GI Special:

thomasfbarton@earthlink.net

3.22.07

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GI SPECIAL 5C19:

 

 

IRAQ VETS LEAD MARCH ON PENTAGON

Photo by Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist (jeff@paterson.net) Indybay.org

 

Led by Iraq Veterans Against the War, tens of thousands marched on the Pentagon to demand "U.S. out of Iraq now!" WASHINGTON DC March 17, 2007 Indybay.org

 

 

We Know You Have Been Betrayed

 

Comment: T

 

Add one more to the long list of betrayals connected to Bush’s failed Imperial disaster in Iraq: the way major media have already dropped their exposures of how seriously wounded Iraq veterans are getting shit dumped on their heads by the pack of traitors that run the government.

 

What would not be understandable, or forgivable, is if supposed opponents of the war also turn their back on the mistreatment of the wounded.

 

There has been a curious silence about that lately from many of the usual suspects who fill the world with words from their self-appointed positions as bosses of the movement against the war. 

 

Perhaps that will change.  Probably not.  These empty suits have no interest in troops at any level, wounded or not. 

 

They have refused for years to lead the anti-war movement in face-to-face outreach to serving members of the armed forces turning against the war, so why be surprised if they continue their perfect record of turning their backs on you and their faces to the Imperial politicians in Washington DC.

 

They never cared about the wounded troops at Walter Reed or anywhere else.  These scum simply used them as a political stick to beat Bush, and when the headlines passed, they had other priorities. 

 

As usual, they trade in betrayal. 

 

The honorable exceptions are Iraq Veterans Against The War, Veterans For Peace and the Military Project.  These organizations have declared that direct, face to face outreach to members of the armed forces is key to stopping the war.

 

It would be a mistake, however, to assume other anti-war leaders are all closet Democratic Party hacks.  Some just feel more social and class identity with a member of Congress than they do for any soldier.  Some are simply clueless.  That’s why they’re obsessed with the silly notion that they can convince the government to stop the war.

 

The Imperial government won’t give up on this war because citizens send the politicians emails and show up in DC a couple times a year waving signs.  The Imperial government is doing its job: fighting fang and claw to hang onto every square inch of the U.S. Empire they can.  And on that cause Democrat and Republican politicians are in perfect agreement.

 

The good news is that there are Americans, more every day, who know you’ve been betrayed by the Imperial politicians and their apologists.

 

There are Americans, more every day, who understand it will be up to you to save yourselves, and by so doing save us all. 

 

With support from dedicated Iraq veterans and civilians who understand that you are the people who can stop the war, everything is possible.

 

Anything less wastes blood and time and effort, prolonging the war.

 

Lest We Forget:

Walter Reed: Some Ugly History

The New Guy Got Chopped While Gen. Kiley, The Truly Responsible Rat, Almost Kept His Command

 

 

March 12, 2007 Army Times Editorial

 

Defense Secretary Robert Gates got his first big test last week and showed exactly what kind of secretary he is.

 

Unhappy with a week of slow-burn obfuscation and missteps as the Army tried to downplay revelations in this newspaper and others about the deplorable conditions in which injured combat troops lived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, Gates asked Army Secretary Francis Harvey to resign.

 

Commanders ultimately are responsible for what happens on their watch, so it makes sense that Harvey take the fall.  But while Harvey can be faulted for the Army’s inadequate response, there are others far closer to the situation who likewise must go.

 

Harvey’s resignation followed by a day the firing of Maj. Gen. George Weightman, who commanded Walter Reed.

 

But the troubles at the hospital — substandard housing for injured troops and a dysfunctional medical evaluation system — did not start on Weightman’s watch.

 

As far back as 2005, service members spoke about these problems in congressional hearings.  The Government Accountability Office reported on the problems last March. And the Army Inspector General has been investigating the problems for over a year.

 

Indeed, the GAO report traces the problems back to the tenure of Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, who commanded Walter Reed from June 2002 to September 2004.

 

It is impossible to believe Kiley, now the Army surgeon general, was unaware of this sorry situation when he commanded the hospital — and if he was, one must question his competence and leadership.

 

Evidently, he has remained either willfully ignorant or unconcerned during his tenure as surgeon general.

 

When the scandal broke, in fact, Kiley blamed the media for exaggerating the problems, rather than acknowledging his own responsibility.

 

The secretary was forced out because the Army mishandled its response to the troubles at Walter Reed.

 

But as the Army surgeon general, Kiley is ultimately responsible for not only that hospital, but the Army’s slow, complex and unfair disability evaluations system.

 

He has failed in this role and should follow Harvey out the door.

 

MORE:

 

The Dirty Little Secrets About Walter Reed:

Top Generals Were Warned That Giving Contract To Bush Buddy War Profiteers Would Destroy Services;

Pentagon Tries To Silence Fired Reed Commander;

"First Sergeant And Platoon Sergeants Replaced But Several Soldiers Told Army Times In December That Those Were Exactly The People Who Were Trying To Fix Things"

 

 

 

March 12, 2007 Army Times:  By Kelly Kennedy, William H. McMichael and Gina Cavallaro - Staff writers [Excerpts]

 

The more than 1 million soldiers of the Army, deeply involved on two war fronts, suddenly find themselves serving under leadership tainted by scandal and in critical transition.

 

Army Secretary Francis Harvey is serving out the final days of command cut short, pushed out the door by his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

 

The Army also announced the same day Harvey resigned that Maj. Gen. Eric R. Schoomaker will become the new commanding general of Walter Reed.  Schoomaker, now the commanding general of the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, Md., is a doctor and the brother of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who is retiring in April.

 

Eric Schoomaker replaces Army Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, whom Harvey fired March 1.  According to a statement released by the Army, service leaders had "lost trust and confidence" in Weightman’s ability "to address needed solutions for soldier outpatient care."

 

Some supporters have said Weightman was a fall guy for those higher up the chain.

 

After he was fired, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sought to have him testify, but Army officials refused to allow the general to appear before the legislators, who then subpoenaed him to a scheduled March 5 hearing.

 

Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and national security and foreign affairs subcommittee Chairman Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., said they want Weightman to testify about a memo written in September by Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi to Weightman.

 

In a letter from the committee to Weightman, the members said the Garibaldi memo "describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of 'highly skilled and experienced personnel.’ ...

 

According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed."

 

The committee’s letter also noted that Walter Reed awarded a five-year, $120 million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.

 

The committee also noted that more than 300 federal employees providing facilities management services at Walter Reed dropped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, the day before IAP took over facilities management.

 

IAP replaced the remaining 60 employees with 50 private workers.

 

During the year between awarding the contract to IAP and when the company started, "skilled government workers apparently began leaving Walter Reed in droves," the letter states.

 

"The memorandum also indicates that officials at the highest levels of Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Medical Command were informed about the dangers of privatization, but appeared to do little to prevent them."

 

The memo signed by Garibaldi requests more federal employees because the hospital mission has grown "significantly" during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

It states that medical command did not concur with their request for more people.

 

"Without favorable consideration of these requests," Garibaldi wrote, "(Walter Reed Army Medical Center) Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure."

 

Weightman arrived at Walter Reed as commander in August.  By then, a Government Accountability Office report had already laid out the problems with the Army’s medical evaluation system that occurred between 2001 and 2005, and an inspector general investigation was underway that ultimately found 87 problems with the medical evaluation system.

 

Those well-documented problems occurred during the tenures of Maj. Gen. Kenneth Farmer, now retired, who was at Walter Reed from 2004 to 2006, and [Lt. Gen. Kevin] Kiley, now the Army surgeon general, who served as Walter Reed chief from 2002 to 2004.

 

"It’s clear that General Kiley, the surgeon general at the Army, knew about the conditions at Building 18," McCaskill [Senator Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.] said, referring to the facility just off the Walter Reed campus where some outpatient troops are housed.

 

Critics, including soldiers, lawyers and lawmakers, say the problems at Walter Reed have been known for years — through soldier complaints, congressional testimony, and investigations by the GAO and the Rand Corp.

 

"The chain of command knew about this," Paul Rieckhoff, director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told Army Times.

 

"There is no way they didn’t know.  In 2004, we knew soldiers were carrying the paperwork through the snow.  Congress needs to find out who knew and clean house."

 

Army Times also reported problems with the physical evaluation board system in June, while several other papers reported problems as they wrote stories about individual soldiers.

 

Retired Army Lt. Col. Mike Parker also finds it frustrating.  For at least two years, he has gathered thousands of pages of documents — which he shared with Army Times — and banged on doors trying to get the problems he saw fixed.  He spends much of his free time trying to help soldiers through the process.

 

Parker also spent time alerting lawmakers and speaking before the Veterans’ Disability Benefits Commission — which has heard testimony from doctors in the disability rating system who say much needs to be done to help soldiers.

 

In March 2006, Parker filed a complaint with the inspector general at Walter Reed, asking for an investigation of whether the medical evaluation boards were following the law, and another complaint with the Army’s Human Resources Command.

 

He said the Army is supposed to rate injuries according to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Schedule for Rating Disabilities but charged that Army officials wrote their own regulation in the mid-1990s that allows them to rate disabilities differently — and at lower percentages.  No other service has such a regulation.

 

When Parker filed a complaint asking about the legality of that regulation, the Human Resources Command Inspector General’s Office sent him a reply stating that the issue was "not within our purview."

 

"It took them 10 months ... to tell me there’s a regulation that says (the Army) can do it," Parker said, shaking his head and laughing.

 

"No shit, Sherlock."

 

The Army response to media coverage of the problems seems to have loosened things up — though the blame, he said, is rolling downhill.

 

Soldiers in Building 18 reported that their first sergeant and platoon sergeants would be replaced within a month.

 

But several soldiers told Army Times in December that those were exactly the people who were trying to fix things, and that they were brought in specifically to solve some of the problems in January 2005.

 

Pvt. Martin Jackson, of the 1st Armored Division, spent almost two years in the Medical Hold Unit recovering and waiting on paperwork.  Though he complained extensively about the physical evaluation board system, he praised his noncommissioned officers.

 

"Now we have formations once a day, and we don’t have to hunt down our platoon sergeant," as they had to before 2005, Martin said.

 

The current first sergeant is "the first one here and the last to leave. The platoon sergeants you have now? They actually care. With the new commander and first sergeant, there’s been a big turnaround."

 

Spc. Karl Unbehagan, of the 3rd Infantry Division, also spent several months at Walter Reed and remembers what it was like before the new first sergeant.

 

"The platoon sergeant was in medical hold with mental issues," Unbehagan said.

 

"He’d answer your questions between slugs of Cold Duck. If it weren’t for our (current) direct chain of command, I wouldn’t have gotten anything done."

 

MORE:

 

"We Got In Gen. Kiley’s Face On A Regular Basis"

 

March 7, 2007 By Seth Stern, Congressional Quarterly

 

Senior Republicans who knew about problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center while their party controlled Congress insist they did all they could to prod the Pentagon to fix them.

 

But C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., former chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said he stopped short of going public with the hospital’s problems to avoid embarrassing the Army while it was fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

He described repeatedly confronting the hospital’s then commander, Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, about patients who, they discovered, had received poor care.

 

Young said his wife, Beverly, found one Walter Reed patient lying in his hospital bed without sheets or blankets, having soiled himself.

 

Another, who suffered from a battlefield brain injury, had fallen out of his bed three times, even after Young had told Kiley about the problem, the lawmaker said.

 

And he said a third patient, who had an aneurysm, died after a respiratory therapist ignored family warnings about the patient’s fragile condition and treated him anyway.

 

"We got in Gen. Kiley’s face on a regular basis," Young said, adding that he even contacted the commander of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda in the hopes of getting better care there for the patient with the aneurysm, though doctors at Walter Reed declined to transfer him.

 

He placed the blame for the hospital’s substandard conditions on Kiley, who now serves as the Army’s surgeon general, its top-ranking uniformed doctor.

 

MORE:

 

"Screwing The Vets Isn’t Incompetence; It’s A Trade Off"

"If Someone Gets The Gravy, Someone Gets The Shaft"

 

March 10, 2007 By Conn Hallinan, Portside [Excerpts]

 

Harvey was brought in by Rumsfeld specifically to reduce the federal work force and, as he said in a speech last year, 'improve efficiency.’ 

 

A former executive for the one of the nation’s leading arms producers, Westinghouse, Harvey hired IAP Worldwide Services-run by two former Halliburton executives-which promptly reduced the number of people providing service at Walter Reed from 300 to 60.

 

In contrast are the way the 'Big Five’ arms companies, Lockheed Martin. Northup Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon are treated. The first three of the above 'Five’ will corner one out of every four dollars in the $481.5 billion military budget.

 

In turn, the companies pony up tens of millions in contributions by Election Day. Since 2000, Lockheed Martin, Northup Grumman and General Dynamics have poured $62.5 million into the election cycles, favoring Republicans at a rate of a little more than two to one.

 

When veteran advocates complained about the disability issue, Pentagon spokesperson Marine Major Stewart Upton responded with the verbal equivalent of the 'fog of war’: 'We are in the midst of a business-process review that will generate improvements to the program effectiveness, including timeliness goals for processing cases and standard definitions of start and end points as well as other metrics to ensure that progress can be accurately measured over time against common metrics.’

 

Screwing the vets isn’t incompetence; it’s a trade off.  If someone gets the gravy, someone gets the shaft.

 

MORE:

 

"A Man Goes To War For His Nation, And When He Comes Home He Has To Go To War To Get His Benefits And Is Treated Like A Criminal"

 

[Thanks to Elaine Brower, The Military Project, who sent this in.]

 

March 07, 2007 Joe Galloway, Military.com [Excerpts]

 

It was a perfect storm of a week for the White House as the tidal wave of righteous indignation over the treatment of wounded troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan swept over Washington.

 

One Army private first class was medically retired after he received traumatic brain injuries in two explosions in Iraq, and he’s suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. 

 

He wrote that he was judged 40 percent disabled and sent home to support his wife and two children on $700 a month.

 

He has, he wrote, been waiting five months to get enrolled at the nearest Veterans Administration hospital for further treatment.

 

"It is a shame that a man goes to war for his nation, and when he comes home he has to go to war to get his benefits and is treated like a criminal," the former soldier wrote. "You know what his crime is: He got wounded fighting for his country."

 

Unable to work and nearing bankruptcy, the soldier said he was "suicidal."

 

*********************************

 

The Surgeon General of the Army, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, was the commander at Walter Reed for three years.

 

With his appointment as the top medical officer, he now lives across the street from the infamous Building 18 at Walter Reed, where wounded soldiers lived in rooms blackened with mold and infested with rats and insects.

 

Kiley told the congressional hearing that he’d never visited that building and it wasn’t his job to do inspections.

 

Although the online magazine Salon first blew the whistle on Walter Reed some two years ago, he said he first learned of problems with outpatient soldiers there when he read about them in The Washington Post last month.

 

The representatives also heard that maintenance and repairs at Walter Reed had been farmed out to a private firm under a $120 million contract.

 

The contractor replaced 300 government workers with 50 of its own maintenance workers.

 

They call it "privatization," and under the leadership of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, it became the answer to all questions and all problems.

 

The money men at the Pentagon, headed by Assistant Secretary of Defense David Chu, obsess over the human costs of war and the fallout of all those wounded and disabled who must be cared for, along with military veterans and retirees.

 

Those "entitlements" eat up money that they think should be spent instead on new technology, more expensive weapons systems needed and unneeded, and the defense contracting firms that are reliable contributors to political campaigns.

 

They’re right to call these benefits entitlements. 

 

Our troops and the veterans of our wars ARE entitled.

 

They’re entitled to the best medical care. 

 

They’re entitled to their disability pensions. 

 

They’re entitled to all a grateful nation can provide for them, or for their survivors.

 

Those who’d cheat them of their entitlements are entitled to fair hearings and, depending on the results, fast dismissals from their government or military jobs.

 

Any future medical care of those failed bureaucrats and politicians should be performed at Walter Reed Hospital’s Building 18, before the whitewash is slapped on and the roach motels are put out.

 

MORE:

 

"They Fired The Wrong Guy"

"They Needed A Fall-Guy"

 

March 09, 2007 "The Online Campaign"

 

From: Jeanette Kidd (mailto: jkidd11@verizon.net) [Excerpts]

 

To all my Friends and Relatives,

 

I have been silent for the past week about the terrible injustice that has taken place this past week and I can no longer restrain myself. 

 

I am talking about the firing of Major General George Weightman at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC). 

 

George Weightman is my brother-in-law and I am more proud of him today than I ever have been in the past.  I have known him for over 34 years.  He is one of the most honorable men I have ever known in my life.

 

He took command at WRAMC at the very end of August, 2006.  By my count that has only been six months. 

 

Did he know about ALL the things wrong at WRAMC?  My guess is "no"; how could he?  But he was aware of most of the problems and was in the process of correcting them. 

 

The problems cited by the Washington Post were documented over the last two years. 

 

George inherited this mess. 

 

He requested and just got funding for improvements at WRAMC on February 4th!!

 

They fired the wrong guy.  They needed a fall-guy. 

 

Well, I am really angry about this. 

 

This is the man who walks home from the Metro station in Washington DC, up Georgia Avenue , where the police wear flack jackets while on duty.  When I asked him why he would do this, he told me his soldiers do it, why shouldn’t he.  He’s no better. 

 

:: Article nr. 31583 sent on 23-mar-2007 13:00 ECT

www.uruknet.info?p=31583

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