Veterans for Common Sense

Never before have I felt such irk from a Cheney smirk — the one with which he confidently assured CBS’s Bob Schieffer on Sunday’s “Face the Nation” that the Democrats will continue to vote to fund the war without including serious restrictions.

Cheney referred approvingly to the fact that “Carl Levin, who’s chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has indicated that they definitely do want to pass funding for the troops.”

Cheney expressed confidence that the Democrats will “not leave America’s fighting forces in harm’s way without the resources they need to defend themselves.” And yes, the vice president went on to reassure viewers, against all evidence to the contrary: “We are making progress.”

The administration’s main objective could hardly be clearer, even to mainstream pundits allergic to spelling it out. By waving the flag of patriotism, the White House is confident it can continue to intimidate enough Democrats to get the only thing it really wants: enough money to stave off defeat in Iraq until President George W. Bush and Cheney are safely out of office. That, of course, also explains the foredoomed “surge” in troop strength.

But how is it that Cheney can enlist the likes of Carl Levin in a policy built on the backs of American troops? Based on recent casualty rates, some 1,500 American troops already “in harm’s way” will die, and several times that number will be wounded before Cheney and Bush leave office — not to mention the ever mounting casualties among Iraqis.

Is Cheney exaggerating the support he sees in Levin? Apparently not. The senior senator from Michigan seems ready to provide additional funding for the war, no matter what. On April 8, right after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he would cosponsor legislation cutting off all funding for combat troops after March 31, 2008, Levin undercut him by telling ABC’s “This Week”: “We’re not going to vote to cut the funding, period. … We’re not going to cut off funding for the troops. We shouldn’t cut off funding for the troops. … We’re going to vote for a bill that funds the troops, period. We’re going to fund the troops. We always have.”

Got that?

What would prompt Levin to undermine his own majority leader? Levin was challenged on that point last Sunday at the University of Michigan. He replied that cutting funding for the war is what Rush Limbaugh wants and would play into Bush’s hands. The Democrats would probably lose a battle over funding and end up looking “really bad,” added Levin.

Not very persuasive, senator — not when more and more are getting killed in Iraq every day.

Levin may be concerned about things other than looking bad. Those taking part in last month’s meeting of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington heard stern warnings from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni that America not show “weakness” on Iraq — warnings that a U.S. troop withdrawal would make the neighborhood far more dangerous for Israel.

Federal Election Commission records show that Levin has received more money from pro-Israel political action committees than any other senator. But, given his distinguished record, it would seem appropriate to give him the benefit of the doubt. It seems less likely that he is influenced by the money than by his penchant to see little or no daylight between what he perceives to be Israel’s interests and those of the United States.

This appears to be the kind of “passionate attachment” against which George Washington warned so strongly in his farewell address more than 200 years ago.

RAY McGOVERN was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is now on the steering group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Write to him in care of the Free Press Editorial Page, 600 W. Fort St., Detroit 48226 or oped@freepress.com.

Privatized medicine, by law, may replace Department of Veterans Affairs care only if the VA is not physically available for former service members who live in rural areas.

But if veterans are waiting in line for months for initial exams, are the VA facilities “physically available”?

“I think we’ve established that there is a hardship already,” Andy Behrman, chairman of the Rural Health Policy Board of the National Rural Health Association, told the House Veterans’ Affairs health subcommittee at a hearing Wednesday. “That’s why we’re here.”

With 44 percent of service members today coming from rural towns, the committee hoped to come up with some solutions for the thousands of veterans not getting the care they need. Many veterans struggle because there are no VA facilities in their areas, because they can’t afford the travel expenses to VA facilities, because there is a national crisis in getting mental and specialized health care professionals to work in rural areas, and because the VA system is so backed up that veterans can’t get the care they need when they need it.

“I’m worried that protecting the system isn’t protecting the vets,” said Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark.

Representatives of veterans’ groups at the hearing said more funding must go to VA facilities to keep standards of care, as well as expertise in veterans’ issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries, at the maximum level.

“It’s very important to make sure the quality of care as well as the continuum of care Veterans’ Affairs is known for remain intact,” said Adrian Atizado, assistant national legislative director for Disabled American Veterans.

Atizado also said initial contracts with private companies always look good, but when it’s time to renew those contracts three years later, the costs can go up substantially. The quick fix of privatized care can’t fix the system in the long run and will cost more, he said.

He recommended better funding for the VA, as well as mobile health care clinics to travel to veterans. He also recommended stronger connections with medical schools, and providing veterans with sufficient reimbursement when they do travel long distances for care.

In addition to Atizado’s input, Behrman recommended more contracts with Federally Qualified Community Health Centers in rural areas, more case managers for traumatic brain injuries, and targeted care for minority and female veterans.

Gerald Cross, acting principal deputy undersecretary for health in the Veterans Health Administration, said the VA is holding its own, and noted that 98.5 percent of veterans live within 90 minutes of a VA facility.

“VA’s comprehensive approach for providing care to veterans residing in rural areas has proven successful,” he said. “New technologies and better planning are allowing us to provide quality care in any location.”

He said tele-health allows patients to receive care by phone, and home-based health care have helped people who can’t travel. VA also has increased the number of community-based outpatient clinics by 717 since 1995, and 45 percent of them are in rural areas.

But Shannon Middleton, deputy director for health for the American Legion, said many of the CBOCs “are at or near capacity,” she said, “and many still do not provide adequate mental health services to veterans in need.”

Cross said the VA planned to add 2,000 veterans with PTSD to the telemedicine program by 2008. At that rate, it would take 30 years to reach all of the veterans returning with PTSD, said Rep. Michael Michaud, D-Maine.

“There are 218,000 vets in southern Nevada who have no health care facilities,” said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. “We will be taking care of their health care and mental health care needs for many years to come, and we can’t handle what we’ve got.”

Before the subcommittee had a chance to question Cross further about how the VA is addressing the problems, lawmakers had to adjourn the hearing to vote on other matters.

“We have to do better,” Michaud said as the hearing broke up. “I know VA is intending to do better.”

SOUTHERN PINES — The Department of Veterans Affairs hopes to improve mental-health care, reduce the wait for appointments and build more clinics and offices, a top official said Tuesday.

President Bush has proposed a budget to improve problems in the services the department offers, according to Patrick W. Dunne, the department’s assistant secretary for policy and planning.

Dunne spoke to members of the Sandhills Chapter of the Military Officers Association of America at the Belle Meade Retirement Resort in Southern Pines. About 75 people attended.

The retired admiral said Bush has requested $87 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Dunne said a large chunk of that money is allocated for medical care. He alluded to revelations of problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and to problems at VA Hospitals around the country, then said the department is trying to fix what went wrong.

“The VA can and will do better in the future,” he said. “One failure is unacceptable.”

Dunne, who has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mathematics, said part of his job is to use census data and other statistics to figure out where veterans live so the VA can determine where to build clinics and offices.

He said the VA sometimes struggles to link veterans with the services they need and said the department is planning to hire 100 patient advocates to help veterans navigate the system.

Ideally, he said, veterans would fill those jobs, “so that in essence, we would have veterans serving veterans.”

Dunne said the VA hopes to improve treatment for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, especially those who have suffered traumatic brain injuries.

He said VA medical providers soon will be trained in recognizing brain injuries, and said the department plans to screen all soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan for brain injuries.

He said the department is planning to move mental-health treatment into the VA’s primary care clinics, so that veterans can be treated for mental health problems at a primary care clinic.

“The fact is, VA is seeing more and more veterans with mental health syndromes,” he said.

Gary Geist, president of the Sandhills Chapter of the Military Officers Association of America, said he asked Dunne to speak at Tuesday’s luncheon because he thinks it is important that veterans learn about the services available to them.

He said he wanted to encourage members of the Sandhills Chapter to support local VA centers.

Dunne said the department is evaluating its programs and trying to fill gaps in service.

“We want to anticipate what’s coming in the future,” he said. “And be ready when it gets here.”

Staff writer Laura Arenschield can be reached at arenschieldl@fayobserver.com or 486-3572.

Over the past six months, American troops have died in Iraq at the highest rate since the war began, an indication that the conflict is becoming increasingly dangerous for U.S. forces even after more than four years of fighting.

From October 2006 through last month, 532 American soldiers were killed, the most during any six-month period of the war. March also marked the first time that the U.S. military suffered four straight months of 80 or more fatalities. April, with 58 service members killed through Monday, is on pace to be one of the deadliest months of the conflict for American forces.

Senior American military officials attribute much of the increase to the Baghdad security crackdown, now in its third month. But the rate of fatalities was increasing even before a more aggressive strategy began moving U.S. troops from heavily fortified bases into smaller neighborhood outposts throughout the capital, placing them at greater risk of roadside bombings and small-arms attacks.

ROADSIDE BLASTS

Roadside bombs have long been the No. 1 killer of American troops in Iraq.

Since October, officials said, insurgents have been employing more sophisticated devices, with the most lethal results coming in Baghdad. Nearly 38 percent of military deaths since October have occurred in the capital, compared with 29 percent over the previous 12 months, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (http://icasualties.org), an independent, U.S.-based Web site that monitors military and civilian casualties.

At the same time, insurgents are leaving Baghdad to escape the crackdown, and in recent weeks U.S. and Iraqi troops have launched major operations outside the capital. Some of the heaviest fighting has occurred in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, where 44 American service members have died so far this year — more than in the previous 22 months combined.

In the past, U.S. fatalities had a tendency to spike in months of heavy combat, then drop to lower levels in subsequent months. April 2004 and November 2004 were the deadliest months of the war for American forces, due mostly to intense combat in Iraq’s western Anbar province.

But those high death tolls quickly dropped; for example, the death toll in April 2004 was 135, but fell to 42 two months later. The November 2004 toll was 137, but dropped to 58 in February 2005 and 35 the following month.

The past several months, however, have brought the longest period of sustained heavy casualties since U.S. troops entered Iraq in March 2003. December saw 112 soldiers die, the most since November 2004, and the subsequent three months registered 83, 80 and 81 fatalities, respectively.

Baghdad has supplanted Anbar as the deadliest region for American forces. Of the 58 deaths so far in April, 34 have occurred in the capital. The figures include all deaths, not just those that the military says occurred due to hostile action.

COALITION FORCES

Under Gen. David Petraeus, coalition forces have opened 31 joint U.S.-Iraqi security stations and 22 neighborhood outposts in Baghdad to create an around-the-clock military presence on the streets. Officials said the plan is working. The number of murders and executions of civilians in Baghdad had fallen by 26 percent since the start of the year, Caldwell said.

Statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers from several provinces also show an overall decline in killings, though recent data indicate that the trend might be reversing. The number of corpses found in Baghdad from March 15 to April 14, for example, rose 26 percent over the previous 30 days, the McClatchy-gathered statistics show.

The shift in military tactics nevertheless has raised the risks to soldiers.

”We do what we can to mitigate that risk,” said Lt. Col. Chris Garver, a military spokesman. ‘But General Petraeus’ plan is to be out there in the neighborhoods as opposed to hunkered down on a FOB [forward operating base].”

Commanders are employing a similar strategy in Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province located 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. Insurgent groups have been moving into Baqouba, a fierce battleground for Sunni militias.

A battalion of Stryker soldiers arrived in March and has been trying to secure Baqouba through neighborhood outposts, regular patrols and coordinated military operations, sometimes with Iraqi troops, said Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly.

”Over the last three to four months we’ve had several major operations,” Donnelly said. “When you put more troops into a battle space, the battle space gets more concentrated, and there’s a more likely chance you run into the enemy and cause him to maneuver.”

For more than five years, the United States of America has been relying on its volunteer military to fight a war against radical Muslim terrorists. Just a couple hundred thousand Americans and their families are carrying this burden for the other 300 million of us. Over 3,000 have died, and tens of thousands more have been injured, many seriously.And how do we thank them when they are no longer fit for service? By cheating them out of their benefits.

The case of Army Specialist Jon Town, of Findlay, has been featured in the April 9, 2007 issue of The Nation magazine as well as Monday’s Courier. In brief, Town served in the Army for seven years, receiving numerous honors including a Purple Heart. He was injured in October 2004 in Ramadi, Iraq, when a rocket struck about 2 feet from his head. He survived, but he sustained permanent hearing loss and also continues to deal with depression, headaches and insomnia. At one point Town attempted suicide. An Army psychologist told him he had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

These symptoms should sound familiar to anyone who’s served in a war or known someone who has. But to the Army, which in 2006 convinced Town that he should be discharged, it was “personality disorder” “” a supposedly pre-existing condition that let the Army off the hook on paying benefits.

Town insists that he was promised by the Army psychologist who handled his case that if he agreed to be discharged under Chapter 5-13, all his benefits would remain intact. Instead, he received no disability pay and no long-term VA medical care, even though his medical condition was the direct result of injuries sustained in Iraq. And to top it off, he was told he had to repay most of his re-enlistment bonus. Town left Fort Carson, Colo., owing the Army $3,000.

Town’s Army psychologist says he never discussed benefits with him, and the Army continues to deny systematic cheating of soldiers in order to save money. But obviously there is a reason why more than 22,000 personality disorder discharges have been issued to U.S. troops over the past five years. Doesn’t the military screen enlistees? Of course it does. Town served not only honorably but with distinction until he was injured. For the Army to cheat him and others out of their benefits because they were wounded in the service of their country is an unconscionable breach of trust.

Town’s case seems to be finally getting the attention it deserves. But what of the other soldiers in similar cases? Retired Lt. Gen. James Terry Scott testified to Congress last week that preliminary results of a study by the Veterans’ Disability Benefits Commission, which he chairs, show there may indeed be an effort to keep costs down by underrating the severity of soldiers’ disabilities.

All Americans owe a debt to those who serve in the volunteer military. Medical care and benefits are the least we can do to repay them. We urge Congressman Jim Jordan and Sen. Sherrod Brown to fully investigate the stories of Town and others like him, and fight not only for the reinstatement of their full benefits but also to stop the Army’s systematic abuse of its volunteer soldiers, if such indeed is going on.

In addition, congressional Democrats need to quickly pass a generous and pork-free military spending bill so the Army has less reason to be overly careful with its money.

Amnesty International today warned that the Middle East is on the verge of a new humanitarian crisis unless the European Union, US and other states take urgent and concrete measures to assist the more than three million people forcibly displaced by the conflict in Iraq.

In a briefing released in advance of an international conference being convened by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva, 17-18 April 2007, the organization called for other states to immediately help alleviate the situation of Iraqi refugees who have increasingly flooded into Syria and Jordan, particularly since the February 2006 attack by armed insurgents on one of Iraq’s holiest shrines, the Samarra’ mosque. That attack sparked a new, more intensive bout of sectarian bloodletting in which civilians from across Iraq’s increasingly divided communities have been among the principal targets.

“Syria and Jordan, who together now host some two million Iraqis, have borne the brunt of the refugee exodus so far, but there must be a limit to which they can continue to do so in the face of the continuing surge by Iraqis desperate to escape the conflict,” said Malcolm Smart, Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North African Programme. “It is vital that other governments now step in and deliver — not just pledge — direct assistance in order to ensure that the refugees are adequately housed and fed, and have access to health care and education, in Syria, Jordan and the other countries which are now helping bear the consequences of the disaster in Iraq.”

As well as direct aid to the Iraqi refugee communities and the countries hosting them, Amnesty International is calling on the US, EU and other states to establish generous resettlement programmes in order to assist Iraqi refugees, especially the most vulnerable and at risk, to start new lives well away from the conflict zone, and to afford all refugees and rejected asylum seekers effective protection. “The UK government and others which persist in returning failed asylum seekers to Iraq, arguing that the Kurdish north is relatively peaceful, should desist from this practice forthwith,” said Malcolm Smart. “Iraqis’ lives should not be put at risk in order for governments to demonstrate to a domestic audience that they can be tough on asylum seekers — this is just playing with other people’s lives.”

Amnesty International is also calling for action to assist the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have become internally displaced. “The Iraqi government, the states contributing troops to the Multinational Force, and other governments and political and religious leaders in the region must redouble their efforts to find a political solution, one that brings an end to sectarian and other violence and allows Iraqis to return to their homes and live in peace,” said Malcolm Smart. “Until and unless they do so, and find a solution which respects basic human rights, Iraqis will continue to pay the price with their lives and the stability of the entire region will remain under threat.”

The vaccination against anthrax is mandatory for its U.S. troops deployed overseas to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One soldier refused the vaccination and said he is more afraid of it than bullets.

To watch the CBS News video, click this link: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=2684326n