snizz
Full Member
I'm sure I'd be more upset if I weren't quite so heavily sedated
Posts: 322
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Post by snizz on Dec 9, 2004 22:05:57 GMT -5
About damn time, where was this stuff before the election? But let's hear it for our troops anyway! And to think, this guy's staying on?! Larfing me ass off at how they're all scrambling around trying to remove their feet from their mouths again. Rumsfeld Gets His Ear Bent
RICHARD SISK WASHINGTON BUREAU
Rumsfeld's remark that the troops would have to make do with their equipment triggered a storm of bipartisan criticism from Congress.
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) said Rumsfeld's statement was "inexcusable" and underlined the "need to improve the equipment we are providing to the reserve component of our force," her spokesman said.
Rep. Steve Israel (D-L.I.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said: "It's about time Donald Rumsfeld finally heard the truth we hear constantly from the troops. They're underfunded, shortchanged and undersupplied."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) seized on the sergeant's complaint about the controversial "stop-loss" order issued to her and thousands of other troops that barred her from retiring.
"We've got to expand the size of the military," McCain told CNN, "and stop-loss is a terrible thing for morale."
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snizz
Full Member
I'm sure I'd be more upset if I weren't quite so heavily sedated
Posts: 322
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Post by snizz on Dec 9, 2004 22:07:46 GMT -5
War Wounds Are Growing BY PAUL H.B. SHIN DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER It's not just the death toll that keeps climbing: More soldiers have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan to date than in the first five years of the Vietnam War, a new report shows.
But because of dramatic advances in battlefield surgery, nine of 10 wounded soldiers are now surviving their injuries - the highest rate in the history of U.S. warfare.
Since the start of the war in March 2003, nearly 1,300 G.I.s have died on the battlefield.
"We need to multiply that number by 10 to have a grasp of how many were actually injured in battle. That gives a different sense of the magnitude of the war," said Dr. Atul Gawande, a Harvard medical school surgeon writes in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In World War II, 30% of injured soldiers died.
In Vietnam, that number dropped slightly, to 24%.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, 10,726 soldiers have been injured. But small surgical teams have been able to keep them alive by moving with troops on the front lines and patching up the most seriously wounded until they can reach field hospitals, according to the report, which also includes graphic photos of maimed soldiers.
"What you have now are these 20-person teams, traveling in a handful of Humvees with three tents they can set up in one hour and begin operating out of five backpacks," he said. "They are doing some revolutionary things that have made unprecedented changes in survival."
"We basically work to save life over limb," said Navy Capt. Kenneth Kelleher, chief of the surgical company at the main U.S. Marine base near Fallujah.
"If the injury is not going to be salvageable, we do a rapid amputation, and there have been a fair number of those," he said.
Battlefield surgeons have had to unlearn prior training that encouraged them to track a patient for as long as possible.
But the improved survival rate also means more soldiers will live with dramatic handicaps.
The Pentagon reports that more than half of the casualties in Iraq were so severe that the G.I.s were unable to return to duty.
"It's an entirely new set of challenges for rehabilitation - physically and emotionally," Gawande said.
Another challenge is getting enough surgeons on the battlefield. The Army has only 120 general surgeons on active duty. "They clearly are stretched thinner than they have been," Gawande said.
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Post by Roughneck on Dec 15, 2004 17:34:21 GMT -5
Bush Gives Medal of Freedom to 'Pivotal' Iraq Figures
By Ann Gerhart Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 15, 2004; Page C01
Trumpeting America as liberator, the White House conferred the highest civilian honor yesterday on three men intimately involved with the decision to invade Iraq or the troubled aftermath of the invasion.
President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Tommy Franks, the now-retired Army general who led the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; former CIA director George Tenet, who told Bush it was a "slam dunk" that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction; and L. Paul Bremer, who presided over the first 14 months of Iraq reconstruction.
Past recipients have included Mother Teresa, Mr. Rogers, Rosa Parks and Pope John Paul II.
In the East Room of the White House, Bush said he had chosen the trio because they "played pivotal roles in great events" and made efforts that "made our country more secure and advanced the cause of human liberty." Before an invited audience of 120, which included Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and his nominated replacement, Condoleezza Rice, Bush hung the heavy gold medals, on royal-blue velvet ribbons, around the men's necks. Franks and Tenet grinned broadly. Bremer later wiped his eyes.
Some Democrats questioned the choice.
"My hunch is that George Bush wasn't using the same standard when honoring Tenet and Bremer that was applied to previous honorees," said David Wade, a spokesman for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who lost last month's presidential election to Bush. And Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, said yesterday he "would have reached a different conclusion" on Tenet. "I don't think [he] served the president or the nation well," Levin said.
The president heralded Tenet for being "one of the first to recognize" the growing threat to America from "radical terrorist networks." He made no mention of the failures outlined by the 9/11 commission that forced the administration to overhaul the nation's intelligence operations.
He praised Franks for his Iraq war plan, which utilized "a force half the size of the force that won the Gulf War" to reach Baghdad in less than a month, "the fastest, longest armored advance in the history of American warfare." Bush did not note that more Americans have died after the toppling of Saddam Hussein than during that initial charge.
Bremer, Bush said, "worked day and night in difficult dangerous conditions" to rebuild Iraq and help leaders chart the country's political future. "Every benchmark . . . was achieved on time or ahead of schedule, including the transfer of sovereignty that ended his tenure," the president said. He did not add that the transfer was hurriedly arranged two days early because of fears insurgents would attack the ceremonies.
The Medal of Freedom was established by President Harry Truman in 1945 as a way to honor allies who had helped the war effort, and most initial recipients were not American citizens, said Jim Salmon, who tracks the medal's history for a Web site. In 1963, President John Kennedy, by executive order, restricted the award so that it could be given only by the president. Since that time, presidents have used the medal to honor a wide variety of individuals in sports, arts, letters, charity and social justice.
Yesterday's medals, said Salmon, "are a unique situation. This is not the norm, for there to be three people in the same genre, with the same basic events," honored so quickly after their service or after pointed questioning by congressional leaders, as all three men were in the past two years.
Reporters peppered White House press secretary Scott McClellan yesterday in two sessions over the timing of the medals and whether the ceremony indicated that the president had forgiven Tenet, who resigned in June after seven years leading the agency, for intelligence failures dealing with 9/11 and Iraq.
"They have made many incredibly positive contributions to our nation," McClellan said. The recipients "have worked to liberate some 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq from oppression and tyranny. And they have worked to help transform a very dangerous region in the world that has been a breeding ground for terrorism, a breeding ground from where people hijack planes and flew them into buildings."
Paul Rieckhoff, a former Army lieutenant who served in Iraq and now runs an organization of veterans against the war, said the awards are "a slap in the face to the troops" from "an administration that loves the big PR move. . . . It validates how out of touch Washington is with the reality of what is on the ground in Iraq."
And Brookings Institution fellow Michael O'Hanlon, who monitors Iraq, suggested that if the president wanted to honor service in Iraq, he could have selected other people to honor. "I wouldn't expect him to show any wavering" over the decision to go to war, O'Hanlon said of the president, "but I'm troubled by the use of this award in a different way. He could have called attention to the bravery in Iraq, without having to make it about the most controversial figures in the whole operation."
In Iraq yesterday, U.S. military officials announced combat deaths of two Marines, bringing the toll to 10 Marines in three days. A suicide bomber blew up seven people and wounded at least 13 at a Green Zone checkpoint in Baghdad. Military brass announced that the U.S. military would have a record high of 150,000 troops on the ground in the nation through the Jan. 30 election and "a little bit after." In Mosul, gunmen killed a provincial council member, and soldiers discovered eight more bodies of Iraqis, bringing to more than 150 the number of likely victims of insurgents targeting Iraqi police and security forces in that city in the past six weeks.
Once again, NOW they find their balls...although this has to be the most direct criticism I've seen thus far in a normal article by a major paper yet.
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Post by LS on Jan 18, 2005 0:09:24 GMT -5
An About-Face On Support Paul Vitello Newsday
Americans seem eager to "support our troops" these days. It says so on the bumper of every other car on the road, anyway.
But how our government treats the troops when they come home - as veterans - is no cause for bumper sticker pride.
Some older veterans wait more than a year for an appointment to see a doctor via the Byzantine bureaucracy of the Department of Veteran Affairs.
If you are not a recent returning soldier, you can spend a whole day seeking help and wind up so frustrated, so desperately unsupported, that you end up calling a local newspaper columnist. I get a call like that about twice a week.
"They're yanking us around," said one, John Welge of Lindenhurst, a 57-year-old disabled Vietnam veteran who happened to call yesterday. "There's so many cuts, everybody's doing the job of three people. I've been on the phone all day trying to get someone to help me with a simple medical form ..."
A trillion-dollar deficit, caused mainly by huge tax cuts during the past four years, has led the VA to impose many economies, small and large. Seven VA hospitals are scheduled to be closed, for instance. The VA is also reviewing the possibility of reneging on a landmark 1996 reform that more than tripled the number of veterans eligible for health-care coverage - from 2 million to 7 million.
In this strange atmosphere of VA belt-tightening when more is being asked of a current generation of troops, veterans advocates saw Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.), chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, as one of their few reliable friends.
He ushered through increases in college tuition aid for veterans, advocated for improved disability benefits, for marginally better death benefits for survivors of soldiers killed in action, for the first program for helping homeless vets. Smith frequently locked horns with his own party leadership in efforts to expand health care services.
After taking the committee chairmanship in 2001, he openly criticized Republican leaders for what he considered inadequate VA budget proposals.
"He is a very principle-based guy," said Steve Robertson, director of legislative affairs for the American Legion. "He's very passionate. In areas where he thought he was right, he was willing to take a stand. Veterans admired that about him."
If you don't follow the intricacies of Washington politics, then you might want to know how the House Republican leadership felt about Rep. Smith's willingness to take a stand for our veterans.
They didn't like it much.
Last week, despite protests from seven major veterans organizations including the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, Smith was removed as chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee. He had been due to step down in 2006.
He was replaced by Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.), a Persian Gulf veteran who is considered more loyal to House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay. According to an analysis by the Asbury Park Press, Buyer voted with his leadership 99 percent of the time while Smith's record of conformity was only 77 percent.
Richard Fuller, legislative director for Paralyzed Veterans of America, told the Washington weekly newspaper The Hill that the motive for Smith's removal was clearly to "make an example" of him because of his willingness to buck the leadership. Hastert and DeLay have declined to discuss it.
In a statement after his ouster, Smith said: "I honestly believe that conformity is not loyalty, that constructive disagreement is the highest sense of loyalty."
To the House Republican leaders, though, supporting our troops apparently begins and ends with supporting our House leaders.
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Post by LS on Jan 18, 2005 0:11:35 GMT -5
Failing America's Heroes Mort Zuckerman NY Daily News The commitment Americans make to those who voluntarily put themselves in harm's way to fight our wars is a mark of our character. It is reflected in two ways. The first is the effort to save the wounded. The success is unparalleled. Some 98% of the wounded now survive, a mortality rate half that of previous wars and down 22% even when compared with the first Gulf War, thanks to rapid evacuation, better body armor, fast-clot bandages, better tourniquets and access to fresh whole blood that saves many soldiers from bleeding to death.
Beyond that, there is a greater understanding than there was just a few years ago of the mental stress of combat, much aggravated in Iraq, where our soldiers face an enemy who masquerades in civilian clothes and bogus uniforms and blows himself up in order to kill and maim. Posttraumatic stress disorder has a debilitating effect on the brain's chemistry that sometimes lasts the rest of a person's life.
For all the great advances in battlefield medicine, however, America comes up short when it comes to follow-on assistance to our men and women who bear arms.
If an American in military uniform is killed, his or her family receives a one-time, tax-exempt death gratuity of $12,000 and rent-free government housing for 180 days or its equivalent. There is a special group life insurance program that could provide as much as an additional $250,000 if the serviceman or his family subscribes to the program. Compare this with the millions of dollars that the families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks received.
Then there is the Survivor Benefit Plan, which pays the spouse of a military person killed in action 55% of his or her retirement pay - an amount already so low that it qualifies many military families for food stamps.
Recently, the law was revamped to allow spouses to remarry after age 57 and keep this minimal compensation.
For those who seek to return to ordinary life, the compensation is similarly mean. Injured or ill veterans must submit to a complex set of reviews before medical boards that decide whether they qualify for financial help and how much they'll receive. How much should a vet receive for trying to live partially or fully blind, deaf, limbless, disfigured or brain-damaged? Much less than you would assume. Think of coping without a hip and leg, for instance, on around $12,000 a year.
On top of this, the Department of Veterans Affairs is overwhelmed. It provides benefits and care for approximately 5million American veterans. Typically overburdened during war, it now has a backlog of some 300,000 claims, on top of having to deal with 150,000 National Guard and reserve veterans who also have become eligible because of service in Iraq.
Meanwhile, those from the National Guard and the reserves who are injured on duty must navigate a system suited more to full-time soldiers. Most are required to stay on military bases to get government medical treatment and to collect their active-duty salary, as well as finish the evaluation that determines whether they return to duty or leave with severance and disability payments.
This means they are away from home for way too long. The VA should allow part-timers to receive active-duty pay while they are being treated at hospitals and VA sites closer to their homes and, if necessary, to be treated by their own doctors with appropriately reasonable medical insurance.
There is some good news, however. The VA has been working hard to reduce the backlog of soldiers' claims and to cut waiting times for medical appointments. There also has been an increase in veterans' disability compensation rates - up to $2,300 a month, or $27,600 a year - for 100% disabled veterans without dependents. But President Bush proposed to cut the VA's 2005 budget request by $1.2 billion, over the objections of the secretary of veterans affairs, and to reduce the number of VA staff who handle benefit claims at the very time when the number and complexity of such claims are increasing.
This is, to put it plainly, outrageous.
Our military personnel should not be treated as second-class citizens. Those wounded and disabled while fighting the war on terrorism for the rest of us will need special help to cope with the scars and disabilities inflicted by a savage, amoral enemy.
Soldiers who volunteered to leave their loved ones to defend the rest of us deserve better, much better.
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Post by LS on Feb 17, 2005 22:16:18 GMT -5
Veterans Target Benefit Cuts
BY ERIK HOLM NEWSDAY STAFF WRITER February 14, 2005
War may be hell, three veterans of the Iraq conflict told college students Monday, but coming home is no picnic either.
The three painted a bleak picture of a soldier's life in the war zone at a forum at Nassau Community College, saying troops still lack body armor, fly in decades-old helicopters and don't have enough Arabic-speaking interpreters to do their jobs effectively.
But they saved their harshest words for the conditions that soldiers face after returning home. They cited a lack of services and compassion -- both in Washington and among the general public -- for high rates of alcoholism, homelessness and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder among the recently returned troops.
"A lot of people praise the dead for being heroes ... but people forget about the living who returned," said Nicole Goodwin, a former army private. "You always see those bumper stickers that say 'Support the Troops.' I'm a living troop. I'm tired of seeing those words ... where's the action?"
The members of Operation Truth, a veteran's group founded last summer to push for more resources for soldiers overseas and at home, castigated Congress and the administration of President George W. Bush for proposing cuts to benefits for veterans, saying that the Veteran's Affairs hospitals, though run by well-meaning staff members, were already underfunded.
Paul Rieckhoff, an Army reserve lieutenant, said his father, also a veteran, had warned him upon his return from Iraq about federally funded vets hospitals.
"The VA is the last place you want to go," Rieckhoff said his father told him. "When older veterans are telling the new guys that, there's a problem."
Goodwin, who shipped out to Iraq a month after she gave birth to her only child, said she returned to family members who quickly told her to move out. She stayed on friends' couches and was homeless for a time, she said, before finding an apartment in East Harlem and enrolling in community college in the Bronx.
"There's no parachute, no net to stop you" for soldiers who don't get off on the right foot, she said.
Rieckhoff, who founded the group shortly after returning from Iraq a year ago, said he started it when he realized that "most of the American people were not getting the whole picture."
The third panelist, former Marine intelligence officer Andrew Borene, said he wasn't opposed to war -- but did object to many of the decisions made by the top military officers and the administration.
"You can't be a U.S. Marine and be a pacifist. They don't let you into the club," Borene said. "But there are things we could do better."
About 400 people attended the wide-ranging discussion at the student center, and afterward, a handful of students approached Rieckhoff to ask if they should enlist.
"That would take a lot more time to answer that we have," he said to one. "There's good and there's bad. You need to tak to some guys who've been over there.
"Here," he said, "take my card."
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They're Real Experts On War Paul Vitello February 15, 2005
Think of three American experts on the war in Iraq.
If you are like me, the people who come to mind are an undersecretary of defense, a retired general who appears on a cable news network and a commentator who lives in Washington, D.C.
None of these people, of course, has recently been shot at in Iraq. None has worried about rolling over a land mine in an unarmored vehicle. None has seen up close the frustration of an Iraqi civilian after American soldiers ransack his home in search of weapons or people never found.
None has seen a friend lose both his legs in combat.
"So we got together, a few vets and I," said Paul Rieckhoff, who served in Iraq in 2003-2004 as a first lieutenant in the Army National Guard, leading a platoon, "and we decided to get out the word about the kind of life soldiers live every day." He and two other members of an organization he founded, Operation Truth, spoke yesterday at Nassau Community College.
They presented themselves as the kind of experts we don't hear from much on the subject of the war in Iraq. They don't do global strategy and they don't do public relations.
They are experts in the unseen realities.
They talk about the morale-damage caused by the military's Stop Loss policy, which can extend a soldier's service almost indefinitely. They raise troubling questions about the role of private contractors in combat zones. Halliburton, for instance, now lures some of the military's best combat soldiers away with wages and benefits far above military pay grades.
They spotlight the unseemly fact that, while paying lip service to the heroism of the troops, the Bush administration has already cut, and proposes still more cuts in services for veterans.
"I love the Marine Corps. I won't say anything bad about the organization," said former Marine Lt. Andrew Borene, who served during the invasion of Iraq. But a friend of his was killed in a crash of a helicopter that, in his estimation, was old and should have long since been replaced.
"People are getting killed because of a lack of civilian leadership," he said. He referred to the much-publicized shortage of armor-plated vehicles and body armor, which persists despite the publicity, and a less-publicized shortage of Arab linguists to help troops navigate a hostile and volatile environment.
Rieckhoff, Borene and former Army Pvt. Nicole Goodwin all delivered chilling presentations about the gaps in protection for American troops in combat. They visit college campuses, mainly, but also have made appearances before church groups and anti-war groups.
They were all careful, however, not to step on the cracks in the pavement of the war itself. The issue of why we went in the first place, and what we realistically hope to leave behind when we go, are apparently not the mission of Operation Truth.
It's about the troops on the ground and the veterans coming home. "It's a little too easy to praise the dead for being heroes. But people forget about the living who return," said Goodwin, who became homeless within two months of her return from Iraq - partly due to abandonment by her daughter's father, partly, she said, due to the post-traumatic stress of having served in a war zone through a summer of 120-degree heat. She has since found an apartment.
When they were done, some members of an audience that numbered about 400 approached the three to ask some questions.
One was an 18-year-old liberal arts freshman from Hicksville named Andrew Antonik. "Knowing what you know now, do you think I should enlist, or should I finish college?"
He addressed Rieckhoff, who at 29 wears a shaved head and is built like a linebacker. Rieckhoff looked at the young man, paused and decided it was too big a question to answer on the spot.
"Call me," he said, handing Antonik his card. "I'll put you in touch with some guys who've been there."
This is the kind of expert for whom there are few easy answers - the kind we don't see much on TV.
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Post by LS on Feb 17, 2005 22:18:54 GMT -5
Bush Wants To Levy A 'Sickness Tax' Marie Cocco February 15, 2005
If you want people to consume less of something, tax it.
Keeping this economic logic in mind, you can see the direction of the Bush administration's plan for the American health care system. He intends to tax it.
Like so many tax initiatives this president puts forward, his health care tax wouldn't fall on the well-insured or the well-off. It would be imposed on those who are sick or poor or have spent so much paying for a chronic illness or disability that they've wound up in a nursing home and on Medicaid.
Understand that President George W. Bush does not call the health care proposals included in his budget a health tax. (It would be more accurate, anyway, to call them a sickness tax.) He plans, for example, for the Veterans Administration to collect a $250 annual "enrollment fee" from vets who want to get health care from the government. And he would add to that a $15 monthly co-payment for prescriptions, more than doubling the current $7 co-pay. Based on the administration's estimates, veterans' groups believe that more than 200,000 vets would leave the VA health system because of the higher costs. If you want people to consume less of something, tax it.
And this might be a good policy if, in fact, affluent veterans who could otherwise afford to buy health care from employers or on their own were affected by it. But, by and large, they wouldn't be.
Under a series of restrictions imposed in the past few years, veterans without a service-connected disability are eligible for VA health care only if they have incomes of about $25,000 to $28,000, according to Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. These are the people who would now pay the Bush veterans' health care tax or leave the veterans' health system. For what alternative?
If the vets are members of the World War II generation, they are eligible for Medicare. If they are Vietnam vets or Gulf War vets - or Iraq and Afghanistan vets - they might be able to get insurance through an employer. But how many jobs paying $25,000 come, these days, with health insurance? "It's going to drive those away who may not have any other access to health care," Davis says.
There is always Medicaid, the joint state and federal program that efficiently and admirably acted as a safety net these past few years, adding to its rolls when millions in working families - especially children - lost health insurance because of job losses or because employers dropped coverage. But this is the government health program the administration targets with the keenest eye and potentially the sharpest knife.
Those who fell back on Medicaid when all else failed are among the "optional" patients Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt sees as optimum for cost-cutting. "Most of them are healthy people who just need help paying for health insurance," Leavitt said in a recent speech.
Who are these healthy people?
Millions are aged and infirm - more than half the elderly on Medicaid are "optional." They are typically elderly people in nursing homes who have met state requirements to "spend down" their assets and have incomes of less than $6,769, according to an analysis by Families USA, a health care consumer group. Millions more are children who live just above the poverty level. And everyone on Medicaid who receives drug coverage is optional, since covering prescriptions isn't required.
We will, no doubt, soon hear alarmist talk about how Medicaid costs are out of control, how the states have to be given more "flexibility" to run the programs efficiently. The "runaway-cost" rhetoric obscures this truth: Medicaid and Medicare spending per enrollee has grown much more slowly of late than spending per enrollee in the employer-based system.
The health care system as a whole is (unlike Social Security) indeed in crisis. But is taxing vets with marginal incomes and turning elderly people out of nursing home beds going to solve it? The tax-and-slash method seems instead to be a fine model for creating more uninsured.
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