Veterans for Common Sense

May 15, 2007 – The Defense Department began blocking access on its computers to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other Web sites yesterday, severing some of the most popular ties linking U.S. troops in combat areas to their far-flung relatives and friends, and depriving soldiers of a favorite diversion from the boredom of overseas duty.

The banned Web sites include some of the Internet’s most popular destinations for social networking and sharing photographs, videos and audio recordings. Soldiers and their families frequent the sites to exchange notes, swap pictures and share recorded messages — a form of digital communication that, along with e-mail, has largely replaced the much-anticipated mail call of previous wars.

Senior officers said they enacted the worldwide ban out of concern that the rapidly increasing use of these sites threatened to overwhelm the military’s private Internet network and risk the disclosure of combat-sensitive material.

“The idea behind it is to have the bandwidth available to mission-critical areas,” said Navy Lt. Denver Applehans, a spokesman for U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the task force that designed the restrictions.

In a memorandum to troops dated Friday, Gen. B.B. Bell, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, said the task force had noted “a significant increase in the use of DoD network resources tied up by individuals visiting certain recreational Internet sites,” he said. Bell added that the traffic poses “a significant operational security challenge.”

In computer rooms on bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, soldiers crowd around rows of monitors, lining up for a chance to glimpse the latest news from home or leave their distinctive boot print in cyberspace. Some postings on YouTube are grainy battle videos shot with small cameras recording the brilliant flare of roadside explosions and crackle of gunfire set to rock music. Others are more melancholy depictions of loss, showing struggling medics and fallen comrades. Entries on MySpace pages are often more personal, running from reflective to vulgar.

Mitchell Millican of Trafford, Ala., said he had relied on MySpace, a popular social networking site, to stay in touch with his son Pfc. Jonathan M. Millican until he was killed Jan. 20 in an attack on his compound in Karbala, Iraq. “If it wasn’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t have been able to talk to him three days before he died,” Millican said.

Under the policy, troops will still be allowed to access the sites from non-military computers. But few soldiers in combat areas carry private computers. They will continue to have access to the sites through Internet cafes that are not on the military computer network, officers said.

Though soldiers are already barred from posting classified material on public Web sites, these sites also offer an uncensored venue for airing homesickness, frustration with the war in Iraq and anger at the military. But a mid-level Army infantry officer who is headed back to Iraq stressed, “It’s a practical matter, not a civil rights matter.”

He explained he might have trouble if the network is dragged down by soldiers watching YouTube videos. But the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, added that access to the Web sites could be important for morale.

“I am pretty sure the point of MySpace is to hook up with chicks, and the Joes probably get a lot of mileage off being deployed, so I would be more hesitant to take that away,” he said.

Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, acknowledged that the military has legitimate concerns about broadband availability but said that the Pentagon could have rationed Web access rather than cut it off entirely.

“It is an unnecessary hardship on people who already have more hardships than they should have to deal with,” said Maltby, an Army veteran.

Julie Supan, a YouTube spokeswoman, said executives at her Web site wanted to meet Defense officials to discuss the restrictions.

“We certainly don’t want YouTube to be used to share sensitive security information or put anyone in harm’s way,” she said in a statement. “The vast majority of videos on YouTube posted by soldiers, their families and friends are personal messages, original songs, tributes and video letters.”

Executives at several of the affected Web sites said they had not been notified of the restrictions by Defense officials.

“It was definitely a surprise to us,” said Benjamin Sun, chief executive of BlackPlanet, a social networking site popular with African Americans. He said he plans to contact the Pentagon to learn more about the reasons behind the decision and address any concerns.

N. Mark Lam, chief executive of the radio-streaming site Live365, said he, too, had not been notified by Defense officials and planned to ask them why they chose to curtail access to some sites and not to dozens of others providing similar services. He acknowledged that his site requires a large amount of bandwidth.

The Defense Department barred access to the Web sites even as the military has stepped up its campaign to upload official videos to the Web, including on YouTube, to help portray U.S. combat efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan in a favorable light. In the past two months, for instance, the military has posted YouTube videos showing troops engaged in a gun battle in Baghdad, destroying chemical factories, attacking insurgent mortar positions and rescuing a kidnap victim.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said these offerings would not be affected by the restrictions because they aren’t posted through the military’s network. Though many U.S. forces would no longer be able to view these videos, Garver added, “They don’t need to. They live them every day.”

The Defense Department Web site policy comes one month after the Army issued a regulation barring soldiers from posting entries on blogs, participating in online discussion groups or sending personal e-mail unless the content is cleared by an superior officer. Within days of Wired magazine reporting that regulation, the Army issued a fact sheet clarifying that soldiers’ postings would not be subjected to review. But military bloggers continued to warn that the regulation could have a chilling effect on their writing.

Staff writers Ann Scott Tyson and Terissa Schor contributed to this report.

May 16, 2007 – After two days of closed-door meetings to investigate whether Fort Carson is adequately caring for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, commanders and their critics walked away satisfied Tuesday.

Army leaders said they picked up valuable tips and were able to showcase their good works during the congressional fact-finding trip. Veterans advocates said they’re satisfied now that the Army is listening to their concerns.

The panel of Senate staffers spent most of its time in meetings with soldiers and family members who have complained their mental-health issues were mishandled or ignored by the Army.

The staffers will report back to their bosses, including three top Democrats who were represented, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Steve Robinson of Veterans For America said he had a private meeting with Maj. Gen. Jeffery W. Hammond, the 4th Infantry Division commander, and said things appear to be headed in the right direction.

The 4th ID headquarters will move to Fort Carson by 2010.

Lt. Col. David Johnson, a post spokesman, said he’s satisfied that top leaders got to showcase Fort Carson’s successes to the congressional crowd.

Johnson said Fort Carson commanders learned that more education of soldiers on the impacts of PTSD is necessary. Most of the complaints at the post stem from insensitivity from sergeants or junior officers toward troops with PTSD.

The post launched an education campaign this year, and Johnson said those efforts will be redoubled.

Robinson said he got assurances from Hammond that his group will have input into what soldiers are taught about the stress disorder.

Johnson said commanders also learned that they need to more closely track the medical conditions of their soldiers.

“By all means we’re not perfect,” Johnson said. “We have challenges ahead of us.”

Detroit police tell WXYZ they have arrested a suspect in the carjacking and beating a 91-year-old World War II veteran outside a store on Detroit’s west side. The news comes just hours after WXYZ aired shocking video of the attack.

ON CAM:

This story will make you mad and want to cry. We just hope someone out there can give this elderly victim some justice

REPORT:

This video may be hard to watch, but it’s even harder to believe that someone could beat a 91-year-old man, punching this World War II veteran 21 times.

(Mr. Sims) “He come up, he want a light for a cigarette. Just as I … he threw a punch at me.”

Days after the assault, 91-year-old Mr. Sims says the swelling has gone down quite a bit but the black and blue marks are clearly visible. Now he and his family hope Detroit police can catch the man who beat him.

It was last Friday at about 8:30 in the evening outside this west side party store.

The young stranger approached Mr. Sims, asked for a light and then began to beat him over and over again – and Mr. Sims couldn’t go anywhere. He was pinned in between his car door and another car.

(Mr. Sims) “I think we kinda’ wrestled around there. He punched again and again.”

What the man wanted from 91-year-old Sims was his car, a 2005 Chevy Malibu.

(Mr. Sims) “He grabbed my keys out of my hand and hopped in the car.”

A woman who appears to have been with the carjacker tries to get in the car and while a small crowd of people just stand by. The carjacker calmly drives away, leaving Mr. Sims beaten, battered and helpless.

(Mr. Sims) “They give me some painkiller, pills and I’ve been taking them.”

Sources say these are the two people Detroit police want to question. They were caught on store surveillance video minutes before the attack.

Witnesses say the male suspect stands about 5’ 9” tall with a slim build. He had braids in his hair and an earring in his left ear. He wore expensive Cartier glasses that we’re told were recovered by police.

(Mr. Sims) “Somewhere I grabbed him because I knocked his glasses off.”

Now the Sims family is hoping someone can help Detroit police find his attacker.

(Mr. Sims) “I think they should be put in jail and kept there for a number of years.”

ON CAM:

And the suspect could still be driving Mr. Sims 2005 Chevy Malibu. It’s a silver-gray four-door with a handicapped license plate and an Air Force sticker in the front window. Call Detroit police if you have any information.

May 13, 2007 – Progress by September.

That, in three words, is the latest mandate from some nervous Republicans to President Bush over the war in Iraq. As the Democratic-controlled House passed yet another war spending bill last week, and Mr. Bush promised yet another veto, some members of his own party went to the White House with a blunt warning: We’re with you now, but if there is no progress by September, all bets are off.

There’s just one problem. Nobody in Washington seems to agree on what progress actually means — or how, precisely, it might be measured.

After his surprise trip to Iraq last week, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked by Fox News if he saw signs of “decisive progress.” He responded by talking about Anbar Province, where Sunni tribal sheiks are turning against Al Qaeda, he said. Mr. Bush, speaking to the party faithful last week in Washington, offered his own evidence that things are looking better, even before all five brigades of his troop buildup are in place.

“Sectarian murders are down,” the president declared, though he neglected to mention that car bombings and deaths of American soldiers are up.

That is not enough for lawmakers, especially Republicans who are uneasy about how they can go back home and justify their support for an increasingly unpopular war. Congress is grappling with legislation that would prod the Iraqi government into meeting so-called political benchmarks, like passing an oil-revenue-sharing law and holding provincial elections. But some in Washington are grasping for a more complete and accurate way to quantify progress.

“No one knows how to define progress in such a mixed-up situation,” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia and a member of the subcommittee that overseas military spending. “We’re having trouble measuring it. Imagine building a house without a ruler.”

Mr. Kingston, who holds weekly breakfast meetings with the Republican “theme team,” a group of about 30 lawmakers, is trying. The star of last week’s session, held in the basement of the Capitol, was the deputy prime minister of Iraq, Barham Salih, a Kurd. But equally important to Mr. Kingston was the other guest: Jason Campbell, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who is a co-author of something called the Iraq Index.

The Iraq Index is a huge compilation of data tracking life in Iraq — everything from the monthly car-bomb rate to how many foreign nationals are kidnapped to how many Iraqis have electricity and Internet access. It is long on numbers and short on analysis, though the latest report, dated April 30, includes a brief, and somewhat gloomy, summation in which the authors write that “on balance, the picture in Iraq has some signs of hope, but continues to present more grounds for worry than for confidence.”

Mr. Kingston has been circulating the index on both sides of the aisle and has asked its authors to winnow down the indicators to a manageable number — say, fewer than a dozen — that could serve as a standard bipartisan metric. Given that Brookings is a left-leaning institution, he said, he hoped Democrats might sign on.

“It would be like the Dow Jones,” he said. “Nobody accuses the Dow Jones of being biased. It would be good information for all of us. And then you could say who’s winning and losing.”

So far, Republicans like Mr. Kingston are hanging with the president on the spending bill. They voted overwhelmingly against a measure, vetoed by Mr. Bush earlier this month, to set a timeline for troop withdrawal. But they must also worry about re-election in 2008 — a worry the president no longer has. Having already lost control of Congress, they can ill afford another election in which Iraq is the dominant issue. A standardized metric might give them a useful exit strategy.

But Michael O’Hanlon, the lead author of the Iraq Index, is skeptical. He says metrics are “important grist for a fact-based debate,” but history shows it is dangerous to rely on too few of them.

“Metrics were used in Vietnam, and we had the wrong ones, and in my opinion they did net harm to the debate,” Mr. O’Hanlon said, adding, “I’m afraid that Congressman Kingston is going to continue to be frustrated, because we can’t be exactly precise about which indicators are the conclusive ones.”

In any event, such an index would be politically unpalatable to the White House, which does not want to back itself into a corner by agreeing to someone else’s standard for progress. The White House says the only progress report that counts is the one from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new top commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the new ambassador, who are expected to testify on Capitol Hill in September.

The two are apparently trying to prepare. They have spent the last month in Iraq consulting with a team of independent advisers who have been asked to “think through the question of, Is the current strategy for waging war going well or not?” said Stephen Biddle, a defense policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and member of the team. Mr. Biddle could not talk about his work, he said, but he did fault the White House for not being more open with the public about its own idea of what constitutes progress.

“By being unbelievably vague about everything,” he said, “they’re making it very hard for congressmen and senators to go to their constituents and say, ‘Look, here’s why things are going better than you might imagine.’ ”

Some say measuring progress is simple: you will know it when you see it.

“I want to see life starting to come back,” said Senator Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, who has been generally supportive of the president. “I want to see people in markets. I want to see couples strolling down the street, folks sitting at outdoor cafes.”

Others, like Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who is facing a strong Democratic challenger next year, have their own specific ideas. Ms. Collins says she is looking for provincial elections, an oil law to be signed and put in place, and “a significant reduction in violence and attacks accompanied by a transfer of more and more authority to the Iraqi forces.”

Ms. Collins, like Mr. Bennett, says much will depend on General Petraeus’s progress report. But she acknowledges that one man’s progress may be another man’s failure.

“To me,” she said, “the difficult question is going to be if the analysis is mixed, and I suspect it may well be. And for me, a mixed report is not sufficient to continue to have an open-ended commitment of troops.”

Some Republicans are not waiting until the fall to re-evaluate. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee announced last week that while he would support funding the troops, he also intends to introduce legislation to put the bipartisan Iraq Study Group report into effect. The report sets a goal of withdrawing combat forces by March 2008, a timeline Mr. Bush explicitly rejected when he announced the troop buildup in January.

Mr. Alexander said he was simply trying to bring a divided country together. “I don’t see any way for us to maintain a long-term presence in Iraq,” he said, “without more bipartisan support.”

For Mr. Bush, then, the clock is ticking. Mr. Kingston says he expects the debate to “become a lot more democratic” in the next few months, as more Republicans grow queasy and defect.

In the meantime, he hopes to come up with some useful way of figuring out whether he and his colleagues should abandon their president in September, or remain supportive for a little while longer:

“I’ve heard three years of nearly happy-talk in testimony,” Mr. Kingston said. “We always seem to be about to be around this elusive corner, but we never get there.”

May 14, 2007 – Do most of us really know what war is? Did we ever see anyone get shot through the temple and fall dead at your feet?

Then a minute later, as one of your friends falls beside you, look down and see that his chin is blown off? You carry your friend, who is bleeding profusely, away from what is left of his face to an aid station. He is one of the lucky ones. He has made his payment for our freedom and is going home.

Another friend has his arm blown off; he doesn’t say much about it, though. His only concern is how he is going to work on his farm.

How many of us have seen the providence of God when a mortar shell lands beside your head but fails to go off?

I’m a World War II veteran. And, like FDR, I hate war; it should be avoided if possible. The price of war is high. I’ve seen it; I’ve felt it. I have scars both internal and external.

For the cause of that time, I answered, and for that cause I would answer again today.

The Iraq war is another matter, though. This war is based on mistakes made from its outset. The reasoning for the war evolved from weapons of mass destruction to liberation of the Iraqi people.

For liberation to be truthful, one must want to be liberated. The logic of the current administration is to say that if you aren’t for the war, you are against the troops.

What action would be better for our troops than to remove them from a war that was started from political mistakes?

Why should our troops pay for these mistakes? Let’s get our troops out now, and let the Iraqis earn their own liberty, as we did.

If you agree with this war and want to stay the course, the recruiting office is open and ready for business.

William Deel Jr. Locust Grove

May 10, 2007 – North Carolina VA hospital officials face more congressional scrutiny as part of a national probe into the federal agency’s executive bonuses.

The House Veterans’ Affairs Committee plans a hearing this month that will, in part, examine $335,000 paid to top N.C. managers during years they oversaw poor care.

“The message that sends out is that there’s no accountability,” said U.S. Rep. Bob Filner, the California Democrat who heads the committee. “What is the relationship between bonuses and reports of poor performance? We want to know why these were given out.”

The hearing’s broader focus will be top-ranked Veterans Affairs officials who collected bonuses shortly after the agency revealed it had seriously undercalculated its budget needs and would run short of money. Filner called for the hearing last week, saying the agency hadn’t taken into account the cost of caring for soldiers returning from current deployments.

“It concerns me that the same officials that miscalculated the needs of our veterans were awarded with significant bonuses,” he said.

N.C. members of the House and Senate last week asked the VA to explain the local bonuses, reported by the Observer. The payments, spanning 2000 to 2006, include rewards for executives at the Salisbury veterans hospital as VA officials investigated suspicious deaths. Regional managers in Durham also received bonuses.

And those regional awards came as the Asheville veterans hospital struggled with care problems and had to suspend its nursing home admissions after a patient died.

Last week also brought the broader look at VA bonuses.

U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, a Hawaii Democrat and chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, asked VA Secretary James Nicholson why officials were rewarded after the budget emergency. Akaka released a list of bonuses totaling $3.8 million, paid last year to 226 people.

“Just one year after VA’s notorious budget shortfall, when VA management was forced to request emergency funds based on a determination that the budget was short billions of dollars, several senior budget staff each received VA’s highest bonus award of $33,000,” Akaka said.

The N.C. bonuses ranged from $4,000 a year per person to more than $29,000.

Filner held a hearing last month after the Observer reported multiple accounts of poor care at the Salisbury VA hospital. He called the facility a “case study” for the need for tougher oversight nationwide.

“Once again, North Carolina is the one where we have the most paperwork — that’s where the documentation is the most clear,” he said of the bonus issues. “We want to … use your stuff to ask about how do you justify such things. I’d like to see the evaluations of the people you’re talking about.”

U.S. Reps. Mel Watt, a Charlotte Democrat, and Sue Myrick, a Charlotte Republican, have criticized the local bonuses. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole, a Republican and a Salisbury native, asked the VA for an explanation. Her Republican colleague, North Carolina’s Richard Burr told the Observer that the VA “has some tough questions to answer about the criteria and mechanisms used to award bonuses.”

The VA has said its Asheville and Salisbury hospitals made changes and improved care. They say bonuses are necessary to attract workers and compete with higher private-sector pay.

Filner said he didn’t rule out bonuses for deserving workers, but asked, “Are people being rewarded for the wrong reasons?”

February 1, 2005–Supporters and apologists for President G.W. Bush will often assail my assertion that the Bush administration has done more to dismantle constitutional protections of our liberties than any president in modern memory. It seems that these people believe that until federal Storm Troopers knock down the doors of their homes and drag them off to the gulags, they have lost no freedoms. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If history is any teacher, it instructs us in the incremental process that elitists use to implement their totalitarian agenda. The first step is to use an incessant, highly orchestrated propaganda. For all practical purposes, the major media in the United States is providing that propaganda. At the national level, there is hardly any investigative journalism going on. Instead, the national press corps has become little more than lazy lackeys for the White House.

The second step is to lay the foundation for totalitarianism by passing legislation that may later be used against the citizenry. And that is exactly what the Bush administration has very successfully accomplished. It very adroitly succeeded where the Clinton administration failed.

For example, most conservatives would be surprised to learn that the Patriot Act and Department of Homeland Security was the brainchild of one William Jefferson Clinton. However, a recalcitrant Republican Congress denied Clinton the opportunity to implement these plans. Of course, with the Republican, G.W. Bush, serving as President, that same Republican Congress was all too eager to pass these bills into law.

Whether or not individual Americans have been personally subjected to tyranny as a result of lost freedoms doesn’t change the fact that they have already lost these freedoms.
 
The third step is to demonize and marginalize anyone and everyone who opposes the government’s plans and ambitions. Such opponents are characterized as “unpatriotic,” “obstructionist,” “uncompassionate,” or even “ungodly.” Once again, the Bush minions have very skillfully done just that. Anyone who dares to oppose or even question Bush must be regarded as enemies of America or even as enemies of God.

Of course, the last step is to begin using the power and force of government to physically silence or remove those who are determined to require such treatment. And, as Germany’s National Socialists proved, by the time this happens, there is no one around who is capable of coming to the assistance of such people.

For those who are willing to objectively analyze Bush’s actions and policies, the truth is clearly seen: this President has systematically put in place laws, policies, and bureaucracies that can, are, and will continue to strip the American citizenry of the constitutional protections of their liberties.

Following are examples of freedoms which President Bush and his fellow Republicans in Congress have already expunged (as reported by the Associated Press):

FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION: Government may monitor religious and political institutions without suspecting criminal activity to assist terror investigations.

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records questions.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.

RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government may monitor federal prison jailhouse conversations between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.

FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government may search and seize Americans’ papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror investigation.

RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.

RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.

That good citizens are compliant and unconcerned regarding G.W. Bush’s propensity to trample constitutional freedoms bespeaks a great ignorance or a great apathy, or both.
 
These rights have already been lost! Whether individual Americans have been personally subjected to the resultant tyranny or not doesn’t change the fact that they have already lost these freedoms! This fact, alone, should be enough for any studious lover-of-liberty to be outraged.

That good citizens are compliant and unconcerned regarding G.W. Bush’s propensity to trample constitutional freedoms bespeaks a great ignorance or a great apathy, or both.

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© 2005 Chuck Baldwin. This article was originally circulated at chuckbaldwinlive.com and is republished in the Chronicle with permission of the author. The author, a minister who holds two doctorates of divinity, hosts a radio program called “Chuck Baldwin Live,’ whose broadcast area includes the Florida Panhandle and Southern Alabama. The program is described on its website as “conservative, Christian, pro-life, pro-family, and patriotic. We support constitutional government and the Bill of Rights. We hold fast to the principles and values expressed by the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence.” The author was the Constitution Party’s 2004 vice-presidential candidate on a ticket headed by Michael Peroutka of Millersville, Md., a graduate of Loyola College in Maryland and the University of Baltimore School of Law.

Chuck Baldwin may be reached at chuck@chuckbaldwinlive.com, or visit his website at chuckbaldwinlive.com.