Astonishingly disgusting

Associated Press:

For now, about 1,500 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have been identified by the Department of Veterans Affairs. About 400 of them have taken part in VA programs designed to target homelessness.

The 1,500 are a small, young segment of an estimated 336,000 veterans in the United States who were homeless at some point in 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Bush: destroying our military

Associated Press:

Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam war, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year.

According to the Army, about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier. Overall, 4,698 soldiers deserted this year, compared to 3,301 last year.

Marines want out

Old link, but I never posted it.

New York Times:

The Marine Corps is pressing to remove its forces from Iraq and to send marines instead to Afghanistan, to take over the leading role in combat there, according to senior military and Pentagon officials.

The idea by the Marine Corps commandant would effectively leave the Iraq war in the hands of the Army while giving the Marines a prominent new role in Afghanistan, under overall NATO command.

The suggestion was raised in a session last week convened by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and regional war-fighting commanders. While still under review, its supporters, including some in the Army, argue that a realignment could allow the Army and Marines each to operate more efficiently in sustaining troop levels for two wars that have put a strain on their forces.

As described by officials who had been briefed on the closed-door discussion, the idea represents the first tangible new thinking to emerge since the White House last month endorsed a plan to begin gradual troop withdrawals from Iraq, but also signals that American forces likely will be in Iraq for years to come.

One way to bolster military enlistments

Spiegel Online:

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has granted US citizenship to 32,500 foreign soldiers. In July 2002, US President George W. Bush issued an executive order to expand existing legislation to offer a fast track to citizenship to foreigners who agree to fight for the US Armed Forces. About 8,000 non-Americans have joined the US military every year since then.

The foreigners already represent 5 percent of all recruits. They even make up the majority of soldiers from some New York and Los Angeles neighborhoods. Four years and 3,800 US deaths after the beginning of the Iraq campaign, fewer and fewer American citizens are willing to fight in a war opposed by a majority of the US population. But despite the Iraq war's lack of popularity, US generals are demanding 180,000 new recruits a year.

The Pentagon already spends $3.2 billion a year on recruitment, even sending its recruiters to high schools to persuade 17-year-olds still a year away from graduation to enlist.

No one wants to fight Bush's war, so people desperate to become Americans are bribed to do so. If they survive.

Mental Health Crisis For American Troops

CBS News:

The Pentagon's top health official said Thursday he wants to see better mental health assessments, stronger privacy protections and a "buddy system" to change the military's stigma against seeking help for anxiety and depression.

Speaking to Congress as the military rushes to improve its much-criticized mental health system, S. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, also acknowledged that the Army's touted plans to hire 25 percent additional mental health specialists may prove hard to fulfill for awhile because of problems in recruiting and retaining active-duty professionals.

This is astonishing:

About 38 percent of soldiers and 31 percent of Marines report psychological conditions such as brain injury and PTSD after returning from deployment. Among members of the National Guard, the figure is much higher — 49 percent — with numbers expected to grow because of repeated and extended deployments.

As Bush Abuses Our Troops, Suicides Hit Record Levels

One family's incomprehensible loss is reported by Reuters:

The parents of an Iraq war veteran who committed suicide sued the U.S. government on Thursday for negligence, charging their son hanged himself after the government ignored his depression.

The suit accuses the federal government of not helping 23-year-old Jeffrey Lucey, who committed suicide in his parents' Massachusetts basement less than a year after returning home from fighting during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. U.S. Veterans Affairs Secretary James Nicholson was also named in the suit.

"This government is guilty of not taking care of the troops after they come home," the veteran's father, Kevin Lucey, said in an interview. "We are hoping to show this nation how broken the Veterans Administration is. We want to make this a responsive and efficient system."

The Bush Administration's systematic abuse of our military personnel is one of the ongoing outrages of the Iraq War. Let's review.

Overused and over-extended.

Christian Science Monitor: As of the beginning of 2006, Stop-Loss policy had prevented at least 50,000 troops from leaving the military when their service was scheduled to end.

USA Today: Multiple deployments are adding to the troops' stress.

United Press International: Nearly two-thirds of polled veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars consider the military over-extended.

Spiegel Online: Troops stationed in Germany are increasingly going AWOL rather than be cannon fodder for Bush's insanity.

New York Times: The army had to revise updwards its understated desertion rate.

Boston Globe: West Point graduates are leaving the military at the highest rate in three decades, as repeated tours of Iraq drive out some of the army's best young officers.

Los Angeles Times: Both Republican and Democratic governors warned Bush that using National Guard troops for his escalation was overburdening units already stretched to their limits.

Associated Press: Two army brigades had to forgo their desert training to accomodate Bush's escalation schedule.

Associated Press: Deployed single parents are having to fight to retain custody of their children.

CNN: In April of this year, tours of duty were extended from 12 to 15 months.


New York Times: Republicans killed Senator Webb's attempt to give troops more down time between deployments

Inadequately protected

New York Times: A 2006 study showed that eighty percent of marines killed from upper body wounds would have survived, if they'd had adequate body armor.

Newsweek: Troops have been having to improvise their own vehicle armor, because the military hasn't been providing the real thing.

Washington Post: Even as the escalation began, thousands of Army Humvees still lacked FRAG Kit 5 armor protection.

Inadequately cared for, when wounded or scarred.

Salon: The Veterans Administration knew as early as 2004 that there were serious problems with the conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center- and did nothing.

Salon: The Department of Defense also knew about the problems long before public exposure and the resulting outcry forced them to actually do something about it.

National Public Radio: Veterans are receiving fewer medical disability benefits now than before the war.

MSNBC: Up to twenty percent of Iraq Vets may be suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Washington Post: A Pentagon task force concluded that the available medical care for those troops suffering psychological problems is "woefully inadequate."

Actually being sent back into battle, when medically unfit.

Salon: Wounded soldiers classified as medically unfit for battle were being reclassified as fit, so they could be sent back into battle.

Salon: These reclassifications were done to provide enough manpower for Bush's escalation.

Salon: Even soldiers with acute Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder were being sent back to Iraq.

Anyone who makes it through Basic Training is both physically and psychologically strong; but the abuse suffered by our troops at the hands of the Bush Administration is too much even for many of them. It is unprecedented. How unprecedented?

As Stacy Bannerman wrote, in Foreign Policy in Focus:

Pentagon statistics reveal that the suicide rate for U.S. troops who have served in Iraq is double what it was in peacetime.

Soldiers who have served -- or are serving -- in Iraq are killing themselves at higher percentages than in any other war where such figures have been tracked. According to a report recently released by the Defense Manpower Data Center, suicide accounted for over 25 percent of all noncombat Army deaths in Iraq in 2006. One of the reasons for "the higher suicide rate in Iraq [is] the higher percentage of reserve troops," said military analyst James F. Dunnigan.

Corporate media pundits sometimes ask why we liberals so despise this Administration. This story is but one reason.

American Troops Are Killing Themselves

Editor & Publisher:

One of the least covered aspects of the fallout from the Iraq war is the rising toll of suicides, both near the battlefield and back home.

Latest official figures released by the Pentagon reveal at least 116 self-inflicted fatalities in Iraq. But this does not include several dozen still under investigation, nor any of the many cases back in the U.S.

Considering the way Bush is abusing them, it's little wonder.

Why do they hate our troops?

Bob Geiger, of the Huffington Post:

We didn't need any further proof that Congressional Republicans really don't give a damn about the troops or their families but we just got it in the United States Senate anyway.

Just moments ago, Senate Republicans succeeded in a filibuster in which they refused to end debate on Virginia Democrat Jim Webb's S. 2012, which would have placed strict limits on National Guard and reserve deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as well as mandating more downtime at home before active-duty combat troops are returned to battle.

The vote was 56-41 to end debate, with 60 votes needed to move to a full, up-or-down vote on the Webb measure. Once again, the GOP has been successful at destroying another Democratic attempt at helping service members and their families caught in the buzzsaw of the Bush administration's lies and incompetence.

And from the Washington Post:

The Pentagon inspector general's office has found that a program to deliver special armored vehicles to protect military personnel in Iraq from roadside bombs has been marred by delays and questionable contracting practices that may have endangered troops.

The office examined $2.2 billion worth of contracts for armored vehicles and kits to upgrade them, according to a report made available to The Washington Post yesterday. Investigators found, among other things, that the Marine Corps issued $416.7 million in sole-source contracts to Force Protection of Ladson, S.C., for armored vehicles. A sole-source contract is a deal awarded without competitive bidding, usually because the Pentagon determines the firm is the only one able to deliver a service or because it needs an item quickly. Yet the report found that Marine officials knew of other potential bidders and that some advocates of competition were overruled.

The contracts continued even though Force Protection "did not perform as a responsible contractor and repeatedly failed to meet contractual delivery schedules for getting vehicles to the theater," the report said. Under one contract issued in 2005, Force Protection failed to deliver 98 percent of 122 mine-resistant vehicles on time despite getting $6.7 million from the Marines to upgrade its production facilities.

Deployed Troops Losing Custody Of Their Children

AP:

A federal law called the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act is meant to protect them by staying civil court actions and administrative proceedings during military activation. They can't be evicted. Creditors can't seize their property. Civilian health benefits, if suspended during deployment, must be reinstated.

And yet service members' children can be - and are being - taken from them after they are deployed.

Some family court judges say that determining what's best for a child in a custody case is simply not comparable to deciding civil property disputes and the like; they have ruled that family law trumps the federal law protecting servicemembers. And so, in many cases when a soldier deploys, the ex-spouse seeks custody, and temporary changes become lasting.

WHO Doesn't Support The Troops? Bush Ignores The Wounded!

With Bush, Cheney, and McCain once again equating Democratic opposition to the war with lack of support for the troops, Salon's Mark Benjamin has produced yet another bombshell report on the Administration's callous neglect of those wounded in the war!

When the Walter Reed scandal exploded in the media in February, bringing wide attention to inadequate care for veterans at the Army's flagship hospital, Defense Department officials expressed shock and claimed ignorance. Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., the assistant defense secretary who oversees military medicine, declared at a press conference on Feb. 21: "This news caught me -- as it did many other people -- completely by surprise."

But Salon has learned that the Defense Department had been conducting monthly focus group discussions with soldiers treated at Walter Reed since before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had even begun, and that it continued to do so as wounded veterans of those conflicts arrived at the facility. The interviews with outpatients were set up to monitor Army healthcare and provide military officials with direct information about it.

"They were trying to find out the good and the bad and the ugly," said a former Defense Department official familiar with the DoD focus groups. "That is the good-news story. The bad-news story is they did not do anything about it."

Simply put: they knew! And they didn't care!

So, let's review...

NPR already reported that the Pentagon is giving disability benefits to fewer veterans, since the war began!

When service members are forced to leave the military by war injuries or illness, they face a complex system for getting health and disability benefits. Sometimes, health care gets cut off when new veterans find they need it most. Some retired soldiers and their families say they are worried that the Pentagon won't spend enough money to give the injured the care they deserve.

And NPR reported on research done by retired Lieutenant Colonel Michael Parker:

Parker started digging through Pentagon data, and the numbers he found shocked him. He learned that the Pentagon is giving fewer veterans disability benefits today than it was before the Iraq war — despite the fact that thousands of soldiers are leaving the military with serious injuries.

"It went from 102,000 and change in 2001... and now it's down to 89,500," says Parker. "It's counterintuitive. Why are the number of disability retirees shrinking during wartime?"

And the New York Times reported in January that up to eighty percent of the marines killed in Iraq could still be alive, if they'd been given adequate body armor!

A secret Pentagon study has found that at least 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had extra body armor. That armor has been available since 2003 but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.

A month later, the Washington Post reported that the troops being sent to Iraq as part of Bush's escalation are not even being given adequate protections!

The Army is working to fill a shortfall in Iraq of thousands of advanced Humvee armor kits designed to reduce U.S. troop deaths from roadside bombs -- including a rising threat from particularly lethal weapons linked to Iran and known as "explosively formed penetrators" (EFP) -- that are now inflicting 70 percent of the American casualties in the country, according to U.S. military and civilian officials.

The additional protection is needed for thousands of U.S. reinforcement troops flowing into Baghdad, where these devastating weapons -- used primarily by Shiite fighters -- are particularly prevalent, the officials said.

U.S. Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan lack more than 4,000 of the latest Humvee armor kit, known as FRAG Kit 5, according to U.S. officials. The Army has ramped up production of the armor, giving priority to troops in Baghdad, but the upgrade is not scheduled to be completed until this summer, Army officials said. That is well into the timeline for major operations launched last week to quell violence by Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias, which the U.S. military now views as the top security threat in Iraq.

And, of course, the troops themselves considered themselves overextended, thanks to Stop-Loss policies, and that was even before the latest round of tour extensions!

And, of course, it was Benjamin who already broke the stories that wounded troops are being sent back into battle; and that a VA official who investigated conditions at Walter Reed in 2004, and apparently did nothing is being promoted!

So, let's be clear: the Bush-Cheney administration is overworking the troops, failing to give them adequate protective armor, neglecting them when they return from the war wounded, giving fewer disability benefits, and promoting the very people who knew about these scandals and did nothing about them! And Bush and Cheney run around blathering that Democratic attempts to bring the troops home from his failed war means a lack of support? Bush and Cheney could not be doing more to abuse our troops, and less to support them, if that was their deliberate intention! And no amount of lies, warmongering, and fearmongering can hide the fundamental facts! Bush and Cheney are the enemies of America's military personnel!

Why Does Bush Hate Our Troops?

NPR:

When service members are forced to leave the military by war injuries or illness, they face a complex system for getting health and disability benefits. Sometimes, health care gets cut off when new veterans find they need it most. Some retired soldiers and their families say they are worried that the Pentagon won't spend enough money to give the injured the care they deserve.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Michael Parker did a little research:

Parker started digging through Pentagon data, and the numbers he found shocked him. He learned that the Pentagon is giving fewer veterans disability benefits today than it was before the Iraq war — despite the fact that thousands of soldiers are leaving the military with serious injuries.

"It went from 102,000 and change in 2001... and now it's down to 89,500," says Parker. "It's counterintuitive. Why are the number of disability retirees shrinking during wartime?"

Why, indeed?

Bush Continues To Undermine Our National Security

Boston Globe:

Recent graduates of the US Military Academy at West Point are choosing to leave active duty at the highest rate in more than three decades, a sign to many military specialists that repeated tours in Iraq are prematurely driving out some of the Army's top young officers.

According to statistics compiled by West Point, of the 903 Army officers commissioned upon graduation in 2001, nearly 46 percent left the service last year -- 35 percent at the conclusion of their five years of required service, and another 11 percent over the next six months. And more than 54 percent of the 935 graduates in the class of 2000 had left active duty by this January, the statistics show.

The figures mark the lowest retention rate of graduates after the completion of their mandatory duty since at least 1977, with the exception of members of three classes in the late 1980s who were encouraged to leave as the military downsized following the end of the Cold War.

Salon: VA Knew Of Walter Reed Problems in 2004!

Salon's incredible Mark Benjamin, who broke the story about wounded veterans being sent back to Iraq, has done it again!

From today's edition:

Bush administration officials have claimed that they were unaware of problems with veterans' care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center until a flurry of media reports earlier this year brought the hospital's shortcomings to their attention. But Salon has obtained written proof -- a report prepared for a Department of Veterans Affairs task force -- that officials should have been aware of the situation as long ago as August 2004. President Bush, meanwhile, having promised to improve care at the hospital, has just announce plans to nominate the co-chair of that task force to run all of the VA's health services.

You would think he'd also be nominated for a Medal of Freedom, but I guess they want him to inflict as much damage as possible before he earns that singular form of recognition.

In August 2004, VA researchers conducted focus group interviews with Walter Reed patients and their families. The report based on those interviews, and obtained by Salon, says that the patients -- seriously wounded veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan -- told the VA that they were "frustrated, confused, sometimes angry" about their experiences at the hospital. Documents provided to Salon show the focus group report was delivered to top VA officials in November 2004.

Of course, after the scandal first broke, Bush pretended to have only found out about it through the media reports.

From the February 21 Washington Post:

At the White House, press secretary Tony Snow said that he spoke with President Bush yesterday about Walter Reed and that the president told him: "Find out what the problem is and fix it."

Snow said Bush "first learned of the troubling allegations regarding Walter Reed from the stories this weekend in The Washington Post. He is deeply concerned and wants any problems identified and fixed." The spokesman said he did not know why the president, who has visited the facility many times in the past five years, had not heard about these problems before.

Then, Bush did a cynical photo-op tour of Walter Reed, to deflect blame and pretend to care.

From the AP, on March 30:

President Bush apologized to troops face to face on Friday for shoddy conditions they have endured at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He shook the artificial hand of a lieutenant and cradled a newborn whose daddy is nursing his remaining, severely injured leg back to health.

"The problems at Walter Reed were caused by bureaucratic and administrative failures," Bush said during a nearly three-hour visit to the medical center — his first since reports surfaced of shabby conditions for veterans in outpatient housing. "The system failed you and it failed our troops, and we're going to fix it."

Right: "bureaucratic and administrative failures." The buck stops anywhere but at 1600 Pennsylvania. This wasn't an administrative failure, it was an Administrative failure. So, how's he going to fix it?

Benjamin:

The report shows that top VA officials were involved in the focus group process back in 2004. Michael Kussman, then the acting deputy undersecretary for health, was co-chair of the VA's Seamless Transition Task Force, which produced the final report. The task force was supposed to make sure veterans had access to healthcare and got their benefits in a fair and timely fashion. Not only is Kussman still at the VA, but he is also in line to be promoted. On April 4, the White House announced that the president intends to nominate Kussman to be undersecretary for health at the VA.

That's right. Heckuva job, Kussman. It's hard work. Keep it up.

On February 25, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin pointed out that the Republican Congress had, as usual, protected Bush by refusing to investigate. So, the new Congress has yet another Bush scandal to deal with; but it now has yet another crtiical responsibility: stop the promotion of Michael Kussman!

Why Does Bush Hate Our Troops?

Salon:

Salon has uncovered further evidence that the military sent soldiers with acute post-traumatic stress disorder, severe back injuries and other serious war wounds back to Iraq.

Go read.

Endless War

Reuters:

The Pentagon has identified some 14,000 National Guard soldiers who may go to Iraq as part of planning for deployments stretching as far as 2010, a senior U.S. defense official said on Friday.

Some of the Guard soldiers, part of the U.S. military's reserve component, may face deployment far sooner than the Pentagon's goal of five years at home for every year they are mobilized, the official said.

But the official, speaking on condition of anonymity as no announcement has yet been made, said more than two-thirds of the soldiers had not previously been deployed.

Salon: Deployment Of Wounded Troops Tied To Bush's Iraq Escalation!

After interviewing a dozen soldiers, Mark Benjamin is today reporting in Salon that the Army is deploying seriously injured troops to Fort Irwin, California:

Military experts say they suspect that the deployment to Fort Irwin of injured soldiers was an effort to pump up manpower statistics used to show the readiness of Army units. With the military increasingly strained after four years of war, Army readiness has become a critical part of the debate over Iraq. Some congressional Democrats have considered plans to limit the White House's ability to deploy more troops unless the Pentagon can certify that units headed into the fray are fully equipped and fully manned.

It's a harrowing story, and Benjamin has already reported that some injured soldiers were being reclassified from medically unfit to fit, so they could be sent back to Iraq!

This abuse of service personnel is being directly tied to the Bush Administration's escalation of the Iraq War:

A military official knowledgeable about the training in California in January and the medical processing of the injured soldiers at Fort Benning in February told Salon that commanders were taking desperate actions to meet an accelerated deployment schedule dictated by President Bush's so-called surge plan for securing Baghdad. "None of this would have happened if we had just slowed down a little bit," the military official said. "A lot of people were under a lot of pressure at that time."

Of course, as Sidney Blumenthal has already reported in Salon:

Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush's escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.

And the military says it will still need these escalated troop numbers into 2008!

New York Times:

The day-to-day commander of American forces in Iraq has recommended that the heightened American troop levels there be maintained through February 2008, military officials said Wednesday.

So, a desperate military command is resorting to the redeployment of injured troops and downgraded recruitment standards in order to find the cannon fodder for Bush's continuing disaster. It's little wonder that the Army is under-reporting desertion rates; and little wonder that, as the Washington Post reported:

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.

More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a "death spiral," in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.

It just keeps getting worse.

Army Admits Desertion Rate Higher Than Previously Stated

New York Times:

A total of 3,196 active-duty soldiers deserted the Army last year, or 853 more than previously reported, according to revised figures from the Army.

The new calculations by the Army, which had about 500,000 active-duty troops at the end of 2006, significantly alter the annual desertion totals since the 2000 fiscal year.

In 2005, for example, the Army now says 2,543 soldiers deserted, not the 2,011 it had reported. For some earlier years, the desertion numbers were revised downward.

Wonder why...

Hating the Troops

Army Times:

The Pentagon also clamped down on media coverage of any and all Defense Department medical facilities, to include suspending planned projects by CNN and the Discovery Channel, saying in an e-mail to spokespeople: “It will be in most cases not appropriate to engage the media while this review takes place,” referring to an investigation of the problems at Walter Reed.

Suppress the flow of information and the problem will go away.

Support The Troops!

Bring them home!

Der Spiegel:

As criticism of the Iraq war grows at home, some US soldiers abroad are rejecting Bush's mission. On military bases across Germany, many are now seeking a way out through desertion or early discharge.

Why does he hate America?

Los Angeles Times:

Republican and Democratic governors meeting here Saturday warned that President Bush's "surge" of additional troops to Iraq would put added pressure on National Guard units already stretched to their limits.

"We the governors rely on the Guard to respond to natural disasters, a pandemic or terrorist attack," said North Carolina Gov. Michael F. Easley, a Democrat. "Currently, we don't have the manpower or the equipment to perform that dual role" of responding to both state and federal needs.

The Pentagon last week announced plans to send 14,000 National Guard members to Iraq next year as support for the 21,500 troops to be deployed under Bush's plan. The announcement came on the heels of a change in Pentagon policy to deploy Guard troops more frequently but to limit tours to a year; the average now is 18 months.