President-Elect Obama Prepares to Issue Order to Close Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Team VCS

January 12, 2009, Washington – President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to issue an executive order his first week in office — and perhaps his first day — to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, according to two presidential transition team advisers. It’s unlikely the detention facility at the Navy base in Cuba will be closed anytime soon. In an interview last weekend, Obama said it would be “a challenge” to close it even within the first 100 days of his administration.

But the order, which one adviser said could be issued as early as Jan. 20, would start the process of deciding what to do with the estimated 250 al-Qaida and Taliban suspects and potential witnesses who are being held there. Most have not been charged with a crime.

The Guantanamo directive would be one of a series of executive orders Obama is planning to issue shortly after he takes office next Tuesday, according to the two advisers. Also expected is an executive order about certain interrogation methods, but details were not immediately available Monday.

The advisers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the orders that have not yet been finalized.

Obama transition team spokeswoman Brooke Anderson declined comment Monday.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the order an important first step, but demanded details on how Guantanamo will be shuttered.

“What we need are specifics about the timeline for the shuttering of the military commissions and the release or charging of detainees who have been indefinitely held for years,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said in a statement. “An executive order lacking such detail, especially after the transition team has had months to develop a comprehensive plan on an issue this important, would be insufficient.”

The two advisers said the executive order will direct the new administration to look at each of the cases of the Guantanamo detainees to see whether they can be released or if they should still be held — and if so, where.

Many of the Guantanamo detainees are cleared for release, and others could be sent back to their native countries and held there. But many nations have resisted Bush administration efforts to repatriate the prisoners back home. Both Obama advisers said it’s hoped that nations that had initially resisted taking detainees will be more willing to do so after dealing with the new administration.

What remains the thorniest issue for Obama, the advisers said, is what to do with the rest of the prisoners — including at least 15 so-called “high value detainees” considered among the most dangerous there.

Detainees held on U.S. soil would have certain legal rights that they were not entitled to while imprisoned in Cuba. It’s also not clear if they would face trial through the current military tribunal system, or in federal civilian courts, or though a to-be-developed legal system that would mark a hybrid of the two.

Where to imprison the detainees also is a problem.

Obama promised during the presidential campaign to shut Guantanamo, endearing him to constitutional law experts, civil libertarians and other critics who called the Bush administration detentions a violation of international law.

But he acknowledged in an interview Sunday that the process of closing the prison would be harder and longer than initially thought.

“That’s a challenge,” Obama said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I think it’s going to take some time and our legal teams are working in consultation with our national security apparatus as we speak to help design exactly what we need to do.

“But I don’t want to be ambiguous about this,” he said. “We are going to close Guantanamo and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our constitution.”

President George W. Bush established military tribunals to prosecute detainees at Guantanamo. He also supports closing the prison, but strongly opposes bringing prisoners to the United States.

Lawmakers have moved to block transfer of the detainees to at least two potential and frequently discussed military facilities: an Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. A Marine Corps prison at Camp Pendleton in Southern California also is under consideration, a Pentagon official said.

Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., said Monday that “it’s hard to show why terror suspects should be housed in Kansas.”

“If the holding facility at Guantanamo Bay is closed, a new facility should be built, designed specifically to handle detainees,” Brownback said in a statement.

A Pentagon team also has been looking at how to shut Guantanamo and move its detainees, but spokesman Bryan Whitman did not immediately know Monday whether it was completed.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged , , | Comments Off on President-Elect Obama Prepares to Issue Order to Close Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp

Army Makes Deployment Hearing Test Mandatory

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Team VCS

January 12, 2009 – Bomb blasts, howling engines, growling generators and the deafening roar of military aircraft have made the war zones noisy enough to damage soldiers’ hearing.

An estimated 25 percent of redeploying soldiers have reported experiencing some change in their hearing, or dizziness or ringing of the ears, according to Army audiologists whose data was gathered from hearing tests done at units and installations after deployments.

The hearing tests are now mandatory in an effort to collect the data from all soldiers and make sure they are fit for duty and get follow-up care if needed. They must take the test as soon as practicable upon redeployment, or as part of their post-deployment health assessment.

Active-duty soldiers are required to have the test no later than six months after redeployment.

For National Guard and Reserve soldiers, the test must take place before they go off active duty.

The guidance was announced Jan. 5 in an all-Army activity message issued by the Army surgeon general’s office.

Soldiers who have complained about hearing loss have been given an audiogram as part of their post-deployment defense occupational environmental health readiness system for hearing conservation.

The post-deployment test for all soldiers, which can also serve as their mandatory annual audiogram, will help identify others who may be unaware of a gradual hearing loss.

The Army is “trying to identify those who may have changes in their hearing and we can make sure they are provided the adequate follow up,” said Col. Kathy Gates, audiology consultant to the Army surgeon general.

The hearing test is also aimed at making sure that soldiers are fit for duty.

“We shoot, move and communicate as an Army, and our communication on the battlefield is actually quite challenging if you take an individual who sustained a mild amount of hearing loss from a deployment. Hearing loss comes on gradually in many instances, and the individual’s not even aware of it,” said Lt. Col. Eric Fallon, program manager for the Army Hearing Program and Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine.

Fallon and Gates emphasized the importance of preventive measures in avoiding even minor hearing loss, the most effective being the noise reduction ear plugs issued as part of the rapid fielding initiative.

“With today’s technology, we no longer have to accept hearing loss as a by-product of service,” Gates said.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on Army Makes Deployment Hearing Test Mandatory

Newspaper Editorial: New York Times Says No to Purple Heart Medal for PTSD

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Team VCS

January 11, 2009 – The Pentagon’s recent decision not to award the Purple Heart to soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder strikes us as reasonable and well considered. This is not to say that the result was uncomplicated or unlikely to cause understandable sadness and pain.

Please read VCS response to New York Times editorial: http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/articleid/12080

The military has always honored the sacrifice of veterans who are wounded in its wars. But it has been slow to recognize that those wounds can include invisible injuries: the nightmares, rages and terrors of PTSD, which are as real as any scar or missing limb.

PTSD can be difficult to diagnose, with symptoms that can arise later in life, far from the battlefield and are not necessarily linked to any specific actions of an enemy. So the Pentagon contends that it has no choice but to exclude its sufferers from the Purple Heart, given to those whose injuries result from direct and intentional action by the enemy. Doing so would not debase the medal, as some defenders of the Purple Heart callously put it, but it would change it, perhaps in unintended and unwelcome ways.

The main criterion for awarding the Purple Heart has always been bloodshed. Those looking for absolute fairness in this distinction will never find it: a soldier who cowers or blunders into harm’s way will receive his medal just as surely as his quick-thinking, unscathed buddy will not. A soldier whose lacerations heal completely will wear the same medal as someone who has lost a limb or been paralyzed for life.

None of this relieves the military of its duty to fully honor those whose injuries are unseen. A Purple Heart may not be the answer – not until, perhaps, advances in brain science bring full objectivity to the diagnosis of mental injury. But PTSD sufferers surely deserve medical care every bit as diligent and excellent as what their fellow veterans receive for more visible injuries. The Pentagon has been prodded to do so by the deadly innovation of the current war: the bomb blasts that have exacted such a deadly toll in brain injuries.

The military is, in fact, moving forward merely by mentioning PTSD and the Purple Heart in the same breath. Imagine Gen. George Patton, who so notoriously slapped a quivering enlisted man, learning that his beloved Army was even considering giving medals to those whose combat tours left them mentally shattered.

But there is far more to do. Recent veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you that the military stigma against mental illness has not abated, that the combat ethos – suck it up, soldier – persists and that some officers continue to belittle the severity, and even question the existence, of post-traumatic stress.

At least 300,000 service members who were in Afghanistan or Iraq show symptoms of PTSD. They know a truth their forebears of Vietnam, Korea and World War II have lived with for years: war injures everyone it touches.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged , | Comments Off on Newspaper Editorial: New York Times Says No to Purple Heart Medal for PTSD

Jan 12 VCS Update: A Medal for PTSD? VCS Urges PTSD Exams and Treatment Now

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Team VCS

January 12, 2009 -The Department of Defense (DoD) rejected the idea of a Purple Heart Medal for veterans diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Last week, The New York Times editorialized against a medal for PTSD. In contrast, the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail spoke up in favor of recognizing the enormous psychological impact of war on our veterans. Recognition of PTSD would reduce stigma, the newspaper reasoned.

Several reporters called VCS for comment about the issue, and here is what we told them.

We believe a more important issue is the troubling fact that many soldiers and veterans are waiting months, often years, for mental healthcare and disability benefits.

What veterans need are pre- and post-deployment medical examinations as well as prompt and high-quality treatment without stigma. Congress ordered the military to conduct the deployment examinations in 1997, yet the military still refuses to perform the exams required by the Force Health Protection law, PL 105-85, Sections 761 – 771. Once again, VCS urges the DoD to follow the law.

What the public needs are facts about PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI) so discrimination against our veterans is mitigated. For example, the Department of Labor launched a new website that we highly recommend for employers and others interested in PTSD and TBI.

The scope of the mental healthcare crisis from Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans is large and growing. So far, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals and clinics have already treated 350,000 new war veterans, including 150,000 for mental health conditions. Nearly 330,000 veterans have already filed disability claims against VA.  However, of the 84,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans diagnosed by VA with PTSD, only 42,000 receive disability benefits from VA for PTSD.  That’s wrong.

We can avoid the tragic mistakes of past generations as soon as the DoD starts providing prompt medical exams for all service members plus high-quality medical care for PTSD and TBI for those who need it. We need to call on the DoD to stop improperly ejecting soldiers diagnosed with PTSD from the military.

We believe that reducing stigma will invite more veterans to seek treatment so they can recover from the significant psychological wounds of war. We also believe that reducing stigma will allow for a smoother readjustment for our veterans into colleges, jobs, and communities without fear of discrimination.

The stakes are high: action now to begin exams and reduce stigma can reduce problems that impact veterans who do not receive treatment: broken families, unemployment, jail, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, and suicide.

While a medal for PTSD may be appropriate, as the Canadians are doing, we believe there are more pressing issues such as healthcare, benefits for veterans, and reducing stigma. We are already experiencing a suicide epidemic among younger veterans, so the problem is real and worsening, and real action is needed now.

In 2009, VCS will work with Congress, the new Administration, and other non-profits to fix this problem quickly and competently. Our veterans earned no less than a square deal from a grateful nation.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged , | Comments Off on Jan 12 VCS Update: A Medal for PTSD? VCS Urges PTSD Exams and Treatment Now

Top Army Recruiter Weighs Fat Camp for Recruits

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Team VCS

January 12, 2009, Fort Jackson, SC – The Army has been dismissing so many overweight applicants that its top recruiter, trying to keep troop numbers up in wartime, is considering starting a fat farm to transform chubby trainees into svelte soldiers. To reduce fat of our body you can used ostomy bag, They use for any lifestyle. You can order ostomy bag covers by Stealth Belt from stealth belt website.

Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick, head of the Army Recruiting Command, said he wants to see a formal diet and fitness regimen running alongside a new school at Fort Jackson that helps aspiring troops earn their GEDs. If you are looking for gym leggings, here you will get best seamless gym leggings range visit us.

Bostick told The Associated Press that obesity looms as “a bigger challenge for us in the years ahead” than any other problem that keeps young people from entering the military, including lack of a GED or high school diploma, misconduct or criminal behavior and other health issues such as eye or ear problems.

According to Defense Department figures provided to the AP, over the past four years 47,447 potential recruits flunked induction physicals at the nation’s 35 Military Entrance Processing Stations because they were overweight.

That is a fraction of the 205,902 such exams given in 2005 and 250,764 in 2008, but still amounts to a hefty number and comes at a time when the military is more interested than ever in recruits. The Army and Marine Corps together paid more than $600 million over the past year in bonuses and other financial incentives to attract volunteers.

While the services have reported exceeding their recruiting goals in the past year, the Pentagon remains under pressure to find a constant flow of recruits. The Defense Department has announced plans to boost the active duty Army by 65,000 to a total of 547,000 soldiers by next year, and grow the Marines from 175,000 to 202,000 by 2011.

Obesity afflicts recruits for other physically demanding jobs, including firefighters. Deputy Chief Ed Nied, chair of the safety, health and survival section of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, said fire departments are also making a “major push” to encourage better fitness among young people who want to join.

“We draw from the same exact population that they (the military) draw from,” Nied said from his Tucson, Ariz., headquarters. “This comes from a lack of physical education in the high schools.”

In an interview during a visit to the Army’s largest training installation, Bostick said a slim-down camp could be part of the new Army Prep School at Fort Jackson, S.C. The school opened in August, and gives recruits who didn’t graduate from high school the chance to earn a GED before starting their nine weeks of basic training.

“We are looking at the Army Prep School as a place where we might send some (recruits) that have weight issues,” the two-star general said.

The prep school is housed in several one- and two-story buildings on a small part of this sprawling training installation. The classrooms and living quarters are Spartan. GED candidates wear Army uniforms, exercise before breakfast and study under the guidance of enlisted officers. They do not mix or conduct weapons training with soldiers participating in the nine weeks of basic training maneuvers elsewhere on the fort.

Bostick argues that many of the young people who want to join the Army have a hard time understanding a healthy diet and the importance of daily exercise, but could get within the military limits with guidance.

“It took them 18 years to get to where they are at, so it’s very difficult for them to lose the kind of weight that they need to on their own,” said Bostick, who did not provide any timing for when his idea might reach fruition, nor any projection of its potential cost.

Lawrence J. Korb, a former Pentagon chief of personnel during the Reagan administration, said the Army has to fight even harder than the other service branches to get the recruits they need.

“The Army has a tough time recruiting as compared to the other services,” said Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington. He said the burden for fighting an unpopular war in Iraq has fallen primarily on the military’s largest service.

“They are doing this because they are desperate,” Korb said.

Recruiters echo Bostick’s worries about weight issues among potential candidates for the military.

“I’d say that out of every 10 applicants that come in, probably three we couldn’t take – they are obese,” said Sgt. Darryl Bogan, a recruiter in Columbia. An additional 20 percent to 30 percent of recruits are slightly overweight, but some can get the weight off, Bogan said.

“We are getting heavier as a nation as far as our young people are concerned,” Bogan said.

Besides basic weight and height guidelines, Bogan said the Army uses body fat percentages and an aerobics test to determine whether recruits can withstand the rigors of basic training. Recruits must step up and down on a riser at a certain rate per minute, then perform some push-ups and sit-ups and have their heart rates measured.

One of Bogan’s recruits, 18-year-old Idalia Halley, was shocked when she found she was a few pounds too heavy to enter boot camp.

“My mom was like, ‘You better come run with me,'” Halley recalled, saying it took several weeks of healthy eating and runs with her Army-veteran mom to finally get into the service.

On her second try, Halley said she weighed in at 162 pounds and logged a 30 percent rate of body fat to meet the Army’s standard.

Toting her M-16 during weapons exercises in basic training, Halley said she’d slimmed down even more in the first weeks of training.

“I know I’ve lost some weight because I have to pull my pants up tighter,” the Army private said. “And besides, I don’t think the food’s all that great – except breakfast.”

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on Top Army Recruiter Weighs Fat Camp for Recruits

President Bush Admission: I Personally Authorized Torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Team VCS

January 11, 2009 – In an interview with Brit Hume that aired today on Fox News Sunday, President Bush admitted that he personally authorized the torture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He said he personally asked “what tools” were available to use on him, and sought legal approval for waterboarding him:

BUSH: One such person who gave us information was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. – And I’m in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made.

Bush staunchly defended the program, saying it saved American lives – despite interrogators’ claims to the contrary. He waved away the debate over torture by saying dismissively, “Look, I understand why people can get carried away on this issue.”

Last year, Bush admitted that he was “aware” that his national security team met to discuss KSM’s interrogation, and that he approved of the meeting. His admission today suggests Bush had a far more direct role in developing the specific torture program, which included waterboarding, a freezing cell, and long periods of standing and stress positions (all of which have long been considered torture).

What’s more, a former Pentagon intelligence analyst told Vanity Fair that “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence”; another former CIA official, who read all the reports from KSM’s interrogation, said, “90 percent of it was total f*cking bullsh*t.”

Watch the video here.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged , | Comments Off on President Bush Admission: I Personally Authorized Torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Editorial Column: Why the Anti-War Movement is Lost

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Team VCS

January 12, 2009 – As Inauguration Day approaches, the anti-war movement is working hard to stay politically relevant.

President-elect Barack Obama, the anti-war candidate, has been empowered by a frustrated electorate demanding exactly what he promised in his campaign: change.

But the anti-war movement isn’t buying the “change” Obama is selling. Instead, they’ve crafted unrealistic demands for the next president, and should he not kowtow, they’ll undoubtedly convince themselves he’s no different from George W. Bush. Perhaps they already have.

Most Americans agree that the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe financially and militarily. Some have strictly advocated against the war from a position of philanthropy for the Iraqi people and our service- people killed in action. Whatever the gripe, all aspects have legitimacy.

But many fail to realize that the war isn’t something that can be easily corrected, because it’s festered for far too long. And since day one, a bipartisan majority of Congress has repeatedly voted to give the Bush administration every tool needed to continue the war – even members of Congress who receive the anti-war vote.

In the summer of 2007, I had a meeting with Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) and his senior military adviser. Davis, former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, struck me as a concerned moderate looking for a practical and realistic solution to the mess in Iraq.

DAVIS UNDERSTOOD my frustration with the war and said, “We have to be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.” I would hear Obama echo the exact same sentiment repeatedly on the campaign trail.

Later, I and two other vets met with Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.). He listened for more than an hour. At the end, Castle agreed we needed to get out of Iraq. But he had no concrete solution – and neither did we.

As you can see, Republicans are not so different from Democrats on the war issue.

The main contrast I saw in my years of anti-Iraq war advocacy was that while members of both parties voted the same way, the Democrats griped about their votes. They acknowledge that they were against what they were voting for. So what’s the alternative? Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney aren’t getting elected to anything anytime soon.

And here’s what we have to look forward to. On March 19, many anti-war groups will assemble a tumultuous crowd at the post-Bush Pentagon. They’ll scream for the immediate withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan and Iraq while jumping up and down in opposition to the military industrial complex.

They’ll demand that legal action be taken against Bush for ordering the invasion of Iraq.

But the Defense Department doesn’t decide whether or not we go to war – that’s up to the president and Congress. The military HQ is the wrong venue.

Some Iraq vets will join this protest out of a feeling of nostalgia for a time before they were even born. But it’s no longer the Vietnam war, civil-rights, military draft ’60s. Sporting a grungy military uniform is a tactic that the real policymakers can dismiss as a non-threat to their political viability. Even John Kerry quit that gig more than 30 years ago.

Over the life of the recent anti-war movement, the attempted revival of the ’60s was destined for failure from the beginning.

Too many other issues were dragged into the effort. What middle-of-the-road Americans would attend a demonstration against the war if they knew they’d be standing in a mob of Che Guevara T-shirts listening to chants of “Free Mumia!”?

I support people protesting what they think are injustices, but all issues aren’t linked. It’s not a good tactic to force people to stand under an umbrella of issues, all of which that they may not support.

By alienating the silent majority, the current anti-war movement has dealt itself a bad hand that essentially diminished its credibility.

In a democracy, strength is in numbers. This anti-establishment and absolutist view of the political process is likely to be the real cause of their implosion.

As someone who’s been fighting for years for an end to the war in Iraq, I find this tragic because we need the voices of millions to put pressure on our elected officials to end the conflict and fix the many problems facing our country. But those voices have to be credible to be taken seriously, and circus acts never are.

What pains me the most about the self-destruction of the anti-war movement is the fact that the people behind it genuinely want an end to the war. They’re not phony front groups or partisan hacks using the war as an advantage to promote their political party, in my mind a worse sin than dragging in all those irrelevant issues.

But the truth is that the “real” anti-war movement has become far too radical to be effective.

They’ve pushed themselves into a corner where there’s no possibility of meeting an opposing side halfway. If they ever hope to regroup into a force capable of generating a strong political will, they’ll need to accept that it’s 2009, not 1969 – and be more tolerant of other opinions. *

John Bruhns is an Iraq war veteran from the Philadelphia area. He writes on politics and the war in Iraq.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged | Comments Off on Editorial Column: Why the Anti-War Movement is Lost

Turkish Government Arrests 100 in Coup Plot

Posted on January 11, 2009 by Team VCS

The coup plot case underlines a widening divide between the country’s growing Islamic class and secularists. 

January 11, 2009, Ankara, Turkey (AP) — A Turkish court formally arrested 14 more people Sunday for ties to an alleged secularist plot by ultranationalists to bring down the Islamic-rooted government, bringing the total of people involved in the case to more than 100.

The prime minister said the crackdown will shed light on a network of renegade agents within the state and make Turkey transparent. Critics say it is designed to silence the government’s opponents.

The case highlights a difficult question about who holds the levers of power in a nation where tensions between secularists and Islamists, and liberals and rightists, have created deep fault lines in the country.

The problem is aggravated by key demands from the European Union — which Turkey hopes to join — to reduce the military’s influence in politics, make security officials accountable for torture and grant more rights to the country’s Kurds.

Over the weekend, an Istanbul anti-terror court formally arrested and jailed 18 coup plot suspects, including a former police chief and four active duty military officers. Fourteen of the 18 were arrested Sunday.

Police detained another 33 suspects in the case Sunday and displayed confiscated weapons. Prosecutors say the plot aimed to destabilize Turkey through a series of attacks and trigger a coup in 2009.

There are already 86 suspects on trial in the case and they include a top author, a political party leader, journalists, a former university dean and a lawyer along with 16 retired military officers. All were outspoken opponents of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan’s party — which narrowly escaped a ban last year for allegedly undermining the country’s secular principles — says it is trying to strengthen democracy to steer the country toward EU membership even as allegations mount from the secular opposition that the government is using its power to silence critics.

“Are you afraid of seeing Turkey becoming more transparent? Are you afraid of efforts to enlighten sinister incidents?” Erdogan shouted Sunday. “Turkey is changing.”

Erdogan has alarmed secularists for trying to lift the ban on Islamic head scarves at universities, and nationalists for policies such as launching the country’s first 24-hour Kurdish-language television station on Jan. 1. He uttered a few words in the once-banned tongue in a marked shift policy toward Kurds.

Turkey’s military, an instigator of coups in past decades, has warned that secular ideals are in peril, though an armed intervention seems unlikely for now. But many officers are uncomfortable with the government’s Kurdish policy as they fight a war against autonomy-seeking rebels that has killed nearly 40,000 people since 1984.

The coup plot case underlines a widening divide between the country’s growing Islamic class and secularists.

The roots of the conflict lie in the era of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey and early 20th century war hero who viewed Islam as an impediment to modern development and a symbol of the ills of the Ottoman Empire.

Ataturk imposed a secular system with an authoritarian streak, restricting religious dress, education and practices.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged , | Comments Off on Turkish Government Arrests 100 in Coup Plot

Vets can face hurdles securing the benefits they earned

Posted on January 11, 2009 by Team VCS

January 11, 2009 – For former Army medic Ivy Lara, the whistle of a mortar shell is all she remembers.

Trapped, no time for cover. The explosion leveled the sergeant’s quarters and hurled her through the air.

A repaired ear and injured knee pose challenges for Lara, but nothing like the migraines, mood swings and nightmares that caught her by surprise months after she left the bloodshed of Iraq in December 2004.

Yet in one way she’s luckier than other Nevada veterans. Now a student at the College of Southern Nevada, Lara, 30, thinks she’s getting much of the health care, schooling and compensation and pension she earned in the military. Many veterans don’t.

She got those benefits only through the intervention of the Nevada Office of Veterans Services, an understaffed agency wrestling the behemoth U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Without that help, she said, she would be either “homeless” or “crazy.”

That mortar blast caused a traumatic brain injury that wasn’t diagnosed until months later. And battlefield memories haunt her, she said in December.

“You look at me on the outside and I look normal, but on the inside I am falling apart,” Lara said. “I have nightmares about the patients I had over there; the patients who died in my hands and the soldiers I wasn’t able to help; the innocent kids who weren’t supposed to get killed.”

With an estimated 339,235 vets in Nevada, it means a staggering one in nine residents is a veteran, and that Nevada is among the top five states in the percentage of veterans in its population.

However, it is 48th in the percentage of its veterans receiving compensation or pension benefits, and 48th for the per capita cash value of those benefits, according to the Nevada Office of Veterans Services.

Meanwhile, Clark County’s figures are in the bottom half for Nevada’s 17 counties. The national average for monthly compensation and pension of $1,453 is 60 percent higher than the Clark County average of $910.

And, with the Las Vegas economy in what some characterize as a depression and legislators pressed to balance the state budget, many expect things will get worse.

As a result, even fewer veterans may access their benefits at a time when: soldiers, looking for an education, are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan; Vietnam-era veterans are retiring here along with other baby boomers; and veterans of World War II and Korea need care in their twilight years.

One reason for the dismal ranking is that the Nevada Office of Veterans Services has few service officers compared to the number of veterans.

This handful of state-paid advocates identify veterans and shepherd them through the bureaucratic labyrinth that is the federal VA, as they apply for benefits or appeal the VA’s routine rejections.

The state office has one Veterans Services officer for every 20,000 vets. That is half the national average of one for every 10,000 veterans, and far below the average of one for every 2,000 or 3,000 vets as is the case in some California counties, said Tim Tetz, director of the state Office of Veterans Services.

“In many cases, we promised to take care of them (veterans) for life, and then we abandon them,” Tetz said. “The VA makes the vets jump through so many hoops that many people give up, and that is why we need the veteran service officers. Everything is tied to the veteran service officer, whether it is PTSD, the education benefits, the health care benefits or changes to your home or your car if you’ve been injured.”

States with more service officers go beyond helping veterans get financial benefits from the VA. They are better equipped to assist with job-related problems and veteran access to medical and mental health services.

Lara, who the VA classifies as 80 percent unemployable, receives medical care and collects $1,400 a month. She is waiting to hear if she qualifies for more given the extent of her service-related injuries.

Lara says a friend told her to seek help from state’s Veterans Services in leveraging her federal benefits. Lara said Veterans Services Officer Tom George navigated for her the extensive documentation required just to be considered for benefits.

“They are very necessary. I would probably be going crazy right now. I wouldn’t know where to go because they (the military) never told me where to go (for VA benefits),” Lara said. “The only income I have is from the VA, and I am having trouble finding a job right now.”

The Office of Veterans Services is a small state department. It operates two cemeteries and a nursing home for veterans, and employs nine Veterans Services officers. It has limited influence in Carson City at a time when Gov. Jim Gibbons, also a veteran, has ordered all departments to slash budgets more than 20 percent.

Tetz has cut costs at the vets’ nursing home and trimmed his budget elsewhere to avoid reducing the number of service officers in the state. Their services to Nevada veterans are too vital, he said. Furthermore, every $1 spent by Nevada to employ a service officer generates about $735 in additional federal payments for Nevada veterans to spend in their communities, he said.

Jeanette Rae, program manager for the Office of Veterans Services, said the agency has four service officers in Las Vegas and another at the state-run, veterans nursing home in Boulder City.

Adding those to veteran advocates from the VA and from nonprofit groups such as U.S. Vets, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and others, the ratio shrinks from 20,000 to 14,000 veterans for every vets’ advocate, she said.

“With the huge number of veterans down south, we have a ratio that is rather astronomical,” Rae said from her Northern Nevada office.

Unlike other state agencies, Veterans Services spends taxpayer money to access federal money that can make some veteran, who might have been a financial liability to his community, an asset instead.

Rather than have veterans frequenting emergency rooms, county jail cells or homeless shelters, they might own homes, pay taxes and send their children to college if they are identified as veterans and qualify for compensation, health coverage, a pension or other service from the VA, Rae said.

In August, a Vietnam-era veteran won a lengthy battle with the VA in which the agency forced him to appeal claim after claim before he received the benefits he had earned, Rae said.

He came to the state agency for help eight years ago, and might have given up hope but for the experience and knowledge of the service officers on his case, she said.

The benefits that veteran earned included years of retroactive compensation and a monthly stipend. Given his medical condition, it is likely his death will be “service related” and his widow will be eligible for his monthly compensation, Rae said.

“We have changed a family forever,” she said.

If the number of Nevada veterans receiving their VA benefits — and the value of the benefits — were equal to national averages, Nevada’s veterans would receive $173 million more than they do now, said Jay Hansen, a professional lobbyist and guest speaker at the Nevada 2008 Veterans Summit held in December.

That would be new money, which would continue coming to the state year after year until a veteran died and no longer received his benefits, he said.

“That is a huge amount of money, and it is something that you can have a direct impact on,” Hansen told veterans advocates at the Summit. “And, that is if we just got to the national average.”

An investment in veterans services officers paid dividends in New Mexico, said Lou Helwig, deputy secretary of the New Mexico Department of Veterans Services.

Like Nevada today, New Mexico 10 years ago was ranked near the bottom of the 50 states in per capita compensation and pension its veterans collected. Now, it ranks first.

“We felt the state should be in charge of the grass-roots effort,” Helwig said. “The importance of representing a veteran with power of attorney is significant in terms of the claims being more likely to be successful than if the veteran fills out the claim himself.”

In addition to hiring more veterans services officers, New Mexico demanded the service officers be more proactive and it established a “collaborative” approach by enlisting the federal VA, nonprofit groups and other veterans services organizations, Helwig said.

“The Legislature (in Nevada) needs to think of veterans as an economic force,” Helwig said. “The average income of a veteran in New Mexico is more than $2,000 a month.”

Other states, including Maryland, have taken legislative steps to increase their role in veterans affairs. Maryland passed a bill this year requiring the state to help veterans who aren’t getting timely mental health treatment from the VA.

Assemblywoman Kathy McClain, D-Las Vegas, and state Sen. Terry Care, D-Las Vegas, are the two state lawmakers on the state’s Veterans Services Commission, which oversees state veterans services. Both are serving their last terms in the Legislature due to term limits, which means the commission will have new representatives in 2011.

During a committee meeting earlier this month, neither was optimistic about avoiding additional cuts to the veterans services agency during the upcoming legislative session.

“We have a big problem with the state budget and we are going to have to look at ways of enhancing our revenue,” said McClain, chairwoman of the Veterans Services Commission. “This depression is not going to be over for some time and we can’t keep cutting essential services.”

For soldiers such as Lara, the Army medic, and Kenneth C. Evans, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Air Reserve, there is little room for debate or compromise when it comes to caring for veterans.

Evans, who owns a small development company in North Las Vegas, was stationed at Kirkuk Regional Air Base in Northern Iraq, where the bodies of dead soldiers were taken for transport back to the United States.

“I look at young soldiers in the Army and the young Marines and I think we need to do all that we can to get them the housing, medical, education and whatever other benefits they have coming to them,” Evans said. “We should give the same level of energy and focus in delivering these benefits as these young men and women do when they go outside the wire to do direct combat missions.”

Lara, who attends group counseling with other veterans at the Vet Center, said one member of her group committed suicide while waiting to receive his VA benefits.

Like other veterans, he had difficulty expressing his thoughts or fears to his civilian family and friends. He was subject to mood swings. He had trouble with his girlfriend, and in holding down a job, Lara said.

At one meeting, Lara told him she would help him in getting his benefits. Her friend didn’t show up for the next meeting. Lara never saw him again, she said.

“In our group, we all agree that we (veterans) get the runaround and it is very upsetting,” Lara said. “It was very disappointing to us. He served his country and this is how his country pays him back. … It broke our hearts.”

Contact reporter Frank Geary at fgeary@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0277.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged | Comments Off on Vets can face hurdles securing the benefits they earned

Editorial Column: Bush Rule was Eight Years of Madoff Ponzi Scams

Posted on January 11, 2009 by Team VCS

January 11, 2009 – Three days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.

The source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction — led by a Bush appointee, no less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a “new” Iraq.

The report quotes no less an authority than Colin Powell on how the scam worked. Back in 2003, Powell said, the Defense Department just “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ” Those of us who questioned these astonishing numbers were dismissed as fools, much like those who begged in vain to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to challenge Madoff’s math.

What’s most remarkable about the Times article, however, is how little stir it caused. When, in 1971, The Times got its hands on the Pentagon Papers, the internal federal history of the Vietnam disaster, the revelations caused a national uproar. But after eight years of battering by Bush, the nation has been rendered half-catatonic. The Iraq Pentagon Papers sank with barely a trace.

After all, next to big-ticket administration horrors like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the politicized hiring and firing at Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department, the wreckage of Iraq reconstruction is what Ralph Kramden of “The Honeymooners” would dismiss as “a mere bag of shells.” The $50 billion also pales next to other sums that remain unaccounted for in the Bush era, from the $345 billion in lost tax revenue due to unpoliced offshore corporate tax havens to the far-from-transparent disposition of some $350 billion in Wall Street bailout money. In the old Pat Moynihan phrase, the Bush years have “defined deviancy down” in terms of how low a standard of ethical behavior we now tolerate as the norm from public officials.

Not even a good old-fashioned sex scandal could get our outrage going again. Indeed, a juicy one erupted last year in the Interior Department, where the inspector general found that officials “had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Two officials tasked with marketing oil on behalf of American taxpayers got so blotto at a daytime golf event sponsored by Shell that they became too incapacitated to drive and had to be put up by the oil company.

Back in the day, an oil-fueled scandal in that one department alone could mesmerize a nation and earn Warren Harding a permanent ranking among our all-time worst presidents. But while the scandals at Bush’s Interior resemble Teapot Dome — and also encompass millions of dollars in lost federal oil and gas royalties — they barely registered beyond the Beltway. Even late-night comics yawned when The Washington Post administered a coup de grâce last week, reporting that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne spent $235,000 from taxpayers to redo his office bathroom (monogrammed towels included).

It took 110 pages for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research organization, to compile the CliffsNotes inventory of the Bush wreckage last month. It found “125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government.” That accounting is conservative. There are still too many unanswered questions.

Just a short list is staggering. Who put that bogus “uranium from Africa” into the crucial prewar State of the Union address after the C.I.A. removed it from previous Bush speeches? How high up were the authorities who ordered and condoned torture and then let the “rotten apples” at the bottom of the military heap take the fall? Who orchestrated the Pentagon’s elaborate P.R. efforts to cover up Pat Tillman’s death by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan?

And, for extra credit, whatever did happen to Bush’s records from the Texas Air National Guard?

The biggest question hovering over all this history, however, concerns the future more than the past. If we get bogged down in adjudicating every Bush White House wrong, how will we have the energy, time or focus to deal with the all-hands-on-deck crises that this administration’s malfeasance and ineptitude have bequeathed us? The president-elect himself struck this note last spring. “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Barack Obama said. “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

Henry Waxman, the California congressman who has been our most tireless inquisitor into Bush scandals, essentially agreed when I spoke to him last week. Though he remains outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds: “I don’t see Congress pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.” He would rather see any prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the historical record. “We need to depoliticize it,” he says. “If a Democratic Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.”

We could certainly do worse than another 9/11 Commission. Among those Americans still enraged about the Bush years, there are also calls for truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes trials and, in a petition movement on Obama’s transition Web site, a special prosecutor in the Patrick Fitzgerald mode. One of the sharpest appointments yet made by the incoming president may support decisive action: Dawn Johnsen, a law professor and former Clinton administration official who last week was chosen to run the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.

This is the same office where the Bush apparatchik John Yoo produced his infamous memos justifying torture. Johnsen is a fierce critic of such constitutional abuses. In articles for Slate last year, she wondered “where is the outrage, the public outcry” over a government that has acted lawlessly and that “does not respect the legal and moral bounds of human decency.” She asked, “How do we save our country’s honor, and our own?”

The last is not a rhetorical question. While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed. A new Justice Department must enforce the law; Congress must press outstanding subpoenas to smoke out potential criminal activity; every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its electronic and paper trail. As Johnsen wrote last March, we must also “resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists.”

As if to anticipate the current debate, she added that “we must avoid any temptation simply to move on,” because the national honor cannot be restored “without full disclosure.” She was talking about America regaining its international reputation in the aftermath of our government’s descent into the dark side of torture and “extraordinary rendition.” But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.

As the financial historian Ron Chernow wrote in the Times last week, we could desperately use a Ferdinand Pecora, the investigator who illuminated the history of the 1929 meltdown in Senate hearings on the eve of the New Deal. The terrain to be mined would include not just the usual Wall Street suspects and their Congressional and regulatory enablers but also the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a strangely neglected ground zero in the foreclosure meltdown. The department’s secretary, Alphonso Jackson, resigned in March amid still-unresolved investigations over whether he enriched himself and friends with government contracts.

The tentative and amorphous $800 billion stimulus proposed by Obama last week sounds like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket when set against the damage it must help counteract: more than $10 trillion in new debt and new obligations piled up by the Bush administration in eight years, as calculated by the economists Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current Harper’s Magazine.

If Bernie Madoff, at least, can still revive what remains of our deadened capacity for outrage, so can those who pulled off Washington’s Ponzi schemes. The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Editorial Column: Bush Rule was Eight Years of Madoff Ponzi Scams