| The Truth About Veteran Suicides Friday 09 May 2008
by: Aaron Glantz, Foreign Policy in Focus
http://www.truthout.org/article/aaron-glantz-the-truth-about-veteran-suicides
Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day. One
thousand former soldiers
receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide
every month. More
veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas.
These are statistics that most Americans dont know, because the Bush
administration has
refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, the government has
tried to present it as
a war without casualties.
In fact, they never would have come to light were it not for a class
action lawsuit brought
by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of
the 1.7 million
Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege
the Department of
Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental health care and
disability benefits to
veterans returning from the conflict zones.
The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense vs. Peake,
went to trial last month
at a Federal Courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides are still filing
briefs until May 19 and
waiting for a ruling from Judge Samuel Conti, but the case is already
having an impact.
"Shh!"
Thats because over the course of the two week trial, the VA was
compelled to produce a
series of do***ents that show the extent of the crisis effecting wounded
soldiers.
Shh! begins one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VAs Mental
Health Division,
advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that 1,000 veterans
receiving care at the VA
try to kill themselves every month.
Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000
suicide attempts per month
among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we
should (carefully)
address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?
the e-mail concludes.
Leading Democrats on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee
immediately called for Katzs
resignation. On May 6, the Chair of the House Committee on Veterans
Affairs, Bob Filner (D-CA)
convened a hearing titled The Truth About Veterans Suicides and called
Katz and VA Secretary
James Peake to testify.
That e-mail was in poor tone but the content was part of a dialogue
about what we should do
about new information, Katz said in response to Filners questions. The
e-mail represents a
healthy dialogue among members of VA staff about when its appropriate to
disclose and make
public information early in the process.
Filner was nonplused and accused Katz and Peake of a cover-up.
We should all be angry about what has gone on here, Filner said. This
is a matter of life
and death for the veterans that we are responsible for and I think there
was criminal negligence
in the way this was handled. If we do not admit, assume or know then the
problem will continue
and people will die. If thats not criminal negligence, I dont know what
is.
A Pattern
Its also part of a pattern. The high number of veteran suicides
werent the only government
statistics the Bush Administration was forced to reveal because of the
class action lawsuit.
Another set of do***ents presented in court showed that in the six
months leading up to
March 31, a total of 1,467 veterans died waiting to learn if their
disability claim would be
approved by the government. A third set of do***ents showed that veterans
who appeal a VA
decision to deny their disability claim have to wait an average of 1,608
days, or nearly four
and a half years, for their answer.
Other casualty statistics are not directly concealed, but are also
not revealed on a
regular basis. For example, the Pentagon regularly re****ts on the numbers
of American troops
wounded in Iraq (currently at 31,948) but neglects to mention that it has
two other categories
injured (10,180) and ill (28,451). All three of these categories represent
soldiers who are so
damaged physically they have to be medically evacuated to Germany for
treatment, but by
splitting the numbers up the sense of casualties down the public
consciousness.
Heres another number that we dont often hear discussed in the media:
287,790. Thats the
number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who had filed a
disability claim with the
Veterans Administration as of March 25th. That figure was not announced to
the public at a news
conference, but obtained by Veterans for Common Sense using the Freedom of
Information Act.
Why all the secrecy? Why is it so hard to get accurate casualty
figures out of our
government? Because the Bush Administration knows if Americans woke up to
the real, human costs
of this war they would fight harder to oppose it.
Some "Cakewalk"
Think back to 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, when leading
neo-conservative thinker and
Donald Rumsfeld aide Ken Adelman predicted the war would be a cakewalk.
Or consider this statement from Vice President Dick Cheney. Two days
before the invasion,
Cheney told NBCs Tim Russert the war would go relatively quickly(ending
in) weeks rather than
months.
Today, those comments are gone but the motivation behind them
remains. This is why the VAs
head of mental health wrote Shh! telling a spokesperson not to respond to
a re****ters inquiry.
But all the shhing in the world cannot stop the horrible pain thats
mounting after five
years of war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.
Unpleasant Facts
According to an April 2008 study by the Rand Cor****ation, 300,000
Iraq and Afghanistan war
veterans currently suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or major
depression. Another
320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage. A
majority are not receiving
help from the Pentagon and VA system which are more concerned with
concealing unpleasant facts
than they are with providing care.
In its study, the RAND Cor****ation wrote that the federal government
fails to care for war
veterans at its own peril - noting post traumatic stress disorder and
traumatic brain injury can
have far reaching and damaging consequences.
Individuals afflicted with these conditions face higher risks for
other psychological
problems and for attempting suicide. They have higher rates of unhealthy
behaviors such as
smoking, overeating, and unsafe *** and higher rates of physical health
problems and mortality.
Individuals with these conditions also tend to miss more work or re****t
being less productive,
the re****t said. These conditions can impair relation****ps, disrupt
marriages, aggravate the
difficulties of parenting, and cause problems in children that may extend
the consequences of
combat trauma across generations.
These consequences can have a high economic toll, RAND said. However,
most attempts to
measure the costs of these conditions focus only on medical costs to the
government. Yet, direct
costs of treatment are only a fraction of the total costs related to
mental health and cognitive
conditions. Far higher are the long-term individual and societal costs
stemming from lost
productivity, reduced quality of life, homelessness, domestic violence,
the strain on families,
and suicide. Delivering effective care and restoring veterans to full
mental health have the
potential to reduce these longer-term costs significantly.
Bush and Congress have the power to stop this problem before it gets
worse. Its not too
late to extend needed mental health care to our returning Iraq and
Afghanistan war veterans; its
not too late to begin properly screening and treating returning servicemen
and women whove
experienced a traumatic brain injury; and it is not too late to simplify
the disability claims
process so that wounded veterans do not die waiting for their check. As
the Rand study shows,
this isnt only in the best interest of veterans, its in the best interest
of our country in the
long run.
To start with, the Bush Administration needs to give us some honest
information about the
true human costs of the Iraq War.
--------
Aaron Glantz, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is the author of
two upcoming books on
Iraq: "The War Comes Home: Wa****ngtons Battle Against Americas Veterans"
(UC Press) and "Winter
Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations"
(Haymarket). He edits the
website WarComesHome.org.
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Finally, the campaigns of 1793 and 1794 set Clausewitz on the path of
recognizing war as a
political phenomenon. Wars, as everyone knew, were fought for a purpose
that was political,
or at least always had political consequences. Not as readily apparent
was the implication
that followed. If war was meant to achieve a political purpose, everything
that entered into
war — social and economic preparation, strategic planning, the conduct of
operations, the
use of violence on all levels — should be determined by this purpose, or
at least accord
with it. Even though soldiers had to acquire special expertise, and
function in what in some
respects was a separate world, it would be a denial of reality to allow
them to carry on
their bloody work undisturbed until an armistice brought their political
employer back into
the equation. Just as war and its institutions reflected their social
environment, so every
aspect of fighting should be suffused by its political impulse, whether
this impulse was
intense or moderate. The appropriate relation****p between politics and war
occupied
Clausewitz throughout his life, but even his earliest manuscripts and
letters show his
awareness of their interaction.
The ease with which this link — always acknowledged in the abstract —
can be forgotten in
specific cases, and Clausewitz’s insistence that it must never be
overlooked, are
illustrated by his polite rejection toward the end of his life of a
strategic problem set by
the chief of the Prussian General Staff, in which every military detail of
the opposing
sides was spelled out, but no mention made of their political purpose. To
a friend who had
sent him the problem for comment, Clausewitz replied that it was not
possible to draft a
sensible plan of operations without indicating the political condition of
the states
involved, and their relation****p to each other: ‘War is not an independent
phenomenon, but
the continuation of politics by different means. Consequently, the main
lines of every major
strategic plan are largely political in nature, and their political
character increases the
more the plan applies to the entire campaign and to the whole state. A war
plan results
directly from the political conditions of the two warring states, as well
as from their
relations to third powers. A plan of campaign results from the war plan,
and frequently - if
there is only one theater of operations - may even be identical with it.
But the political
element even enters the separate components of a campaign; rarely will it
be without
influence on such major episodes of warfare as a battle, etc. According to
this point of
view, there can be no question of a purely military evaluation of a great
strategic issue,
nor of a purely military scheme to solve it.’
Everyman’s Library, 1993 ISBN: 0679420436 On war /by Clausewitz, Carl
von, 1780-1831.
Knopf, 1993. From the introduction by Peter Paret, Pg7
_____________________________________________________________________
The U-2 is a jet-powered reconnaissance aircraft specially designed to fly
at high altitudes
(i.e., above 70,000 ft [21 km]). It was used during the late 1950s to
overfly the Soviet
Union, China, the Middle East, and Cuba; flights over the Soviet Union,
the primary mission
for which the plane was designed, ended in 1960 when a U-2 flown by CIA
pilot Gary Powers
was shot down over the Soviet Union. This event was a major political
embarrassment for the U.S.
http://www.espionageinfo.com/Te-Uk/U-2-Spy-Plane.html
Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev's reaction to the overflights which
were discovered
just before a summit conference in Paris with President Eisenhower: "It
was as though the
Americans had deliberately tried to place a time bomb under the meeting" .
. ."How could
they count on us to give them a helping hand if we allowed ourselves to be
spat upon without
so much as a murmur of protest?" The only solution was to demand a formal
public apology
from Eisenhower and a guarantee that no more overflights would take place
. . .
But the apology Khrushchev was looking for would not come. Despite
having trespassed
on the Soviet Union for the past four years with scores of flights by both
U-2's and heavy
bombers, the old general still could not say the words, it was just not in
him. . . A time
bomb had exploded, prematurely ending the summit conference. . .
Back in Wa****ngton, the mood was glum. The Senate Foreign Relations
Committee was
leaning toward holding a closed door investigation into the U-2 incident .
. . In public,
Eisenhower maintained a brave face. He "heartily approved" of the
congressional probe and
would 'of course fully cooperate,' he quickly told anyone who asked. But
in private he was
very troubled. For weeks he had tried to head off the investigation. His
major concern was
that his own personal involvement in the overflights would surface,
especially the May Day
disaster. Equally, he was very worried that details of the dangerous
bomber overflights
would leak out. The massed overflight may in fact, have been one of the
most dangerous
actions ever approved by a president.
pg. 51-55 ~Body of Secrets; Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security
Agency
James Bamford
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress of
human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims,
have been born of
earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating,
all-absorbing, and for the time
being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does
nothing. If there is
no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and
yet depreciate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want
rain without
thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may
be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and
it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and
you have found out the
exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and
these will continue
till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The
limits of tyrants are
prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of
these ideas, Negroes
will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as
they submit to those
devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men
may not get all they
pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we
ever get free from
the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal.
We must do this by
labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the
lives of others."
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
Frederick Douglass, 1857
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http://www.politicsusaweb.com/
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