq chasing allegations (ever increasing) of contractor crimes and misconduct? Who will guard the investigators? Who will interview Iraqi witnesses? Where will the funding come from? Who will arrest the heavily-armed mercenary alleged to have committed a crime, particularly when he was doing exactly what he was supposed to do in keeping VIP US officials alive in Iraq?

While there may be some token prosecutions that stem from the recent uptick in reporting on contractor crimes in Iraq, the reality is that without private forces from Blackwater and its ilk, the US occupation of Iraq would be untenable. Nothing will be done that would actually jeopardize the use of such forces in the war zone. While Blackwater’s conduct in Iraq is horrifying, it is important to remember that US ambassadors–all four who have served under the Iraq occupation–owe their lives to Blackwater’s shoot-first-and-never-ask-questions cowboy tactics. They are the reason the company can brag it has never lost an American life it was protecting. Blackwater does its job and while it is essential to prosecute its operatives for their crimes, the ultimately responsible party is the entity that hired them and deployed them armed and dangerous in Iraq.

November 1, 2007 – Amman, Jordan–It is said that Iraq is the world’s best-known conflict but the least well-known humanitarian crisis.

In the United States, where public attention span is low but the capacity for denial high, Iraq’s daily carnage no longer commands headlines. American public discourse long ago shifted to the domestic political implications of Iraq for George W. Bush et al.

Those who do think of Iraq think mostly of the murderous sectarianism of the Sunnis and Shiites. If Muslims are killing each other, there’s not much America can do, Iraq being another Yugoslavia – once the iron grip of Saddam Hussein or Josip Tito was gone, all the old animosities re-emerged.

But in Iraq, there was no such suppressed hatred. Shiites and Sunnis had always lived in harmony. Inter-marriage was common. The bombed-out Shiite shrine in Samara was in a Sunni neighbourhood.

The more apt parallel is with the 1947 partition of British India that precipitated a mass migration and a massacre among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs who had lived in harmony for centuries.

When the state abrogates its most basic role of maintaining social order, anti-social forces and criminals can send scared people into a frenzy of primitive behaviour.

What’s happening in Iraq is the direct result of American war-mongering and criminal incompetence.

Since the 2003 U.S. invasion, between 75,000 and 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed (depending on who’s counting). This is in addition to the 1 million Iraqis, half of them children under 5, who died slow deaths during the 1991-2003 U.S.-led United Nations economic sanctions (a UNESCO estimate).

More than 4 million Iraqis have been displaced. Half have fled to Syria, Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere.

This is the largest forced migration of people in the Middle East since 1948, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency.

Nearly 8 million Iraqis – one in three – are in need of humanitarian aid.

Nearly half the internally displaced people do not have access to the Public Distribution System of ration cards and permits.

Only a third of Iraqis can access safe drinking water. The health system is collapsing. The drug distribution system has broken down. The sewage system has collapsed and only a fifth of Iraqis have access to a functional sanitary system.

Three-fourths of the internally displaced are either women (28 per cent) or children (48 per cent).

“Ninety per cent of those who die violent deaths are men, leaving huge numbers of widows and orphans without support,” according to a special Iraq edition of Forced Migration Review, a publication of the Refugee Studies Centre of the University of Oxford (fmreview.org/Iraq).

“In the short term, there appears to be no way to address the protection vacuum in much of Iraq. Multinational Force Iraq and the Iraqi Security Forces are incapable of protecting civilians.”

Prostitution is on the rise. “Young girls are increasingly obliged to contribute to family incomes. Consequently, the incidence of sexual and gender-based violence is on the rise,” say Jose Riera and Andrew Harper, of UNHCR (unhcr.org/iraq). “Child labour and other means of exploitation are increasingly reported.”

UNICEF estimates that 4.5 million children are under-nourished. One child in 10 is under-weight. One in five is short for their age. In some areas, up to 90 per cent of children are not in school.

This is one reality show you won’t see on your television.

Haroon Siddiqui, the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus, appears Thursday and Sunday. Email: hsiddiq@thestar.ca

November 2, 2007, WASHINGTON, DC (AP) – Michael Mukasey drew closer to becoming attorney general Friday after two key Senate Democrats said they would vote for him despite his refusal to define an interrogation technique that stimulates drowning as torture.  [VCS Note: If Mukasey is confirmed, the world will want to know if he will name a special prosecutor to investigate President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney and their use of illegal torture.]

The decision by Sens. Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein came shortly after the chairman of the committee, Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., announced he would vote against Mukasey, a former federal judge.

“This is an extremely difficult decision,” Schumer said in a statement, adding that Mukasey “is not my ideal choice.”

In announcing her support for Mukasey, Feinstein, D-Calif., said “first and foremost, Michael Mukasey is not Alberto Gonzales,” referring to the former attorney general who resigned in September after months of questions about his honesty.

Including Leahy, five of the Judiciary Committee’s 10 Democrats had said they would vote against Mukasey’s confirmation after the nominee earlier this week refused to say that waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, is torture and therefore illegal.

But with nine Republicans on the panel, Schumer’s and Feinstein’s support for Mukasey virtually guarantees that a majority of the committee will recommend his confirmation when it votes on it next Tuesday.

Leaders in both parties have said they expect Mukasey to get at least 70 votes when the full, 100-member Senate votes on his confirmation. But Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had said he would not bring it up for a vote without Judiciary Committee action first.

Schumer’s announcement followed a private meeting Friday with Mukasey to discuss waterboarding.

“I deeply oppose it,” Schumer said of waterboarding. “Unfortunately, this nominee, indeed any proposed by President Bush, will not agree with this. I am, however, confident that this nominee would enforce a law that bans waterboarding.”

Schumer, who was Mukasey’s chief Democratic sponsor, said the retired judge told him that if Congress passes a law banning waterboarding “the president would have absolutely no legal authority to ignore such a law.” Schumer said Mukasey said he would enforce any congressional ban the controversial interrogation method.

Torture is considered a war crime by the international community and waterboarding has been banned by the U.S. military, but CIA interrogators are believed to have used the technique on terror detainees as recently as a few years ago.

Mukasey has called waterboarding personally “repugnant,” and in a letter to senators this week said he did not know enough about how it has been used to define it as torture. He also said he thought it would be irresponsible to discuss it since doing so could make interrogators and other government officials vulnerable to lawsuits.

Early Friday, President Bush renewed his plea for Mukasey’s confirmation.

“He’s a good man. He’s a fair man. He’s an independent man, and he’s plenty qualified to be attorney general,” Bush said of Mukasey, just after landing in Columbia, S.C., on his way to a political fundraiser and to give a speech at Fort Jackson.

On Thursday, Bush had warned that the Justice Department would go without a leader in a time of war if Democrats thwarted Mukasey.

Bush also said that if the Judiciary Committee were to block Mukasey because of his noncommittal stance on the legality of waterboarding, it would set a new standard for confirmation that could not be met by any responsible nominee for attorney general.

Overloading is the reason for denying services. Critics say it’s a national crisis.

The Associated Press, October 29, 2007, Saint Petersburg, Florida – Two Tampa Bay veterans hospitals turn away critically ill patients for huge chunks of the year because of an overloaded veterans’ health-care system.

James A. Haley VA Medical Center in Tampa and Bay Pines VA Medical Center in St. Petersburg are the nation’s busiest and fourth-busiest Veterans Affairs hospitals, respectively.

Haley has been on “divert” status for critical patients 27 percent of the time since Jan. 1, 2006, or the equivalent of about 170 days, VA figures reviewed by the St. Petersburg Times show. The hospital diverts all patients regardless of condition 16 percent of the time.

Since 2000, Bay Pines has diverted patients far more frequently than any other hospital in Pinellas County. Last year, it diverted veterans during 1,150 hours, about 48 days, or 13 percent of the time, Pinellas paramedic records show.

“There’s no intent to deny veterans care,” said Dr. George Van Buskirk, chief of staff at Bay Pines. “I like to think we’re as compassionate as possible. We’d rather send them out to a place that can take care of them than have them languish on a gurney in the hallway.”

But some question the VA’s resources.

“The VA has never dealt with its capacity issues seriously,” said Bill Geden, district director in west-central Florida for the Blinded Veterans Association. “They’re underfunded, undermanned and overloaded.”

In one instance, Bay Pines said it “made a rare mistake” last June when it turned away a nonveteran who suffered a fatal heart attack 200 feet from its emergency room.

The VA says it cannot assess how the Florida hospitals’ diversion rates compare to others nationally. But officials at both Haley and Bay Pines say they are making it a priority to improve performance.

In 2003, for example, Bay Pines diverted paramedics 2,464 hours or 28 percent of the time. Similar statistics were posted in 2004.

This year, Bay Pines is diverting about 7 percent of the time, about 500 hours so far.

Haley’s diversion numbers have not improved in recent years, though it also has expanded its emergency care and hired three “bed czars.”

Meanwhile, the number of patients treated at both hospitals is on the rise.

“It’s like putting your finger in a dike, actually,” said Dr. Edward Cutolo, Haley’s chief of staff.

Bay Pines treated 49,800 patients in 2000 and tallied 516,000 outpatient visits. In 2006, the numbers increased to 95,000 and 1.1 million.

“It doesn’t seem right that a veterans hospital can ever be filled up,” said Dick Shockey, 77, an Army veteran who was turned away from Bay Pines three years ago. “But veterans end up with a big surprise.”

The problem is not specific to VA hospitals.

About 36 percent of all hospitals reported going on diversion, a survey by the American Hospital Association revealed.

“It’s a crisis across America, not just the VA,” said Michael O’Rourke, assistant director of veterans health policy at the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “There’s a shortage of emergency room physicians, and there’s a shortage of beds, and there’s a shortage of nursing staff.”

Senator Biden Issues Statement on Mukasey Nomination Following Refusal to Unequivocally State that Waterboarding is Torture. Senator Biden to Oppose Mukasey Nomination, and Biden Reiterates Call on Colleagues to Support his Legislation Banning Waterboarding and Other Forms of Torture.

October 30, 2007, Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-DE) issued the following statement today after Judge Michael Mukasey responded to a request for clarification regarding his evasive testimony on waterboarding:
 
“I am disappointed by Judge Mukasey’s response.  He was asked a direct question on the specifics of waterboarding and he refused to unequivocally state that this practice is torture.  For this reason, I shall oppose his nomination to be the United States Attorney General.
 
“Waterboarding is by any standard, torture.  I called on my colleagues today to support legislation I introduced this summer banning waterboarding and other forms of torture.  When we use torture or other cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees, we diminish our ability to argue that the same techniques should not be used against our own troops.  We need to send a clear message that torture, inhumane, and degrading treatment of detainees is unacceptable and is not permitted by U.S. law.  Period.  We cannot have a United States Attorney General who will equivocate and dissemble on this matter.  Too much is at stake.”

###

November 1, 2007 – I’m going to make this short and sweet. Dr. James Peake (Lt. Gen. Ret.) should NOT be confirmed as the new VA Secretary.  Just like the candied-apples that get handed out at Halloween, we have a pretty, sweet exterior…but, inside we have a rotten apple.

Dr. Peake is being sold to the American people as a doctor and decorated military veteran.  While he is both, these do not qualify him to be VA Secretary.  Listed below are five reasons Dr. Peake should NOT be confirmed.

1.  Peake has no first-hand experience with the VA system.  He is an outsider who will have to spend the next year trying to get up to speed.  Veterans can’t afford such an unqualified person at the helm of the VA.

2.  Peake, while Surgeon General of the Army (2000-2004), spoke often of his “efficiency” and his “financial objectives.”  Basically, Peake is a number-crunching budget-slasher.  VA needs someone to lobby for adequate funding…not someone who wrote this about his job at the Army:  “…our duty to be responsible stewards of the taxpayers’ resources.”

3.  Peake’s “financial objectives” mentioned above were well-realized as budgets for Walter Reed were kept low and jobs were outsourced.  We saw what happened at Walter Reed.  And, the problems there were known in 2004 as VA and DoD talked with patients about the problems.  Those reports were buried.  Peake cannot hide from these facts.

4.  Peake, as he mentioned in his acceptance address, will push for full implementation of the Dole-Shalala Commission recommendations.  If the Dole-Shalala legislation is passed, the VA disability compensation system will be changed forever.  As Randy Reese of the DAV wrote, “At any point in time, disabled veterans would receive three types of variable payments. This is a recipe for abandoning the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”  And, it is a recipe to move backward and include all veterans in this unfair system.

5.  Peake is currently chief medical director and chief operating officer of QTC Management Inc., which provides contract medical exams for the VA and the military.  The Chairman of the QTC board is former VA Secretary Anthony Principi.  QTC has garnered a multi-year VA contract that could be worth well over a billion dollars.  This is as close as you can get to a conflict of interest.  It’s just another example of the good ol’ boy revolving door in Washington.  In simple terms:  Those that have, get.

I encourage all veterans to pass this information along and to contact Members of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and strongly urge that Dr. James Peake NOT be confirmed as Secretary of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Contact the Senate Committee here: http://www.veterans.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?pageid=1

Larry Scott