Veterans for Common Sense

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Raids that resulted in the arrests of six alleged militia members and the seizure of hundreds of hand grenades and bullets were “much ado about nothing,” a defense lawyer said Friday.

A cache of ammunition that was confiscated _ 2,500 rounds _ wasn’t that large, and the scores of homemade hand grenades that agents seized could be made with powder from fireworks and components readily available in military surplus stores, attorney Scott Boudreaux said.

Even prosecutors say the ragtag group called the Alabama Free Militia had no intended target and was simply stockpiling munitions, said Boudreaux, who plans to meet this weekend with his client, Raymond Kirk Dillard, 46, of Collinsville, a supposed major in the paramilitary group.

“Frankly, I don’t think that’s a big deal,” said Boudreaux. “It seems to be much ado about nothing.”

Jim Cavanaugh, regional director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the raids eliminated a huge threat. The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks extremist organizations, said the weapons seizure was the largest in the South in years.

“The arrests and the seizure of such an enormous arsenal are a compelling reminder that extremist groups continue to operate in otherwise peaceful communities filled with law-abiding citizens,” said Bill Nigut of Atlanta, ADL regional director.

Five men were jailed without bond on federal charges of conspiring to make a firearm after the raids, conducted early Thursday in four Alabama counties. They included Dillard; Adam Lynn Cunningham, 41; Bonnell Hughes, 57; Randall Garrett Cole, 22; and James Ray McElroy, 20.

A sixth alleged member, 30-year-old Michael Wayne Bobo, was charged with being a drug user in possession of a firearm.

Don Colee, an attorney for Hughes, said all six men were due in court on Tuesday for a hearing where a federal judge will determine whether the government can keep them in custody.

Dillard lived in a small camper without electricity or running water in northeast Alabama, and neighbors said McElroy lived in a makeshift tent nearby. Bobo lived with his parents in an upscale subdivision in suburban Birmingham.

A court document indicates Dillard, unknowingly met with an ATF informant at a flea market in Collinsville about four months ago, told him he was organizing a militia and later accepted him into the group as a sergeant major.

The informant was at the home of Cole, an alleged militia lieutenant, about two months ago when he saw grenades, according to the document, a sworn statement by ATF agent Adam Nesmith. Investigators found more weapons as they monitored the group through the informant and with video and audio surveillance, Nesmith said.

During the raid, agents recovered 130 hand grenades, a grenade launcher, about 70 hand grenades rigged to be fired from a rifle, a machine gun, a short-barrel shotgun, 2,500 rounds of ammunition, explosives components, stolen fireworks and other items.

U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said the fireworks used to make the grenades were commercial grade, not the type sold in retail stores in Alabama.

“Even to possess these fireworks without a license is a felony in Alabama,” she said.

January 2, 1997 — Six months after the Pentagon’s momentous announcement that American troops may have been exposed to clouds of nerve gas and other Iraqi chemical weapons shortly after the Persian Gulf war, no one yet knows the cause of the chronic health problems reported by tens of thousands of gulf war veterans.

Some of the illnesses may be the result of exposure to chemical weapons, as many gulf war veterans insist. Other veterans almost certainly suffer from the physical aftereffects of wartime stress, a phenomenon seen after other wars, or from exposure to a number of other chemicals, including pesticides, smoke from oil-well fires or the experimental drugs that were given to the troops to protect them from nerve gas.

Yet, even if the medical mystery is never solved, this much has become painfully clear to many of the 700,000 men and women who served in the brief but intense war against Iraq and its President, Saddam Hussein, in 1991: The files of the Defense Department and other Government agencies held extensive evidence suggesting that American soldiers had been exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons in the war, even as the Government assured the veterans and the public that no such evidence existed.

After years of denials, the Pentagon now acknowledges that more than 20,000 troops may have been exposed when a battalion of American combat engineers blew up the Kamisiyah ammunition depot in the southern Iraqi desert in March 1991.

Almost daily since that announcement last June, the Government has been confronted with new disclosures on the issue — about the thousands of chemical-detection alarms that sounded throughout the war, about the eagerness of American commanders to dismiss what soldiers considered to be valid chemical detections, about the callousness that many veterans faced when they sought medical care after the war.

While the relationship between these episodes and the veterans’ health problems remains unclear, the resulting credibility crisis from so many years of denial has only added to the misery of gulf war veterans whose health has faltered since the war.

Many of them are now left with the suspicion that military commanders cared more about the perception of the war as a military triumph than about getting to the bottom of the health problems reported by those who were sent to fight. Many ailing gulf war veterans are unwilling at this point to accept any explanation from the Pentagon.

The Government’s denials may also have had a direct effect on the way in which veterans’ health problems were addressed.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, which is ultimately responsible for the medical care of ailing gulf war veterans, has said that it held off for years on any major research on the health effects of low-level exposure to nerve gas and other chemical weapons because of the Defense Department’s assertions that there was no evidence of exposures.

The Pentagon Position: Following a Policy Of ‘The Three No’s’

James Turner, an investigator for a special White House panel that has studied the issue, described the Pentagon’s public policy for most of the last five years as ”the three no’s: there was no use, there was no exposure, there was no presence” of chemical weapons.

It was a mindset that apparently took hold at the highest levels of the Government. In his Senate confirmation hearings last year as Director of Central Intelligence, John M. Deutch, who had been the Pentagon’s chief investigator on gulf war illnesses, said he believed that ”at present we have no compelling evidence of chemical or biological use in the gulf war — presence or use.”

In May 1994, three Cabinet officials — The Secretary of Defense, William J. Perry; the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Jesse Brown, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala — signed a joint letter to the Senate in which they said that ”there is no classified information that would indicate any exposures to or detections of chemical or biological agents.”

Mr. Deutch said in a recent interview that his testimony was based on the best information available to him at the time. But he acknowledged that in light of the evidence about the Kamisiyah depot, it was ”understandable that people are skeptical” about the Pentagon’s motives.

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the American-led alliance in the gulf war, said that while he had no information during the war to suggest that American troops had been exposed to chemical weapons, he considered the Pentagon’s handling of the issue in the first years after the war ”almost scandalous.”

A review of thousands of Government documents and hundreds of interviews with Government officials, scientists, doctors and veterans’ advocates undermines the Pentagon’s claims since the war that it had aggressively investigated the causes of the illnesses reported by gulf war veterans.

The Pentagon has insisted that its earlier errors in public pronouncements were the result of incomplete, inadequate information. Secretary Perry said in December that any perception that the Defense Department had tried to withhold information on the issue was ”dead wrong.”

The denials began early. Only hours after American ground troops poured across the sandy border from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait at the start of the ground war, General Schwarzkopf stepped from his military command bunker in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh on Feb. 24, 1991, to announce that he was ”delighted” with its progress.

The Initial Reaction: Dismissing Reports Of Chemical Weapons

The fear that the Iraqis would retaliate by using deadly chemical and biological weapons seemed to be unfounded. ”We’ve had some initial reports of chemical-biological weapons — chemical weapons — but those reports to date as far as we’re concerned have been bogus,” he said. ”There have been no reported chemical weapons used.”

The evidence gathered to date shows that in the early hours of the ground war, General Schwarzkopf had no proof that chemical or biological weapons had been released on the battlefield. Yet, over the next several hours — and days and months and years — evidence arrived at the Pentagon suggesting that the initial judgments were wrong.

Even as General Schwarzkopf was meeting with reporters in Riyadh, American marines stationed 300 miles north along the Kuwait-Saudi border had begun to detect nerve gas and mustard agent using the most sophisticated chemical-detection equipment in the American military — the Fox vehicle, a mobile chemical laboratory jammed with computerized detection equipment.

Gunnery Sgt. George J. Grass, a chemical-detection specialist, told Congress in December that his vehicle detected chemical weapons repeatedly in Kuwait in the first days of the ground war. Yet, all of his reports, like those of other chemical specialists, were dismissed by his commanders. Sergeant Grass said he had talked to several other Fox vehicle operators since the war ”and every one of them has verbally acknowledged the positive identification of chemical weapons in their area of operation.”

(Pentagon officials say that while the Fox vehicles can produce false alarms, especially when chemicals are detected in the air instead of on the ground, they are now studying all of the detections to determine if they were in fact valid.)

The Americans were not alone in detecting chemicals. During the earlier air war against Iraq, Czech and French soldiers in the American-led alliance said they had detected chemical weapons in northern Saudi Arabia. On Feb. 3, 1991, a French military spokesman, Gen. Raymond Germanos, said low levels of nerve gas and other chemical agents had been reported ”a little bit everywhere” after the relentless bombing.

The ground war was over in 100 hours. As American soldiers overran areas of the southern Iraqi desert, they were under orders to destroy Iraqi military equipment and ammunition sites.

An early, important target was the Kamisiyah ammunition depot, about 100 miles northwest of Kuwait. The depot was vast, with concrete bunkers spread across almost 20 square miles of desert.

Although the Pentagon has said the bunkers were inspected for chemical weapons, members of the 37th Engineer Battalion, the unit responsible for the demolition, said there was no time, equipment or expertise for a thorough search.

”How would we really know what’s inside those bunkers?” asked James R. Riggins, a retired major who was the executive officer of the 37th. ”We’re obviously not chemical-weapons specialists.” As the detonations began on March 4, the chemical alarms began to sound and soldiers pulled on their rubberized chemical warfare suits.

Under the cease-fire that ended the war, United Nations weapons inspectors were allowed to visit Kamisiyah and other Iraqi weapons storage sites in search of evidence of chemical or biological weapons.

In the fall of 1991, only months after the war, they found evidence that chemical weapons had been stored at Kamisiyah. The Iraqis who had worked at the site acknowledged that shells filled with nerve gas had been stored there.

The inspectors then filed a series of public reports to the United Nations Security Council, outlining what they had found at Kamisiyah. The Pentagon has acknowledged that it received the reports but has said that they were overlooked in the flood of other intelligence data reaching the United States in the months after the war.

By late 1991, groups of gulf war veterans had begun showing up at hospitals run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, complaining of health problems that seemed unusual for men and women who had been in peak physical condition when they were sent to the gulf a year earlier.

Recent studies suggest that while gulf war veterans did not die and were not hospitalized at unusual rates in the first two years after the war, they did report health problems, including digestive problems, chronic fatigue and pains in the joints, at rates far higher than troops who were not deployed to the gulf.

Donald W. Riegle Jr., then a Democratic Senator from Michigan, heard from several ailing Michigan veterans and agreed to begin an investigation of gulf war illnesses in 1993 under the auspices of the Senate Banking Committee, of which he was chairman. The committee had some jurisdiction over the issue because there were questions about American export laws and whether American companies had shipped chemical or biological agents to Iraq.

The Senate Inquiry: Trying to Track Down Some Elusive Data

The inquiry began with a request for all Pentagon documents relating to the ”detection of, or investigations into, the detection of chemical agents, biological agents or radiological agents” during the gulf war.

The letter, dated March 16, 1994, and signed by Mr. Riegle, asked specifically for copies of the combat logs that had been maintained during the war in the headquarters compound of the United States Central Command, the element of the Defense Department that oversaw the war under the direction of General Schwarzkopf.

The response came on April 15, 1994, in a letter from Stephen W. Preston, the Pentagon’s acting general counsel. Mr. Preston said that the Central Command had told him that the logs did not exist.

”Central Command has conducted a search and has identified no documents that meet this description,” he wrote. ”If you provide a more specific description of the documents that this category is intended to cover, I will ask Central Command to repeat the search.”

James J. Tuite 3d, the Banking Committee’s lead investigator, said that in subsequent telephone conversations with the Pentagon he made it clear that the committee wanted a new search, and that it wanted any logs that recorded chemical or biological detections. ”They understood exactly what we wanted,” he said. But the logs were never made available to the committee.

In a joint letter to Mr. Riegle dated May 4, 1994, Secretary Perry, Secretary Brown and Secretary Shalala said they were ”committed to a full and accurate resolution of the issues surrounding the health problems experienced by the men and women who served in the Persian Gulf war.”

But they insisted that ”there is no classified information that would indicate any exposures to or detections of chemical or biological weapons agents” — an assertion that has since been shown to be false.

There were in fact detailed chemical-detection logs at Central Command, and parts of them were eventually made public last year, initially to a veterans group, Gulf War Veterans of Georgia, under a Freedom of Information Act request.  [Note: The request was made by Paul Sullivan, the president of the group in 1994 and 1995.]

Most of the pages of the log were missing, however, including the entries for the eight-day period in March 1991 in which the Kamisiyah depot was blown up. The Pentagon said in December that a search had failed to turn up the missing portions. It had no explanation for their disappearance.

The logs that have been made public show that the Central Command received dozens of reports of chemical detections throughout the war, including reports from the Czech soldiers whose detections were later found by the Pentagon to be valid. During the war, however, the reports were routinely dismissed as false alarms.

Mr. Preston, who now works at the Justice Department, said in an interview that he denied the existence of the logs in his letter to the Senate because this ”was the information that was made available to me” from Central Command. ”I don’t have reason to believe that anyone was deliberately withholding any documents or information,” he said.

The Consequences: Conflicting Testimony And Delayed Research

By early 1994, at least a handful of senior Pentagon officials had begun to change their minds.

In a letter to the Surgeon General dated Jan. 18, 1994, Maj. Gen. Ronald Blanck, director of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, wrote that after meetings with military leaders in the Czech Republic, France and the Middle East, he was convinced that ”clearly, chemical warfare agents were detected and confirmed at low levels” during the war. [This document was also obtained by Sullivan and the Gulf War Veterans of Georgia using FOIA.] 

”The two issues that arise from this are: What was the origin of such agents, and did the agents contribute to the illness described by a small number of United States veterans of the Persian Gulf,” he wrote. ”The answer to the first question has political and military significance but little medical relevance. Of far greater importance to military medicine and to the veterans is the answer to the second question.”

But his information apparently did not reach others in the Pentagon. On May 25, 1994, Mr. Riegle, frustrated by his inability to get important documents from the Pentagon, called a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee to take sworn testimony from officials of the Defense Department.

The witnesses included Edwin Dorn, Under Secretary of Defense for personnel, and Theodore M. Prociv, deputy assistant to Secretary Perry for chemical and biological weapons. In their testimony, the two officials insisted that they knew of no evidence in the Government’s files to suggest that Americans had been exposed to chemical or biological weapons during the war.

”I can say that I do not believe that any chemical agents entered the theater of operations and exposed any of our soldiers,” Mr. Prociv testified. Reminded by Mr. Riegle that he was under oath ”with your professional reputation on the line,” Mr. Prociv said again, ”I do not understand how any of our veterans could have been exposed.”

Mr. Dorn said that chemical-detection equipment had been ”strategically located, and although many detectors alarmed, there were no confirmed detections of any chemical or biological agents at any time during the conflict.” He said in his prepared statement that all of the Iraqis’ chemical weapons and related equipment ”were found stored at locations a great distance from the Kuwait theater of operations.”

But in fact, the Pentagon has made public evidence showing that there were stores of weapons in at least two sites in Iraq within the Kuwait theater of operations, or K.T.O., which included Kuwait and much of southern Iraq. Two former chemical-weapons specialists who operated Fox vehicles testified before Congress in December that they told their commanders that chemical weapons had been found in Kuwait itself.

Mr. Dorn had to be corrected later in the same hearing when a third witness, John Kriese, an analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency, acknowledged under heated questioning that Mr. Dorn’s testimony was wrong. ”I thought we had that fixed to be stricken from the draft testimony,” he said. ”It is not correct to say that all munitions were found far from the K.T.O.”

Mr. Dorn, Mr. Prociv and Mr. Kriese declined to be interviewed for this article. Mr. Riegle, who has since retired from the Senate, said it was obvious that the Pentagon had tried to hide the truth from Congress. ”This is such a remarkable abdication of responsibility after the fact that it takes your breath away,” he said.

The Pentagon’s repeated public assurances after the war that it had no evidence of chemical exposures held up research that might have provided gulf war veterans with at least an explanation of what was responsible for their health problems.

The Department of Veterans Affairs set up a special registry and testing program in 1992 for veterans who believed that their health had been damaged in the gulf.

But the department held off on research projects on the health effects of low doses of chemical weapons — research that began only this year. Dr. Susan Mather, a senior public health officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said that if the department had known earlier about the evidence of chemical exposures, ”I think it definitely would have made a difference in our research program.”

Veterans groups say that the Pentagon’s denials also affected the reception that ailing gulf war veterans received when they sought medical care at hospitals run by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

”Because doctors were told that chemicals had not been used, many veterans were sent straight to the psychiatric department,” said Paul Sullivan, a spokesman for Gulf War Veterans of Georgia.

A recent report by the General Accounting Office noted that as of July 1995, the Department of Veterans Affairs had denied 95 percent of the more than 4,100 claims it had processed from gulf war veterans who were seeking disability payments for undiagnosed war-related ailments. Said Mr. Sullivan: ”The doctors believed that the soldiers must be faking it.”

The following is a transcript of the Democratic Radio Address delivered by Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.) on Saturday April 28, 2007:

You can download the radio address by clicking here: http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v001/democ…adioAddress.mp3

“Good morning, this is Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army, retired.

“I am not now nor have I ever been a Democrat or a Republican. Thus, I do
not speak for the Democratic Party. I speak for myself, as a
non-partisan retired military officer who is a former Director of the
National Security Agency. I do so because Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of
the House of Representatives, asked me.

“In principle, I do not favor Congressional involvement in the execution of U.S. foreign and
military policy. I have seen its perverse effects in many cases. The
conflict in Iraq is different. Over the past couple of years, the
President has let it proceed on automatic pilot, making no corrections
in the face of accumulating evidence that his strategy is failing and
cannot be rescued.

“Thus, he lets the United States fly further and further into trouble, squandering its
influence, money, and blood, facilitating the gains of our enemies. The Congress is the only
mechanism we have to fill this vacuum in command judgment.

“To put this in a simple army metaphor, the Commander-in-Chief seems to
have gone AWOL, that is ‘absent without leave.’ He neither acts nor
talks as though he is in charge. Rather, he engages in tit-for-tat
games.

“Some in Congress on both sides of the aisle have
responded with their own tits-for-tats. These kinds of games, however,
are no longer helpful, much less amusing. They merely reflect the
absence of effective leadership in a crisis. And we are in a crisis.

“Most Americans suspect that something is fundamentally wrong with the
President’s management of the conflict in Iraq. And they are right.

“The challenge we face today is not how to win in Iraq; it is how to recover
from a strategic mistake: invading Iraq in the first place. The war
could never have served American interests.

“But it has served Iran’s interest by revenging Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in the
1980s and enhancing Iran’s influence within Iraq. It has also served al
Qaeda’s interests, providing a much better training ground than did
Afghanistan, allowing it to build its ranks far above the levels and
competence that otherwise would have been possible.

“We cannot ‘win’ a war that serves our enemies interests and not our own. Thus
continuing to pursue the illusion of victory in Iraq makes no sense. We
can now see that it never did.

“A wise commander in this situation normally revises his objectives and changes his strategy,
not just marginally, but radically. Nothing less today will limit the death
and destruction that the invasion of Iraq has unleashed.

“No effective new strategy can be devised for the United States until it
begins withdrawing its forces from Iraq. Only that step will break the
paralysis that now confronts us. Withdrawal is the pre-condition for
winning support from countries in Europe that have stood aside and
other major powers including India, China, Japan, Russia.

“It will also shock and change attitudes in Iran, Syria, and other
countries on Iraq’s borders, making them far more likely to take
seriously new U.S. approaches, not just to Iraq, but to restoring
regional stability and heading off the spreading chaos that our war has
caused.

“The bill that Congress approved this week, with bipartisan support,
setting schedules for withdrawal, provides the President an opportunity to
begin this kind of strategic shift, one that defines regional stability as the measure
of victory, not some impossible outcome.

“I hope the President seizes this moment for a basic change in course and signs the
bill the Congress has sent him.  I will respect him greatly for such a rare act of courage,
and so too, I suspect, will most Americans.

“This is retired General Odom. Thank you for listening.”

——-

General Odom has served as Director of the National Security Agency and Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army’s senior intelligence officer. In his address, General Odom will discuss why he believes President Bush should sign the conference report on the Iraq Accountability Act.

The LSJ’s recent front-page reporting that our returning service personnel were receiving excellent care at our Veterans Administration facilities in Michigan is accurate that care and treatment in our larger metropolitan Veterans facilities, while a problem in the past, is not a problem at this time.

The article however failed to report that one of the reasons for this improvement is the watchdog approach of our nation’s veterans organizations. Suffice it to say, there is not a major problem in care and treatment at our newer, upgraded VA hospitals around the country.

We must remember, however, that not all returning wounded have access to these larger facilities and some must seek service at our Veterans Administration clinics located around the country. Many of these clinics have been reported to be inadequate in structural facilities, medical staff and care-givers.

The other and most important point left out of this article is that while the returning service member is still on the active roles of the Department of Defense, he/she will not encounter any problem in service or treatment at a Veterans Administration facility – because the Department of Defense will pay the bill.

After discharge is when the problems will begin. This is further supported by the backlog of 400,000 cases nationwide, currently awaiting action in the Veterans Administration, from Korea and Vietnam.

Daniel Cooper, an undersecretary of veterans affairs for benefits, confirmed this figure and it was reported in Newsweek magazine in an article, “Failing our wounded.”

A little known fact of this War on Terror is that for every member of our armed forces killed in action, there are 16 wounded who return to their homes in need of continuing treatment. Our ability to provide quick and immediate response and care on the battlefield, has produced a huge need for continuing care here at home.

Therefore, the question must be asked: Are we ready to provide for the lifelong needs these men and women will have? A review of our Veterans Administration clinics will show that we are not.

Out of 631,000 returning service members from both theaters of operation, 73,000 of them have been determined to have some symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a condition that will require psychological treatment. Those same clinics mentioned earlier, which would be required to treat them, do not have that ability or medical staff on board.

A large number of our volunteer military members come from small-town America and must travel great distances to seek help for those medical problems encountered during their service. We are concerned they will become a victim of failed services. We must remember this is a quality of life issue they will face.

What is the answer to this ever-growing problem? It can be summed up in one word: money.

Where will it come from can be answered in two words: America’s citizens.

It is the cost we must pay for our policies right or wrong regardless of party affiliations.

Douglas Williams is legislative director for the Marine Corps League’s Department of Michigan.

A changed news culture has let several important investigative stories slip through the cracks.

In an e-mail uncovered and released by the House Judiciary Committee last month, Tim Griffin, once Karl Rove’s right-hand man, gloated that “no [U.S.] national press picked up” a BBC Television story reporting that the Rove team had developed an elaborate scheme to challenge the votes of thousands of African Americans in the 2004 election.

Griffin wasn’t exactly right. The Los Angeles Times did run a follow-up article a few days later in which it reported the findings. But he was essentially right. Most of the major U.S. newspapers and the vast majority of television news programs ignored the story even though it came at a critical moment just weeks before the election.

According to Griffin (who has since been dispatched to Arkansas to replace one of the U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department), the mainstream media rejected the story because it was wrong.

“That guy is a British reporter who accepted some false allegations and made a story up,” he said.

Let’s get one fact straight, Mr. Griffin. “That guy” is not a British reporter. I am an American living abroad, putting investigative reports on the air from London for the British Broadcasting Corp.

I’m not going to argue with Rove’s minions about the validity of our reporting, which led the news in Britain. But I can tell you this: To the extent that it was ignored in the United States, it wasn’t because the report was false. It was because it was complicated and murky and because it required a lot of time and reporting to get to the bottom of it. In fact, not one U.S. newsperson even bothered to ask me or the BBC for the data and research we had painstakingly done in our effort to demonstrate the existence of the scheme.

The truth is, I knew that a story like this one would never be reported in my own country. Because investigative reporting — the kind Jack Anderson used to do regularly and which was carried in hundreds of papers across the country, the kind of muckraking, data-intensive work that takes time and money and ruffles feathers — is dying.

I’ve been through this before, too many times. Take this investigative report, also buried in the U.S.: Back in December 2000, I received two computer disks from the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Analysis of the data, plus documents that fell my way, indicated that Harris’ office had purged thousands of African Americans from Florida’s voter rolls as “felons.” Florida now admits that many of these voters were not in fact felons. Nevertheless, the blacklisting helped cost Al Gore the White House.

I reported on the phony felon purge in Britain’s Guardian and Observer and on the BBC while Gore was still in the race, while the count was still on.

Yet the story of the Florida purge never appeared in the U.S. daily papers or on television. Until months later, that is, after the Supreme Court had decided the election, when it was picked up by the Washington Post and others.

U.S. papers delayed the story until the U.S. Civil Rights Commission issued a report saying our Guardian/BBC story was correct: Innocents lost their vote. At that point, protected by the official imprimatur, American editors felt it safe enough to venture out with the story. But by then, George W. Bush could read it from his chair in the Oval Office.

Again and again, I see this pattern repeated. Until there is some official investigation or allegation made by a politician, there is no story.

Or sometimes the media like to cover the controversy, not the substance, preferring an ambiguous and unsatisfying “he said, she said” report. Safe reporting, but not investigative.

I know some of the reasons why investigative reporting is on the decline. To begin with, investigations take time and money. A producer from “60 Minutes,” watching my team’s work on another voter purge list, said: “My God! You’d have to make hundreds of calls to make this case.” In America’s cash-short, instant-deadline world, there’s not much room for that.

Are there still aggressive, talented investigative reporters in the U.S.? There are hundreds. I’ll mention two: Seymour Hersh, formerly of the New York Times, and Robert Parry, formerly of the Associated Press, who uncovered the Iran-Contra scandal. The operative word here is “formerly.” Parry tells me that he can no longer do this kind of investigative work within the confines of a U.S. daily newsroom.

One of the biggest disincentives to doing investigative journalism is that it jeopardizes future access to politicians and corporate elite. During the I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial, the testimony of Judith Miller and other U.S. journalists about the confidences they were willing to keep in order to maintain access seemed to me sadly illuminating.

Expose the critters and the door is slammed. That’s not a price many American journalists are willing to pay.

It’s different in Britain. After the 2000 election, when Harris’ lawyer refused to respond to our evidence, my BBC producer made sure I chased him down the hall waving the damning documents. That’s one sure way to end “access.”

Reporters in Britain must adhere to extraordinarily strict standards of accuracy because there is no Bill of Rights, no “freedom of the press” to provide cover against lawsuits. Further, the British government fines reporters who make false accusations and jails others who reveal “official secrets.”

I’ve long argued that Britain needs a 1st Amendment right to press freedom. It could, of course, borrow ours. We don’t use it.

GREG PALAST is the author of “Armed Madhouse: From New Orleans to Baghdad — Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.”

FORT CARSON, Colo. (AP) — A soldier who blames his alleged misconduct on brain damage suffered before he was deployed to Iraq has demanded a court-martial.

Spc. Paul Thurman, 24, of Huntington Beach, Calif., rejected an Article 15 on Friday. Army spokeswoman Karen Linn confirmed Thurman rejected the so-called “nonjudicial punishment,” whose maximum penalties are limited to reduction in grade, loss of half a month’s pay for two months and extra duty or limits on his movements for up to 45 days.

Penalties under a court-martial could be much more severe, but would depend on what he is charged with and Army lawyers are still working on that.

Medical and other Army documents provided to The Associated Press by Thurman show that he suffered brain damage while undergoing Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, N.C. He was deployed despite the medical record, but ultimately was medevaced after a short tour in Iraq and returned to Fort Carson.

He claims he has been harassed since his return.

Stephen Robinson of Veterans for America, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group that lobbies for soldiers says he has encountered many cases similar to Thurman’s.

A letter from his commander, Capt. Anthony L. Leach, documented how his supervisor, platoon sergeant and co-workers noted Thurman’s performance decline because of his injuries. “Soldier’s conditions are not exaggerated in any way,” Leach’s letter said.

The Army has been faced with thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with head injuries. In some cases they have been diagnosed as brain damage, in others they are declared to be suffering from post-traumatic stress.

This post announced this week that it would soon begin testing brain scanning equipment to see if it can better identify a soldier’s medical problem.

LAS VEGAS (AP) – The Nevada parents of a former Marine accused Veterans Affairs officials of insensitivity and improper care for their son, who died this year of an apparent drug overdose.

Tony Bailey told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee on Wednesday that he and his wife, Mary Kaye Bailey, had trouble finding their son’s medical records at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Los Angeles and received a “total lack of sympathy” from hospital officials who handed them their son’s possessions in a garbage bag.

“I assumed that being a large VA facility, they would be best equipped and would have the best experience with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and related drug abuse issues,” Tony Bailey said. “I was wrong.”

The Baileys told their story at a Capitol Hill hearing focusing on VA shortcomings in treating Iraq war veterans with mental health problems.

Also testifying in Washington, D.C., were Randall and Ellen Omvig of Grundy Center, Iowa. Their son Joshua, a 22-year-old war veteran, shot himself with a handgun in December in front of his mother. They blame post-traumatic stress disorder for the suicide.

Ira Katz, deputy chief patient care services officer, told senators the VA was trying to improve mental health services in light of the veterans’ deaths.

“We are looking very carefully at our program, and we’re looking for lessons to be learned,” he said.

Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, the committee chairman, accused Veterans Affairs of failing to keep up with increased demand for mental health care for service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., a committee member, called Justin Bailey’s story “a terrible tragedy” and urged more VA action.

“It’s important to ensure that our nation’s veterans are treated with top-notch medical care and the respect and dignity they deserve,” Ensign said. “It’s critical that we conduct proper oversight so we can prevent similar occurrences in the future.”

Justin Bailey, a 1998 graduate of Las Vegas High School, was among the first Marines to serve in Iraq. He died of an apparent drug overdose Jan. 26 at age 27.

He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after he was discharged from the Marines in April 2004, and checked himself into the VA hospital in West Los Angeles last November.

Despite a history of prescription drug abuse, Justin was allowed to take a long list of medications unsupervised, his father told senators.

Over the past two years of his life, Justin Bailey was prescribed 27 different drugs, his father said. He said the day before Justin died, he was given five prescriptions in dosages of 14, 15 and 30 days.

“It doesn’t appear as if the drugs were monitored effectively, and in my opinion, he was given drugs and sent on his way instead of being properly diagnosed and treated,” Tony Bailey said.

Veterans Administration Secretary Jim Nicholson said during an April 11 appearance in Las Vegas that investigators are probing the circumstances of Justin’s death to form a plan to prevent similar situations.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., blasted the VA on Wednesday for “a lack of caring, a lack of concern, a lack of competence.

“We lost a young veteran for no apparent reason,” she said.

A House panel Thursday began sifting through a variety of bills to improve medical care for veterans, with access to treatment in rural areas among the top concerns addressed by the stack of proposals.

Dominating the hearing by the House Veterans’ Affairs Health Subcommittee were stories of rural veterans spending entire days routinely traveling hundreds of miles to the briefest of appointments, but veterans’ groups voiced ambivalence about how lawmakers would address the problem.

The subcommittee listened to more than half a dozen House members pitch their bills for improving veterans’ care, a number of which call for increased contracting by the Veterans Health Administration at the Department of Veterans Affairs with local providers to treat veterans who live in areas distant from VA facilities.

But some veterans’ lobbyists expressed fear that broader contracting to provide more timely and convenient treatment would undermine the VA’s system for directly providing care itself through its own hospitals and clinics.

Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Fla., made a pitch for her bill (HR 92) that would set standards for timely access to care. Veterans would have to be able to get appointments for primary care from the VA hospitals or clinics within 30 days. In certain instances, if the VA were unable to live up to that standard, it would have to contract for care with private providers.

Although the VA claims that almost all of its facilities comply with the 30-day standard 90 percent or more of the time, but Brown-Waite said many veterans wait much longer than that. “I guess it’s in dog years that they are counting it, because it’s not human days,” she said.

Rep. Solomon P. Ortiz, D-Texas, said that young veterans in his south Texas district face complex medical needs, yet the closest VA hospital is many hours away. A veteran spends five-and-a-half hours to get to the nearest VA hospital to get a 15-minute checkup and then has to spend another five-and-a-half hours getting back home, he said.

“Now we are beginning to see wounds that we have not seen before,” Ortiz said of the injuries sustained by U.S. solders from explosive devices in Iraq. Yet the federal government continues its longtime resistance to building a VA facility in his district, he said. “Young men went and fought a war thinking we were going to take care of their problems,” he said. The government can find money to fight a war, he said, “but for some reason we can’t find the money to keep the promises that we made” to care for them if they are injured or sick.

Ortiz is urging passage of a bill (HR 538) that would establish an in-patient VA facility in his district to serve the more than 100,000 veterans living there.

Overall, the VA has made much progress in providing more timely care, said Dennis M. Cullinan, legislative director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “A few years ago, there were over 300,000 veterans throughout the country who were waiting six months or more for primary health care, but VA has made great strides to reduce this and most initial appointments are being made” within 30 days, he said.

Cullinan said contracting for care in certain geographic where this is not the case raised concerns about what it would cost.“While it would greatly benefit veterans in areas with long waiting times, we must be mindful of it not eating into the health care budget for other locations.”

Adrian Atizado, legislative director of the Disabled American Veterans (DAV), expressed similar concerns about contracting. “The DAV is opposed to any initiative that would turn VA into a primary insurer rather than a provider of health care to veterans,” he said.

Rep. Michael H. Michaud, D-Maine, chairman of the subcommittee, was noncommittal about the bills, saying the hearing was just the first of many his panel would hold to consider legislation.

But Michaud also outlined some of his own thinking on the rural access issue, noting that he has prepared a draft proposal for discussion purposes that would establish mobile clinics to provide care in rural areas, create a special advisory committee on rural veterans to improve access to care and also create “centers of excellence” to carry out research on improving rural access to care.