Veterans for Common Sense

Guard units stretched thin

National Guard chief: Overseas missions left forces short of much-needed gear

Stephen J. Hedges, Chicago Tribune, Saturday, September 17, 2005

WASHINGTON — The deployment of nearly 50,000 National Guard troops from 50 states as part of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort has exposed debilitating equipment shortages in a force already stretched thin by three years of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, head of the National Guard, said in an interview that the needs of Guard units overseas have left troops at home without modern communications and night vision equipment, as well as the vehicles necessary for Guard troops to traverse neighborhoods flooded in the wake of Katrina.

“Communications was the biggest challenge,” Blum said of the Guard’s post-hurricane performance. “You can’t respond if you don’t know what the situation is out there.”

Most of the Guard’s satellite phones–essential during the power and cell phone service outages caused by Katrina–are with troops in Iraq. Indeed, Blum said, the Guard’s best equipment is overseas, causing shortages for disaster relief efforts in this country. The heavy reliance on National Guard and Reserve units by active-duty military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has become a concern in Congress, where lawmakers have questioned whether Guard forces are receiving the proper training and equipment for combat operations.

Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said last week that “once again our Guard is, I don’t like to use the word `stressed,’ but they are challenged” by commitments at home and overseas.

In the past, the military, especially the Army, has called on the Guard for logistics and other support during combat operations abroad. That was initially the case in Iraq, but as attacks on Guard units increased, so did their mission.

“The type of war America is waging in Iraq requires some of the same skills that disaster relief in the gulf states requires,” said Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area think tank. “That would include military police, helicopters and military engineers. So there is the possibility that these two missions would come into conflict.”

Governors in several states have raised concerns about the Guard’s long-term overseas deployments. That’s especially true in the West, where a busy fire season may be in store because of drought; Guardsmen have been used to fight fires.

The Guard staffing shortage was an immediate concern as Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, because about 6,000 Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard troops were deployed in Iraq at the time. That left about 12,500 Guard members available in the two states for hurricane relief.

Several hundred soldiers from the Louisiana unit came back early, and the Guard intends to keep all soldiers returning to hurricane-damaged states from Iraq on active duty to help in the storm-ravaged area.

80,000 stationed overseas

But Blum said the absence of those 6,000 troops had an impact on the ability of units in each state to respond immediately. Those Guard units were called to duty before the hurricane hit. Units from Kansas and Indiana were dispatched to fill the gap, Blum said, but did not arrive until the day after the hurricane came ashore.

About 80,000 Guard members are on duty overseas. Most of them are in Iraq, but some also are serving in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sinai and the Horn of Africa. About 300,000 Guard soldiers and airmen remain available for other missions, enough to staff overseas deployments and stateside relief efforts, Blum said.

Katrina has refocused attention on the homeland security role of the Guard and the heavy demands that have been made on it. The Senate Armed Services Committee has held three closed briefings with the Pentagon and Guard on the military’s hurricane response, and further congressional review of Guard funding and roles is expected this fall. Some experts said the situation is getting dire.

“These guys get the hand-me-downs,” said John Pike, a military analyst with GlobalSecurity.org. “And some of these units are turning into just bunches of guys. I think between the flipping of equipment [to Guard units] and the wearing out of equipment and being under-strength, I don’t know how much more you could take as a force.”

The National Guard traditionally has received secondhand weapons, aircraft, vehicles and other equipment as the active-duty military is re-equipped. But Blum said the steady pace of Guard deployments overseas has reduced the amount of Guard gear available in each state.

Because of the Guard’s close links to the active-duty military, it is difficult to discern what portion of the national defense budget and hurricane relief aid will go to Guard units. But equipment procurement levels for the Guard actually dropped from $447 million in 2004 to $349 million in 2005.

Scrambling to find gear

When Katrina struck, Blum said, the National Guard scrambled to find the gear its troops would need, drawing on units from all over the country. While 32 helicopters were immediately available in the stricken region, he said, 100 more were delivered in the first week.

Both Louisiana and Mississippi requested troops from out of state. The first of those forces –about 1,400 troops–arrived at the Superdome in New Orleans later on the day the storm hit, Blum said. An additional 2,800 troops arrived over the next two days.

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, some Guard units have already returned home. Relief efforts in Mississippi, where a storm surge and high winds receded after inflicting widespread property damage, are being turned over to local Guard units, government agencies and contractors.

In Louisiana, particularly in New Orleans, out-of-state troops are expected to remain for several more weeks.

Ironically, the disaster relief mission could help recruiting, which has been flagging under the weight of continued Iraq deployments.

Re-enlistment is up. And there was enthusiasm among Guard members for the relief mission on the Gulf Coast, despite the fact that the Guard estimates half of those now involved in hurricane relief efforts have already served at least a single one-year tour in Iraq.

Maj. Neal O’Brien, a spokesman for the Ohio National Guard, said Ohio has sent about 1,600 troops to New Orleans. About 7,000 of Ohio’s Guard troops–more than half of the state’s total force–have gone overseas during the last three years, he said.

But when it came to hurricane relief, O’Brien said, “There was no shortage of volunteers who wanted to go down and help.”

shedges@tribune.com

Message: I Care About the Black Folks

Once Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman.

Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum’s mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of “compassionate conservatism,” the lack of concern for the “underprivileged” his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration’s desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters’ “poetry” and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.

Nor can the president’s acceptance of “responsibility” for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn’t cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he’d seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime’s worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton “culture of responsibility.” It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush’s own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America’s highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.

Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration’s gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm’s dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband’s ineptitude. When she complained of seeing “a lot of the same footage over and over that isn’t necessarily representative of what really happened,” the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture “over and over” on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day.

This White House doesn’t hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove’s Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush’s first 9/11 anniversary speech to his “Top Gun” stunt to Thursday’s laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)

The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush’s repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his “compassion.” In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush’s craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they’d show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled “Compassion” devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.

Some of these poses are re-enacted in the “Hurricane Relief” photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn’t working. The “compassion” photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN.

But even now the administration’s priority of image over substance is embedded like a cancer in the Katrina relief process. Brazenly enough, Mr. Rove has been officially put in charge of the reconstruction effort. The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown’s departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they’d practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns. Thus The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a week after the hurricanethat some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as “community relations officers for FEMA” rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was “to stand beside President Bush” as he toured devastated areas.

The cashiering of “Brownie,” whom Mr. Bush now purports to know as little as he did “Kenny Boy,” changes nothing. The Knight Ridder newspapers found last week that it was the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, not Mr. Brown, who had the greater authority to order federal agencies into service without any request from state or local officials. Mr. Chertoff waited a crucial, unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an “incident of national significance,” the trigger needed for federal action. Like Mr. Brown, he was oblivious to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the convention center, confessing his ignorance of conditions there to NPR on the same day that the FEMA chief famously did so to Ted Koppel. Yet Mr. Bush’s “culture of responsibility” does not hold Mr. Chertoff accountable. Quite the contrary: on Thursday the president charged Homeland Security with reviewing “emergency plans in every major city in America.” Mr. Chertoff will surely do a heck of a job.

WHEN there’s money on the line, cronies always come first in this White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina, the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine what it’s doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers’ money sent its way for Katrina relief. Actually, you don’t have to imagine: we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000 campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie, Mr. Allbaugh’s college roommate, was installed in his place.

It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged about his gubernatorial prowess “on the front line of catastrophic situations,” specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one of many questions that must be answered by the independent investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating (77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of “armies of compassion” will prove as worthless as the “thousand points of light” that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It’s up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it’s presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.

What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.

For Immediate Release: September 8, 2005

Contacts: Charles Sheehan-Miles, 202-558-4553

In Letter to President, Veterans Concerned for Health of Troops in Gulf Coast;
Call for Federalizing National Guard Units Deployed in New Orleans

Washington, DC — Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), a nonpartisan veterans’ organization with 14,000 members, delivered a letter to the President today calling for National Guard units deployed in support of relief efforts in the Gulf Coast to be federalized.

The letter, sent September 8, cited the serious contamination of water and soil in the New Orleans area, noting that many service-members are expected to be deployed in the area for months and may suffer long-term health effects due to exposure to some toxins.

“The big lesson from Gulf War illnesses,” says Charles Sheehan-Miles, the group’s executive director, “is that we must have data in order to track what’s going on with the troops. That’s why we believe the federal government must coordinate not only deployment of troops, but also long-term health monitoring.”

Sheehan-Miles also pointed out that National Guard units activated by the state, rather than the federal government, are not eligible for health benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The complete text of the letter is available online at http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org

Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) — Negotiations aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs will resume Sept. 13 in Beijing, China Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said today at a regular briefing in Beijing.

“We hope these talks can push us forward on this issue,” Qin said.

South Korea, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia, are offering North Korea food and economic aid and security guarantees in return for the abolition of its nuclear program. Delegates failed to reach an agreement in 13 days of talks that ended on Aug. 7.

This round of talks, like the last, won’t have a time limit, Qin said.

“All sides need to work toward the goal of a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula,” he said. “This requires adjusting the schedule as progress is made. We see the six-party talks as a process. We cannot resolve everything in just a few rounds.”

North Korea delayed returning to Beijing as scheduled on the week of Aug. 29, citing U.S.-South Korean annual military exercises. The Kim Jong Il regime said earlier it would return to the talks during the week of Sept. 12.

Talks stalled last month after North Korea insisted on retaining a peaceful nuclear program to produce power. U.S. officials are concerned North Korea may convert a civilian nuclear program to military use and build nuclear weapons. North Korea said on Feb. 10 it had nuclear weapons and planned to build more.

Sudan: Detainees Suffer Arbitrary Arrest, Execution 07 Sep 2005 00:05:28 GMT
Source: Human Rights Watch
(New York, September 7, 2005) – The Sudanese government has executed prisoners who were minors at the time of their arrest, Human Rights Watch said today. Despite the human rights commitments the government has made in the peace process with southern-based rebels, death penalty defendants are routinely denied fair trials, and arbitrary arrests and detentions remain commonplace in Sudan. “The government promised that the North-South peace accord would usher in a new day in Sudan, but we have yet to see it in the field of human rights,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Beyond the conflict in Darfur, Sudanese across the country still remain at risk of arbitrary arrest, detention and torture.” Human Rights Watch called on the Sudanese government to commute death sentences for all those sentenced to death, estimated at more than 300 persons, instead of executing them before the new government has time to form. New parliamentarians were appointed only last week, and ministries remain to be filled by new appointees under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Khartoum should also ensure full and unimpeded access for international monitors to all conflict-related and political detainees throughout the country. Mohammed Jamal Gesmallah and Imad Ali Abdullah, both in their twenties, were executed on August 31 in Khartoum’s Kober Prison. According to their families, they were 16 and 17 years old at the time of the crimes for which they were punished. Under international law, the death penalty must not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below 18 years of age. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty to which Sudan is a party, also prohibits this. Human Rights Watch opposes capital punishment in all circumstances because it is inherently cruel and inhumane. In Sudan, death sentences are often carried out without notice, and many of the trials leading to the sentences lack basic fair-trial protections for the accused, in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Sudan acceded in 1986. Detainees continue to be arbitrarily arrested, held in inhumane conditions, subjected to torture and denied access to legal counsel. “Sudan has incorporated the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other human rights treaties into its interim national constitution,” said Takirambudde. “But such steps will be meaningless if Sudanese citizens continue to suffer arbitrary arrests, torture and death sentences after unfair trials.” In other cases, the death penalty is imposed on persons after denial of their right to a fair trial. Al-Tayeb Ali Ahmed, a 36-year-old policeman from Darfur, was accused of participating in the rebel insurgency in Darfur in January 2004 and given the death penalty. Based on a confession extracted through torture, he was convicted of crimes against the state after a summary trial at the Special Court in Fashir, North Darfur. At his trial, he had no lawyer and no opportunity to call witnesses in his defense. The day before his scheduled execution in Kober Prison in July, Al-Tayeb’s family was notified that they could collect his body the following day. They instead called an attorney and filed an appeal to the constitutional court. The execution was stayed only 10 minutes before it was scheduled to occur. “The death penalty cases are only one part of the problem,” said Takirambudde. “Politically-motivated arrests and detentions of individuals in conflict areas or linked to opposition groups are an almost daily event.” Arbitrary arrests and detentions Although Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir promised on June 30 to release all political prisoners and lift the nationwide state of emergency, except in Darfur and eastern Sudan, arbitrary arrests and detentions remain commonplace in Sudan. This public commitment followed Sudan’s signing of the peace accord between the government and the southern-based rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army, in January, and the report of the United Nations’ International Commission of Inquiry for Darfur later the same month. The U.N. commission’s report recommended that the International Committee of the Red Cross and U.N. human rights monitors be given “full and unimpeded access to all those detained in relation to the situation in Darfur.” The U.N. Mission in Sudan, established to support the peace process, is to field international human rights monitors as part of its work during the next six years of the CPA’s term. Meanwhile, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has dozens of international monitors, mostly assigned to Darfur. Hundreds of people have been arbitrarily arrested and detained in Darfur over the past few years, often simply on the basis of their ethnicity or political affiliation. More than half of the estimated 150 people on death row in Kober Prison are believed to be from Darfur, many of them detained for politically motivated reasons. Arbitrary arrests and detentions, however, are not only linked to events in Darfur. On August 1 and 2, during the unrest that followed John Garang’s unexpected death in a helicopter crash, more than 1,500 people were reportedly arrested in Khartoum. Many of those who were arrested have not been charged, and there are fears that some may face torture and ill-treatment in detention. The Sudanese government also has reportedly detained dozens of individuals in eastern Sudan in early 2005 following riots in Port Sudan that resulted in the deaths of at least 20 people. The Sudanese government continues to use tactics like moving prisoners around different facilities and detaining individuals in unofficial security sites to divert scrutiny.

U.S. hands Najaf to Iraq forces

By Saad Sarhan and Omar Fekeiki
The Washington Post

NAJAF, Iraq — The U.S. military pulled hundreds of troops out of the southern city of Najaf yesterday, transferring security duties to Iraqi forces and sticking to a schedule that the United States hopes will allow the withdrawal of tens of thousands of its forces by early spring.

The handover came as Marine F/A-18 jets bombed two bridges near the Syrian border, hitting infrastructure in an area where insurgents have maintained effective control despite off-and-on offensives by U.S. forces. Insurgents have used the bridges to move fighters and arms across the Euphrates River toward Baghdad and other cities, the U.S. military said.

Roadside bombs killed two U.S. service members yesterday — one in Baghdad and one in Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar province — the U.S. military said. At least 1,893 U.S. military personnel have died since the war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Suspected insurgents kidnapped the son of the new governor in Ramadi. Insurgents kidnapped the previous Anbar governor in May and he was killed in a U.S. attack on the house where he was being held.

U.S. Marines have about 5,000 men to cover the province’s 24,000 square miles. American officers in Anbar say the forces are too few to bring the province under control, but U.S. and Iraqi officials say the U.S. raids have helped disrupt the flow of bombs and recruits into the rest of Iraq.

The handover ceremony in Najaf marked the first transfer of an entire city from U.S. to Iraqi military responsibility this year. The raising of the Iraqi flag at a former U.S. base was “pretty much putting the city of Najaf in Iraqi control,” Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, spokesman for the U.S. military, said in Baghdad.

U.S. forces will continue to support Iraqi troops in an advisory role and with logistics, Boylan said.

Najaf has been the scene of relatively few insurgent attacks. In August 2004, U.S. and Iraqi forces here launched a major assault to disarm the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr that had staged two uprisings against the U.S. military presence in Iraq. The assault claimed dozens of lives from both sides and ended only when Iraq’s most influential cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, ordered al-Sadr to rein in his fighters.

Tensions surged again last month when clashes erupted between al-Sadr’s men and Iraqi Interior Ministry forces seen as loyal to a rival Shiite bloc, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Nineteen died in those battles.

Elsewhere, thousands of civilians fled Tal Afar, a predominantly ethnic Turkomen city 260 miles northwest of Baghdad where U.S. and Iraqi soldiers are trying to wrest control from insurgents. The city also sits along a major trade and smuggling route to Syria.

Also yesterday:

Constitution draft final: Iraq’s main Shiite and Sunni Muslim sects abandoned efforts to amend a draft constitution yesterday and a version rejected by many Sunnis will be printed in this form for a referendum Oct. 15. Sunnis, long the dominant political force, fear losing influence to majority Shiites, who were oppressed under Saddam Hussein but now control the government along with Kurds from the north. The Sunni minority could also kill the constitutional draft at the referendum if it can muster a two-thirds majority of no votes in three of Iraq’s 18 provinces.

Gas rationed: Partly to ration gas, Iraq, which has the world’s third-largest oil reserves, has ordered half of Baghdad’s cars off the roads starting yesterday, with only cars with license plates ending in an odd number allowed on the streets. At 9 a.m., normally the height of rush hour, streets were almost empty.

Additional information from Reuters and The Associated Press

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

Marine Corps Capt. Matthew Phillips survived terrorists’ 120mm mortar rounds in Fallujah, but he’d better watch out for the big wooden club wielded by Chris Kilgus.

Phillips arrived a few minutes late to receive his purple cap and membership Tuesday from Chapter 351 of the Military Order of the Purple Heart, drawing the ire of Kilgus, the chapter’s sergeant-at-arms.

“Get in that door on time, or else…,” Kilgus said, trying to stare down a Marine less than half his age and twice his weight.

“This is my one freebie, huh?” Phillips said as he sat down chastised, sort of.

He was honored by 16 veterans at Shreveport’s Highland Center, people who share something with him that few others in the city do. All have been wounded in action as members of the nation’s military.

The chapter issued a blanket invitation to local military members wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, but timing may have limited their haul to Phillips, who was the only such veteran to show Tuesday. Of the handful of recently wounded veterans around, several have gone to help with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

Phillips said his unit will turn its drill this weekend into an effort to volunteer at area shelters. So the offer of free membership will be repeated, likely in October, to entice the missed veterans and those with the 256th Brigade soon to return from Iraq.

“Our guys are getting old and we need young blood,” said chapter President Richard Garner, a Vietnam War veteran.

Phillips, with Bossier City-based Bravo Co., 1/23rd Marines, largely has recovered from being wounded Nov. 10 in Fallujah. But before he was barraged by questions from the older veterans and their wives, he said he was honored to be numbered among their ranks.

“It’s interesting and awkward to think of myself in these terms,” he said when Garner praised him for his service. “Many of you men were wounded in actions I learned about in boot camp. It’s very humbling to come into the company of men who earned that medal.”

NEW ORLEANS, Sept 6 (Reuters) – The U.S. government agency leading the rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina said on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as they are recovered from the flooded New Orleans area.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims. An agency spokeswoman said space was needed on the rescue boats and that “the recovery of the victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect.” “We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media,” the spokeswoman said in an e-mailed response to a Reuters inquiry. The Bush administration also has prevented the news media from photographing flag-draped caskets of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, which has sparked criticism that the government is trying to block images that put the war in a bad light. The White House is under fire for its handling of the relief effort, which many officials have charged was slow and bureacratic, contributing to the death and mayhem in New Orleans after the storm struck on Aug. 29. (Additional reporting by Deborah Charles

Veterans Eye Seats in Congress Tuesday, September 06, 2005 By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

WASHINGTON — Veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are planning to challenge congressional incumbents on both sides of the political aisle in 2006, but which party will benefit remains to be seen.

While dispelling speculation that Democrats are actively recruiting war veterans to feed into the public’s growing concern over President Bush’s strategy in Iraq, party operatives say they are sure that such candidates could pose a formidable challenge to Republicans next year.

“[Veterans] do have more leeway to criticize Bush,” said Tom King, a Democratic strategist. “It gives Republicans something to think about.”

Ohio Democrat Paul Hackett (search) raised some eyebrows in early August when he came within a few points of beating Republican Jean Schmidt (search) in a special election for the GOP-dominated Cincinnati-area district seat vacated by Rob Portman (search), who is now the U.S. trade representative.

Although analysts attribute Hackett’s run to other factors, including state Republican scandals and election fatigue, Hackett, an Iraqi combat veteran, drew national attention and support for his willingness to criticize the president openly about his policy in Iraq.

He called Bush a “chickenhawk” and at one point told USA Today that “I don’t like the son of a b—- that lives in the White House, but I’d put my life on the line for him.”

King said Hackett’s campaigned appealed to voters fed up with Washington spin.

“He showed the persona of a straight shooter,” he said.

But even Hackett says that while the national media seized on his veteran status, it was not the main theme of his campaign. He doesn’t think either party should bank too much on veterans’ appeal in future elections.

“I don’t think that veterans have a distinct advantage,” Hackett told FOXNews.com. “At most, it causes somebody to take another look at them.”

That aside, Hackett did not refute the idea that a Democratic veteran of Iraq is in a unique position to criticize Republican war policies.

“A Democrat who is a veteran of the Iraq war can be more intelligently critical about the issues surrounding it and how it impacts the country more freely than any other politician or any other Democratic politician for that matter,” he said. “But I don’t think that makes you a winner.”

Officials from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said the DCCC is not pursuing veterans to run for seats in 2006.

“We are actively recruiting the best candidates we can,” said Sarah Feinberg, DCCC spokeswoman.

So far, at least three veterans have announced their intentions to run next year against Republican incumbents: Patrick Murphy, who is challenging Pennsylvania Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick; Tim Walz, who is challenging Minnesota Rep. Gil Gutknecht; and David Ashe, who wants a rematch against Virginia Rep. Thelma Drake.

All three question the current policy in Iraq.

“When I was in Iraq, quite frankly I became disheartened with our government. I think our government wasn’t doing enough to support our troops,” said Murphy, who won a Bronze Star as an 82nd Airborne Division captain. He has also taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Like the others, Walz insists the military experience “is not the linchpin” of his candidacy, “but one piece of my character.” But he says that fatigue over the war in Iraq is evident in the faces and questions of the people he is meeting on the campaign trail.

“The first lesson from Vietnam was always support the troops – the American public is there” as far as Iraq is concerned, he said. “The second lesson of Vietnam is always question the mission, and we’re not doing that. The American people are smart and they deserve to know what the plan is.”

According to the Congressional Research Service, 141 members of the 109th Congress have served in the military, a number that has been on a steady decline since the end of the Vietnam War. Carl Forti, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said many different factors determine whether a candidate wins a congressional seat, and being in the military is just one of them.

“To us, it’s much more important to recruit someone who can win,” Forti said.

Forti called any Democratic ambition to use Hackett as a “national mold” for success “unrealistic.”

Democratic veterans aren’t the only ones stepping up to challenge incumbent lawmakers, particularly on the issue of war policy.

Republican veteran Hiram Lewis is running against Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Also running are Van Taylor and Bentley Nettles, both Republicans seeking to oust Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Texas.

Lewis said Byrd’s position on the war spurred his candidacy.

“I started thinking about it overseas, when I saw Byrd talking about the war being unconstitutional on the Senate floor,” said Lewis, who served until January 2004 as a magistrate in Baghdad as part of the West Virginia National Guard. He then ran and narrowly lost a race against West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw.

Lewis said he blames Byrd for hurting troops’ morale in the theater. “I thought he should have refrained from the anti-war rhetoric,” he said.

Political analysts say the success of these veterans will depend in part on their positions and in part on the kind of districts they hope to represent.

“If Democrats are going to try to win a conservative or moderate district, but come across as a member of the anti-war movement, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” said John Fortier, political expert for the American Enterprise Institute. “On the other hand, if they have some criticism of the war, but are still willing to put on the uniform, I think that’s fine.”

Democratic candidate Ashe, whose Virginia district is smack in the middle of several military installations and the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock, said veterans offer a unique perspective on domestic veterans’ issues, like funding for health care.

“[Drake] has demonstrated over and over that she is not really curious about how the military works. She’s just part of the echo chamber,” said Ashe, who served in an infantry battalion in Iraq and said he “watched the mismanagement” by the Coalition Provisional Authority “from the ground.”

Tom Gordy, Drake’s chief of staff, said Ashe used the same lines in the 2004 election, but to no avail. Gordy added that he can’t decide how new veteran challengers will play nationally.

“It’s hard to pinpoint,” he said. “Is it going to play in the 2nd District? It didn’t last time.”