Bear Any Burden: The Heavy Cost of Using U.S. Troops as Experimental Test Subjects

Posted on February 28, 2005 by Team VCS

Bear Any Burden: The Heavy Cost of Using U.S. Troops as Experimental Test Subjects

That’s one thing neither the Pentagon nor Big Pharm is willing to do for our troops.

As a general rule, 26-year-old National Guard members ought to be some of most physically fit people on the planet. For eight out of the nine years that Randi Airola served as a technician in the Army and Air National Guard, she met that description. Then, in March 1999, in a moment that would the mark beginning of the end of her honorable military service (and the start of a lifelong struggle), Airola received her fourth dose of a compulsory vaccine to prevent service members from contracting anthrax.

The anthrax vaccine given to service members requires six doses plus an annual booster shot. Airola had taken the shot before, so the slight lightheadedness she felt after leaving the doctor’s office was nothing for her to get worked up over. The next day, though, while serving as honor guard at a funeral, she nearly passed out. She spent the rest of the week in bed, suffering from an immobilizing combination of muscle weakness, abdominal cramping, sore joints, and vertigo.

Over the coming months, her pain increased, growing so intense that even a daily dose of 16,000 milligrams of Motrin wouldn’t offer enough relief to get her through the day. Civilian doctors were baffled by her condition, and though she missed 140 hours of work in a two-month span, she was denied any referral to see a military physician.

Officials in Airola’s chain of command shrugged off the possibility that the anthrax vaccine may have been responsible for her condition, and in October 1999, she was ordered to take her fifth shot. She refused, and was honorably discharged in 2000. Not long after, she was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia.

“Today I only suffer from memory loss and occasional headaches,” Airola wrote me in a recent e-mail. “I’m better off than I was.” That, of course, is an understatement. But with her improved condition, Airola has channeled her pain, anger, and frustration into advocacy on behalf of veterans injured from the anthrax vaccine. Now, Airola serves as the executive director of the Military Vaccine Education Network, a group of veterans and assorted allies that advocate on behalf of service members who have been seriously injured from their mandatory inoculations.

Given Airola’s devotion to the cause, I was not surprised to see her written testimony on a table reserved for press at a February 8 hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Bioterrorism Preparedness and Public Heath. The subcommittee had met that day to discuss the future of the nation’s biodefense strategies. As was expected, panelists from the Bush administration teamed with pharmaceutical-company representatives to admonish Congress to try hard to entice those companies into developing new bioterrorism vaccines.

At issue was a collection of industry-friendly measures, known as BioShield II, that would expand upon the incentives already available to pharmaceutical companies that develop bioterrorism vaccines. Last June, President Bush signed into law a $6 billion program intended to broaden the nation’s stockpiles of vaccines for biological nasties like smallpox, anthrax, and botulism. Project BioShield, as the program is known, passed nearly unanimously through Congress.

But to those testifying before the subcommittee, it was not an entirely sufficient catalyst. What is urgently needed, they insisted, is a set of extensive product-liability protections that would shield companies that manufacturer bioterrorism countermeasures — specifically, vaccines — from punitive lawsuits.

Under a provision of “The Protecting America in the War on Terror Act 2005” (the likely legislative vehicle of BioShield II), introduced by Senator Judd Gregg in January, manufacturers of bioterrorism vaccines would be granted just that. Even if they make a faulty product, those manufacturers would be indemnified from punitive lawsuits. Except in extreme cases of fraud, someone injured by a poorly manufactured bioterrorism vaccine would not be able to collect anything more than $250,000 in compensatory damages.

Bioterrorism-vaccine manufacturers insist that liability protection is a crucial incentive. After all, every vaccine contains potentially dangerous organisms, and some recipients of any vaccine will experience adverse side effects, which can sometimes be quite severe. As it is now, the federal government often grants such protections on a case-by-case basis when it negotiates individual procurement contracts.

But enshrining into law such blanket liability protection begs the question: If the manufacturer is not liable for the safety of its product, who is?

To the chagrin of U.S. troops, the likely answer is the Department of Defense. Our troops are certain to be the first recipients of any new bioterrorism vaccine; under the doctrine of Force Health Protection, the Pentagon seeks to immunize as many service members as possible from potential biological threats. Despite the fact that no soldier has yet to suffer a bioterrorism attack in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Pentagon insists our soldiers face that constant threat. Further, under a provision of the original BioShield legislation, the Defense Department reserves the right to administer to soldiers experimental new vaccines (in the event of a vaguely defined “emergency”) before they are fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Once the Defense Department purchases mass quantities of a vaccine, there is little incentive to discontinue its use, even if it becomes clear that the vaccine is not as safe or effective as first promised. For our soldiers, the combination of product-liability protection and the Defense Department’s oversight can be a double misfortune. “A historical lesson that industry may not want to acknowledge is that when the removal of manufacturers’ liability is sought and obtained, the resulting products have usually been associated with serious safety issues,” wrote Dr. Meryl Nass, one of the world’s foremost experts on bioterrorism vaccines, in submitted testimony to the subcommittee. (She submitted her written testimony in absentia.)

The troubled history of the anthrax vaccine underscores this phenomenon well. In 1998, the Army procured the vaccine with a contract that guaranteed product-liability protections for the manufacturer. Since then, more than a million troops have taken the vaccine — most after the post-September 11 anthrax scare and in the run-up to the Iraq War. In September 2002, a General Accounting Office report found that systemic reactions to the anthrax shot (that is, the worst category of adverse reactions) occurred at more than 100 times the estimated 0.2-percent rate that the manufacturer had printed on the product insert.

To make matters worse, Nass says, federal agencies have effectively shifted the real costs of liability protection onto other federal agencies. As she pointed out in her testimony, although it was the Army’s decision to indemnify the vaccine’s manufacturer, the Defense Department has not felt much of a pinch in its pockets from soldiers who have become disabled as a consequence of the anthrax vaccine. Under a 1950 Supreme Court decision that has come to be known as the Feres Doctrine, the federal government is not liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act for injuries to members of the armed forces sustained while on active duty. Further, disabled veterans are paid primarily by the Department of Veterans Affairs and/or Social Security disability.

These structural barriers to accountability may help to explain the Pentagon’s cavalier attitude toward soldiers who question the anthrax vaccine’s safety. As word of the adverse reactions to the vaccine spread through the ranks, soldiers began to refuse the order to take it; some of those refuseniks have since been discharged, and at least 100 have been court-martialed for their insubordination.

In March 2003, six service members who refused to take the vaccine filed suit against the Defense Department. The plaintiffs did not claim any tort, but alleged that the vaccine that soldiers were routinely ordered to take was never legally approved as a countermeasure against the inhalation form of anthrax. Last October, District Judge Emmet Sullivan decided in their favor. Sullivan ruled that the FDA had failed to follow its own licensing procedure for the vaccine and ordered the program halted until the FDA relicenses the vaccine, soldiers are granted the right to refuse to take the vaccine, or the president waives the right of informed consent. “Absent an informed consent or presidential waiver,” Sullivan wrote in his October 27 opinion, “the United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs.”

Despite his ruling, the Defense Department continued to administer the vaccine, and on February 14, the judge warned Donald Rumsfeld that he may be held in contempt for violating the court’s order. For its part, the Defense Department claims that only 250 people were “mistakenly” given the vaccine after the ruling; other estimates put the number of those illegally vaccinated at upward of 900.

The numbers of those vaccinated in violation of the court order, however, is beside the point. As the Defense Department’s flagship vaccination program, the saga of the anthrax treatment shows what could happen if sweeping product-liability protections, as envisioned in BioShield II, are not paired with an overhaul of the Pentagon’s own accountability structure. Soldiers deserve safe and effective vaccines, but the system is not set up to maximize a product’s safety. If product liability is neither the responsibility of the manufacturer nor any burden to the Defense Department (which purchases and administers the vaccine), the risks of a poorly made product are disproportionately born by the service member.

Given the potential danger of any vaccine, liability protection may, in fact, be a prerequisite for shareholders to back a company that manufacturers bioterrorism vaccines. But as service members like Randi Airola know, it can be hard to trust the Pentagon.

Mark Leon Goldberg is a Prospect writing fellow.

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VA Opens Doors to Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans Seeking Counseling Assistance

Posted on February 28, 2005 by Team VCS

VA Opens Doors to Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans Seeking Counseling Assistance

Trauma of Iraq war haunting thousands returning home

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Jeremy Harrison sees the warning signs in the Iraq war veterans who walk through his office door every day — flashbacks, inability to relax or relate, restless nights and more.

Jesus Bocanegra, 23, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, visits the South Texas War Memorial. By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

He recognizes them as symptoms of combat stress because he’s trained to, as a counselor at the small storefront Vet Center here run by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He recognizes them as well because he, too, has faced readjustment in the year since he returned from Iraq, where he served as a sergeant in an engineering company that helped capture Baghdad in 2003.

“Sometimes these sessions are helpful to me,” Harrison says, taking a break from counseling some of the nation’s newest combat veterans. “Because I deal with a lot of the same problems.”

As the United States nears the two-year mark in its military presence in Iraq still fighting a violent insurgency, it is also coming to grips with one of the products of war at home: a new generation of veterans, some of them scarred in ways seen and unseen. While military hospitals mend the physical wounds, the VA is attempting to focus its massive health and benefits bureaucracy on the long-term needs of combat veterans after they leave military service. Some suffer from wounds of flesh and bone, others of emotions and psyche.

These injured and disabled men and women represent the most grievously wounded group of returning combat veterans since the Vietnam War, which officially ended in 1975. Of more than 5 million veterans treated at VA facilities last year, from counseling centers like this one to big hospitals, 48,733 were from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many of the most common wounds aren’t seen until soldiers return home. Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is an often-debilitating mental condition that can produce a range of unwanted emotional responses to the trauma of combat. It can emerge weeks, months or years later. If left untreated, it can severely affect the lives not only of veterans, but their families as well.

Of the 244,054 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan already discharged from service, 12,422 have been in VA counseling centers for readjustment problems and symptoms associated with PTSD. Comparisons to past wars are difficult because emotional problems were often ignored or written off as “combat fatigue” or “shell shock.” PTSD wasn’t even an official diagnosis, accepted by the medical profession, until after Vietnam.

There is greater recognition of the mental-health consequences of combat now, and much research has been done in the past 25 years. The VA has a program that attempts to address them and supports extensive research. Harrison is one of 50 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars hired by the VA as counselors for their fellow veterans.

‘It takes you back there’

Post-traumatic stress was defined in 1980, partly based on the experiences of soldiers and victims of war. It produces a wide range of symptoms in men and women who have experienced a traumatic event that provoked intense fear, helplessness or horror. (Related story: Iraq injuries differ from past wars)

The events are sometimes re-experienced later through intrusive memories, nightmares, hallucinations or flashbacks, usually triggered by anything that symbolizes or resembles the trauma. Troubled sleep, irritability, anger, poor concentration, hypervigilance and exaggerated responses are often symptoms.

Individuals may feel depression, detachment or estrangement, guilt, intense anxiety and panic, and other negative emotions. They often feel they have little in common with civilian peers; issues that concern friends and family seem trivial after combat.

Harrison says they may even hit their partners during nightmares and never know it.

Many Iraq veterans have returned home to find the aftermath of combat presents them with new challenges:

•Jesus Bocanegra was an Army infantry scout for units that pursued Saddam Hussein in his hometown of Tikrit. After he returned home to McAllen, Texas, it took him six months to find a job.

He was diagnosed with PTSD and is waiting for the VA to process his disability claim. He goes to the local Vet Center but is unable to relate to the Vietnam-era counselors.

“I had real bad flashbacks. I couldn’t control them,” Bocanegra, 23, says. “I saw the murder of children, women. It was just horrible for anyone to experience.”

Bocanegra recalls calling in Apache helicopter strikes on a house by the Tigris River where he had seen crates of enemy ammunition carried in. When the gunfire ended, there was silence.

But then children’s cries and screams drifted from the destroyed home, he says. “I didn’t know there were kids there,” he says. “Those screams are the most horrible thing you can hear.”

At home in the Rio Grande Valley, on the Mexico border, he says young people have no concept of what he’s experienced. His readjustment has been difficult: His friends threw a homecoming party for him, and he got arrested for drunken driving on the way home.

“The Army is the gateway to get away from poverty here,” Bocanegra says. “You go to the Army and expect to be better off, but the best job you can get (back home) is flipping burgers. … What am I supposed to do now? How are you going to live?”

•Lt. Julian Goodrum, an Army reservist from Knoxville, Tenn., is being treated for PTSD with therapy and anti-anxiety drugs at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He checked himself into a civilian psychiatric hospital after he was turned away from a military clinic, where he had sought attention for his mental problems at Fort Knox, Ky. He’s facing a court-martial for being AWOL while in the civilian facility.

Goodrum, 34, was a transportation platoon leader in Iraq, running convoys of supplies from Kuwait into Iraq during the invasion. He returned to the USA in the summer of 2003 and experienced isolation, depression, an inability to sleep and racing thoughts.

“It just accumulated until it overwhelmed me. I was having a breakdown and trying to get assistance,” he says. “The smell of diesel would trigger things for me. Loud noises, crowds, heavy traffic give me a hard time now. I have a lot of panic. … You feel like you’re choking.”

•Sean Huze, a Marine corporal awaiting discharge at Camp Lejeune, N.C., doesn’t have PTSD but says everyone who saw combat suffers from at least some combat stress. He says the unrelenting insurgent threat in Iraq gives no opportunity to relax, and combat numbs the senses and emotions.

“There is no ‘front,’ ” Huze says. “You go back to the rear, at the Army base in Mosul, and you go in to get your chow, and the chow hall blows up.”

Huze, 30, says the horror often isn’t felt until later. “I saw a dead child, probably 3 or 4 years old, lying on the road in Nasiriyah,” he says. “It moved me less than if I saw a dead dog at the time. I didn’t care. Then you come back, if you are fortunate enough, and hold your own child, and you think of the dead child you didn’t care about. … You think about how little you cared at the time, and that hurts.”

Smells bring back the horror. “A barbecue pit — throw a steak on the grill, and it smells a lot like searing flesh,” he says. “You go to get your car worked on, and if anyone is welding, the smell of the burning metal is no different than burning caused by rounds fired at it. It takes you back there instantly.”

•Allen Walsh, an Army reservist, came back to Tucson 45 pounds lighter and with an injured wrist. Since he was unable to get his old job back as a reputable driving school instructor back, he started his own business instead, a mobile barbecue service. He’s been waiting nearly a year on a disability claim with the VA.

Walsh, 36, spent much of the war in Kuwait, attached to a Marine unit providing force protection and chemical decontamination. He says he has experienced PTSD, which he attributes to the constant threat of attack and demand for instant life-or-death decisions.

“It seemed like every day you were always pointing your weapon at somebody. It’s something I have to live with,” he says.

At home, he found he couldn’t sleep more than three or four hours a night. When the nightmares began, he started smoking cigarettes. He’d find himself shaking and quick-tempered.

“Any little noise and I’d jump out of bed and run around the house with a gun,” he says. “I’d wake up at night with cold sweats.”

‘A safe environment’

A recent Defense Department study of combat troops returning from Iraq found that soldiers and Marines who need counseling the most are least likely to seek it because of the stigma of mental health care in the military.

By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAYJesus Bocanegra is waiting for the VA to process his disability claim.

One in six troops questioned in the study admitted to symptoms of severe depression, PTSD or other problems. Of those, six in 10 felt their commanders would treat them differently and fellow troops would lose confidence if they acknowledged their problems.

A report this month by the Government Accountability Office said the VA “is a world leader in PTSD treatment.” But it said the department “does not have sufficient capacity to meet the needs of new combat veterans while still providing for veterans of past wars.” It said the department hasn’t met its own goals for PTSD clinical care and education, even as it anticipates “greater numbers of veterans with PTSD seeking VA services.”

Harrison, who was a school counselor and Army Reservist from Wheeling, W.Va., before being called to active duty in January 2003, thinks cases of PTSD may be even more common than the military’s one-in-six estimate.

He is on the leading edge of the effort to help these veterans back home. Harrison and other counselors invite Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to stop in to talk. Often, that leads to counseling sessions and regular weekly group therapy. If appropriate, they refer the veterans to VA doctors for drug therapies such as antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.

“First of all, I let them talk. I want to find out all their problems,” he says. “Then I assure them they’re not alone. It’s OK.”

Fifty counselors from the latest war is a small number, considering the VA operates 206 counseling centers across the country. Their strategy is to talk with veterans about readjustment before they have problems, or before small problems become big ones. The VA also has staff at 136 U.S. military bases now, including five people at Walter Reed, where many of the most grievously injured are sent.

The toughest part of helping veterans, Harrison says, is getting them to overcome fears of being stigmatized and to step into a Vet Center. “They think they can handle the situation themselves,” he says.

Vet Centers provide help for broader issues of readjustment back to civilian life, including finding a job, alcohol and drug abuse counseling, sexual trauma counseling, spouse and family counseling, and mental or emotional problems that fall short of PTSD.

More than 80{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of the staff are veterans, and 60{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} served in combat zones, says Al Batres, head of the VA’s readjustment counseling service. “We’re oriented toward peer counseling, and we provide a safe environment for soldiers who have been traumatized,” he says.

“A Vietnam veteran myself, it would have been so great if we’d had this kind of outreach,” says Johnny Bragg, director of the Vet Center where Harrison works. “If you can get with the guys who come back fresh … and actually work with their trauma and issues, hopefully over the years you won’t see the long-term PTSD.”

In all cases, the veteran has to be the one who wants to talk before counselors can help. “Once they come through the door, they usually come back,” Harrison says. “For them, this is the only chance to talk to somebody, because their families don’t understand, their friends don’t understand. That’s the big thing. They can’t talk to anyone. They can’t relate to anyone.”

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BofA and DoD Security SNAFU: Info on 1.2 Million Customers Lost by Bank

Posted on February 26, 2005 by Team VCS

BofA and DoD Security SNAFU: Info on 1.2 Customers Lost by Bank

Bank Loses Tapes of Records of 1.2 Million With Visa Cards

Bank of America said yesterday that it had lost computer backup tapes containing personal information about 1.2 million federal employees, including some senators, with Visa charge cards issued by the bank.

A spokeswoman for Bank of America, Alexandra Trower, said the bank did not believe that the information had been stolen or had fallen into the hands of people using it to commit fraud. There has been no suspicious activity on any of the affected accounts, she said.

The cards were issued to government employees who need to travel or make purchases on government business. About 900,000 of the cardholders are employees of the Defense Department. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, was one of the cardholders.

The bank sent letters yesterday to those whose data was on the lost tapes, providing a telephone number for questions or problems. The bank said it did not think it needed to change those account numbers.

Ms. Trower declined to provide many details about the incident, citing security concerns. She said that the tapes were part of a shipment in late December from a bank facility to another location meant to house backups. A few days after the shipment arrived, the bank discovered that a small number of the tapes were missing. The bank then notified the Secret Service, which has legal responsibility for credit card theft.

The investigation so far has turned up no evidence of wrongdoing and is consistent with the view that the tapes were simply lost in transit.

“We are presuming it’s not malicious activity,” said Barbara J. Desoer, the bank’s chief technology, service and fulfillment executive.

The bank notified the General Services Administration of the lost tapes on Jan. 11, said Mary Alice Johnson, a spokeswoman for the agency, which administers the government’s charge card program, known as Smart Pay. Several banks issue cards for federal agencies under that program.

Ms. Johnson said the bank had “behaved as a good citizen.”

The incident comes at a time of increasing attention to the risks to people when information about them held in corporate databases falls into the wrong hands.

Choicepoint, a company that sells personal data to landlords and employers, said last month that it had inadvertently sold personal data on 145,000 people to thieves last year. The information was used to steal the identities of at least 750 people.

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Suicides in Marine Corps Rise by 29{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}

Posted on February 26, 2005 by Team VCS

Suicides in Marine Corps Rise by 29{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}; Fast Pace of Operations Are Believed to Contribute

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 25, 2005; Page A19

The Marine Corps suffered a 29 percent spike in suicides last year, reaching the highest number in at least a decade, with the demanding pace of military operations likely contributing to the deaths, the top-ranking U.S. Marine said yesterday.

Thirty-one Marines committed suicide in 2004, all of them enlisted men, not commissioned officers. The majority were younger than 25 and took their lives with gunshot wounds, according to Marine statistics. Another 83 Marines attempted suicide. There were 24 suicides in 2003, and there have not been more than 29 in any year in the last 10.

Although last year’s suicide rate rose, it was still below the national average for a comparable civilian group, in keeping with an established pattern of suicide being lower in the U.S. military than in the civilian population.

Marine commanders say the rise in suicides continues a worrisome three-year trend that is likely linked to stress from the sharply increased pace of war-zone rotations. At the same time, they said the increase in suicides is not directly related to service in Iraq or Afghanistan; since 2001 24 percent of the suicides have been committed by Marines who have been deployed there, the statistics show.

It is “not only Iraq, it’s just the ops tempo [operational tempo] in general, that’s what I think,” Gen. Michael W. Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, told reporters at a breakfast meeting yesterday.

Hagee’s remarks echoed a strong warning in a Dec. 13 memo that he issued on suicide prevention. “This problem is pervasive and is impacting Marines throughout the Corps, not just those who have been deployed in support of the global war on terrorism,” the memo said. “The increased operational tempo that our Corps is experiencing may be affecting the ability of our Marines to deal with perceived overwhelming stresses associated with relationship, financial, and disciplinary problems.”

Indeed, about 70 percent of Marine suicides over the past four years have been caused by problems in personal relationships, which can be exacerbated by heavy workloads, said Cmdr. Thomas Gaskin, a behavioral health specialist for the Corps’ Personal and Family Readiness Division at Quantico. “That is the single biggest stressor,” he said.

With a force that is the youngest in the military services and predominantly male, the Marine Corps has generally experienced the highest suicide rate among the military branches because its demographics mirror a high-risk group in the general population. More than 60 percent of Marines are younger than 25, and 16 percent are teenagers.

Suicide rates for all the services began rising in 2002, and the Army had an increase in 2003, the first year of the Iraq war. This leads experts to believe that stress is broadly linked to deployments.

However, despite ongoing rotations to Iraq, the Army’s suicides in that country fell back closer to historic levels last year, officials said. That may suggest that, as with the Marine Corps, suicide rates may be more connected to the general demands on the force than to service in combat zones, officials said.

Marine officials said the suicides in their force show no definitive causal patterns. “There are no clear trends among any specific groups,” said Greg Gordon, a spokesman for the Personal and Family Readiness Division.

Hagee warned that while some Marines have displayed obvious warning signs of suicidal tendencies — such as a preoccupation with dying, risky behavior, withdrawal or giving away their possessions — many do not. In his memo, he warned that some Marines feel stigmatized for seeking help.

“They may feel it is not acceptable to ask for help because they don’t want to be labeled as ‘weak’ or ‘defective’ in the eyes of their subordinates, peers, or leaders,” he wrote. Commanders, he emphasized, must redouble their efforts to make Marines feel comfortable in revealing problems that could lead to suicide.

Growing concerns over suicide have led both the Army and Marines to dispatch more mental health professionals to Iraq and Afghanistan, in an effort to provide more immediate prevention. In response to the rising number of suicides in Iraq in 2003, the Army deployed several “combat stress” detachments there to allow psychologists to treat soldiers who demonstrate suicidal tendencies without requiring them to leave the country.

Similarly, the Marines in 2004 launched an “operational stress control and readiness program” in which mental health professionals are embedded in Marine divisions in Iraq and travel to individual units to treat Marines. “Before, we had to ship them out of theater. Now they can provide help immediately,” Gordon said.

The Marines are also developing a prevention tool for commanders called “a leader’s guide for managing Marines under stress,” which is expected to be issued early this year and includes checklists of what to do for suicidal behavior.

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Soldier shocked by pupils’ letters

Posted on February 26, 2005 by Team VCS

Soldier shocked by pupils’ letters

Gary Younge in New York
Thursday February 24, 2005
The Guardian

A teacher has apologised for letters sent by his sixth-grade students to an American soldier, accusing the US military of killing civilians and destroying Iraqi mosques in a futile war on terror.

Alex Kunhardt sent the letters to Private Rob Jacobs for a social studies assignment. Pte Jacobs, who is serving 10 miles from the North Korean border, said his excitement at getting the letters from the Brooklyn schoolchildren turned to shock as he read them.

One of the letters from the 11- to 12-year-old pupils, stamped with a smiley face, said the soldier might have been risking his life for his country, but then asked: “Have you seen how many civilians you or some other soldier killed?”

Another read: “I feel that you are being forced to kill innocent people. Iraq never attacked us, if Bush cared so much about this country then we would be out there trying to find Osama bin Laden. Bush calls this war the war on terrorism. What terrorism? Name one terrorist from Iraq … I know I can’t.”

Most letters did include support for the troops, but few were completely uncritical. A Muslim boy wrote: “I know your [sic] trying to save our country and kill the terrorists but you are also destroying holy places like mosques.”

Another stated: “Bush thinks he’s brave … in his safe little white house with as many guards as he thinks he needs.” He concluded with: “By the way, when you shoot someone, is it great or horrible?”

Pte Jacobs, 20, told the New York Post: “It’s hard enough for soldiers to deal with being away from their families, they don’t need to be getting letters like this. If they don’t have anything nice to say, they might as well not say anything at all.” Pte Jacobs added that the letters were demoralising.

Mr Kunhardt apologised this week. “It was never my intention to demean or insult anyone. I never meant for the words of my students to hurt any of our troops,” he said.

Pte Jacobs’s father accepted the apology on his son’s behalf.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, said: “We have freedom of speech and you certainly cannot go around censoring what people want to write. I think most of [the soldiers overseas] believe that the freedoms we have … are protected by them putting their lives at risk.”

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W.’s Stiletto Democracy

Posted on February 26, 2005 by Team VCS

W.’s Stiletto Democracy

WASHINGTON – It was remarkable to see President Bush lecture Vladimir Putin on the importance of checks and balances in a democratic society.

Remarkably brazen, given that the only checks Mr. Bush seems to believe in are those written to the “journalists” Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Karen Ryan, the fake TV anchor, to help promote his policies. The administration has given a whole new meaning to checkbook journalism, paying a stupendous $97 million to an outside P.R. firm to buy columnists and produce propaganda, including faux video news releases.

The only balance W. likes is the slavering, Pravda-like “Fair and Balanced” coverage Fox News provides. Mr. Bush pledges to spread democracy while his officials strive to create a Potemkin press village at home. This White House seems to prefer softball questions from a self-advertised male escort with a fake name to hardball questions from journalists with real names; it prefers tossing journalists who protect their sources into the gulag to giving up the officials who broke the law by leaking the name of their own C.I.A. agent.

W., who once looked into Mr. Putin’s soul and liked what he saw, did not demand the end of tyranny, as he did in his second Inaugural Address. His upper lip sweating a bit, he did not rise to the level of his hero Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Instead, he said that “the common ground is a lot more than those areas where we disagree.” The Russians were happy to stress the common ground as well.

An irritated Mr. Putin compared the Russian system to the American Electoral College, perhaps reminding the man preaching to him about democracy that he had come in second in 2000 according to the popular vote, the standard most democracies use.

Certainly the autocratic former K.G.B. agent needs to be upbraided by someone – Tony Blair, maybe? – for eviscerating the meager steps toward democracy that Russia had made before Mr. Putin came to power. But Mr. Bush is on shaky ground if he wants to hold up his administration as a paragon of safeguarding liberty – considering it has trampled civil liberties in the name of the war on terror and outsourced the torture of prisoners to bastions of democracy like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. (The secretary of state canceled a trip to Egypt this week after Egypt’s arrest of a leading opposition politician.)

“I live in a transparent country,” Mr. Bush protested to a Russian reporter who implicitly criticized the Patriot Act by noting that the private lives of American citizens “are now being monitored by the state.”

Dick Cheney’s secret meetings with energy lobbyists were certainly a model of transparency. As was the buildup to the Iraq war, when the Bush hawks did their best to cloak the real reasons they wanted to go to war and trumpet the trumped-up reasons.

The Bush administration wields maximum secrecy with minimal opposition. The White House press is timid. The poor, limp Democrats don’t have enough power to convene Congressional hearings on any Republican outrages and are reduced to writing whining letters of protest that are tossed in the Oval Office trash.

When nearly $9 billion allotted for Iraqi reconstruction during Paul Bremer’s tenure went up in smoke, Democratic lawmakers vainly pleaded with Republicans to open a Congressional investigation.

Even the near absence of checks and balances is not enough for W. Not content with controlling the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and a good chunk of the Fourth Estate, he goes to even more ludicrous lengths to avoid being challenged.

The White House wants its Republican allies in the Senate to stamp out the filibuster, one of the few weapons the handcuffed Democrats have left. They want to invoke the so-called nuclear option and get rid of the 150-year-old tradition in order to ram through more right-wing judges.

Mr. Bush and Condi Rice strut in their speeches – the secretary of state also strutted in Wiesbaden in her foxy “Matrix”-dominatrix black leather stiletto boots – but they shy away from taking questions from the public unless they get to vet the questions and audiences in advance.

Administration officials went so far as to cancel a town hall meeting during Mr. Bush’s visit to Germany last week after deciding an unscripted setting would be too risky, opting for a round-table talk in Mainz with preselected Germans and Americans.

The president loves democracy – as long as democracy means he’s always right.

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The Feres Doctrine Prevents Accountability and Endangers the Troops

Posted on February 24, 2005 by Team VCS

        For the past fifty years, our military has been subjected to an obscure legal doctrine known as “The Feres Doctrine.”  While the average soldier can normally spend his entire career without even giving the Supreme Court a second thought, the results of Feres are seen daily in military clinics and hospitals. 

            According to Feres, the United States is not liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act for injuries to members of the armed forces sustained while on active duty and resulting from the negligence of others in the armed forces.  Basically, Feres states that if a military doctor cuts off your otherwise healthy leg by mistake, you get no money from the government.  It applies with equal force to negligence by any soldiers, including professionals such as military lawyers, pharmacists, nurses, psychologists, and pilots.  The Supreme Court crafted the doctrine in 1950 with Feres v. United States, and it has been continually upheld by courts since that time.  Judges refuse to overturn Feres and point to Congress to change the statute.  Legislators ignore the courts, either inadvertently or by design.  The outcome can be criminal medical care and an unaccountable government.           

            When I was with the First Cavalry Division, I worked on the case of a Major who was being eliminated from the service.  He had graduated from medical school, but never passed his medical boards despite repeated attempts.  (He was also being kicked out for getting caught shoplifting and for a DUI.)  The military allowed him to practice medicine under the supervision of another doctor, which is a fairly straightforward practice.

            You’re probably saying to yourself, “So what’s the problem?” 

            He was an eye surgeon. 

            “It’s not problem to let him operate on a soldier’s eyes, since he’s under the supervision of another doctor, right?” 

            Wrong.  The supervising physician was at Fort Sam Houston, and he was at Fort Hood.  If he blinded a soldier, the doctor could not be sued since he was operating within the scope of his employment.  The government could not be sued because of Feres.  All the soldier gets is an “Oops” and two glass eyes (which are probably made by the lowest bidder).              

            If the government knew it might be liable in a lawsuit, it would have a vastly increased incentive to provide quality medical care.  A former commander of mine once told me that, “the true measure of a man may be seen in how he behaves when he knows he will not be held accountable for his actions.”  Remove the incentive for doing the right thing, guarantee a lack of punishment for doing the wrong, and what do you get?  All too often, you are left with the expedient, the cheap, and the good-enough-for-government-work.  When Uncle Sam knows he will not be sued for botched surgeries, erroneous prescriptions, and filthy hospitals, he has no incentive to fix those problems. 

            I do not mean to denigrate the valiant efforts of our doctors, nurses, and medics that serve with honor and save lives every day, both in combat or peacetime.  I do have an issue with incompetence, malfeasance, and a$$-covering.  If those are present, the problem needs to fixed and those accountable need to be punished, whatever the profession.             

            Feres does have salvageable sections.  For instance, we do not want Private Schmedlapp second-guessing his company commander’s tactical decisions in a court of law.  To allow him to sue his superiors for negligent decisions would almost certainly injure good order and discipline.  So, maintaining the bar to negligence actions does make sense where the command relationship would be challenged.  But, is there any harm to good order and discipline if a soldier or his widow sues the federal government based on negligent medical care in the post hospital?  No.  It makes the government accountable for ensuring quality military medicine.

            What is the solution to the problem?  End the finger-pointing.  Either the Supreme Court needs to overturn Feres, or Congress needs to amend the statute to clarify the issue.  Allow negligence lawsuits that are aimed outside of the chain of command, such as for professional malpractice, but maintain the prohibition on a soldier suing his superiors.  Regardless of the solution, we cannot allow “business as usual” to continue.

            Countless people gloss over the words “God Bless America” without a second thought.  Well, God has blessed America, because our nation has been endowed with amazing young men and women that are willing to sacrifice everything to keep us free.  They deserve only the best in return.

Jason Thelen served as a Captain in the US Army Reserve during Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is the fourth in a series of columns he is writing for Veterans for Common Sense. He can be reached at jthelen294@yahoo.com

Find more articles by Jason Thelan. Read previous columns here:

It could have just as easily been me, February 18, 2005

Open Letter to Senator Cornyn, February 9, 2005

Dear America from an Iraq War veteran, February 2, 2005

  

 

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When Democracy Failed in 2005

Posted on February 24, 2005 by Team VCS

When Democracy Failed – 2005

This weekend – February 27th – is the 72nd anniversary, but the corporate media most likely won’t cover it. The generation that experienced this history firsthand is now largely dead, and only a few of us dare hear their ghosts.

It started when the government, in the midst of an economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist. Some, like Sefton Delmer – a London Daily Express reporter on the scene – say they certainly did not, while others, like William Shirer, suggest they did.)

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.

He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.

His coarse use of language – reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state – and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion – “a sign from God,” he called it – to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader’s flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.

Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation’s now-popular leader had pushed through legislation – in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it – that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people’s homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

To get his patriotic “Decree on the Protection of People and State” passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn’t had time to read the bill before voting on it.

Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in public – and there were many – quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police’s batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader’s public speeches. (In the meantime, he was taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a very competent orator.)

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to stir a “racial pride” among his countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as “The Homeland,” a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl’s famous propaganda movie “Triumph Of The Will.” As hoped, people’s hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was “the” homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the “true people,” he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation’s concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it’s of little concern to us.

Playing on this new implicitly racial nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn’t act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.

His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a “New Christianity.” Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared “Gott Mit Uns” – God Is With Us – and most of them fervently believed it was true.

Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation’s leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various troublesome “intellectuals” and “liberals.” He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.

He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.

His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terrorist attack, “Radio and press are at out disposal.” Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation’s leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded from the public’s recollection as his central security office began advertising a program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors. This program was so successful that the names of some of the people “denounced” were soon being broadcast on radio stations. Those denounced often included opposition politicians and news reporters who dared speak out – a favorite target of his regime and the media he now controlled through intimidation and ownership by corporate allies.

To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn’t enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation’s largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.

He also reached out to the churches, declaring that the nation had clear Christian roots, that any nation that didn’t openly support religion was morally bankrupt, and that his administration would openly and proudly provide both moral and financial support to initiatives based on faith to provide social services.

In this, he was reaching back to his own embrace of Christianity, which he noted in an April 12, 1922 speech:

“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers … was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

“In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders…

“As a Christian … I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…”

When he later survived an assassination attempt, he said, “Now I am completely content. The fact that I left the Burgerbraukeller earlier than usual is a corroboration of Providence’s intention to let me reach my goal.”

Many government functions started with prayer. Every school day started with prayer and every child heard the wonders of Christianity and – especially – the Ten Commandments in school. The leader even ended many of his speeches with a prayer, as he did in a February 20, 1938 speech before Parliament:

“In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and our action, to our judgment and our resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger.”

But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack, voices of dissent again arose within and without the government. Students had started an active program opposing him (later known as the White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own government, questions of his possibly illegitimate rise to power, his corruption of religious leaders, and the oft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians about the people being held in detention without due process or access to attorneys or family.

With his number two man – a master at manipulating the media – he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with the terrorist who had set afire the nation’s most important building was tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity.

He called a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe – at first – denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar’s Rome or Alexander’s Greece.

It took a few months, and intense international debate and lobbying with European nations, but, after he personally met with the leader of the United Kingdom, finally a deal was struck. After the military action began, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the nervous British people that giving in to this leader’s new first-strike doctrine would bring “peace for our time.” Thus Hitler annexed Austria in a lightning move, riding a wave of popular support as leaders so often do in times of war. The Austrian government was unseated and replaced by a new leadership friendly to Germany, and German corporations began to take over Austrian resources.

In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, Hitler said, “Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators.”

To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn’t think they’d succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will.

Rather than the government being run by multiple parties in a pluralistic, democratic fashion, one single party sought total control. Emulating a technique also used by Stalin, but as ancient as Rome, the Party used the power of its influence on the government to take over all government functions, hand out government favors, and reward Party contributors with government positions and contracts.

In times of war, they said, there could be only “one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief” (“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer”), and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself. You were either with us, or you were with the terrorists.

It was a simplistic perspective, but that was what would work, he was told by his Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels: “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

Those questioning him were labeled “anti-German” or “not good Germans,” and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation’s valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the army came) against the “intellectuals and liberals” who were critical of his policies.

Another technique was to “manufacture news,” through the use of paid shills posing as reporters, seducing real reporters with promises of access to the leader in exchange for favorable coverage, and thinly veiled threats to those who exposed his lies. As his Propaganda Minister said, “It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.”

Nonetheless, once the “small war” annexation of Austria was successfully and quickly completed, and peace returned, voices of opposition were again raised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of news bulletins about the dangers of terrorist communist cells wasn’t enough to rouse the populace and totally suppress dissent. A full-out war was necessary to divert public attention from the growing rumbles within the country about disappearing dissidents; violence against liberals, Jews, and union leaders; and the epidemic of crony capitalism that was producing empires of wealth in the corporate sector but threatening the middle class’s way of life.

A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.

In the months after that, he claimed that Poland had weapons of mass destruction (poison gas) and was supporting terrorists against Germany. Those who doubted that Poland represented a threat were shouted down or branded as ignorant. Elections were rigged, run by party hacks. Only loyal Party members were given passes for admission to public events with the leader, so there would never be a single newsreel of a heckler, and no doubt in the minds of the people that the leader enjoyed vast support.

And his support did grow, as Propaganda Minister Goebbels’ dictum bore fruit:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Within a few months Poland, too, was invaded in a “defensive, pre-emptive” action. The nation was now fully at war, and all internal dissent was suppressed in the name of national security; it was the end of Germany’s first experiment with democracy.

As we conclude this review of history, there are a few milestones worth remembering.

February 27, 2005, is the 72nd anniversary of Dutch terrorist Marinus van der Lubbe’s successful firebombing of the German Parliament (Reichstag) building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to legitimacy and reshaped the German constitution. By the time of his successful and brief action to seize Austria, in which almost no German blood was shed, Hitler was the most beloved and popular leader in the history of his nation. Hailed around the world, he was later Time magazine’s “Man Of The Year.”

Most Americans remember his office for the security of the homeland, known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, simply by its most famous agency’s initials: the SS.

We also remember that the Germans developed a new form of highly violent warfare they named “lightning war” or blitzkrieg, which, while generating devastating civilian losses, also produced a highly desirable “shock and awe” among the nation’s leadership according to the authors of the 1996 book “Shock And Awe” published by the National Defense University Press.

Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983) left us this definition of the form of government the German democracy had become through Hitler’s close alliance with the largest German corporations and his policy of using religion and war as tools to keep power: “fas-cism (fâsh’iz’em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

Today, as we face financial and political crises, it’s useful to remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.

Germany’s response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society’s richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, bust up unions, and create an illusion of prosperity through government debt and continual and ever-expanding war spending.

America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.

To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.

Thom Hartmann (www.thomhartmann.com) lived and worked in Germany during the 1980s, is the Project Censored Award-winning, best-selling author of over a dozen books, and is the host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk radio program. This article, in slightly altered form, was first published in 2003 by CommonDreams.org and is now also a chapter in Thom’s book What Would Jefferson Do?, published in 2004 by Random House/Harmony.

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For some returning vets, war may not be over yet

Posted on February 23, 2005 by Team VCS

PARIS, Ill. – It was a day for high school bands and red, white and blue balloons, for cheers and tears and a sea of jubilant family and friends in every imaginable form of patriotic attire.

“The 1544th” finally had come home.

For 14 months while stationed in Iraq, the battered Illinois National Guard 1544th Transportation Company had endured more than 100 mortar attacks and had driven more than 580,000 hostile miles transporting supplies and ammunition.

During that time, the unit of about 160 members had suffered more deaths and injuries than any other National Guard company in the nation, military officials said.

Five soldiers – Sgt. Ivory L. Phillips, Sgt. Jeremy L. Ridlen, Sgt. Shawna Morrison, Spc. Charles Lam and Spc. Jessica L. Cawvey – did not return, killed either by mortar attacks or roadside bombs. They accounted for half of all Illinois Army National Guard fatalities in Iraq.

About 70 others were injured; about 20 of those were hurt seriously enough to be sent home.

But this was not the day to dwell on that. The citizen-soldiers of this tightknit community were back, and some 5,000 people lined the streets Tuesday to greet them.

“We’ve prayed hard for this day,” said Annette Brown, who stood in the middle of Main Street straining to get a glimpse of her arriving fiance, Willridge Simms.

And the troops were grateful for those prayers and the greeting.

“This is just awesome,” Sgt. Tyler Heleine said. “You can see that we’ve got the best support in the country.”

But while the 1544th’s battles in Iraq are done, the war is still not over for them and this community. Over the next few weeks and even months, in scores of individual homes here and in neighboring towns, returning veterans and their families will be quietly struggling try to deal with the hidden scars of the war.

According to the military, one of every six service members will return from Iraq with a mental disorder, and some experts believe the number could be even higher. Twenty-three percent of Iraq veterans treated at Veterans Affairs facilities have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It’s a big thing,” said Sgt. Major John Bauer, who is with the Illinois National Guard 651st Troop Command. “We’re trying hard to address it. It’s not just about dealing with the soldier. The family has to be brought into it as well.”

Murder, suicide and depression

The military began seeing the psychological impact shortly after the war began. In 2002, three soldiers who returned from the war in Afghanistan to their base in Fort Bragg, N.C., murdered their wives.

In July 2003, five soldiers in Iraq committed suicide, prompting the Army to send a team of mental health experts to Iraq.

The military’s primary concerns are depression problems and post-traumatic stress disorder, a debilitating change in the brain’s chemistry that includes flashbacks, sleep disorders, panic attacks, acute anxiety, emotional numbness and violent outbursts.

Lisset Greene of Spring Hill, Fla., believes it was post-traumatic stress disorder that took her husband from her. Greene said when her husband, Sgt. Curtis Greene, returned from Iraq in 2003, he was a changed man.

“Before he left, he loved the Army,” said Greene, 31. “After he came back, he hated it.”

Greene had nightmares, his wife said. He would awake covered in sweat. He was irritable and short-tempered.

The Curtis Greene she knew before Iraq was mild-mannered. This one was violent. “There were times that I felt unsafe in the house with him,” she said.

Twice the police had to be called to the couple’s home. Once, he was taken away in handcuffs.

He was seeing a psychiatrist, but Lisset said it didn’t seem to help. On Dec. 6, soldiers found Greene hanging in his barracks. He was 25.

Families must prepare

The vast majority of returning members of the 1544th will not have serious readjustment issues. But families here know they will be dealing with some form of re-entry stress. Paris firefighter Steve Wirth, whose 20-year-old daughter, Staci, returned Tuesday with the 1544th, said he began to prepare even before her arrival.

“We’ve discussed it, family-wise,” Wirth said while standing inside the fire station. “There’s going to be changes all the way around. We’re going to give her her space.”

Wirth said he knows the college student he kissed goodbye 14 months ago as she headed off to training and eventually to Iraq is not going to be the one he gets back.

“She’s going to be more mature, I know that, and going to have seen some things that we can’t imagine,” he said.

Tammy Johns, who runs a computer company with her husband, Max, said she is worried about how the war may have affected their daughter, Shelly, 20, a college student.

“I worry about her having nightmares,” Tammy Johns said. “I worry about road rage. I worry about the fact that we have guns in the house. Should we take the ammunition out of the house?”

Coming to grips

The returning soldiers are just as concerned about the effect of the war on their psyches as are their families, some said.

“That’s all I think about lately,” said Sgt. Heather Furry of the 1544th, who is also the mother of an 8-year-old daughter, Macy.

“I’ve got to get back in the routine of being the mom, going back to work, having a house to take care of, the bills. I know it’s all not going to go smoothly, but that’s part of being a parent.”

Furry, a dental assistant, said she knows that what she’s seen has had an impact on her. Furry endured a mortar attack in September that killed Shawna Morrison of Paris and Charles Lamb of nearby Martinsville, Ill., and wounded 13 other soldiers.

In a letter to her mother, Furry, 27, wrote of her efforts to come to grips with the horror of the attack and her futile attempt to save Morrison.

“We’ve been through a lot,” said Furry, who is leaving the National Guard after 11 years of service.

And because she has been through so much, she said, she is going to seek counseling, whether she thinks she needs it or not.

Is military help enough?

To help returning veterans, the military says it is mounting its most extensive effort ever to deal with potential re-entry problems. For instance, returning soldiers and Marines undergo mandatory face-to-face screenings with doctors and psychologists. Readjustment counseling for soldiers and their families has been set up at 206 Vet Centers around the nation. Counseling hot lines are available.

But some people, such as Charles Sheehan-Miles, executive director of the Washington-based Veterans for Common and a veteran of the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, are concerned that the military is not doing enough.

They note that the New England Journal of Medicine reported last year that 16 percent of veterans of the war in Iraq suffer from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, but fewer than 40 of them had actually sought help.

Sheehan-Miles said he has been surveying counseling services at various bases and has found them uneven.

“What I’m afraid of is that in one instance you might find a base that is fully aware of the problem and at another base they’re not,” said Sheehan-Miles, who said he had difficulty sleeping, nightmares and considered suicide after his service in Iraq and Kuwait.

One major problem is that many soldiers are reluctant to seek counseling or report strange behavior for fear that it might hurt their career.

Sheehan-Miles said that while the military says it encourages soldiers to seek counseling, it’s handling of one case has sent mixed signals.

While in Iraq, Sgt. George Andreas Pogany had a panic attack and sought medical help. In response, the military court-martialed him for cowardice. The case was thrown out, however, after it was determined that the attacks were probably caused by an antimalaria drug issued to some in combat.

In Paris and other communities across the nation, the military has been counseling families on how to help returning family members readjust.

Don’t ask questions

Patty Kennedy, Heather Furry’s mother, has been attending the meetings here in which the military has brought in psychologists and psychiatrists who offer tips on how to deal with returning veterans.

“They’ve told us to not ask them questions about the war,” she said. “If they want to talk about it, let them talk, but we shouldn’t bring it up. There were other things, like don’t tell her what you want. Ask her what she wants you to do for her.”

But even with pre-counseling, many families here won’t be ready, said Tara Hopkins, whose husband, Erik Hopkins, returned home in September, his body riddled with shrapnel from the mortar attack that claimed Morrison and Lamb.

“They don’t understand the nightmares they have at night,” Hopkins said. “It’s very overwhelming. It’s been an emotional roller coaster.”

Hopkins said the counseling that she and her husband have received through the Army has been vital to re-establishing their relationship.

She explained that it’s not just the returning soldier that has to readjust, but the other family members as well. She explained how she had to “get back into the wife role” once her husband returned.

“I was so used to doing things without him that he was complaining that I would leave him out of the plans I’d made for me and the kids,” she said.

On Tuesday, however, few were thinking of those problems. Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, Sen. Dick Durbin and other dignitaries had turned out to honor the men and women of the 1544th.

“It’s been a long wait,” said Quinn, who previously attended the funerals of all five guardsmen from the unit. “We’re happy to finally have them home.”

Reporter Ron Harris
E-mail: rharris@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8214

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on For some returning vets, war may not be over yet

Iraq War Veteran Faces Murder Charge in Chicago

Posted on February 22, 2005 by Team VCS

Killers on and off the battlefield?

BY FRANK MAINCrime Reporter fmain@suntimes.com

Pierre Cole seemed high on killing. Cole, a soldier in Iraq, called his dad from overseas to boast about gunning down enemies in a firefight in 2003.

“He was on cloud nine,” said his father, Willie Cole. “‘Hey, I got a couple of them,’ ” he said. ” ‘I let loose.'”

Willie Cole — a former military police officer who served in Panama when the United States deposed President Manuel Noriega in 1989 — was shocked.

“It disturbed me, his reaction to the loss of life,” said Willie Cole, a caterer in the south suburbs. “I said, ‘Regardless of what you’re over there for, the other guy is fighting for something, too. You have to respect that.'”

But Pierre Cole tuned out his dad.

“He commented to me, ‘F— it. I’m glad it’s him, not me.'”

Now Pierre Cole, 22, is back from Iraq and facing a murder charge in Cook County Criminal Court for allegedly killing a West Side store owner, In Taik Jung, during a botched robbery Oct. 14.

Pierre Cole was on leave from Iraq. His father and others wonder if Cole’s military experience played a role in the slaying.

Seven other soldiers from the same base — Fort Riley, Kan. — also have been charged with murder, for other killings, since August.

Five of those soldiers have been accused of killing civilians in Iraq, although the murder charge against one of them was dropped. Two more soldiers are charged with killing members of their unit near their base in Kansas. It’s a rare cluster of murder cases for any one Army base.

Statistics obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that 18 murder cases were tried under military law for the entire Army in 2003, 30 in 2002 and 18 in 2001. Of the current Fort Riley cases, every one but Cole’s is being handled in military courts.

It’s impossible to know if these defendants would have been charged in violent crimes had they never joined the military.

But Gary Solis, a former Marine prosecutor who teaches the law of war at West Point, suggested a study by the Army’s inspector general on potential links among the murder cases.

“It is troubling to have these egregious murders in Iraq and now to have them in the States, too,” Solis said. “Maybe they would look at leadership, garrison routine, enlistment records and pre-enlistment records to see whether they had juvenile records before they entered the Army.”

Immigrants became merchants

In Taik Jung, 50, came to the United States in 1980 from a small town in Korea.

He and Kimberly Jung married the next year. Like many immigrants to Chicago, the Jungs became merchants, working to make a better life for their son and daughter, who are now in their 20s and attend the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The Jungs ran a jewelry store before opening Best Fit clothing in the 4000 block of West Madison about eight years ago.

“We were open 10 to 6:30, seven days a week,” said Kimberly Jung. “My husband never had time for himself.”

They knew the West Garfield Park neighborhood could be dangerous, but they relied on their Christian faith to keep them safe.

The couple trusted their employee, Latorria Fields, 38, because of her religious upbringing and family background.

“She taught a youth group at her church,” Kimberly Jung recalled.

But Fields allegedly wound up playing a part in In Taik Jung’s death.

Pierre Cole and his uncle, Lee McGee, a veteran of the first Gulf War, decided to rob the store and Fields agreed to help, prosecutors said.

Fields told them how much money came into the store and promised to remove a video surveillance tape in exchange for part of the loot, police said.

On the day of the murder, McGee and Cole shopped and made small talk with Jung for about an hour before McGee pulled out a handgun and shot the storekeeper, prosecutors said.

Then Cole also allegedly pulled out a pistol and shot Jung.

They rifled through his pockets looking for a wallet but did not find one, authorities said. They couldn’t open the cash register and left virtually empty-handed before fleeing to Kansas, where they were arrested Dec. 2, police said.

Fields, meanwhile, had failed to remove the surveillance tape, which police seized. The tape showed Jung ringing up clothing purchases for the men, police said.

“We had a terrible business for two years,” Kimberly Jung said. “The economy is very bad. Now I have closed the store, but I still have my responsibility to raise my kids. I don’t know why this happened. I have to put my house on the market next month. I have no insurance. I am having a very hard time financially.”

Shared war stories with uncle

Cole grew up in a stable home with a grandfather at 47th and Laramie near Midway Airport. His other grandfather, Willie Cole’s father, is a bishop at True Vine Pentecostal Church in Aliceville, Ala.

“We’ve always been out for an honest day’s work,” said his father, the executive chef at C&C Catering in Harvey.

Pierre Cole attended Flower High School in Chicago, then moved in with his father in Dolton and transferred to Thornton High. He dropped out to work for the Job Corps in culinary arts.

“Pierre wasn’t excelling in school,” his father said. “He was drinking with friends and not fitting in. The Job Corps was good for him.”

When he was 18, Cole chose to enter the military like his father and uncle. He was assigned to the Headquarters and Headquarters Company , 1st Battalion, 34th Armor Regiment of the 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division based at Fort Riley.

The 34th Armor has suffered major losses in Iraq, and Cole saw some of his comrades killed in action, his father said.

“He saw his lieutenant get killed,” he said. “One time they mortared guys playing softball near his unit. One soldier’s head was blown off, and his body was sent back without a head.”

When his son came home on leave in September, he hooked up with McGee, his 37-year-old uncle who served in a tank unit in the 1991 Gulf War, Willie Cole said.

“They had a lot of stories to share,” he said.

Willie Cole said he traveled to Fort Riley to see Pierre after he returned home from Iraq and was shocked at the lack of discipline at the base.

“Here was my son, drinking for a couple days straight, starting in the morning at Fort Riley. Groups of people came back and all they wanted to do was party. There should have been alcohol awareness counseling, and they should have been dealing with coming back from combat. There was none of that.”

Later, Willie Cole was in Louisiana when he learned that police were looking for his son and Lee McGee.

“It’s not serious,” Willie Cole remembers his son telling him in October.

Willie Cole said he was dumbfounded when he learned what his son was accused of doing in Chicago.

“Out of character doesn’t describe it,” he said. “He was going to sign up for four more years, with a bonus. All that is gone.”

Pierre Cole’s mother, Eunice McGee, also can’t believe her son is in jail facing the possibility of Death Row.

“I believe he snapped,” she said. “It hurts me that my brother [McGee] got him into this situation. When [President] Bush sends soldiers home from Iraq, he ought to get them counseling. To me, this was not my son at all.”

Through his attorney, Pierre Cole refused to answer questions, except to say he is aware of the charges against the other Fort Riley soldiers but does not know the men.

The ‘Straight and Stalwart’

Six other Fort Riley soldiers charged with murder are members of the 41st Infantry Regiment, whose slogan is “Straight and Stalwart.”

In Iraq, Staff Sgts. Johnny Horne Jr. and Cardenas J. Alban were accused of a “mercy killing,” shooting a 16-year-old who was severely burned and wounded in the abdomen after the soldiers attacked a dump truck outside Baghdad on Aug. 18, 2004. The soldiers fired on the truck after hearing a report that it was depositing bombs on the road.

Horne and Alban have pleaded guilty. Horne was sentenced to three years in prison, and Alban got a one-year term.

Is there a larger story?

In the same incident, Sgt. Michael P. Williams was charged with murder for allegedly ordering his soldiers to “light him up” when another unarmed Iraqi ran from the dump truck. Charges against a platoon leader were dropped.

Ten days later, Williams allegedly killed an Iraqi after removing his handcuffs. Another soldier had put an AK-47 on a table after finding the assault weapon in a search of a home. Williams claimed he shot the Iraqi because he saw the man go for the weapon and “felt threatened,” prosecutors said.

Spec. Brent W. May allegedly led another unarmed Iraqi into the same house and asked Williams, “Can I shoot him?” May shot the man in the head and bragged about the killing afterward, prosecutors said.

The murder charges are pending against Williams and May.

Two other soldiers in the 41st, Sgts. Aaron R. Stanley and Eric Colvin, were in Kansas when they became murderers, authorities said.

“I thought from the first day I took this case that there was a larger story,” said Capt. Trevor Oliver, an Army attorney who represents Stanley. “Is there a psychological problem that runs through all of these soldiers? Drug problems?”

Stanley and Colvin had stayed behind when their unit returned to Iraq in July.

The war veterans were living in a farmhouse that Stanley rented in rural Clay County about 30 miles from the base. Stanley already was in trouble. He was facing charges in civilian court for allegedly manufacturing methamphetamine, an illegal drug.

On Sept. 13, he and Colvin allegedly killed two fellow soldiers, Staff Sgt. Matthew Werner and Spec. Christopher D. Hymer, at the farmhouse. Hymer was shot seven times and Werner six times, a coroner testified earlier this month at a military hearing. Both of the slain men had traces of Valium and methamphetamine in their blood, the coroner said.

Stanley called 911 and said he shot two people trying to break into his house, but he and Colvin were charged with murder in military court.

Stanley also was charged with being absent without leave and violating an order restricting him to the limits of Fort Riley at the time of the shooting.

Oliver disputed whether his client was really AWOL. Originally, Stanley was supposed to be restricted to the base while the civilian drug case was pending against him, Oliver said.

“Then the unit said he could go off base with an NCO [a non- commissioned officer] escort,” Oliver said. “Stanley was a sergeant, E-5, and his friends were E-5s. So he essentially could go off base with his friends.”

Oliver said he plans to pursue a self-defense strategy.

A medical exam found Stanley is mentally fit to stand trial and does not suffer from full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder from his combat experience, Oliver said. Still, his client was diagnosed with “PTSD-like stress” that may become part of his defense, he said.

Oliver would not discuss specifics of the case but said the military should look for any common threads running through the series of killings.

“To have six or more under court martial for one unit is strange,” he said of the 41st Infantry. “To have them all charged with murder is extremely strange.”

Hymer’s mother, Cathy Hymer, said her son was a football and basketball player in his hometown of Liberal, Mo., in the southwest corner of the state. He drove a Bradley armored vehicle and escorted a four-star general in Kuwait, she said.

He seemed to enjoy the soldier’s life, his mother said.

On April 27, 2003, Hymer was in the Middle East and wrote to his mother, “We left the airport a few days ago and moved into Saddam’s palace resort. There are many man-made lakes and canals. We have been fishing, swimming and boating. . . . Living the good life. I don’t know too many people who can say that in a war zone.”

Cathy Hymer did not know the men accused of killing her son. She is angry the Army did not keep better track of Stanley, keeping him on base after he was charged in the civilian drug case.

“This was cold-blooded murder,” she said. “I want answers for why this happened. The Army is not communicating with us at all.”

‘Exceptionally well-trained’

Fort Riley would not comment on the string of murders except for a statement that Maj. Gen. Dennis Hardy, the base commander, had released Oct. 1 before Cole was charged in Chicago.

“I remain confident that all our soldiers are exceptionally well-trained,” Hardy said. “They know the difference between right and wrong, between acceptable and unacceptable actions. We should not allow these incidents to overshadow the tremendous efforts of our soldiers in Iraq.”

Solis, the West Point instructor and a former military prosecutor, said the Fort Riley cases — especially the overseas ones — could signal the need for better leadership in the field.

Army leaders in Iraq, for example, could be dehumanizing the enemy, which can lead to soldiers feeling they are above the law and to commit “bad acts.”

“In Japan, we called the enemy ‘Nips,'” Solis said. “In Vietnam they were ‘Charlie’ or ‘Gooner’ or ‘Slope,’ and in Iraq they’re ‘rag heads.’ But that is not universally true. Commanders can instruct their troops not to use those names. I know some commanders in Iraq are insisting the enemy be called ‘ACMs’ or anti-coalition militia.”

As a former prosecutor, however, Solis said he is always wary of the argument that combat stress leads to criminal acts.

“The military is a reflection of civilian society,” he said. “We have good guys and bad guys. It’s possible these [Fort Riley] soldiers would have been bad guys in spite of the war.”

Pierre Cole’s father was not so sure about that.

“The moral of the story is that if we take American soldiers and turn them into fighting machines,” he said, “we need to take them back and desensitize them, and turn them back into the people they were before they left home. We have guerrilla fighters walking around our streets now.”

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