Veterans for Common Sense

December 1, 2008, Islamabad, Pakistan – A suicide car bomber killed nine civilians in northwest Pakistan Monday, while militants elsewhere in the violence-plagued region attacked trucks that carry supplies to NATO troops in Afghanistan.

 The suicide bombing took place in the town of Mingora in the Swat Valley. The motorist detonated explosives when police tried to stop him from crossing a security checkpoint, said police officer Dilawar Khan.

The blast also wounded 50 others, including 10 who were in critical condition, Khan said.

In the second attack, militants fired rockets at a supply terminal in Peshawar that sits along a route from Pakistan to Afghanistan. The attack left two people dead, two others wounded and 12 trucks ablaze, Peshawar police spokesman Mohammad Rasool said.

Because Afghanistan is landlocked, many supplies for NATO-led troops fighting Islamic militants there have to be trucked in from Pakistan — and the swath of tribal areas in northwest Pakistan has become a haven for militants who mount regular attacks in both countries, U.S. officials have said.

 Pakistan’s central government has long exerted little control in the area, but it launched an intense military offensive in late July to flush out militants. As retaliation for the military presence, the Taliban has carried out a series of deadly bombings — and said the attacks will continue until the troops pull out.

Convoys carrying food and military supplies to U.S. troops in Afghanistan have regularly come under attack.

Last month, Pakistani officials suspended travel through a key mountain pass — the Khyber Pass — citing security concerns. They reversed their decision a day later.

The Swat Valley, where the suicide bombing occurred, was once Pakistan’s biggest tourist destination.

But in recent months, militants bent on imposing fundamentalist Islamic law have unleashed a wave of violence across the North West Frontier Province, where Swat is located, that has claimed hundreds of lives, many of them security personnel.

December 3, 2008 – The divorce rate among soldiers and Marines increased last year as military marriages suffered continuing stress from America’s two ongoing wars. There were an estimated 10,200 failed marriages in the active duty Army and 3,077 among Marines, according to figures obtained by The Associated Press for the budget year ended Sept. 30.

That’s a divorce rate of 3.5 percent among more than 287,000 married troops in the Army, up from 3.3 percent in the previous fiscal year, according to Defense Department figures.

“With increasing demands placed on Army families and soldiers — including frequent deployments and relocations — intimate relationships are tested,” said Army spokesman Paul Boyce.

The new data shows 3.7 percent of more than 84,000 married Marines divorced in fiscal year 2008, up from 3.3 percent in 2007. The Marine Corps called the increase statistically small and said officials would need to examine them farther.

“That said, Marine Corps leadership is keenly aware of the burden military families carry in a time of war,” said Col. Dave Lapan, a spokesman. “Our leaders, from the commandant on down, are paying serious attention to the strain.”

Some veteran and family groups question whether Pentagon figures are too low, saying they do not take into account many who divorce after leaving the service. The groups are unable to offer other estimates.

“Divorce rates are up — no doubt about it — a kind of predictable ripple effect of this pace of operations,” Paul Rieckhoff of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America said in a recent interview. “And that’s not even taking into account the number of marriages that are strained” but still holding together.

But defense officials say they are holding divorces down below what they might otherwise be with a myriad of efforts in recent years to support couples enduring unprecedented separations and other hardships because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The long and repeated deployments required of many troops have been widely blamed for unprecedented stresses on military couples. Spouses at home must manage families and households without their partner. The strain also has contributed to higher suicide rates and more mental health problems among troops.

The Marines and soldiers have been the bulk of the land force fighting the two wars.

The divorce rate stayed at 3.5 percent this year for the Air Force and went down slightly to 3 percent from 3.2 percent for the Navy.

Women in the military usually suffer higher rates of failed marriages than men and that trend held true again last year. Army women divorced at a rate of 8.5 percent compared to 2.9 percent for men. Female Marines divorced at a rate of 9.2 percent, compared to 3.3 percent of the married men.

There is no comparable system for tracking civilian divorces. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the divorce rate for the general population was 3.6 per 1,000 people in 2005 — the most recent statistics immediately available; that was the lowest rate since 1970.

The per capita divorce rate is different from a second method of calculation — the percentage of marriages that eventually will end in divorce or separation. The CDC said that year that 43 percent of all first marriages end in divorce within 10 years.

The military numbers also do not speak to troubled but intact marriages. In mental health surveys taken in Iraq, some 15 percent of troops have said they intended to divorce when they got home.

All the services have started programs to help couples weather wartime stresses.

“Military families continue to stand behind their soldiers and help those in need,” Boyce said, noting that 58 percent of soldiers in today’s Army are married. “America is now in the third-longest war in its history. This is the first extended conflict since the Revolution fought with an all-volunteer Army.”

Military programs aimed at helping couples include the Army chaplains’ Strong Bonds, which helps single-soldiers choose mates wisely and build lifelong relationships; a couples course, and a family course that trains couples with children to stay close and parent well.

Officials also have worked to improve the quality of life for families by funding various programs and services such as health care, better schools, youth services and child care.

The Marines have offered workshops to teach couples to manage conflict, solve problems and communicate better. The Navy started a similar program, using weekend retreats for couples.

Troops also get mental-health training in a program called Battlemind that teaches about common problems to expect at home as they readjust to domestic life.

December 3, 2008 – Development of a joint inpatient electronic health records system will satisfy almost all the requirements of the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments, according to a long sequestered report obtained by Nextgov.

The report, prepared by Booz Allen Hamilton in January, said Defense and VA share a common definition of an inpatient electronic health record and both share similar functional requirements to manage patient care. Booz Allen analyzed more than 1,800 functional requirements and determined that 97 percent of them were similar and only 3 percent were specific to each department. The differences primarily involved admission, discharge and transfer capabilities.

“This overwhelming level of jointness confirms the main hypothesis of this study that DoD and VA care for patients in a similar manner and thus have similar functional requirements,” the report concluded.

Defense is working with VA to develop a system architecture to manage both inpatient and outpatient electronic health records, Charles Campbell, the chief information officer at the Military Health System said in September. The fiscal 2009 Defense Authorization Bill requires Defense and VA to adopt technology-neutral guidelines and standards so the two agencies can share electronic health records and soldiers’ health records can move seamlessly with them from the battlefield to hospitals and clinics run by VA.

Defense operates an outpatient electronic health record system called the Armed Forces Health Technology Longitudinal Application, but it does not operate an inpatient system. VA has an inpatient record system called the Computerized Patient Record System, which is a component of an electronic health care system called the Veterans Health Information System and Architecture. Booz Allen reported that VA needs to modernize this latter system.

The need to update CPRS and the requirement to deploy an inpatient electronic health record in the Military Heath System presents a “unique opportunity” for both departments to investigate the feasibility of a common system, the Booz Allen report noted.

Even though Defense has unique requirements for battlefield or theater medicine that VA does not have, the study determined there were few differences in the kind of system needed to help care for a patient at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington or on the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan.

Booz Allen interviewed military theater health experts and concluded that there were few differences in the functional requirements for a battlefield health system and a system used at Walter Reed. “The main functional differences are actually features that are not needed in theater,” the report noted.

Booz Allen received input on its study from 24 commercial organizations, including electronic health record companies. The industry urged Defense and VA to shift from building a customized in-house electronic health record systems to one based on commercial systems.

The IT consulting firm Gartner, working on Booz Allen’s behalf, examined electronic health record systems from seven vendors and said only health system developers Epic Systems Corp. and Cerner Corp. have fully integrated systems that support all Defense’s and VA’s requirements. Epic fielded a $3 billion electronic health record systems for Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest private hospital company, and Cerner won a contract in 2005 to deploy its laboratory information system to Defense hospitals and clinics worldwide.

Joseph Dal Molin, founder of e-cology Corp. in Toronto and who works on deployments of electronic health record systems, said instead of looking to commercial sources for a joint inpatient electronic health record, Defense and Veterans Affairs should upgrade VA’s inpatient system, which meets a key requirement of the Booz Allen study, user satisfaction.

Steve Arnold, chairman of the global electronic health record task force for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, said Defense and VA should develop a converged electronic health record system that can follow a patient through the continuum of care from a battlefield aid station to care in a VA hospital.

Arnold said such a converged system should be developed on commercial electronic health record systems because VA’s system aging. Dal Molin disagreed, and said it would be less expensive to upgrade VA’s Veterans Health Information System and Architecture than to build one from scratch.

Booz Allen estimated it would cost between $1.4 billion and $5.2 billion to develop the joint system and take from six to 17 years to deploy.

Booz Allen recommended that Defense and VA conduct a cost/benefit analysis of various options to integrating electronic health record systems, including maintenance of the present systems as is, procuring and deploying commercial systems, and leveraging the capabilities of existing Defense and VA systems.

In July, S. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs said he favored a “converged evolution” of the Veterans Health Information System and Architecture and the Armed Forces Health Technology Longitudinal Application into one system.

A spokeswoman for the Military Health System said Defense and VA have not decided how to adopt the Booz Allen recommendations and does not expect a decision until January.

December 2, 2008 – In what’s been called George W. Bush’s first exit interview, the outgoing President continues a lie that he first unveiled several months after launching the Iraq War, justifying the invasion by claiming that Saddam Hussein didn’t let the U.N. inspectors in.

Like previous times when President Bush has used this lie, it went unchallenged by the journalist who heard the false claim, in this case ABC News anchor Charles Gibson.

According to the text of the ABC News interview, which was released Dec. 1, Gibson asked Bush, “If the [U.S.] intelligence had been right [and revealed no Iraq WMD], would there have been an Iraq War?”

Bush answered, “Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld.”

Of course, the historical record is clear: Hussein did let U.N. arms inspectors into Iraq in the fall of 2002 to search any site of their choosing. Their travels around Iraq in white vans were recorded daily by the international news media, as they found no evidence that Iraq had WMD stockpiles, even at sites targeted by U.S. intelligence.

Hussein and his government also declared publicly that they didn’t possess WMD, including providing the United Nations a 12,000-page declaration on Dec. 7, 2002, explaining how Iraq’s stocks of chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed in the 1990s.

However, still set on invading, Bush forced the U.N. inspectors to leave Iraq in March 2003, a departure that was followed within days by his “shock and awe” attack on Iraq, beginning March 19.

Several months later, with Hussein’s government ousted and with the U.S. military coming up empty in its search for WMD caches, Bush began his historical revisionism by insisting publicly that he had no choice but to invade because Hussein supposedly had barred U.N. inspectors.

On July 14, 2003, Bush told reporters:

“We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”

Facing no contradiction from the White House press corps, Bush continued repeating this lie again and again in varied forms.

On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”

Color of Truth

As the months and years went by, Bush’s lie and its unchallenged retelling took on the color of truth.

At a March 21, 2006, news conference, Bush again blamed the war on Hussein’s defiance of U.N. demands for unfettered inspections.

“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said, ‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did.”

At a press conference on May 24, 2007, Bush offered a short-hand version, even inviting the journalists to remember the invented history.

“As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: [U.N. Resolution] 1441 was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. So the choice was his [Hussein’s] to make. And he made a choice that has subsequently caused him to lose his life.”

In the frequent repetition of this claim, Bush never acknowledged the fact that Hussein did comply with Resolution 1441 by declaring accurately that he had disposed of his WMD stockpiles and by permitting U.N. inspectors to examine any site of their choosing.

Prominent Washington journalists even have repeated Bush’s lie as their own. For instance, in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he – Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.

“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,” Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”

In the real history, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But faux reality had become the trademark of the Bush presidency — and its supporters in the press corps.

Choosing War?

The Washington conventional wisdom eventually embraced another fake belief, that Hussein provoked the war by misleading people into believing that he still possessed WMD.

In line with this bogus version of history, “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley asked FBI interrogator George Piro, who had debriefed Hussein in prison, why the dictator kept pretending that he had WMD even as U.S. troops massed on Iraq’s borders, when a simple announcement that the WMD was gone would have prevented the war.

“For a man who drew America into two wars and countless military engagements, we never knew what Saddam Hussein was thinking,” Pelley said in introducing the segment on the interrogation of Hussein about his WMD stockpiles, which aired Jan. 27, 2008. “Why did he choose war with the United States?”

This “60 Minutes” segment never mentioned the fact that Hussein and his government did disclose that it had eliminated its WMD. Instead Pelley pressed Piro on the question of why Hussein supposedly was hiding that fact:

“Why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?”

After Piro mentioned Hussein’s lingering fear of neighboring Iran, Pelley felt he was close to an answer to the mystery: “He believed that he couldn’t survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?”

But, still, Pelley puzzled over why Hussein’s continued in his miscalculation.
Pelley asked:

“As the U.S. marched toward war and we began massing troops on his border, why didn’t he stop it then? And say, ‘Look, I have no weapons of mass destruction,’ I mean, how could he have wanted his country to be invaded?”

It apparently never matters to the major U.S. news media (nor to President Bush) that Hussein and the Iraq government did declare that they had no WMD and did let the U.N. inspectors in to check.

Now, with the new ABC News interview, it looks as if that pattern – of Bush lying about the circumstances of the Iraq War and the Washington press corps nodding along – will continue until Bush’s last days in office.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

November 30, 2008 – The thousands of American contractors in Iraq who have been above Iraqi law since the war began are suddenly facing a new era in which their United States passports will no longer protect them from arrest and imprisonment.

When the Iraqi government ratified an agreement last week setting new terms for a continued American presence in Iraq, private contractors working for the Pentagon faced the inevitability that they would be stripped of their immunity from Iraqi law. That immunity had been granted by the Coalition Provisional Authority before a postwar Iraqi government was established.

Now that the contractors’ legal protection is to lapse, officials in the defense contracting industry are trying to come to grips with how their operations will change in Iraq, how many of their American employees will be sent home, and whether the weak and often corrupt Iraqi judicial system will become an impediment to recruiting Western workers. If it is approved by Iraq’s Presidency Council, as expected, the agreement will go into effect on Jan. 1.

So far, no major company working in Iraq has announced plans to withdraw from the country. Some industry experts said that while the corporations would stay, they would be forced to rely much more on Iraqi employees, rather than on Americans and other foreigners who might fear working without legal protection.

Spokesmen for many of the major contracting companies declined to comment on the change in legal status in Iraq, while others said it was premature to predict the impact. Some said Americans working in Iraq would be watching how the Iraqi government dealt with its new power, and would wait and see whether there were arbitrary arrests or court rulings tainted by corruption before deciding whether to stay.

“I think the question of what this means for recruiting American employees is complicated,” said one official close to the contracting industry who was not authorized to speak on the record about the issue. “I think it will depend on the first case, and whether it is handled in a responsible fashion, or whether someone is left in an Iraqi jail without recourse. If that happens, word will get around, and that could have a chilling effect on recruiting.”

More than 170,000 contractors now work for the military and other American agencies in Iraq, more than the total number of American troops in the country. Only about 17 percent of the contractors are Americans, according to administration figures; about half are Iraqis, and one-third are workers from third countries. The proportion of Americans could drop quickly with the loss of legal immunity.

One of the biggest concerns for contractors is the lack of details on how the security agreement with Iraq will work.

The legal immunity for contractors was eliminated in negotiations between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government on the agreement, which set the terms for the continued American military presence while also establishing a withdrawal date. Contractors were not involved in the talks.

A major question is whether under the pact the Iraqi government will be able to prosecute Americans for past crimes. The Iraqi government’s insistence on an end to legal immunity for contractors was fueled largely by the shootings of Iraqi citizens by guards working for private security firms, including Blackwater Worldwide, which has a contract to protect United States diplomats in Baghdad.

In September 2007, Blackwater security guards were involved in a shooting in downtown Baghdad in which at least 17 Iraqis were killed. After the shooting, the Iraqi government demanded that Blackwater be expelled from the country and that its guards be held accountable.

Despite the protests, the State Department has continued to use Blackwater in Baghdad, although the Justice Department has been conducting a criminal investigation of the shooting.

The fact that Blackwater continued to operate in Iraq contributed to the Iraqi government’s hard-line stance on the legal immunity issue in the negotiations. Whether the Iraqi government will now begin its own criminal investigation of the Blackwater shooting is unclear, administration officials and contracting industry executives said.

December 3, 2008 – IN THEIR BOOTS is releasing a documentary on the Jeff Lucey story.  It will be available online at www.intheirboots.com.  Spread the word and help us bring attention to this issue.

A Marine Reservist seeks help from the  Department of Veterans Affairs to heal his invisible wounds. But like too many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, his condition worsens, his medical needs go un-met, and he ultimately takes his own life. For the past four years, his family has been advocating to prevent other veterans from experiencing a similar fate.

Log on to www.InTheirBoots.com on Wednesday, December 3rd  at 7pm EST/4pm PST to watch the latest webcast of IN THEIR BOOTS. This 30-minute show profiles the challenges American service members and their families face before, during and after deployment. This show is not about war but the people experiencing it.

After the “real story,” our host, Jan Bender, will speak with an expert on the issue of service member suicide.

November 30, 2008, Tucson, AZ – Can ancient Chinese healing rites help Iraq war veterans cope with combat trauma?

A Tucson-area therapist believes they can, and is offering free treatments for local Iraq vets to test an approach that involves tapping on the acupuncture points used in Chinese medicine.

The Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, is relatively little known and not widely embraced in traditional therapy circles.

But recent articles in psychology and traumatology journals say it has been used to successfully treat crime victims, disaster responders and witnesses to the World Trade Center attacks.

It also is being used to treat troops for combat stress at a handful of veterans’ hospitals around the country, though not in Tucson.

Mary Stafford of Oro Valley is 1 of a dozen or so therapists nationwide taking part in a clinical trial of the method to assess its effectiveness on returning veterans.