I've had good conservative friends LOSE IT when I've sent them info concerning the obscene fascist behavior of the Bush administration and the GOP and then claim that I was seduced by liberal "propaganda" while never addressing the issues. And yet when I send them evidence that OTHER conservatives and Republicans are beginning to ask the same damn questions about Bush and the government leaders of the GOP I never hear them respond with a peep.
April 24, 2005
EDITORIAL
Wisps of Life in Congress
We are not optimistic, or naïve, enough to call it a trend yet, but there have been signs that some sensible Republicans are starting to realize that the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, are vastly overreaching any plausible electoral mandate in their quest for one-party control of every aspect of government and their demands for mute party fealty.
The most striking example was in the Senate, where a few Republicans are starting to resist President Bush's latest demand for unquestioning approval of a high-level nominee who is clearly unsuitable for the job he has been given.
Last week, at a tense meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator George Voinovich of Ohio shocked fellow Republicans by suddenly holding back his endorsement of John Bolton as United Nations ambassador, as evidence mounted of Mr. Bolton's being a bullying ideologue who tried to intimidate intelligence analysts into conforming to his preconceived conclusions on major issues of national security.
It was particularly encouraging that Senator Voinovich was swayed by the arguments of two Democratic senators, Joseph Biden of Delaware and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. That sort of reasoned, bipartisan debate had become an endangered species in Bill Frist's Senate, where the committees charged with vetting presidential nominees have been turned into rubber-stamp bodies.
After Senator Voinovich forced a delay in the vote on Mr. Bolton, we learned that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had been quietly warning Republican senators that Mr. Bolton had a bad history of dealing with people who disagreed with him. And another Bush appointee, the former ambassador to South Korea, told the committee that Mr. Bolton had, to put it charitably, misled its members in one part of his testimony.
In the House, a member of the pioneer class of the Gingrich revolution, Walter Jones of North Carolina, felt strongly enough about doing the job to which he was elected to join the Democrats' call for an effective bipartisan ethics committee to look into complaints about Mr. DeLay's authoritarian behavior and exploitation of Washington's lobbying industry. "People at home want to know why the ethics committee isn't working," Mr. Jones explained. He poignantly echoed the resolve expressed by Mr. DeLay 10 years ago when power was fresh and he vowed to tell voters when their representatives were "feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special interest groups."
Mr. Bush is still sticking with Mr. Bolton and Mr. DeLay. But Republican concerns undercut his attempt to paint the criticism of both men as partisan. The fast-emerging question for him and the other Republicans is, when they will realize that nothing in the American system provides for the party that wins an election to do whatever it wants, no matter what objections are raised by the minority party or even some of its own members? The point is not lost on American voters: primal party loyalty is no substitute for effective, democratic government.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
Friday, April 15, 2005
THE GREED OF BUSH KNOWS NO BOUNDS (WHILE HIS MIND IS CLOSED)
The only thing that matters behind the greed of the Bush administration is how much money it can cultivate NOW while the country and its people go to hell.
April 15, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST NYT
Bush Disarms, Unilaterally
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
One of the things that I can't figure out about the Bush team is why an administration that is so focused on projecting U.S. military strength abroad has taken such little interest in America's economic competitiveness at home - the underlying engine of our strength. At a time when the global economic playing field is being flattened - enabling young Indians and Chinese to collaborate and compete with Americans more than ever before - this administration is off on an ideological jag. It is trying to take apart the New Deal by privatizing Social Security, when what we really need most today is a New New Deal to make more Americans employable in 21st-century jobs.
We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry. We have an administration that won't lift a finger to prevent the expensing of stock options, which is going to inhibit the ability of U.S. high-tech firms to attract talent - at a time when China encourages its start-ups to grant stock options to young innovators. And we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism.
The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon's budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year - after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.
When the National Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan study by the country's leading technologists and industrialists about how to re-energize U.S. competitiveness, was unveiled last December, it was virtually ignored by the White House. Did you hear about it? Probably not, because the president preferred to focus all attention on privatizing Social Security.
It's as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era.
Thomas Bleha, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer in Japan, has a fascinating piece in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs that begins like this: "In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only 'basic' broadband, among the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband."
Since it took over in 2001, the Bush team has made it clear that its priorities are tax cuts, missile defense and the war on terrorism - not keeping the U.S. at the forefront of Internet innovation. In the administration's first three years, President Bush barely uttered the word "broadband," Mr. Bleha notes, but when America "dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead.
"By May 2003, a higher percentage of homes in Japan than the United States had broadband. ...
"Today, nearly all Japanese have access to 'high-speed' broadband, with an average connection time 16 times faster than in the United States - for only about $22 a month. ... And that is to say nothing of Internet access through mobile phones, an area in which Japan is even further ahead of the United States. It is now clear that Japan and its neighbors will lead the charge in high-speed broadband over the next several years."
South Korea, which has the world's greatest percentage of broadband users, and urban China, which last year surpassed the U.S. in the number of broadband users, are keeping pace with Japan - not us. By investing heavily in these new technologies, Mr. Bleha notes, these nations will be the first to reap their benefits - from increased productivity to stronger platforms for technological innovation; new kinds of jobs, services and content; and rising standards of living.
Economics is not like war. It can be win-win. But you need to be at a certain level to be able to claim your share of a global pie that is both expanding and becoming more complex. Tax cuts can't solve every problem. This administration - which often seems more interested in indulging creationism than spurring creativity - is doing a very poor job of preparing the country for that next level.
April 15, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST NYT
Bush Disarms, Unilaterally
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
One of the things that I can't figure out about the Bush team is why an administration that is so focused on projecting U.S. military strength abroad has taken such little interest in America's economic competitiveness at home - the underlying engine of our strength. At a time when the global economic playing field is being flattened - enabling young Indians and Chinese to collaborate and compete with Americans more than ever before - this administration is off on an ideological jag. It is trying to take apart the New Deal by privatizing Social Security, when what we really need most today is a New New Deal to make more Americans employable in 21st-century jobs.
We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry. We have an administration that won't lift a finger to prevent the expensing of stock options, which is going to inhibit the ability of U.S. high-tech firms to attract talent - at a time when China encourages its start-ups to grant stock options to young innovators. And we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism.
The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon's budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year - after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.
When the National Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan study by the country's leading technologists and industrialists about how to re-energize U.S. competitiveness, was unveiled last December, it was virtually ignored by the White House. Did you hear about it? Probably not, because the president preferred to focus all attention on privatizing Social Security.
It's as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era.
Thomas Bleha, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer in Japan, has a fascinating piece in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs that begins like this: "In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only 'basic' broadband, among the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband."
Since it took over in 2001, the Bush team has made it clear that its priorities are tax cuts, missile defense and the war on terrorism - not keeping the U.S. at the forefront of Internet innovation. In the administration's first three years, President Bush barely uttered the word "broadband," Mr. Bleha notes, but when America "dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead.
"By May 2003, a higher percentage of homes in Japan than the United States had broadband. ...
"Today, nearly all Japanese have access to 'high-speed' broadband, with an average connection time 16 times faster than in the United States - for only about $22 a month. ... And that is to say nothing of Internet access through mobile phones, an area in which Japan is even further ahead of the United States. It is now clear that Japan and its neighbors will lead the charge in high-speed broadband over the next several years."
South Korea, which has the world's greatest percentage of broadband users, and urban China, which last year surpassed the U.S. in the number of broadband users, are keeping pace with Japan - not us. By investing heavily in these new technologies, Mr. Bleha notes, these nations will be the first to reap their benefits - from increased productivity to stronger platforms for technological innovation; new kinds of jobs, services and content; and rising standards of living.
Economics is not like war. It can be win-win. But you need to be at a certain level to be able to claim your share of a global pie that is both expanding and becoming more complex. Tax cuts can't solve every problem. This administration - which often seems more interested in indulging creationism than spurring creativity - is doing a very poor job of preparing the country for that next level.
The GOP Leadership's Fascist Use Of Religion For Corporate Gain
Is there any doubt how nazi-like the people are behind the Bush administration? The great men and women that created this country did so to fight against religion being used by the state as a means to control its people and vice versa. They specifically called for a separation of state and church so that EVERYONE will be treated equal under the Constitution. No more. We are seeing the ultra-right wing neocons using religion under propaganda to radicalize the government's courts to suit its cozy corporate agenda.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
April 15, 2005
Frist Set to Use Religious Stage on Judicial Issue
| |
ASHINGTON, April 14 - As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.
Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."
Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations.
Dr. Frist's spokesman said the senator's speech in the telecast would reflect his previous remarks on judicial appointments. In the past he has consistently balanced a determination "not to yield" on the president's nominees with appeals to the Democrats for compromise. He has distanced himself from the statements of others like the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, who have attacked the courts, saying they are too liberal, "run amok" or are hostile to Christianity.
The telecast, however, will put Dr. Frist in a very different context. Asked about Dr. Frist's participation in an event describing the filibuster "as against people of faith," his spokesman, Bob Stevenson, did not answer the question directly.
"Senator Frist is doing everything he can to ensure judicial nominees are treated fairly and that every senator has the opportunity to give the president their advice and consent through an up or down vote," Mr. Stevenson said, adding, "He has spoken to groups all across the nation to press that point, and as long as a minority of Democrats continue to block a vote, he will continue to do so."
Some of the nation's most influential evangelical Protestants are participating in the teleconference in Louisville, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the born-again Watergate figure and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
The event is taking place as Democrats and Republicans alike are escalating their public relations campaigns in anticipation of an imminent confrontation. The Democratic minority has blocked confirmation of 10 of President Bush's judicial nominees by preventing Republicans from gaining the 60 votes needed to close debate, using the filibuster tactic often used by political minorities and most notoriously employed by opponents of civil rights.
Dr. Frist has threatened that the Republican majority might change the rules to require only a majority vote on nominees, and Democrats have vowed to bring Senate business to a standstill if he does.
On Thursday, one wavering Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, told a television interviewer, Chris Matthews, that he would vote against the change.
"By the way, when Bill Clinton was president, we, effectively, in the Judiciary Committee blocked a number of his nominees," Mr. McCain said.
On Thursday the Judiciary Committee sent the nomination of Thomas B. Griffith for an appellate court post to the Senate floor. Democrats say they do not intend to block Mr. Griffith's nomination.
That cleared the way for the committee to approve several previously blocked judicial appointees in the next two weeks.
The telecast also signals an escalation of the campaign for the rule change by Christian conservatives who see the current court battle as the climax of a 30-year culture war, a chance to reverse decades of legal decisions about abortion, religion in public life, gay rights and marriage.
"As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, wrote in a message on the group's Web site. "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."
Democrats accused Dr. Frist of exploiting religious faith for political ends by joining the telecast. "No party has a monopoly on faith, and for Senator Frist to participate in this kind of telecast just throws more oil on the partisan flames," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.
But Mr. Perkins stood by the characterization of Democrats as hostile to faith. "What they have done is, they have targeted people for reasons of their faith or moral position," he said, referring to Democratic criticisms of nominees over their views of cases about abortion rights or public religious expressions.
"The issue of the judiciary is really something that has been veiled by this 'judicial mystique' so our folks don't really understand it, but they are beginning to connect the dots," Mr. Perkins said in an interview, reciting a string of court decisions about prayer or displays of religion.
"They were all brought about by the courts," he said.
Democrats, for their part, are already stepping up their efforts to link Dr. Frist and the rule change with conservatives statements about unaccountable judges hostile to faith.
On Thursday, Mr. Schumer released an open letter calling on Dr. Frist to denounce such attacks. "The last thing we need is inflammatory rhetoric which on its face encourages violence against judges," he wrote.
BUSH FAMILY OIL/CIA CONNECTIONS RISE FROM SLIME AGAIN
An old Bush Family sleazy CIA/American Corporate snake is flushed out of its slime to the surface once again.
April 15, 2005
Accusations Against Lobbyist Echo Charges in 70's Scandal
By TODD S. PURDUM
WASHINGTON, April 14 - Back then the commodity in play was rice and this time, a criminal complaint alleges, it was oil. But nearly 30 years after Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman, stood at the center of the Koreagate influence-peddling scandal that rocked official Washington, he has emerged at the center of the United Nations' Iraqi oil-for-food scandal - accused in a strikingly similar scheme.
Mr. Park is 70 now, no longer the brash Georgetown host and bon vivant known as the "Onassis of the Orient" and famous in the eight-track era for his $32,000 stereo system, chauffeured limousine and a guest list that ran the gamut from Gerald R. Ford to Frank Sinatra. But the complaint unsealed in Manhattan on Thursday suggests that age may not have slowed his approach.
In 1977, Mr. Park was charged with 36 counts of conspiracy, bribery, mail fraud, failure to register as a foreign agent and making illegal political contributions. A long investigation found that he had concocted a scheme, with the help of high-ranking Korean Central Intelligence Agency officials, to collect inflated commissions from sales of American-grown rice to South Korea, and to use some of the money to buy support for South Korea in Congress.
The charges were later dropped, after Mr. Park testified at Congressional hearings and in front of federal grand juries. His testimony led to ethics proceedings and criminal charges against several members of Congress and former members and made him a boldface name in the string of post-Watergate corruption inquiries conducted here in the late 1970's... (Click on link above for rest of story)
A recap on Park (not kin to me!).
...In 1965, with Gray's help, Tongsun Park, had formed the George Town Club in Washington. According to Trento:
Park put up the money and, with introductions from Gray and others, recruited "founders" for the club like the late Marine Gen. Graves Erskine, who had an active intelligence career. Anna Chennault became a force in the club. Others followed, and most, like Gray, had the same conservative political outlook, connections to the intelligence world, or `congressional overtones.' Gray's ties to right-wing Asians like Chennault and Park had deep roots. Gray had been critical of Eisenhower [when he was appointments secretary for Eisenhower] for never being partisan enough. Perhaps that is why Gray embraced wholeheartedly the powers behind the China Lobby. One reason Gray was attached to the lobby was that they had long been behind the funding of Richard Nixon's various campaigns.
Tongsun Park was an "agent of influence," trained by the Korean intelligence agency, which was created by and is widely regarded as a subsidiary of the CIA. The George Town Club has served as a discrete meeting place where right-wing foreign intelligence agents can socialize and conduct business with U.S. government officials.
Robert Gray has also been linked with former CIA and naval intelligence agent Edwin Wilson, although Gray denies it. In 1971, Wilson left the CIA and set up a series of new front companies for a secret Navy operation-Task Force 157. Wilson says that Robert Gray "was on the Board [of Directors]. We had an agreement that anything that H&K didn't want, they would throw to me so that I could make some money out of it, and Bob and I would share that."
THE GRAY AREA BEHIND HILL & KNOWLTON Gray's connection to Iran-Contra has never been fully examined. Notably, the Tower Commission, Reagan's official 1986 investigation, all but ignored it. In 1983, Texas Senator John Tower had declined to seek reelection thinking he had a deal with Reagan to become Secretary of Defense. After Weinberger decided to stay on in the second Reagan term, Tower found himself without a job. In 1986, his friend Robert Gray offered him a position on the board of directors of Gray and Co. Shortly thereafter, Tower was asked to head the presidential inquiry. Not suprisingly, the Tower Commission kept Gray and Co. out of the investigation, in spite of the facts that several key players in the scandal had worked for Gray and Co., and Gray's Madrid office was suspected of involvement in the secret arms shipments to Iran.
Despite large gaps in the official inquiry, it has been established that Robert Owen, Oliver North's messenger and bagman, worked for Gray and Co. after leaving then-Senator Dan Quayle's staff in 1983. Owen worked primarily with Neil Livingstone, a mysterious figure who claims to be a mover and shaker in the intelligence world but who is described as a "groupie." Livingstone worked with Ed Wilson, Air Panama, and as a front man for business activities sponsored by the CIA and Israeli intelligence. Owen and Livingstone traveled frequently to Central America to meet with the Contras in 1984. An interesting footnote to Iran-Contra is that in 1986, Saudi Arabian arms broker Adnan Khashoggi hired Hill and Knowlton and Gray and Co. to milk maximum publicity out of his major donation to a $20.5 million sports center, named after him, at American University.
THE FOURTH BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT The pattern of influence peddling and insider abuse is clear. The potential for real reform is less obvious. Despite his stated intention to restrict the influence of lobbyists and PR manipulation, Clinton's reforms are viewed with cynical amusement by those in the know. Although newly restricted from directly lobbying their former agencies, retiring government officials can simply take jobs with PR firms, sit at their desks, and instruct others to say "Ron, or Howard, sent me." Nor does the updated Foreign Agents Registration Act have real teeth. The act-legislated in 1938 when U.S. PR firms were discovered working as propagandists and lobbyists for Nazi Germany-is rarely enforced. While it requires agents of governments to register, it omits requirements for agents of foreign corporations, who often serve the same interests.
And if loopholes for lobbying are comfortably large, public relations activities remain totally unregulated and unscrutinized by any government agency. Given the power and scope of PR firms, their track records of manipulation, their collusion with intelligence agencies, and their disregard for the human rights records and corporate misdeeds of many of their clients, this lack of oversight endangers democracy. Careful regulation, stringent reporting requirements, and government and citizen oversight are essential first steps in preventing these giant transnationals from functioning as a virtual fourth branch of government. More at CLICK HERE.
April 15, 2005
Accusations Against Lobbyist Echo Charges in 70's Scandal
By TODD S. PURDUM
WASHINGTON, April 14 - Back then the commodity in play was rice and this time, a criminal complaint alleges, it was oil. But nearly 30 years after Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman, stood at the center of the Koreagate influence-peddling scandal that rocked official Washington, he has emerged at the center of the United Nations' Iraqi oil-for-food scandal - accused in a strikingly similar scheme.
Mr. Park is 70 now, no longer the brash Georgetown host and bon vivant known as the "Onassis of the Orient" and famous in the eight-track era for his $32,000 stereo system, chauffeured limousine and a guest list that ran the gamut from Gerald R. Ford to Frank Sinatra. But the complaint unsealed in Manhattan on Thursday suggests that age may not have slowed his approach.
In 1977, Mr. Park was charged with 36 counts of conspiracy, bribery, mail fraud, failure to register as a foreign agent and making illegal political contributions. A long investigation found that he had concocted a scheme, with the help of high-ranking Korean Central Intelligence Agency officials, to collect inflated commissions from sales of American-grown rice to South Korea, and to use some of the money to buy support for South Korea in Congress.
The charges were later dropped, after Mr. Park testified at Congressional hearings and in front of federal grand juries. His testimony led to ethics proceedings and criminal charges against several members of Congress and former members and made him a boldface name in the string of post-Watergate corruption inquiries conducted here in the late 1970's... (Click on link above for rest of story)
A recap on Park (not kin to me!).
...In 1965, with Gray's help, Tongsun Park, had formed the George Town Club in Washington. According to Trento:
Park put up the money and, with introductions from Gray and others, recruited "founders" for the club like the late Marine Gen. Graves Erskine, who had an active intelligence career. Anna Chennault became a force in the club. Others followed, and most, like Gray, had the same conservative political outlook, connections to the intelligence world, or `congressional overtones.' Gray's ties to right-wing Asians like Chennault and Park had deep roots. Gray had been critical of Eisenhower [when he was appointments secretary for Eisenhower] for never being partisan enough. Perhaps that is why Gray embraced wholeheartedly the powers behind the China Lobby. One reason Gray was attached to the lobby was that they had long been behind the funding of Richard Nixon's various campaigns.
Tongsun Park was an "agent of influence," trained by the Korean intelligence agency, which was created by and is widely regarded as a subsidiary of the CIA. The George Town Club has served as a discrete meeting place where right-wing foreign intelligence agents can socialize and conduct business with U.S. government officials.
Robert Gray has also been linked with former CIA and naval intelligence agent Edwin Wilson, although Gray denies it. In 1971, Wilson left the CIA and set up a series of new front companies for a secret Navy operation-Task Force 157. Wilson says that Robert Gray "was on the Board [of Directors]. We had an agreement that anything that H&K didn't want, they would throw to me so that I could make some money out of it, and Bob and I would share that."
THE GRAY AREA BEHIND HILL & KNOWLTON Gray's connection to Iran-Contra has never been fully examined. Notably, the Tower Commission, Reagan's official 1986 investigation, all but ignored it. In 1983, Texas Senator John Tower had declined to seek reelection thinking he had a deal with Reagan to become Secretary of Defense. After Weinberger decided to stay on in the second Reagan term, Tower found himself without a job. In 1986, his friend Robert Gray offered him a position on the board of directors of Gray and Co. Shortly thereafter, Tower was asked to head the presidential inquiry. Not suprisingly, the Tower Commission kept Gray and Co. out of the investigation, in spite of the facts that several key players in the scandal had worked for Gray and Co., and Gray's Madrid office was suspected of involvement in the secret arms shipments to Iran.
Despite large gaps in the official inquiry, it has been established that Robert Owen, Oliver North's messenger and bagman, worked for Gray and Co. after leaving then-Senator Dan Quayle's staff in 1983. Owen worked primarily with Neil Livingstone, a mysterious figure who claims to be a mover and shaker in the intelligence world but who is described as a "groupie." Livingstone worked with Ed Wilson, Air Panama, and as a front man for business activities sponsored by the CIA and Israeli intelligence. Owen and Livingstone traveled frequently to Central America to meet with the Contras in 1984. An interesting footnote to Iran-Contra is that in 1986, Saudi Arabian arms broker Adnan Khashoggi hired Hill and Knowlton and Gray and Co. to milk maximum publicity out of his major donation to a $20.5 million sports center, named after him, at American University.
THE FOURTH BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT The pattern of influence peddling and insider abuse is clear. The potential for real reform is less obvious. Despite his stated intention to restrict the influence of lobbyists and PR manipulation, Clinton's reforms are viewed with cynical amusement by those in the know. Although newly restricted from directly lobbying their former agencies, retiring government officials can simply take jobs with PR firms, sit at their desks, and instruct others to say "Ron, or Howard, sent me." Nor does the updated Foreign Agents Registration Act have real teeth. The act-legislated in 1938 when U.S. PR firms were discovered working as propagandists and lobbyists for Nazi Germany-is rarely enforced. While it requires agents of governments to register, it omits requirements for agents of foreign corporations, who often serve the same interests.
And if loopholes for lobbying are comfortably large, public relations activities remain totally unregulated and unscrutinized by any government agency. Given the power and scope of PR firms, their track records of manipulation, their collusion with intelligence agencies, and their disregard for the human rights records and corporate misdeeds of many of their clients, this lack of oversight endangers democracy. Careful regulation, stringent reporting requirements, and government and citizen oversight are essential first steps in preventing these giant transnationals from functioning as a virtual fourth branch of government. More at CLICK HERE.
Friday, March 18, 2005
Bush's Arrogance Two Years Later
March 18, 2005
EDITORIAL NYT
Two Years Later
The invasion of Iraq, which began two years ago this weekend, was a world-changing event. We can see many of the consequences already. The good ones, so far, exist mainly as hopes and are fewer than the bad ones, some of which are all too concrete. One of the few positive domestic consequences of the war has been the nation's determination - despite obstruction from the White House and its supporters - to honor the memory of each American man and woman who has died in Iraq. The administration has been shockingly callous about the tens of thousands of Iraqi victims, whom ordinary Americans cannot count let alone name.
The Real Reasons
The Bush administration was famously flexible in explaining why it invaded Iraq, and the most important reason, in the minds of Americans and in the arguments made by American diplomats, turned out to be wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction to destroy. Worse, the specialized machinery and highly lethal conventional weaponry that Saddam Hussein did control was looted during the invasion and is now very likely in the hands of terrorists. As James Glanz and William Broad reported in The Times, among the things missing is high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms. The WMD argument was not only wrong, but the invasion might have also created a new threat.
However, there was another theory behind the invasion. Mr. Bush might have been slow to articulate it, but other prominent officials were saying early on that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would shake up the hidebound, undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and free the natural democratic impulses of Arab and Islamic people. This rationale may still hold up. Iraqi and Afghani voters marching stolidly to the polls was by far the most hopeful image in the past two years.
There is an endless list of qualifications. Many of the most promising signs of change have little to do with Iraq. The peace initiatives in Israel were made possible when Yasir Arafat died and was replaced by a braver, more flexible leader. The new determination of the Lebanese people to throw out their Syrian oppressors was sparked by the assassination of the Lebanese nationalist, Rafik Hariri, not the downfall of Saddam Hussein. And in Iraq itself, the voting largely excluded the Sunni minority, without whose cooperation Iraq will never be anything more than a civil war battleground or a staging platform for a new dictatorship.
With all that said, even the fiercest critic of George Bush's foreign policy would be insane not to want these signs of hope to take root. That would not excuse the waging of an unnecessary war on false pretences, but it could change the course of modern history. Grieving families would find the peace that comes with knowing that spouses, parents or children died to help make a better world.
The Real Losses
Even with the best possible outcome, the invasion is already costly. America's alliances, particularly those with Europe, have been severely frayed since President Bush turned his back on the United Nations in the fall of 2002. Even some of his early supporters, like Spain, have edged away. Tony Blair remains the exception, mainly because of his willingness to ignore public opinion. If there is such a thing as the European street, anti-American feeling is strong and universal.
Things are even worse on the Arab street. While hope for change may be rising, opinion about the United States has never been as profoundly negative. Even under the best circumstances, it would have been hard for the proud people of the Middle East to acknowledge any benefit from an armed intervention by a Western power. And the occupying forces have made themselves easy to hate with maddening human-rights disasters. When the average Egyptian or Palestinian or Saudi thinks about the Americans in Iraq, the image is not voters' purple-stained fingers but the naked Iraqi prisoner at the other end of Pfc. Lynndie England's leash.
The atrocities that occurred in prisons like Abu Ghraib were the product of decisions that began at the very top, when the Bush administration decided that Sept. 11 had wiped out its responsibility to abide by the rules, including the Geneva Conventions and the American Constitution. For the United States, one of the greatest harms from the Iraq conflict has been the administration's willingness to define democracy down on the pretext of wartime emergency.
Mr. Bush was not honest with the American people in the run-up to the war. He hyped the WMD evidence abroad and played down the cost at home. The results of last fall's election ensured that he would pay no political penalty. But other people sit in judgment as well. Mr. Bush's determination to have his war and his tax cuts at the same time meant masking the real price of invading Iraq, and even now the costs are being borne mainly by overseas holders of American debt. The international markets know this, and over the long run are most likely to be less forgiving than American voters.
The New Challenges
Those stains on the index fingers of proud Iraqi voters have long faded. As Robert Worth of The Times discovered in interviews with average citizens, an inevitable disillusionment has set in. People reasonably want to know what comes next. More chilling, they seem to be prepared to blame competing ethnic groups for anything that goes wrong.
Iraq's newly elected leaders must organize a government that Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and smaller ethnic and religious groups feel has their best interests at heart. They must also accomplish some practical matters - more electrical power, cleaner water, better security - to give their constituents the confidence that things really can get better.
The first challenge is up to the Iraqis, and so far, there are not many signs that any group is prepared to compromise for the common good. Americans must help with the second problem, and almost no one inside Iraq seems to feel the infant government can survive right now without the Western military.
It is hard to imagine a quick exit that would not make things much worse. But at the same time, it's clear that the presence of American troops is poisoning the situation. Under constant fire from Sunni insurgents, the soldiers are seldom free to provide the good-will services that many would undoubtedly like to do. Instead they stand behind barricades, terrified that the next vehicle will be driven by a suicide bomber. The inevitable consequence is what happened to the Italian journalist and her protectors whose car was riddled with bullets en route to the airport. Far more often, the people inside the cars are Iraqis.
The invasion has stirred up other dreadful side effects that must be addressed. One is that other rogue nations watched what happened to Saddam Hussein and not unreasonably took the lesson that the only way to keep American forces away permanently was to acquire nuclear weapons quickly. Curbing the international market of the most lethal weapons must be the top priority for the White House, but it is not possible without the multilateral cooperation they scorned before the invasion. North Korea, which any sensible person regards as a far more deadly threat than Saddam Hussein ever was, can be kept in check only by allies working together.
The Enduring Principles
Like a great many Americans and most Europeans, this page opposed the invasion of Iraq. Our reasons seem as good now as they did then. Most important is our belief that the United States cannot work in isolation from the rest of the world. There are too many problems, from global warming to nuclear proliferation, which can be solved only if the major powers collaborate. Americans need both the counsel and restraint of other world leaders. The White House has almost unthinkable power, and the rest of the globe has the right to take a profound interest in making sure it is exercised wisely.
EDITORIAL NYT
Two Years Later
The invasion of Iraq, which began two years ago this weekend, was a world-changing event. We can see many of the consequences already. The good ones, so far, exist mainly as hopes and are fewer than the bad ones, some of which are all too concrete. One of the few positive domestic consequences of the war has been the nation's determination - despite obstruction from the White House and its supporters - to honor the memory of each American man and woman who has died in Iraq. The administration has been shockingly callous about the tens of thousands of Iraqi victims, whom ordinary Americans cannot count let alone name.
The Real Reasons
The Bush administration was famously flexible in explaining why it invaded Iraq, and the most important reason, in the minds of Americans and in the arguments made by American diplomats, turned out to be wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction to destroy. Worse, the specialized machinery and highly lethal conventional weaponry that Saddam Hussein did control was looted during the invasion and is now very likely in the hands of terrorists. As James Glanz and William Broad reported in The Times, among the things missing is high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms. The WMD argument was not only wrong, but the invasion might have also created a new threat.
However, there was another theory behind the invasion. Mr. Bush might have been slow to articulate it, but other prominent officials were saying early on that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would shake up the hidebound, undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and free the natural democratic impulses of Arab and Islamic people. This rationale may still hold up. Iraqi and Afghani voters marching stolidly to the polls was by far the most hopeful image in the past two years.
There is an endless list of qualifications. Many of the most promising signs of change have little to do with Iraq. The peace initiatives in Israel were made possible when Yasir Arafat died and was replaced by a braver, more flexible leader. The new determination of the Lebanese people to throw out their Syrian oppressors was sparked by the assassination of the Lebanese nationalist, Rafik Hariri, not the downfall of Saddam Hussein. And in Iraq itself, the voting largely excluded the Sunni minority, without whose cooperation Iraq will never be anything more than a civil war battleground or a staging platform for a new dictatorship.
With all that said, even the fiercest critic of George Bush's foreign policy would be insane not to want these signs of hope to take root. That would not excuse the waging of an unnecessary war on false pretences, but it could change the course of modern history. Grieving families would find the peace that comes with knowing that spouses, parents or children died to help make a better world.
The Real Losses
Even with the best possible outcome, the invasion is already costly. America's alliances, particularly those with Europe, have been severely frayed since President Bush turned his back on the United Nations in the fall of 2002. Even some of his early supporters, like Spain, have edged away. Tony Blair remains the exception, mainly because of his willingness to ignore public opinion. If there is such a thing as the European street, anti-American feeling is strong and universal.
Things are even worse on the Arab street. While hope for change may be rising, opinion about the United States has never been as profoundly negative. Even under the best circumstances, it would have been hard for the proud people of the Middle East to acknowledge any benefit from an armed intervention by a Western power. And the occupying forces have made themselves easy to hate with maddening human-rights disasters. When the average Egyptian or Palestinian or Saudi thinks about the Americans in Iraq, the image is not voters' purple-stained fingers but the naked Iraqi prisoner at the other end of Pfc. Lynndie England's leash.
The atrocities that occurred in prisons like Abu Ghraib were the product of decisions that began at the very top, when the Bush administration decided that Sept. 11 had wiped out its responsibility to abide by the rules, including the Geneva Conventions and the American Constitution. For the United States, one of the greatest harms from the Iraq conflict has been the administration's willingness to define democracy down on the pretext of wartime emergency.
Mr. Bush was not honest with the American people in the run-up to the war. He hyped the WMD evidence abroad and played down the cost at home. The results of last fall's election ensured that he would pay no political penalty. But other people sit in judgment as well. Mr. Bush's determination to have his war and his tax cuts at the same time meant masking the real price of invading Iraq, and even now the costs are being borne mainly by overseas holders of American debt. The international markets know this, and over the long run are most likely to be less forgiving than American voters.
The New Challenges
Those stains on the index fingers of proud Iraqi voters have long faded. As Robert Worth of The Times discovered in interviews with average citizens, an inevitable disillusionment has set in. People reasonably want to know what comes next. More chilling, they seem to be prepared to blame competing ethnic groups for anything that goes wrong.
Iraq's newly elected leaders must organize a government that Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and smaller ethnic and religious groups feel has their best interests at heart. They must also accomplish some practical matters - more electrical power, cleaner water, better security - to give their constituents the confidence that things really can get better.
The first challenge is up to the Iraqis, and so far, there are not many signs that any group is prepared to compromise for the common good. Americans must help with the second problem, and almost no one inside Iraq seems to feel the infant government can survive right now without the Western military.
It is hard to imagine a quick exit that would not make things much worse. But at the same time, it's clear that the presence of American troops is poisoning the situation. Under constant fire from Sunni insurgents, the soldiers are seldom free to provide the good-will services that many would undoubtedly like to do. Instead they stand behind barricades, terrified that the next vehicle will be driven by a suicide bomber. The inevitable consequence is what happened to the Italian journalist and her protectors whose car was riddled with bullets en route to the airport. Far more often, the people inside the cars are Iraqis.
The invasion has stirred up other dreadful side effects that must be addressed. One is that other rogue nations watched what happened to Saddam Hussein and not unreasonably took the lesson that the only way to keep American forces away permanently was to acquire nuclear weapons quickly. Curbing the international market of the most lethal weapons must be the top priority for the White House, but it is not possible without the multilateral cooperation they scorned before the invasion. North Korea, which any sensible person regards as a far more deadly threat than Saddam Hussein ever was, can be kept in check only by allies working together.
The Enduring Principles
Like a great many Americans and most Europeans, this page opposed the invasion of Iraq. Our reasons seem as good now as they did then. Most important is our belief that the United States cannot work in isolation from the rest of the world. There are too many problems, from global warming to nuclear proliferation, which can be solved only if the major powers collaborate. Americans need both the counsel and restraint of other world leaders. The White House has almost unthinkable power, and the rest of the globe has the right to take a profound interest in making sure it is exercised wisely.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Bush & Rumsfeld Don't Give A @#$% About Our Troops
Bush is an idiot and Rumsfeld is an immoral bastard. Their failed leadership is costing American lives in Iraq and adding to the threat of our nation's future. Don't believe me. Read the following and weep.
March 7, 2005
Many Missteps Tied to Delay in Armor for Troops in Iraq
By MICHAEL MOSS
The war in Iraq was hardly a month old in April 2003 when an Army general in charge of equipping soldiers with protective gear threw the brakes on buying bulletproof vests.
The general, Richard A. Cody, who led a Pentagon group called the Army Strategic Planning Board, had been told by supply chiefs that the combat troops already had all the armor they needed, according to Army officials and records from the board's meetings. Some 50,000 other American soldiers, who were not on the front lines of battle, could do without.
In the following weeks, as Iraqi snipers and suicide bombers stepped up deadly attacks, often directed at those very soldiers behind the front lines, General Cody realized the Army's mistake and did an about-face. On May 15, 2003, he ordered the budget office to buy all the bulletproof vests it could, according to an Army report. He would give one to every soldier, "regardless of duty position."
But the delays were only beginning. The initial misstep, as well as other previously undisclosed problems, show that the Pentagon's difficulties in shielding troops and their vehicles with armor have been far more extensive and intractable than officials have acknowledged, according to government officials, contractors and Defense Department records.
In the case of body armor, the Pentagon gave a contract for thousands of the ceramic plate inserts that make the vests bulletproof to a former Army researcher who had never mass-produced anything. He struggled for a year, then gave up entirely. At the same time, in shipping plates from other companies, the Army's equipment manager effectively reduced the armor's priority to the status of socks, a confidential report by the Army's inspector general shows. Some 10,000 plates were lost along the way, and the rest arrived late.
In all, with additional paperwork delays, the Defense Department took 167 days just to start getting the bulletproof vests to soldiers in Iraq once General Cody placed the order. But for thousands of soldiers, it took weeks and even months more, records show, at a time when the Iraqi insurgency was intensifying and American casualties were mounting.
By contrast, when the United States' allies in Iraq also realized they needed more bulletproof vests, they bypassed the Pentagon and ordered directly from a manufacturer in Michigan. They began getting armor in just 12 days.
The issue of whether American troops were adequately protected received wide attention in December, when an Army National Guard member complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that troops were scrounging for armor to fortify their Humvees and other vehicles. The Pentagon has maintained that it has moved steadfastly to protect all its troops in Iraq.
But an examination of the issues involving the protective shielding and other critical equipment shows how a supply problem seen as an emergency on the ground in Iraq was treated as a routine procurement matter back in Washington.
While all soldiers eventually received plates for their vests, the Army is still scrambling to find new materials to better protect the 10,000 Humvees in Iraq that were not built for combat conditions. They are re-enforced by simple steel plates that cannot withstand the increasingly potent explosives being used by the insurgents, according to contractors who are working to develop more sophisticated armor for the Army.
Army generals say a more effective answer to the threat of explosives may lie in electronic instruments that have proven successful in blocking the detonation of homemade bombs, called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. They have caused about a quarter of the more than 1,500 American deaths in Iraq, including those of two National Guard members from New York City just last week.
Such an electronic countermeasure was used at the start of the war to shield Iraqi oil fields from possible sabotage. But some members of Congress and security experts say shortsighted planning and piecemeal buying on the part of the Army has resulted in too few of the devices being used to protect the troops.
Pentagon officials say that despite the shortcomings, their efforts to protect soldiers have saved many lives. And they say they have taken a number of steps to improve their performance, including the creation of a special unit to quickly buy and field vital gear and the establishment of a task force to come up with ways to combat I.E.D.'s.
They say that material shortages and contractor bottlenecks prevented them from moving faster, and that their response, notwithstanding the 24-week startup for bulletproof vests, compares well with the two years that the Army typically has taken to complete such tasks.
"Our planning process wasn't keeping up with the changes that were required," said Gen. Paul J. Kern, the head of the Army's Materiel Command until he retired in January. "That resulted in the lag in response in acquisition. While we would all like to be faster and more responsive, it was fairly responsive."
American military commanders and Pentagon officials now concede that they consistently misjudged the strength and ingenuity of the insurgency in Iraq, which has grown more sophisticated in its tactics. Because commanders failed to take that force into account, the Army's procurement machine could never catch up, no matter how hard it tried.
Several former high-ranking officers say a complete overhaul of the supply system is needed to ensure that America's troops get all the tools they need to face a determined foe, particularly terrorists.
"This is a new age in war with an enemy that adapts faster than we do," said Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., retired, a former head of the Army War College. "Al Qaeda doesn't have to go to the Board of Accountability in order to develop a new roadside bomb or triggering device."
Others say that the Pentagon's longstanding preference for billion-dollar weaponry has made it less prepared to deliver the basic tools needed by soldiers on the ground.
"We've never been very good at equipping people in a simple, straightforward fashion," said Thomas E. White, who resigned as secretary of the Army in April 2003 after a falling out with Mr. Rumsfeld.
Scrambling for Body Armor
The insurgency had already taken root in Iraq when General Cody made his decision on April 17, 2003, that enough soldiers had bulletproof vests. As more casualty reports flowed in during the next month, he came to recognize that the advice he had gotten from staff members in Washington did not reflect the reality of the war.
"We began to realize how wrong we were and the Army has been scrambling ever since," Mr. White recalls.
General Cody, now the Army's vice chief of staff, declined to comment, but his staff members confirmed the details of the supply problems. Some of the most glaring problems were contained in an April 20, 2004, report by the inspector general that remained confidential until it was released to The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Pentagon put the inspector general on the case after Defense Department officials, noticing that its allies were getting armor so quickly, became suspicious that they were taking armor intended for American soldiers.
But the report wound up criticizing the Pentagon instead.
The allies had indeed asked the Defense Department for bulletproof vests, the inspector general found. After being told they would have to wait until the Americans were fully equipped, they ordered their 9,600 sets from a manufacturer from Central Lake, Mich., Second Chance Body Armor.
By contrast, the inspector general found, the Pentagon took much longer.
For starters, it took the Army 47 days from when General Cody issued his order for bulletproof vests to allocate the necessary funds so that contracts could be awarded, the inspector general found.
Then, the handful of tiny companies making the vests and plates for the Army were snowed under by the soaring demand.
To speed things up, the Pentagon decided to relax its weight requirement, accepting some plates 30 percent heavier and making it possible for more manufacturers to produce them.
But by the fall of 2003, as Pentagon officials were assuring Congress that they were moving as fast as they could to get armor to soldiers, one of the Pentagon's chief producers of plates was fuming.
The company, ArmorWorks of Tempe, Ariz., and its supplier of ceramics, the beer-making Coors family of Colorado, had ramped up their operations to meet the demands of the war, but ArmorWorks' president, William J. Perciballi, says Defense Department delays in awarding contracts for more plates forced him to lay off workers and shut down his assembly line for two months.
When the additional orders were finally awarded in early 2004, he lost out to three lower bidders.
One of those companies, High Performance Materials Group of Boothwyn, Pa., said it could make 20,000 plates for $4,960,000, a price 11 to 15 percent below even the next two successful bidders.
The Pentagon's Defense Supply Center, which handled the contracts, says an Army ballistics engineer determined that High Performance, a research and development company, could do the work, despite its lack of experience in mass production.
"We certainly demonstrated that we could make the plates," said the company's founder, Kenneth A. Gabriel, a former Army researcher who left the military in 1999. He said he had developed his own version of the ceramic plates that passed Army testing and prepared detailed plans for production that the supply center reviewed.
But Mr. Gabriel said he ran into unforeseen trouble. His source for ceramic dried up. Then he lost his building lease. Last December, after missing four deadlines and delivering only 356 plates, he transferred the contract to one of the other winning bidders, and his company dissolved.
In interviews and written responses, the Defense Supply Center said it pressed High Performance as best it could. "Throughout the period of delinquency the contracting officer considered the possibility of a termination for default and a repurchase of the items. However, when reviewing the facts together with the applicable FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) provisions, it was determined that a termination for default would not be the appropriate action," the center said.
Mr. Perciballi of ArmorWorks eventually got more orders, but said: "It was stop, start, stop, start. Couldn't they have ramped up at the start of the war? Our problem was they were taking little bites and never got the whole industry together to see just what we could do."
The final hitch arose in Iraq.
The Army agency responsible for equipping soldiers got swamped by other materials being rushed to Iraq, the inspector general found. The bulletproof vests had been labeled high priority, but in the ensuing chaos, everything got treated as high priority, which meant that in fact nothing was. The Pentagon has a special term for items that get lost in the shuffle: frustrated cargo.
"The massive push of supplies and materiel initially led to containers with OTV (the outer tactical vest portion of body armor), Desert Camouflage Uniforms, boots, T-shirts, and socks being stacked up and becoming frustrated cargo," the inspector general's report found.
The delivery and tracking of body armor was so chaotic that by Jan. 23, 2004, when the last American soldiers got theirs, 10,000 plates were still missing, the report says. Pressed by the inspector general's inquiry, the Army quickly found 97 plates in containers filled with uniforms, boots and socks.
General Kern, who had overseen the procurement system as head of Materiel Command until he retired this year, said he accepted the criticism in the report as a "fair assessment." The report did commend the Army for pushing the industry to increase production by recruiting more companies.
But in all, General Kern said, the 167 days it took to start getting armor to the troops was "historically pretty good."
Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said some of the acquisition rules are necessary to prevent fraud and abuse, but the Pentagon could strip away layers of approvals and evaluations without jeopardizing the process.
"Congress is to blame for some of this," he said, citing the oversight hoops through which the Pentagon has to jump.
Some soldiers waiting for the body armor say they felt punished for speaking out about the delays. Specialist Joseph F. Fabozzi of the New Jersey National Guard complained publicly during a visit home in late 2003.
Returning to Iraq a few weeks later, he said, he was handed a $912 bill for having rear-ended a truck the previous summer while on a convoy. His National Guard unit did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Fabozzi appealed the bill and won, records show, in part by explaining precisely how his gas pedal had jammed - because the trucks did not have armor plating, he and others had been told to place sandbags on the floors. "They would break and spill into the pedals," he said.
Vehicles Without Shielding
Soldiers are still jury-rigging protection for their trucks and Humvees because of another contracting problem with which the Pentagon continues to wrestle.
Going into the war, it had only one contractor, O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt of Fairfield, Ohio, re-enforcing new Humvees with armor, handling 50 a month.
The Pentagon decided against asking Detroit automakers like General Motors, which makes the Humvee's civilian version, the Hummer, to start making armored Humvees because they would need too much time to set up new assembly lines.
But the Pentagon only gradually pushed O'Gara-Hess to ramp up to 550 vehicles a month, a level the company expects to reach only this spring. The latest uptick in ordering came in December after Specialist Thomas Wilson, a member of the Tennessee National Guard, confronted Mr. Rumsfeld in Kuwait.
Mr. Rumsfeld immediately came under criticism for what some saw as a callous dismissal of Mr. Wilson's complaints. In a television appearance last month on "Meet the Press," the defense secretary said that his comments were taken out of context and that the Army was working as hard as it could to provide armor, stressing that money was not an issue.
"It's a matter of production and capability of doing it," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller and chief financial officer until last May, said the Pentagon did not want to saddle O'Gara-Hess with more work than it could handle because of problems that arose with other manufacturers of big-ticket items.
"Given the level of Congressional scrutiny about all contracting procedures," Mr. Zakheim said, "clearly there was a concern that this be done in a graduated fashion so as to avoid another scandal."
At the same time as installing shielding in new Humvees, the Pentagon has had to deal with the 10,000 Humvees in Iraq that were never re-enforced for combat.
To help protect these vehicles, a Pentagon unit that was expediting purchases began pushing the Army to buy ceramic plates from private contractors.
The Army, though, opted for plain steel plates that it could make in its own depots. The plates are failing to withstand the insurgent's bigger bombs, which are also blowing up more heavily armored vehicles. As a result, the Army has been forced to look for additional materials to protect the Humvees, according to contractors involved in the effort.
Learning to Outsmart Bomb
Long before the war, the Pentagon was excited about new ways to subvert these bombs.
A California military contractor developed a countermeasure during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Known as the Shortstop Electronic Protection System, it evolved into a portable device that was heralded for its ability to jam the radio frequencies used by insurgents to detonate their bombs.
Col. Bruce D. Jette, a participant in the meetings of the Strategic Planning Board, the panel led by General Cody, used a jamming device to protect the oil fields in Iraq. Colonel Jette was heading up a new unit called the Rapid Equipping Force, which was given license to ignore the lumbering ways the Army traditionally fills orders from the field.
Colonel Jette, who has a Ph.D. in electronic materials from M.I.T., dodged the Army's research-and-development agencies and phoned his scientist friends to find a commercial robot that could search for explosives. He embedded his staff in combat units. He took manufacturers to Iraq so they could quickly modify designs for body and vehicle armor.
In a report to Congress in January, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, said the unit's work in developing these explosive countermeasures and other tools was emblematic of the Army's transformation into an agile force.
Some Pentagon officials say they first realized soldiers were being killed by I.E.D.'s as early as June 2003, and late that summer the Army's 101st Airborne Division issued a report that cited "numerous" injuries from I.E.D.'s in its plea for more vehicle armor and training to evade the bombs.
The Defense Department had been producing various I.E.D. countermeasures. But the Pentagon did not start ordering large quantities of one of the most promising ones, known as the Warlock, until December 2003, nine months after the war began, according to GlobalSecurity.org, a research firm based in Alexandria, Va.
The firm said in a report that EDO Communications and Countermeasures of Simi Valley, Calif., has received three orders totaling $31 million for 1,899 Warlocks. EDO declined to comment, citing the secrecy constraints imposed by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon has declined to say publicly how many devices it still needs in Iraq to protect all of the troops. But after learning the Army had so few that it could not spare any for training exercises, the House Armed Services Committee in December pushed the Pentagon for a big increases in its spending on I.E.D. countermeasures, to $161 million, in the next few months, until next year's budget is approved.
In presenting that budget to the committee on Feb. 16, Mr. Rumsfeld said the Defense Department had begun a vast effort to fight I.E.D.'s that encompasses many tools and strategies. "U.S. forces are now discovering and destroying more that one-third of I.E.D.'s before they can detonate," he said. "We have every reason to believe that this will improve."
At the hearing, Representative Gene Taylor, a staunch military supporter and Democrat from Mississippi, pointed out that his state had just lost four more National Guard members and criticized the secrecy enshrouding the Defense Department's efforts to deal with the explosives.
"There is the technology to prevent the detonation of most improvised explosive devices that exist," Mr. Taylor said, speaking with frustration. "We've allocated money for it. And yet that number remains classified, Mr. Secretary, not because the insurgents don't know how few are protected, but because I'm of the opinion the American people would be appalled if they knew how few are protected."
Colonel Jette was also frustrated, and in October he resigned. In interviews, he said as the rush of war wore off, the Army's traditional supply corps began reasserting lengthy contracting and testing regimens, leaving him increasingly discouraged.
"That perfection in testing becomes the enemy of what is operationally good enough," he said. "And the soldiers in the field are looking for good enough."
The Rapid Equipping Force has a new leader, but still operates without a permanent charter. Gen. John M. Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff who helped establish the program, said he shares Colonel Jette's concern for its future. "The acquisition system would see it as a threat," said General Keane, who retired in 2003. "There is an implied indictment that they can't deliver in that rapid a period of time, which is essentially true."
March 7, 2005
Many Missteps Tied to Delay in Armor for Troops in Iraq
By MICHAEL MOSS
The war in Iraq was hardly a month old in April 2003 when an Army general in charge of equipping soldiers with protective gear threw the brakes on buying bulletproof vests.
The general, Richard A. Cody, who led a Pentagon group called the Army Strategic Planning Board, had been told by supply chiefs that the combat troops already had all the armor they needed, according to Army officials and records from the board's meetings. Some 50,000 other American soldiers, who were not on the front lines of battle, could do without.
In the following weeks, as Iraqi snipers and suicide bombers stepped up deadly attacks, often directed at those very soldiers behind the front lines, General Cody realized the Army's mistake and did an about-face. On May 15, 2003, he ordered the budget office to buy all the bulletproof vests it could, according to an Army report. He would give one to every soldier, "regardless of duty position."
But the delays were only beginning. The initial misstep, as well as other previously undisclosed problems, show that the Pentagon's difficulties in shielding troops and their vehicles with armor have been far more extensive and intractable than officials have acknowledged, according to government officials, contractors and Defense Department records.
In the case of body armor, the Pentagon gave a contract for thousands of the ceramic plate inserts that make the vests bulletproof to a former Army researcher who had never mass-produced anything. He struggled for a year, then gave up entirely. At the same time, in shipping plates from other companies, the Army's equipment manager effectively reduced the armor's priority to the status of socks, a confidential report by the Army's inspector general shows. Some 10,000 plates were lost along the way, and the rest arrived late.
In all, with additional paperwork delays, the Defense Department took 167 days just to start getting the bulletproof vests to soldiers in Iraq once General Cody placed the order. But for thousands of soldiers, it took weeks and even months more, records show, at a time when the Iraqi insurgency was intensifying and American casualties were mounting.
By contrast, when the United States' allies in Iraq also realized they needed more bulletproof vests, they bypassed the Pentagon and ordered directly from a manufacturer in Michigan. They began getting armor in just 12 days.
The issue of whether American troops were adequately protected received wide attention in December, when an Army National Guard member complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that troops were scrounging for armor to fortify their Humvees and other vehicles. The Pentagon has maintained that it has moved steadfastly to protect all its troops in Iraq.
But an examination of the issues involving the protective shielding and other critical equipment shows how a supply problem seen as an emergency on the ground in Iraq was treated as a routine procurement matter back in Washington.
While all soldiers eventually received plates for their vests, the Army is still scrambling to find new materials to better protect the 10,000 Humvees in Iraq that were not built for combat conditions. They are re-enforced by simple steel plates that cannot withstand the increasingly potent explosives being used by the insurgents, according to contractors who are working to develop more sophisticated armor for the Army.
Army generals say a more effective answer to the threat of explosives may lie in electronic instruments that have proven successful in blocking the detonation of homemade bombs, called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. They have caused about a quarter of the more than 1,500 American deaths in Iraq, including those of two National Guard members from New York City just last week.
Such an electronic countermeasure was used at the start of the war to shield Iraqi oil fields from possible sabotage. But some members of Congress and security experts say shortsighted planning and piecemeal buying on the part of the Army has resulted in too few of the devices being used to protect the troops.
Pentagon officials say that despite the shortcomings, their efforts to protect soldiers have saved many lives. And they say they have taken a number of steps to improve their performance, including the creation of a special unit to quickly buy and field vital gear and the establishment of a task force to come up with ways to combat I.E.D.'s.
They say that material shortages and contractor bottlenecks prevented them from moving faster, and that their response, notwithstanding the 24-week startup for bulletproof vests, compares well with the two years that the Army typically has taken to complete such tasks.
"Our planning process wasn't keeping up with the changes that were required," said Gen. Paul J. Kern, the head of the Army's Materiel Command until he retired in January. "That resulted in the lag in response in acquisition. While we would all like to be faster and more responsive, it was fairly responsive."
American military commanders and Pentagon officials now concede that they consistently misjudged the strength and ingenuity of the insurgency in Iraq, which has grown more sophisticated in its tactics. Because commanders failed to take that force into account, the Army's procurement machine could never catch up, no matter how hard it tried.
Several former high-ranking officers say a complete overhaul of the supply system is needed to ensure that America's troops get all the tools they need to face a determined foe, particularly terrorists.
"This is a new age in war with an enemy that adapts faster than we do," said Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., retired, a former head of the Army War College. "Al Qaeda doesn't have to go to the Board of Accountability in order to develop a new roadside bomb or triggering device."
Others say that the Pentagon's longstanding preference for billion-dollar weaponry has made it less prepared to deliver the basic tools needed by soldiers on the ground.
"We've never been very good at equipping people in a simple, straightforward fashion," said Thomas E. White, who resigned as secretary of the Army in April 2003 after a falling out with Mr. Rumsfeld.
Scrambling for Body Armor
The insurgency had already taken root in Iraq when General Cody made his decision on April 17, 2003, that enough soldiers had bulletproof vests. As more casualty reports flowed in during the next month, he came to recognize that the advice he had gotten from staff members in Washington did not reflect the reality of the war.
"We began to realize how wrong we were and the Army has been scrambling ever since," Mr. White recalls.
General Cody, now the Army's vice chief of staff, declined to comment, but his staff members confirmed the details of the supply problems. Some of the most glaring problems were contained in an April 20, 2004, report by the inspector general that remained confidential until it was released to The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Pentagon put the inspector general on the case after Defense Department officials, noticing that its allies were getting armor so quickly, became suspicious that they were taking armor intended for American soldiers.
But the report wound up criticizing the Pentagon instead.
The allies had indeed asked the Defense Department for bulletproof vests, the inspector general found. After being told they would have to wait until the Americans were fully equipped, they ordered their 9,600 sets from a manufacturer from Central Lake, Mich., Second Chance Body Armor.
By contrast, the inspector general found, the Pentagon took much longer.
For starters, it took the Army 47 days from when General Cody issued his order for bulletproof vests to allocate the necessary funds so that contracts could be awarded, the inspector general found.
Then, the handful of tiny companies making the vests and plates for the Army were snowed under by the soaring demand.
To speed things up, the Pentagon decided to relax its weight requirement, accepting some plates 30 percent heavier and making it possible for more manufacturers to produce them.
But by the fall of 2003, as Pentagon officials were assuring Congress that they were moving as fast as they could to get armor to soldiers, one of the Pentagon's chief producers of plates was fuming.
The company, ArmorWorks of Tempe, Ariz., and its supplier of ceramics, the beer-making Coors family of Colorado, had ramped up their operations to meet the demands of the war, but ArmorWorks' president, William J. Perciballi, says Defense Department delays in awarding contracts for more plates forced him to lay off workers and shut down his assembly line for two months.
When the additional orders were finally awarded in early 2004, he lost out to three lower bidders.
One of those companies, High Performance Materials Group of Boothwyn, Pa., said it could make 20,000 plates for $4,960,000, a price 11 to 15 percent below even the next two successful bidders.
The Pentagon's Defense Supply Center, which handled the contracts, says an Army ballistics engineer determined that High Performance, a research and development company, could do the work, despite its lack of experience in mass production.
"We certainly demonstrated that we could make the plates," said the company's founder, Kenneth A. Gabriel, a former Army researcher who left the military in 1999. He said he had developed his own version of the ceramic plates that passed Army testing and prepared detailed plans for production that the supply center reviewed.
But Mr. Gabriel said he ran into unforeseen trouble. His source for ceramic dried up. Then he lost his building lease. Last December, after missing four deadlines and delivering only 356 plates, he transferred the contract to one of the other winning bidders, and his company dissolved.
In interviews and written responses, the Defense Supply Center said it pressed High Performance as best it could. "Throughout the period of delinquency the contracting officer considered the possibility of a termination for default and a repurchase of the items. However, when reviewing the facts together with the applicable FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) provisions, it was determined that a termination for default would not be the appropriate action," the center said.
Mr. Perciballi of ArmorWorks eventually got more orders, but said: "It was stop, start, stop, start. Couldn't they have ramped up at the start of the war? Our problem was they were taking little bites and never got the whole industry together to see just what we could do."
The final hitch arose in Iraq.
The Army agency responsible for equipping soldiers got swamped by other materials being rushed to Iraq, the inspector general found. The bulletproof vests had been labeled high priority, but in the ensuing chaos, everything got treated as high priority, which meant that in fact nothing was. The Pentagon has a special term for items that get lost in the shuffle: frustrated cargo.
"The massive push of supplies and materiel initially led to containers with OTV (the outer tactical vest portion of body armor), Desert Camouflage Uniforms, boots, T-shirts, and socks being stacked up and becoming frustrated cargo," the inspector general's report found.
The delivery and tracking of body armor was so chaotic that by Jan. 23, 2004, when the last American soldiers got theirs, 10,000 plates were still missing, the report says. Pressed by the inspector general's inquiry, the Army quickly found 97 plates in containers filled with uniforms, boots and socks.
General Kern, who had overseen the procurement system as head of Materiel Command until he retired this year, said he accepted the criticism in the report as a "fair assessment." The report did commend the Army for pushing the industry to increase production by recruiting more companies.
But in all, General Kern said, the 167 days it took to start getting armor to the troops was "historically pretty good."
Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said some of the acquisition rules are necessary to prevent fraud and abuse, but the Pentagon could strip away layers of approvals and evaluations without jeopardizing the process.
"Congress is to blame for some of this," he said, citing the oversight hoops through which the Pentagon has to jump.
Some soldiers waiting for the body armor say they felt punished for speaking out about the delays. Specialist Joseph F. Fabozzi of the New Jersey National Guard complained publicly during a visit home in late 2003.
Returning to Iraq a few weeks later, he said, he was handed a $912 bill for having rear-ended a truck the previous summer while on a convoy. His National Guard unit did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Fabozzi appealed the bill and won, records show, in part by explaining precisely how his gas pedal had jammed - because the trucks did not have armor plating, he and others had been told to place sandbags on the floors. "They would break and spill into the pedals," he said.
Vehicles Without Shielding
Soldiers are still jury-rigging protection for their trucks and Humvees because of another contracting problem with which the Pentagon continues to wrestle.
Going into the war, it had only one contractor, O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt of Fairfield, Ohio, re-enforcing new Humvees with armor, handling 50 a month.
The Pentagon decided against asking Detroit automakers like General Motors, which makes the Humvee's civilian version, the Hummer, to start making armored Humvees because they would need too much time to set up new assembly lines.
But the Pentagon only gradually pushed O'Gara-Hess to ramp up to 550 vehicles a month, a level the company expects to reach only this spring. The latest uptick in ordering came in December after Specialist Thomas Wilson, a member of the Tennessee National Guard, confronted Mr. Rumsfeld in Kuwait.
Mr. Rumsfeld immediately came under criticism for what some saw as a callous dismissal of Mr. Wilson's complaints. In a television appearance last month on "Meet the Press," the defense secretary said that his comments were taken out of context and that the Army was working as hard as it could to provide armor, stressing that money was not an issue.
"It's a matter of production and capability of doing it," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller and chief financial officer until last May, said the Pentagon did not want to saddle O'Gara-Hess with more work than it could handle because of problems that arose with other manufacturers of big-ticket items.
"Given the level of Congressional scrutiny about all contracting procedures," Mr. Zakheim said, "clearly there was a concern that this be done in a graduated fashion so as to avoid another scandal."
At the same time as installing shielding in new Humvees, the Pentagon has had to deal with the 10,000 Humvees in Iraq that were never re-enforced for combat.
To help protect these vehicles, a Pentagon unit that was expediting purchases began pushing the Army to buy ceramic plates from private contractors.
The Army, though, opted for plain steel plates that it could make in its own depots. The plates are failing to withstand the insurgent's bigger bombs, which are also blowing up more heavily armored vehicles. As a result, the Army has been forced to look for additional materials to protect the Humvees, according to contractors involved in the effort.
Learning to Outsmart Bomb
Long before the war, the Pentagon was excited about new ways to subvert these bombs.
A California military contractor developed a countermeasure during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Known as the Shortstop Electronic Protection System, it evolved into a portable device that was heralded for its ability to jam the radio frequencies used by insurgents to detonate their bombs.
Col. Bruce D. Jette, a participant in the meetings of the Strategic Planning Board, the panel led by General Cody, used a jamming device to protect the oil fields in Iraq. Colonel Jette was heading up a new unit called the Rapid Equipping Force, which was given license to ignore the lumbering ways the Army traditionally fills orders from the field.
Colonel Jette, who has a Ph.D. in electronic materials from M.I.T., dodged the Army's research-and-development agencies and phoned his scientist friends to find a commercial robot that could search for explosives. He embedded his staff in combat units. He took manufacturers to Iraq so they could quickly modify designs for body and vehicle armor.
In a report to Congress in January, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, said the unit's work in developing these explosive countermeasures and other tools was emblematic of the Army's transformation into an agile force.
Some Pentagon officials say they first realized soldiers were being killed by I.E.D.'s as early as June 2003, and late that summer the Army's 101st Airborne Division issued a report that cited "numerous" injuries from I.E.D.'s in its plea for more vehicle armor and training to evade the bombs.
The Defense Department had been producing various I.E.D. countermeasures. But the Pentagon did not start ordering large quantities of one of the most promising ones, known as the Warlock, until December 2003, nine months after the war began, according to GlobalSecurity.org, a research firm based in Alexandria, Va.
The firm said in a report that EDO Communications and Countermeasures of Simi Valley, Calif., has received three orders totaling $31 million for 1,899 Warlocks. EDO declined to comment, citing the secrecy constraints imposed by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon has declined to say publicly how many devices it still needs in Iraq to protect all of the troops. But after learning the Army had so few that it could not spare any for training exercises, the House Armed Services Committee in December pushed the Pentagon for a big increases in its spending on I.E.D. countermeasures, to $161 million, in the next few months, until next year's budget is approved.
In presenting that budget to the committee on Feb. 16, Mr. Rumsfeld said the Defense Department had begun a vast effort to fight I.E.D.'s that encompasses many tools and strategies. "U.S. forces are now discovering and destroying more that one-third of I.E.D.'s before they can detonate," he said. "We have every reason to believe that this will improve."
At the hearing, Representative Gene Taylor, a staunch military supporter and Democrat from Mississippi, pointed out that his state had just lost four more National Guard members and criticized the secrecy enshrouding the Defense Department's efforts to deal with the explosives.
"There is the technology to prevent the detonation of most improvised explosive devices that exist," Mr. Taylor said, speaking with frustration. "We've allocated money for it. And yet that number remains classified, Mr. Secretary, not because the insurgents don't know how few are protected, but because I'm of the opinion the American people would be appalled if they knew how few are protected."
Colonel Jette was also frustrated, and in October he resigned. In interviews, he said as the rush of war wore off, the Army's traditional supply corps began reasserting lengthy contracting and testing regimens, leaving him increasingly discouraged.
"That perfection in testing becomes the enemy of what is operationally good enough," he said. "And the soldiers in the field are looking for good enough."
The Rapid Equipping Force has a new leader, but still operates without a permanent charter. Gen. John M. Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff who helped establish the program, said he shares Colonel Jette's concern for its future. "The acquisition system would see it as a threat," said General Keane, who retired in 2003. "There is an implied indictment that they can't deliver in that rapid a period of time, which is essentially true."
Bush & Rumsfeld Don't Give A @#$% About Our Troops
Bush is an idiot and Rumsfeld is an immoral bastard. Their failed leadership is costing American lives in Iraq and adding to the threat of our nation's future. Don't believe me. Read the following and weep.
March 7, 2005
Many Missteps Tied to Delay in Armor for Troops in Iraq
By MICHAEL MOSS
The war in Iraq was hardly a month old in April 2003 when an Army general in charge of equipping soldiers with protective gear threw the brakes on buying bulletproof vests.
The general, Richard A. Cody, who led a Pentagon group called the Army Strategic Planning Board, had been told by supply chiefs that the combat troops already had all the armor they needed, according to Army officials and records from the board's meetings. Some 50,000 other American soldiers, who were not on the front lines of battle, could do without.
In the following weeks, as Iraqi snipers and suicide bombers stepped up deadly attacks, often directed at those very soldiers behind the front lines, General Cody realized the Army's mistake and did an about-face. On May 15, 2003, he ordered the budget office to buy all the bulletproof vests it could, according to an Army report. He would give one to every soldier, "regardless of duty position."
But the delays were only beginning. The initial misstep, as well as other previously undisclosed problems, show that the Pentagon's difficulties in shielding troops and their vehicles with armor have been far more extensive and intractable than officials have acknowledged, according to government officials, contractors and Defense Department records.
In the case of body armor, the Pentagon gave a contract for thousands of the ceramic plate inserts that make the vests bulletproof to a former Army researcher who had never mass-produced anything. He struggled for a year, then gave up entirely. At the same time, in shipping plates from other companies, the Army's equipment manager effectively reduced the armor's priority to the status of socks, a confidential report by the Army's inspector general shows. Some 10,000 plates were lost along the way, and the rest arrived late.
In all, with additional paperwork delays, the Defense Department took 167 days just to start getting the bulletproof vests to soldiers in Iraq once General Cody placed the order. But for thousands of soldiers, it took weeks and even months more, records show, at a time when the Iraqi insurgency was intensifying and American casualties were mounting.
By contrast, when the United States' allies in Iraq also realized they needed more bulletproof vests, they bypassed the Pentagon and ordered directly from a manufacturer in Michigan. They began getting armor in just 12 days.
The issue of whether American troops were adequately protected received wide attention in December, when an Army National Guard member complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that troops were scrounging for armor to fortify their Humvees and other vehicles. The Pentagon has maintained that it has moved steadfastly to protect all its troops in Iraq.
But an examination of the issues involving the protective shielding and other critical equipment shows how a supply problem seen as an emergency on the ground in Iraq was treated as a routine procurement matter back in Washington.
While all soldiers eventually received plates for their vests, the Army is still scrambling to find new materials to better protect the 10,000 Humvees in Iraq that were not built for combat conditions. They are re-enforced by simple steel plates that cannot withstand the increasingly potent explosives being used by the insurgents, according to contractors who are working to develop more sophisticated armor for the Army.
Army generals say a more effective answer to the threat of explosives may lie in electronic instruments that have proven successful in blocking the detonation of homemade bombs, called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. They have caused about a quarter of the more than 1,500 American deaths in Iraq, including those of two National Guard members from New York City just last week.
Such an electronic countermeasure was used at the start of the war to shield Iraqi oil fields from possible sabotage. But some members of Congress and security experts say shortsighted planning and piecemeal buying on the part of the Army has resulted in too few of the devices being used to protect the troops.
Pentagon officials say that despite the shortcomings, their efforts to protect soldiers have saved many lives. And they say they have taken a number of steps to improve their performance, including the creation of a special unit to quickly buy and field vital gear and the establishment of a task force to come up with ways to combat I.E.D.'s.
They say that material shortages and contractor bottlenecks prevented them from moving faster, and that their response, notwithstanding the 24-week startup for bulletproof vests, compares well with the two years that the Army typically has taken to complete such tasks.
"Our planning process wasn't keeping up with the changes that were required," said Gen. Paul J. Kern, the head of the Army's Materiel Command until he retired in January. "That resulted in the lag in response in acquisition. While we would all like to be faster and more responsive, it was fairly responsive."
American military commanders and Pentagon officials now concede that they consistently misjudged the strength and ingenuity of the insurgency in Iraq, which has grown more sophisticated in its tactics. Because commanders failed to take that force into account, the Army's procurement machine could never catch up, no matter how hard it tried.
Several former high-ranking officers say a complete overhaul of the supply system is needed to ensure that America's troops get all the tools they need to face a determined foe, particularly terrorists.
"This is a new age in war with an enemy that adapts faster than we do," said Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., retired, a former head of the Army War College. "Al Qaeda doesn't have to go to the Board of Accountability in order to develop a new roadside bomb or triggering device."
Others say that the Pentagon's longstanding preference for billion-dollar weaponry has made it less prepared to deliver the basic tools needed by soldiers on the ground.
"We've never been very good at equipping people in a simple, straightforward fashion," said Thomas E. White, who resigned as secretary of the Army in April 2003 after a falling out with Mr. Rumsfeld.
Scrambling for Body Armor
The insurgency had already taken root in Iraq when General Cody made his decision on April 17, 2003, that enough soldiers had bulletproof vests. As more casualty reports flowed in during the next month, he came to recognize that the advice he had gotten from staff members in Washington did not reflect the reality of the war.
"We began to realize how wrong we were and the Army has been scrambling ever since," Mr. White recalls.
General Cody, now the Army's vice chief of staff, declined to comment, but his staff members confirmed the details of the supply problems. Some of the most glaring problems were contained in an April 20, 2004, report by the inspector general that remained confidential until it was released to The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Pentagon put the inspector general on the case after Defense Department officials, noticing that its allies were getting armor so quickly, became suspicious that they were taking armor intended for American soldiers.
But the report wound up criticizing the Pentagon instead.
The allies had indeed asked the Defense Department for bulletproof vests, the inspector general found. After being told they would have to wait until the Americans were fully equipped, they ordered their 9,600 sets from a manufacturer from Central Lake, Mich., Second Chance Body Armor.
By contrast, the inspector general found, the Pentagon took much longer.
For starters, it took the Army 47 days from when General Cody issued his order for bulletproof vests to allocate the necessary funds so that contracts could be awarded, the inspector general found.
Then, the handful of tiny companies making the vests and plates for the Army were snowed under by the soaring demand.
To speed things up, the Pentagon decided to relax its weight requirement, accepting some plates 30 percent heavier and making it possible for more manufacturers to produce them.
But by the fall of 2003, as Pentagon officials were assuring Congress that they were moving as fast as they could to get armor to soldiers, one of the Pentagon's chief producers of plates was fuming.
The company, ArmorWorks of Tempe, Ariz., and its supplier of ceramics, the beer-making Coors family of Colorado, had ramped up their operations to meet the demands of the war, but ArmorWorks' president, William J. Perciballi, says Defense Department delays in awarding contracts for more plates forced him to lay off workers and shut down his assembly line for two months.
When the additional orders were finally awarded in early 2004, he lost out to three lower bidders.
One of those companies, High Performance Materials Group of Boothwyn, Pa., said it could make 20,000 plates for $4,960,000, a price 11 to 15 percent below even the next two successful bidders.
The Pentagon's Defense Supply Center, which handled the contracts, says an Army ballistics engineer determined that High Performance, a research and development company, could do the work, despite its lack of experience in mass production.
"We certainly demonstrated that we could make the plates," said the company's founder, Kenneth A. Gabriel, a former Army researcher who left the military in 1999. He said he had developed his own version of the ceramic plates that passed Army testing and prepared detailed plans for production that the supply center reviewed.
But Mr. Gabriel said he ran into unforeseen trouble. His source for ceramic dried up. Then he lost his building lease. Last December, after missing four deadlines and delivering only 356 plates, he transferred the contract to one of the other winning bidders, and his company dissolved.
In interviews and written responses, the Defense Supply Center said it pressed High Performance as best it could. "Throughout the period of delinquency the contracting officer considered the possibility of a termination for default and a repurchase of the items. However, when reviewing the facts together with the applicable FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) provisions, it was determined that a termination for default would not be the appropriate action," the center said.
Mr. Perciballi of ArmorWorks eventually got more orders, but said: "It was stop, start, stop, start. Couldn't they have ramped up at the start of the war? Our problem was they were taking little bites and never got the whole industry together to see just what we could do."
The final hitch arose in Iraq.
The Army agency responsible for equipping soldiers got swamped by other materials being rushed to Iraq, the inspector general found. The bulletproof vests had been labeled high priority, but in the ensuing chaos, everything got treated as high priority, which meant that in fact nothing was. The Pentagon has a special term for items that get lost in the shuffle: frustrated cargo.
"The massive push of supplies and materiel initially led to containers with OTV (the outer tactical vest portion of body armor), Desert Camouflage Uniforms, boots, T-shirts, and socks being stacked up and becoming frustrated cargo," the inspector general's report found.
The delivery and tracking of body armor was so chaotic that by Jan. 23, 2004, when the last American soldiers got theirs, 10,000 plates were still missing, the report says. Pressed by the inspector general's inquiry, the Army quickly found 97 plates in containers filled with uniforms, boots and socks.
General Kern, who had overseen the procurement system as head of Materiel Command until he retired this year, said he accepted the criticism in the report as a "fair assessment." The report did commend the Army for pushing the industry to increase production by recruiting more companies.
But in all, General Kern said, the 167 days it took to start getting armor to the troops was "historically pretty good."
Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said some of the acquisition rules are necessary to prevent fraud and abuse, but the Pentagon could strip away layers of approvals and evaluations without jeopardizing the process.
"Congress is to blame for some of this," he said, citing the oversight hoops through which the Pentagon has to jump.
Some soldiers waiting for the body armor say they felt punished for speaking out about the delays. Specialist Joseph F. Fabozzi of the New Jersey National Guard complained publicly during a visit home in late 2003.
Returning to Iraq a few weeks later, he said, he was handed a $912 bill for having rear-ended a truck the previous summer while on a convoy. His National Guard unit did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Fabozzi appealed the bill and won, records show, in part by explaining precisely how his gas pedal had jammed - because the trucks did not have armor plating, he and others had been told to place sandbags on the floors. "They would break and spill into the pedals," he said.
Vehicles Without Shielding
Soldiers are still jury-rigging protection for their trucks and Humvees because of another contracting problem with which the Pentagon continues to wrestle.
Going into the war, it had only one contractor, O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt of Fairfield, Ohio, re-enforcing new Humvees with armor, handling 50 a month.
The Pentagon decided against asking Detroit automakers like General Motors, which makes the Humvee's civilian version, the Hummer, to start making armored Humvees because they would need too much time to set up new assembly lines.
But the Pentagon only gradually pushed O'Gara-Hess to ramp up to 550 vehicles a month, a level the company expects to reach only this spring. The latest uptick in ordering came in December after Specialist Thomas Wilson, a member of the Tennessee National Guard, confronted Mr. Rumsfeld in Kuwait.
Mr. Rumsfeld immediately came under criticism for what some saw as a callous dismissal of Mr. Wilson's complaints. In a television appearance last month on "Meet the Press," the defense secretary said that his comments were taken out of context and that the Army was working as hard as it could to provide armor, stressing that money was not an issue.
"It's a matter of production and capability of doing it," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller and chief financial officer until last May, said the Pentagon did not want to saddle O'Gara-Hess with more work than it could handle because of problems that arose with other manufacturers of big-ticket items.
"Given the level of Congressional scrutiny about all contracting procedures," Mr. Zakheim said, "clearly there was a concern that this be done in a graduated fashion so as to avoid another scandal."
At the same time as installing shielding in new Humvees, the Pentagon has had to deal with the 10,000 Humvees in Iraq that were never re-enforced for combat.
To help protect these vehicles, a Pentagon unit that was expediting purchases began pushing the Army to buy ceramic plates from private contractors.
The Army, though, opted for plain steel plates that it could make in its own depots. The plates are failing to withstand the insurgent's bigger bombs, which are also blowing up more heavily armored vehicles. As a result, the Army has been forced to look for additional materials to protect the Humvees, according to contractors involved in the effort.
Learning to Outsmart Bomb
Long before the war, the Pentagon was excited about new ways to subvert these bombs.
A California military contractor developed a countermeasure during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Known as the Shortstop Electronic Protection System, it evolved into a portable device that was heralded for its ability to jam the radio frequencies used by insurgents to detonate their bombs.
Col. Bruce D. Jette, a participant in the meetings of the Strategic Planning Board, the panel led by General Cody, used a jamming device to protect the oil fields in Iraq. Colonel Jette was heading up a new unit called the Rapid Equipping Force, which was given license to ignore the lumbering ways the Army traditionally fills orders from the field.
Colonel Jette, who has a Ph.D. in electronic materials from M.I.T., dodged the Army's research-and-development agencies and phoned his scientist friends to find a commercial robot that could search for explosives. He embedded his staff in combat units. He took manufacturers to Iraq so they could quickly modify designs for body and vehicle armor.
In a report to Congress in January, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, said the unit's work in developing these explosive countermeasures and other tools was emblematic of the Army's transformation into an agile force.
Some Pentagon officials say they first realized soldiers were being killed by I.E.D.'s as early as June 2003, and late that summer the Army's 101st Airborne Division issued a report that cited "numerous" injuries from I.E.D.'s in its plea for more vehicle armor and training to evade the bombs.
The Defense Department had been producing various I.E.D. countermeasures. But the Pentagon did not start ordering large quantities of one of the most promising ones, known as the Warlock, until December 2003, nine months after the war began, according to GlobalSecurity.org, a research firm based in Alexandria, Va.
The firm said in a report that EDO Communications and Countermeasures of Simi Valley, Calif., has received three orders totaling $31 million for 1,899 Warlocks. EDO declined to comment, citing the secrecy constraints imposed by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon has declined to say publicly how many devices it still needs in Iraq to protect all of the troops. But after learning the Army had so few that it could not spare any for training exercises, the House Armed Services Committee in December pushed the Pentagon for a big increases in its spending on I.E.D. countermeasures, to $161 million, in the next few months, until next year's budget is approved.
In presenting that budget to the committee on Feb. 16, Mr. Rumsfeld said the Defense Department had begun a vast effort to fight I.E.D.'s that encompasses many tools and strategies. "U.S. forces are now discovering and destroying more that one-third of I.E.D.'s before they can detonate," he said. "We have every reason to believe that this will improve."
At the hearing, Representative Gene Taylor, a staunch military supporter and Democrat from Mississippi, pointed out that his state had just lost four more National Guard members and criticized the secrecy enshrouding the Defense Department's efforts to deal with the explosives.
"There is the technology to prevent the detonation of most improvised explosive devices that exist," Mr. Taylor said, speaking with frustration. "We've allocated money for it. And yet that number remains classified, Mr. Secretary, not because the insurgents don't know how few are protected, but because I'm of the opinion the American people would be appalled if they knew how few are protected."
Colonel Jette was also frustrated, and in October he resigned. In interviews, he said as the rush of war wore off, the Army's traditional supply corps began reasserting lengthy contracting and testing regimens, leaving him increasingly discouraged.
"That perfection in testing becomes the enemy of what is operationally good enough," he said. "And the soldiers in the field are looking for good enough."
The Rapid Equipping Force has a new leader, but still operates without a permanent charter. Gen. John M. Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff who helped establish the program, said he shares Colonel Jette's concern for its future. "The acquisition system would see it as a threat," said General Keane, who retired in 2003. "There is an implied indictment that they can't deliver in that rapid a period of time, which is essentially true."
March 7, 2005
Many Missteps Tied to Delay in Armor for Troops in Iraq
By MICHAEL MOSS
The war in Iraq was hardly a month old in April 2003 when an Army general in charge of equipping soldiers with protective gear threw the brakes on buying bulletproof vests.
The general, Richard A. Cody, who led a Pentagon group called the Army Strategic Planning Board, had been told by supply chiefs that the combat troops already had all the armor they needed, according to Army officials and records from the board's meetings. Some 50,000 other American soldiers, who were not on the front lines of battle, could do without.
In the following weeks, as Iraqi snipers and suicide bombers stepped up deadly attacks, often directed at those very soldiers behind the front lines, General Cody realized the Army's mistake and did an about-face. On May 15, 2003, he ordered the budget office to buy all the bulletproof vests it could, according to an Army report. He would give one to every soldier, "regardless of duty position."
But the delays were only beginning. The initial misstep, as well as other previously undisclosed problems, show that the Pentagon's difficulties in shielding troops and their vehicles with armor have been far more extensive and intractable than officials have acknowledged, according to government officials, contractors and Defense Department records.
In the case of body armor, the Pentagon gave a contract for thousands of the ceramic plate inserts that make the vests bulletproof to a former Army researcher who had never mass-produced anything. He struggled for a year, then gave up entirely. At the same time, in shipping plates from other companies, the Army's equipment manager effectively reduced the armor's priority to the status of socks, a confidential report by the Army's inspector general shows. Some 10,000 plates were lost along the way, and the rest arrived late.
In all, with additional paperwork delays, the Defense Department took 167 days just to start getting the bulletproof vests to soldiers in Iraq once General Cody placed the order. But for thousands of soldiers, it took weeks and even months more, records show, at a time when the Iraqi insurgency was intensifying and American casualties were mounting.
By contrast, when the United States' allies in Iraq also realized they needed more bulletproof vests, they bypassed the Pentagon and ordered directly from a manufacturer in Michigan. They began getting armor in just 12 days.
The issue of whether American troops were adequately protected received wide attention in December, when an Army National Guard member complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that troops were scrounging for armor to fortify their Humvees and other vehicles. The Pentagon has maintained that it has moved steadfastly to protect all its troops in Iraq.
But an examination of the issues involving the protective shielding and other critical equipment shows how a supply problem seen as an emergency on the ground in Iraq was treated as a routine procurement matter back in Washington.
While all soldiers eventually received plates for their vests, the Army is still scrambling to find new materials to better protect the 10,000 Humvees in Iraq that were not built for combat conditions. They are re-enforced by simple steel plates that cannot withstand the increasingly potent explosives being used by the insurgents, according to contractors who are working to develop more sophisticated armor for the Army.
Army generals say a more effective answer to the threat of explosives may lie in electronic instruments that have proven successful in blocking the detonation of homemade bombs, called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. They have caused about a quarter of the more than 1,500 American deaths in Iraq, including those of two National Guard members from New York City just last week.
Such an electronic countermeasure was used at the start of the war to shield Iraqi oil fields from possible sabotage. But some members of Congress and security experts say shortsighted planning and piecemeal buying on the part of the Army has resulted in too few of the devices being used to protect the troops.
Pentagon officials say that despite the shortcomings, their efforts to protect soldiers have saved many lives. And they say they have taken a number of steps to improve their performance, including the creation of a special unit to quickly buy and field vital gear and the establishment of a task force to come up with ways to combat I.E.D.'s.
They say that material shortages and contractor bottlenecks prevented them from moving faster, and that their response, notwithstanding the 24-week startup for bulletproof vests, compares well with the two years that the Army typically has taken to complete such tasks.
"Our planning process wasn't keeping up with the changes that were required," said Gen. Paul J. Kern, the head of the Army's Materiel Command until he retired in January. "That resulted in the lag in response in acquisition. While we would all like to be faster and more responsive, it was fairly responsive."
American military commanders and Pentagon officials now concede that they consistently misjudged the strength and ingenuity of the insurgency in Iraq, which has grown more sophisticated in its tactics. Because commanders failed to take that force into account, the Army's procurement machine could never catch up, no matter how hard it tried.
Several former high-ranking officers say a complete overhaul of the supply system is needed to ensure that America's troops get all the tools they need to face a determined foe, particularly terrorists.
"This is a new age in war with an enemy that adapts faster than we do," said Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., retired, a former head of the Army War College. "Al Qaeda doesn't have to go to the Board of Accountability in order to develop a new roadside bomb or triggering device."
Others say that the Pentagon's longstanding preference for billion-dollar weaponry has made it less prepared to deliver the basic tools needed by soldiers on the ground.
"We've never been very good at equipping people in a simple, straightforward fashion," said Thomas E. White, who resigned as secretary of the Army in April 2003 after a falling out with Mr. Rumsfeld.
Scrambling for Body Armor
The insurgency had already taken root in Iraq when General Cody made his decision on April 17, 2003, that enough soldiers had bulletproof vests. As more casualty reports flowed in during the next month, he came to recognize that the advice he had gotten from staff members in Washington did not reflect the reality of the war.
"We began to realize how wrong we were and the Army has been scrambling ever since," Mr. White recalls.
General Cody, now the Army's vice chief of staff, declined to comment, but his staff members confirmed the details of the supply problems. Some of the most glaring problems were contained in an April 20, 2004, report by the inspector general that remained confidential until it was released to The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Pentagon put the inspector general on the case after Defense Department officials, noticing that its allies were getting armor so quickly, became suspicious that they were taking armor intended for American soldiers.
But the report wound up criticizing the Pentagon instead.
The allies had indeed asked the Defense Department for bulletproof vests, the inspector general found. After being told they would have to wait until the Americans were fully equipped, they ordered their 9,600 sets from a manufacturer from Central Lake, Mich., Second Chance Body Armor.
By contrast, the inspector general found, the Pentagon took much longer.
For starters, it took the Army 47 days from when General Cody issued his order for bulletproof vests to allocate the necessary funds so that contracts could be awarded, the inspector general found.
Then, the handful of tiny companies making the vests and plates for the Army were snowed under by the soaring demand.
To speed things up, the Pentagon decided to relax its weight requirement, accepting some plates 30 percent heavier and making it possible for more manufacturers to produce them.
But by the fall of 2003, as Pentagon officials were assuring Congress that they were moving as fast as they could to get armor to soldiers, one of the Pentagon's chief producers of plates was fuming.
The company, ArmorWorks of Tempe, Ariz., and its supplier of ceramics, the beer-making Coors family of Colorado, had ramped up their operations to meet the demands of the war, but ArmorWorks' president, William J. Perciballi, says Defense Department delays in awarding contracts for more plates forced him to lay off workers and shut down his assembly line for two months.
When the additional orders were finally awarded in early 2004, he lost out to three lower bidders.
One of those companies, High Performance Materials Group of Boothwyn, Pa., said it could make 20,000 plates for $4,960,000, a price 11 to 15 percent below even the next two successful bidders.
The Pentagon's Defense Supply Center, which handled the contracts, says an Army ballistics engineer determined that High Performance, a research and development company, could do the work, despite its lack of experience in mass production.
"We certainly demonstrated that we could make the plates," said the company's founder, Kenneth A. Gabriel, a former Army researcher who left the military in 1999. He said he had developed his own version of the ceramic plates that passed Army testing and prepared detailed plans for production that the supply center reviewed.
But Mr. Gabriel said he ran into unforeseen trouble. His source for ceramic dried up. Then he lost his building lease. Last December, after missing four deadlines and delivering only 356 plates, he transferred the contract to one of the other winning bidders, and his company dissolved.
In interviews and written responses, the Defense Supply Center said it pressed High Performance as best it could. "Throughout the period of delinquency the contracting officer considered the possibility of a termination for default and a repurchase of the items. However, when reviewing the facts together with the applicable FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) provisions, it was determined that a termination for default would not be the appropriate action," the center said.
Mr. Perciballi of ArmorWorks eventually got more orders, but said: "It was stop, start, stop, start. Couldn't they have ramped up at the start of the war? Our problem was they were taking little bites and never got the whole industry together to see just what we could do."
The final hitch arose in Iraq.
The Army agency responsible for equipping soldiers got swamped by other materials being rushed to Iraq, the inspector general found. The bulletproof vests had been labeled high priority, but in the ensuing chaos, everything got treated as high priority, which meant that in fact nothing was. The Pentagon has a special term for items that get lost in the shuffle: frustrated cargo.
"The massive push of supplies and materiel initially led to containers with OTV (the outer tactical vest portion of body armor), Desert Camouflage Uniforms, boots, T-shirts, and socks being stacked up and becoming frustrated cargo," the inspector general's report found.
The delivery and tracking of body armor was so chaotic that by Jan. 23, 2004, when the last American soldiers got theirs, 10,000 plates were still missing, the report says. Pressed by the inspector general's inquiry, the Army quickly found 97 plates in containers filled with uniforms, boots and socks.
General Kern, who had overseen the procurement system as head of Materiel Command until he retired this year, said he accepted the criticism in the report as a "fair assessment." The report did commend the Army for pushing the industry to increase production by recruiting more companies.
But in all, General Kern said, the 167 days it took to start getting armor to the troops was "historically pretty good."
Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said some of the acquisition rules are necessary to prevent fraud and abuse, but the Pentagon could strip away layers of approvals and evaluations without jeopardizing the process.
"Congress is to blame for some of this," he said, citing the oversight hoops through which the Pentagon has to jump.
Some soldiers waiting for the body armor say they felt punished for speaking out about the delays. Specialist Joseph F. Fabozzi of the New Jersey National Guard complained publicly during a visit home in late 2003.
Returning to Iraq a few weeks later, he said, he was handed a $912 bill for having rear-ended a truck the previous summer while on a convoy. His National Guard unit did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Fabozzi appealed the bill and won, records show, in part by explaining precisely how his gas pedal had jammed - because the trucks did not have armor plating, he and others had been told to place sandbags on the floors. "They would break and spill into the pedals," he said.
Vehicles Without Shielding
Soldiers are still jury-rigging protection for their trucks and Humvees because of another contracting problem with which the Pentagon continues to wrestle.
Going into the war, it had only one contractor, O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt of Fairfield, Ohio, re-enforcing new Humvees with armor, handling 50 a month.
The Pentagon decided against asking Detroit automakers like General Motors, which makes the Humvee's civilian version, the Hummer, to start making armored Humvees because they would need too much time to set up new assembly lines.
But the Pentagon only gradually pushed O'Gara-Hess to ramp up to 550 vehicles a month, a level the company expects to reach only this spring. The latest uptick in ordering came in December after Specialist Thomas Wilson, a member of the Tennessee National Guard, confronted Mr. Rumsfeld in Kuwait.
Mr. Rumsfeld immediately came under criticism for what some saw as a callous dismissal of Mr. Wilson's complaints. In a television appearance last month on "Meet the Press," the defense secretary said that his comments were taken out of context and that the Army was working as hard as it could to provide armor, stressing that money was not an issue.
"It's a matter of production and capability of doing it," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller and chief financial officer until last May, said the Pentagon did not want to saddle O'Gara-Hess with more work than it could handle because of problems that arose with other manufacturers of big-ticket items.
"Given the level of Congressional scrutiny about all contracting procedures," Mr. Zakheim said, "clearly there was a concern that this be done in a graduated fashion so as to avoid another scandal."
At the same time as installing shielding in new Humvees, the Pentagon has had to deal with the 10,000 Humvees in Iraq that were never re-enforced for combat.
To help protect these vehicles, a Pentagon unit that was expediting purchases began pushing the Army to buy ceramic plates from private contractors.
The Army, though, opted for plain steel plates that it could make in its own depots. The plates are failing to withstand the insurgent's bigger bombs, which are also blowing up more heavily armored vehicles. As a result, the Army has been forced to look for additional materials to protect the Humvees, according to contractors involved in the effort.
Learning to Outsmart Bomb
Long before the war, the Pentagon was excited about new ways to subvert these bombs.
A California military contractor developed a countermeasure during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Known as the Shortstop Electronic Protection System, it evolved into a portable device that was heralded for its ability to jam the radio frequencies used by insurgents to detonate their bombs.
Col. Bruce D. Jette, a participant in the meetings of the Strategic Planning Board, the panel led by General Cody, used a jamming device to protect the oil fields in Iraq. Colonel Jette was heading up a new unit called the Rapid Equipping Force, which was given license to ignore the lumbering ways the Army traditionally fills orders from the field.
Colonel Jette, who has a Ph.D. in electronic materials from M.I.T., dodged the Army's research-and-development agencies and phoned his scientist friends to find a commercial robot that could search for explosives. He embedded his staff in combat units. He took manufacturers to Iraq so they could quickly modify designs for body and vehicle armor.
In a report to Congress in January, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, said the unit's work in developing these explosive countermeasures and other tools was emblematic of the Army's transformation into an agile force.
Some Pentagon officials say they first realized soldiers were being killed by I.E.D.'s as early as June 2003, and late that summer the Army's 101st Airborne Division issued a report that cited "numerous" injuries from I.E.D.'s in its plea for more vehicle armor and training to evade the bombs.
The Defense Department had been producing various I.E.D. countermeasures. But the Pentagon did not start ordering large quantities of one of the most promising ones, known as the Warlock, until December 2003, nine months after the war began, according to GlobalSecurity.org, a research firm based in Alexandria, Va.
The firm said in a report that EDO Communications and Countermeasures of Simi Valley, Calif., has received three orders totaling $31 million for 1,899 Warlocks. EDO declined to comment, citing the secrecy constraints imposed by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon has declined to say publicly how many devices it still needs in Iraq to protect all of the troops. But after learning the Army had so few that it could not spare any for training exercises, the House Armed Services Committee in December pushed the Pentagon for a big increases in its spending on I.E.D. countermeasures, to $161 million, in the next few months, until next year's budget is approved.
In presenting that budget to the committee on Feb. 16, Mr. Rumsfeld said the Defense Department had begun a vast effort to fight I.E.D.'s that encompasses many tools and strategies. "U.S. forces are now discovering and destroying more that one-third of I.E.D.'s before they can detonate," he said. "We have every reason to believe that this will improve."
At the hearing, Representative Gene Taylor, a staunch military supporter and Democrat from Mississippi, pointed out that his state had just lost four more National Guard members and criticized the secrecy enshrouding the Defense Department's efforts to deal with the explosives.
"There is the technology to prevent the detonation of most improvised explosive devices that exist," Mr. Taylor said, speaking with frustration. "We've allocated money for it. And yet that number remains classified, Mr. Secretary, not because the insurgents don't know how few are protected, but because I'm of the opinion the American people would be appalled if they knew how few are protected."
Colonel Jette was also frustrated, and in October he resigned. In interviews, he said as the rush of war wore off, the Army's traditional supply corps began reasserting lengthy contracting and testing regimens, leaving him increasingly discouraged.
"That perfection in testing becomes the enemy of what is operationally good enough," he said. "And the soldiers in the field are looking for good enough."
The Rapid Equipping Force has a new leader, but still operates without a permanent charter. Gen. John M. Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff who helped establish the program, said he shares Colonel Jette's concern for its future. "The acquisition system would see it as a threat," said General Keane, who retired in 2003. "There is an implied indictment that they can't deliver in that rapid a period of time, which is essentially true."
Thursday, March 03, 2005
1,500 AMERICAN SOLDIERS DEAD IN IRAQ & CLIMBING
American coffins returning from Iraq
US death toll in Iraq reaches 1,500
By Philippe Naughton, Times Online
A grim milestone was passed in Iraq today when a US Marine was killed in action south of Baghdad - the 1,500th American soldier to lose his life since the invasion.
The US military said the soldier, assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, was killed "while conducting security and stability operations".
It would not give any more details, saying in a statement: "Force protection measures preclude the release of any information that could aid enemy personnel in assessing the effectiveness, or lack thereof, with regard to their tactics, techniques and procedures. The release of more details about the incident could place our personnel at greater risk."
The soldier will not be named until his next of kin is informed.
According to an Associated Press count, the death of the Marine brought the US military toll to exactly 1,500 since the US-led invasion on March 20, 2003, almost two years ago. A total of 86 UK soldiers have died in Iraq during the same period.
Iraqbodycount.net, an independent website which relies on credible media reports of deaths, puts the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion at up to 18,395 - although it says many other deaths may have gone unreported. A statistical study in the medical journal the Lancet estimated that Iraqi civilian deaths could be as high as 198,000.
Worryingly, the number of military deaths has shown no sign of falling since President Bush landed on USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 with a banner saying "Mission Accomplished" and declared an end to major combat operations.
A total of 107 US military personnel were killed in Iraq in January, including 31 in a still unexplained helicopter crash in the western desert near Jordan that was the single most costly incident for US forces since the invasion. Ninety per cent of all coalition deaths have come since the US command celebrated the fall of Baghdad.
Experts say the death toll from Iraq is still minor compared to that of the war in Vietnam, the greatest blunder in US military history, where the death of 58,000 Americans instilled a generational fear of 'body bags' in Pentagon planners.
But the losses in Iraq signally failed to derail President Bush's re-election last November, although it has helped to polarise American voters over the issue of Iraq.
Ted Carpenter, a defence analyst at Washington's Cato Institute, said that a more useful comparison might be made with Soviet losses in Afghanistan in the 1980s - another situation that pitted an invading superpower against a tenacious Muslim insurgency.
About 15,000 Soviet troops were killed during nine years of fighting after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, a monthly total about twice as high as that suffered by the more highly trained US forces in Iraq.
Mr Carpenter told Reuters: "Unless the US either can crush the insurgency or negotiate an end to the insurgency, then we're going to see casualty rates similar to those that the Soviets suffered in Afghanistan.
"Though it's not like the Battle of Verdun in World War One (260,000 dead, 450,000 wounded), it's a slow bleed of the occupation army."
Friday, February 18, 2005
CANNON, GOP ATTACK DOG & WHITE HOUSE "TOOL"
Gannon: The early years
Before he was buttering up Bush at White House press conferences, "Jeff Gannon" was doing the GOP's dirty work in attacking Tom Daschle.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason
Feb. 18, 2005 | Long before "Jeff Gannon" became a household pseudonym in the nation's capital, he had earned considerable recognition among the political elites of South Dakota. During that state's closely contested Senate race last year, the Talon News writer -- whose real name is now known to be James Dale Guckert -- dug his claws deep into Tom Daschle, the former Senate minority leader narrowly defeated by Republican John Thune.
In 2004 Republican leaders placed no higher price on any head, besides John Kerry's, than on the Senate Democratic leader's. For years, conservative organizations had attacked Daschle with campaigns that included notorious ads that paired the Army veteran with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The smear efforts damaged Daschle's standing with the state's voters, and as the election grew nearer, Republican blogs and Web sites took up the dirty work. In what has now been exposed as a blatant Republican strategy, the seemingly independent bloggers had in fact been paid by the Thune campaign.
Gannon took up the Republicans' dirty work with great gusto, beginning more than a year before the election, in the summer of 2003. Working with two local South Dakota bloggers, both of whom later turned out to be secretly paid operatives of the Thune campaign, he targeted Daschle and discredited mainstream journalists. Among Gannon's direct hits was an embarrassing story that revealed that the three-term senator and his lobbyist wife, Linda, had applied for a "homestead exemption" on their costly Washington, D.C., residence, claiming it as their primary residence.
Gannon went much further, however, in accusing reporters at the state's most important newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, of shilling for Daschle and, worse still, of colluding with the senator in the intimidation of his political adversaries. Such wild attacks were then played back on the Thune-financed Web logs, which attracted substantial attention in the Senate race and influenced coverage in the South Dakota media. As the National Journal explained in a post-election analysis, the blog assault "opened a new and potentially powerful front in the war over public opinion." The National Journal and local journalists agreed that the blog campaign against Daschle was "crucial." A top Argus Leader editor conceded, "I don't think there's any way to say [the blogs] didn't" affect the paper's coverage.
Daschle's defeat is old news by now, of course. Yet to understand who "Gannon" really was -- and why he obtained such special treatment from Karl Rove's White House communications operation -- one useful exercise may be what intelligence analysts call "walking back the cat." In essence, this means running the movie in reverse slow-motion to see where the suspect came from and what he did along the way.
Looking back at the special role played by Talon and Gannon in the South Dakota Senate campaign may provide clues in the mystery of the male-escort-cum-journalist's extraordinary access to the Bush White House.
The cooperation between the Talon News writer and Daschle's Republican challenger dates back to the early weeks of the South Dakota campaign, when Thune showed up as a guest on "Jeff Gannon's Washington," the writer's Internet radio program on Rightalk.com. It might have seemed unusual for a Midwestern Senate candidate to show up on an Internet radio show in Washington, where he would reach almost no listeners in his home state. But Gannon didn't waste Thune's time. His friendly questioning allowed the Republican candidate to lay out the themes of his campaign to unseat the incumbent: Daschle was an obstructionist opponent of the president, out of touch with the home folks, and married to a rich pharmaceutical lobbyist.
On Feb. 8, 2004, Gannon's interview with Thune was the subject of an article in the Argus-Leader, and immediately got picked up by "DaschlevThune," a Web blog operated by history professor and Republican activist Jon Lauck, and South Dakota Politics.com, run by a lawyer named Jason Van Beek. Lauck promoted a series of Talon News articles by Gannon, which charged that Dave Kranz, the Argus-Leader's chief political correspondent, and a three-decade veteran reporter, was in essence nothing more than a hit man for Daschle.
While promoting Talon and Gannon as credible journalistic sources, Lauck's blog reprinted sensational paragraphs posted by Gannon on the Talon News Web site, urging readers to take special note of the Talon reporter's "quite interesting article" about Daschle's "Sopranos-style" tactics. The story contained no actual evidence of misconduct by either the Democratic senator or the Sioux Falls newspaperman, beyond anonymous quotes that accused them of Mafia-like intimidation of "small business owners" and other beleaguered anti-Daschle dissidents. (The "Sopranos" story, like all of Gannon's other works, has been scrubbed by Talon's Republican owners from their Web site.)
The bloggers promoted dozens of Talon News attacks on Daschle, under the false flag of journalistic independence. They proclaimed themselves the paladins of truth, battling against South Dakota's "liberal media." Nobody in South Dakota would know until months after Nov. 2, when Daschle was so narrowly defeated, that those "independent" bloggers dogging him had been subsidized by the Thune campaign. But there, on the final post-election filings, were the names Lauck and Van Beek, who had been paid $27,000 and $8,000, respectively.
And nobody in South Dakota could know, until now, the true identity and purpose of "Jeff Gannon" and his employers at Talon News.
Before he was buttering up Bush at White House press conferences, "Jeff Gannon" was doing the GOP's dirty work in attacking Tom Daschle.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason
Feb. 18, 2005 | Long before "Jeff Gannon" became a household pseudonym in the nation's capital, he had earned considerable recognition among the political elites of South Dakota. During that state's closely contested Senate race last year, the Talon News writer -- whose real name is now known to be James Dale Guckert -- dug his claws deep into Tom Daschle, the former Senate minority leader narrowly defeated by Republican John Thune.
In 2004 Republican leaders placed no higher price on any head, besides John Kerry's, than on the Senate Democratic leader's. For years, conservative organizations had attacked Daschle with campaigns that included notorious ads that paired the Army veteran with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The smear efforts damaged Daschle's standing with the state's voters, and as the election grew nearer, Republican blogs and Web sites took up the dirty work. In what has now been exposed as a blatant Republican strategy, the seemingly independent bloggers had in fact been paid by the Thune campaign.
Gannon took up the Republicans' dirty work with great gusto, beginning more than a year before the election, in the summer of 2003. Working with two local South Dakota bloggers, both of whom later turned out to be secretly paid operatives of the Thune campaign, he targeted Daschle and discredited mainstream journalists. Among Gannon's direct hits was an embarrassing story that revealed that the three-term senator and his lobbyist wife, Linda, had applied for a "homestead exemption" on their costly Washington, D.C., residence, claiming it as their primary residence.
Gannon went much further, however, in accusing reporters at the state's most important newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, of shilling for Daschle and, worse still, of colluding with the senator in the intimidation of his political adversaries. Such wild attacks were then played back on the Thune-financed Web logs, which attracted substantial attention in the Senate race and influenced coverage in the South Dakota media. As the National Journal explained in a post-election analysis, the blog assault "opened a new and potentially powerful front in the war over public opinion." The National Journal and local journalists agreed that the blog campaign against Daschle was "crucial." A top Argus Leader editor conceded, "I don't think there's any way to say [the blogs] didn't" affect the paper's coverage.
Daschle's defeat is old news by now, of course. Yet to understand who "Gannon" really was -- and why he obtained such special treatment from Karl Rove's White House communications operation -- one useful exercise may be what intelligence analysts call "walking back the cat." In essence, this means running the movie in reverse slow-motion to see where the suspect came from and what he did along the way.
Looking back at the special role played by Talon and Gannon in the South Dakota Senate campaign may provide clues in the mystery of the male-escort-cum-journalist's extraordinary access to the Bush White House.
The cooperation between the Talon News writer and Daschle's Republican challenger dates back to the early weeks of the South Dakota campaign, when Thune showed up as a guest on "Jeff Gannon's Washington," the writer's Internet radio program on Rightalk.com. It might have seemed unusual for a Midwestern Senate candidate to show up on an Internet radio show in Washington, where he would reach almost no listeners in his home state. But Gannon didn't waste Thune's time. His friendly questioning allowed the Republican candidate to lay out the themes of his campaign to unseat the incumbent: Daschle was an obstructionist opponent of the president, out of touch with the home folks, and married to a rich pharmaceutical lobbyist.
On Feb. 8, 2004, Gannon's interview with Thune was the subject of an article in the Argus-Leader, and immediately got picked up by "DaschlevThune," a Web blog operated by history professor and Republican activist Jon Lauck, and South Dakota Politics.com, run by a lawyer named Jason Van Beek. Lauck promoted a series of Talon News articles by Gannon, which charged that Dave Kranz, the Argus-Leader's chief political correspondent, and a three-decade veteran reporter, was in essence nothing more than a hit man for Daschle.
While promoting Talon and Gannon as credible journalistic sources, Lauck's blog reprinted sensational paragraphs posted by Gannon on the Talon News Web site, urging readers to take special note of the Talon reporter's "quite interesting article" about Daschle's "Sopranos-style" tactics. The story contained no actual evidence of misconduct by either the Democratic senator or the Sioux Falls newspaperman, beyond anonymous quotes that accused them of Mafia-like intimidation of "small business owners" and other beleaguered anti-Daschle dissidents. (The "Sopranos" story, like all of Gannon's other works, has been scrubbed by Talon's Republican owners from their Web site.)
The bloggers promoted dozens of Talon News attacks on Daschle, under the false flag of journalistic independence. They proclaimed themselves the paladins of truth, battling against South Dakota's "liberal media." Nobody in South Dakota would know until months after Nov. 2, when Daschle was so narrowly defeated, that those "independent" bloggers dogging him had been subsidized by the Thune campaign. But there, on the final post-election filings, were the names Lauck and Van Beek, who had been paid $27,000 and $8,000, respectively.
And nobody in South Dakota could know, until now, the true identity and purpose of "Jeff Gannon" and his employers at Talon News.
WHO GAVE PROSTITUTE/GOP PARTISAN PLANT THE ACCESS TO WHITE HOUSE?
"Jeff Gannon's" incredible access
There's evidence he got into White House briefings before he was a "reporter."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Eric Boehlert
(click on link above to full story and included links)
Feb. 17, 2005 | James Guckert's mysterious career as a White House correspondent for Talon News just took another strange twist. And once again, the newest revelation raises the central question: Who broke the rules on Guckert's behalf to give him access to the White House? Despite administration claims that Guckert simply followed established protocol in order to routinely slip inside the White House briefing room, it now appears clear that Guckert, who just months before his 2003 debut as a cub reporter was offering himself up online as a $200 an hour male escort, benefited from extraordinarily preferential treatment, likely granted by someone inside the White House press office.
Thanks to the continued digging by online sleuths, there's now documented evidence that Guckert attended White House briefings as early as February 2003. Guckert, using his alias "Jeff Gannon," once boasted online about asking then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer a question at the Feb. 28, 2003, briefing. The date is significant because in order to receive a White House press pass, Guckert would have needed to prove that he worked for a news organization that, in the words of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, "published regularly," in itself an extraordinarily low threshold. Critics have charged that while Talon News may publish regularly, it boasts a nearly all-volunteer news team that includes not a single person with actual journalism experience. (The team does, though, have quite a bit of experience working on Republican campaigns.) In other words, the outfit is not legitimate or independent, two criteria often used in Washington to receive press credentials.
But what's significant about the February 2003 date is that Talon did not even exist then. The organization was created in late March 2003, and began publishing online in early April 2003. Gannon, a jack of all trades who spent time in the military as well as working at an auto repair shop (not to mention escorting), has already stated publicly that Talon News was his first job in journalism. That means he wasn't working for any other news outlet in February 2003 when he was spotted by C-Span cameras inside the White House briefing room. And that means Guckert was ushered into the White House press room in February 2003 for a briefing despite the fact he was not a journalist.
Whereas it was once suspected that White House press officials in charge of doling out coveted press passes went easy on Guckert, a Republican partisan working for an amateurish news outlet who would routinely ask softball questions, it now appears those same unnamed White House officials simply ignored all established credential standards -- including detailed security guidelines -- and gave Guckert White House access, even though he had no professional standing whatsoever.
For more than a week White House officials have refused to answer any of Salon's questions regarding the credential process used for Guckert's press passes.
Democrats on the Hill are also looking for answers. Last week, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., requested from McClellan all documents related to Guckert's press passes. On Wednesday, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., filed a Freedom of Information request with the Department of Homeland Security, in search of all information related to Guckert's credentials and security clearance to cover the White House. On Wednesday Slaughter noted, "With each new revelation it becomes more and more clear that the relationship between the White House and Jeff Gannon was anything but typical. It is time for this administration to stop the stonewalling and come clean with the American people."
President Bush called on Guckert during a Jan. 26 press conference. "It is a huge deal for Bush to pick on you at a press conferences," says a member of the White House press corps. "There are people in the press room who have covered Bush for four years and haven't had a chance to ask him a question." Ironically, it was Guckert's time in the spotlight on Jan. 26 that triggered his downfall. After asking a loaded, partisan question, in which Guckert mocked Democratic leaders for being "divorced from reality," liberal critics online began digging into his qualifications, Talon's partisan ties, and eventually into Guckert's unusual past. Guckert resigned as Talon White House correspondent on Feb. 9.
The question about credentials remains key. The vast majority of reporters covering the White House have what's called a "hard," or permanent, pass. To obtain one they have to verify they work for a recognized news organization with job responsibilities covering the White House. They have to submit to a lengthy security background check conducted by the FBI, which can take months to complete and requires being photographed and fingerprinted. Journalists also must verify to the White House they already have credentials to cover Capitol Hill. Without them, the White House won't complete a hard pass request.
In late 2003 Guckert applied for a Capitol Hill pass and was denied because Talon, which enjoys close ties to GOPUSA.com, was not deemed to be a legitimate, independent news outlet. That in and of itself should have been a red flag for the White House press office. Yet for nearly two years, it allowed Guckert to circumvent the hard pass system by using a day pass whenever he needed White House access. The day pass requires just a minimal background check. It was designed to be used on a temporary basis, such as for reporters coming in from out of town to cover the White House for a brief period. Guckert, though, with the help of somebody inside the press office, turned the day pass system into his own revolving door. That was when he was at least working for Talon News.
To learn Guckert was waved into the White House for fourth estate briefings even before he was affiliated with any kind of news outlet is startling.
PROSTITUTE/REPORTER IN BUSH'S WHITE HOUSE?
This summary is not available. Please
click here to view the post.
BUSH FAILING VETERANS OF IRAQ WITH PROMISED CARE
War on the cheap. The Bush administration is CUTTING aid to our vets and that is why they are not certifying those that need the help because of the long run disability costs. The only time Bush showed up for his National Guard service while in Alabama (the only time with a RECORD of showing up) was to get his teeth fixed. This son of a bitch is the lowest kind of creep. Uses the system for his own health and for staying OUT of Viet Nam, then refuses the system's care to our veterans in a war he created by lying to get them into it.
Visit the SALON article for the links (it's free, all you have to do is watch a short "day pass" advertisement)
Behind the walls of Ward 54
They're overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatized combat vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mark Benjamin
Feb. 18, 2005 | WASHINGTON -- Before he hanged himself with his bathrobe sash in the psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Spc. Alexis Soto-Ramirez complained to friends about his medical treatment. Soto-Ramirez, 43, had been flown out of Iraq five months before then because of chronic back pain that became excruciating during the war. But doctors were really worried about his mind. They thought he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving with the 544th Military Police Company, a unit of the Puerto Rico National Guard, the kind of unit that saw dirty, face-to-face combat in Iraq.
A copy of Soto-Ramirez's medical records, reviewed by Salon, show that a doctor who treated him in Puerto Rico upon his return from Iraq believed his mental problems were probably caused by the war and that his future was in the Army's hands. "Clearly, the psychiatric symptoms are combat related," a clinical psychologist at Roosevelt Roads Naval Hospital wrote on Nov. 24, 2003. The entry says, "Outcome will depend on adequacy and appropriateness of treatment." Doctors in Puerto Rico sent Soto-Ramirez to Walter Reed in Washington, D.C., to get the best care the Army had to offer. There, he was put in Ward 54, Walter Reed's "lockdown," or inpatient psychiatric ward, where the most troubled patients are supposed to have constant supervision.
But less than a month after leaving Puerto Rico, on Jan. 12, 2004, Soto-Ramirez was found dead, hanging in Ward 54. Army buddies who visited him in the days before his death said Soto-Ramirez was increasingly angry and despondent. "He was real upset with the treatment he was getting," said René Negron, a former Walter Reed psychiatric patient and a friend of Soto-Ramirez's. "He said: 'These people are giving me the runaround ... These people think I'm crazy, and I'm not crazy, Negron. I'm getting more crazy being up here.'
"Those people in Ward 54 were responsible for him. Their responsibility was to have a 24-hour watch on him," Negron said in a telephone interview from his home in Puerto Rico. While Soto-Ramirez's death was by his own hand, Negron and other soldiers say the hospital shares the blame.
In fact, repeated interviews over the course of one year with 14 soldiers who have been treated in Walter Reed's inpatient and outpatient psychiatric wards, and a review of medical records and Army documents, suggest that the Army's top hospital is failing to properly care for many soldiers traumatized by the Iraq war. As the Soto-Ramirez case suggests, inadequate suicide watch is one concern. But the problems run deeper. Psychiatric techniques employed at Walter Reed appear outmoded and ineffective compared with state-of-the-art care as described by civilian doctors. For example, Walter Reed favors group therapy over one-on-one counseling; and the group therapy is mostly administered by a rotating cast of medical students and residents, not full-fledged doctors or veterans. The troops also complain that the Army relies too much on pills; few of the soldiers took all the medication given to them by the hospital.
Perhaps most troubling, the Army seems bent on denying that the stress of war has caused the soldiers' mental trauma in the first place. (There is an economic reason for doing so: Mental problems from combat stress can require the Army to pay disability for years.) Soto-Ramirez's medical records reveal the economical mindset of an Army doctor who evaluated him. "Adequate care and treatment may prevent a claim against the government for PTSD," wrote a psychologist in Puerto Rico before sending him to Walter Reed.
"The Army does not want to get into the mental-health game in a real way to really help people," said Col. Travis Beeson, who was flown to Walter Reed for psychiatric help during a second tour with one of the Army's special operations units in Iraq. "They want to Band-Aid it. They want you out of there as fast as possible, and they don't want to pay for it." Indeed, some psychiatric patients at Walter Reed are given the option of signing a form releasing them from the hospital as long as they give up any future disability payments from the Army. One soldier from Pennsylvania, who was shot five times in the chest and saved by body armor, told me he would do anything to get out of Walter Reed, even relinquish disability pay. "I'll sign anything as soon as I can get my hands on it," he told me several days before being released from the hospital. "I loved the Army. I was obsessed with it. The Army was my life. Fuck them now."
The conditions for traumatized vets at the Army's flagship hospital are particularly disturbing because Walter Reed is supposed to be the best. But leading veterans' advocate and retired Army ranger Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, agrees that when it comes to psychiatric care, Walter Reed doesn't make the grade. "I think that Walter Reed is doing a great job of taking care of those suffering acute battlefield injuries -- the amputees, the burn victims, and those hurt by bullets and bombs," said Robinson, who has spent many hours visiting psychiatric patients at Walter Reed. "But they are failing the psychological needs of the returning veterans."
Walter Reed officials declined requests for interviews, although two spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. In written statements to Salon, Walter Reed said the mental and physical health of patients is the hospital's top priority and described its PTSD treatment regimen as being in line with modern medical standards. The hospital said patients see both "board certified" and "board eligible" psychiatrists, including medical students and residents who "participate in the clinical activities on the ward as part of their training, and as is appropriate for their level of training and needs of the soldiers."
The hospital also cited a recent survey in which 42 out of 45 psychiatric inpatients surveyed, or 94 percent, felt that their care was either outstanding or good. "We are satisfied that there is a very high level of patient satisfaction with their treatment," the statement read. The hospital gave few details about the inpatient survey, such as whether it was anonymous, or whether the patients surveyed were even soldiers who recently fought in Iraq. (Inpatients can include military dependents or soldiers who fought in wars decades ago.)
The high level of satisfaction among inpatients as reported by Walter Reed is completely opposite what I saw and heard while tracking soldiers there over the last year. The soldiers I interviewed invited me to their bedsides in the lockdown ward. They handed over their private medical records. They allowed me to call their buddies, their girlfriends, their mothers. All professed to loving the Army, though some said their trust in the institution had been irrevocably shattered. All said their symptoms either stayed the same or worsened while at Walter Reed; two said they made suicide attempts. While it's true that patients' self-reports about treatment are not always objectively based, the repeated, bitter complaints I heard over the course of more than a year, in combination with conversations with civilian experts, cast serious doubts on Walter Reed's approach to treating PTSD sufferers. It all convinced me that something is seriously amiss at the Army's top hospital.
Politicians and celebrities -- like Dale Earnhardt Jr., ZZ Top and President Bush -- routinely visit the wounded at Walter Reed; but dignitaries don't come to Ward 54. When I first visited the lockdown unit in February 2004, it held around 35 patients, who slept as many as six patients to a room. Most patients stay in lockdown for just a few days, then are moved to rooms in hotel-like facilities to get treatment at the Walter Reed outpatient clinic, known as Ward 53. Within the lockdown unit, doors were kept open so that the patients who padded around the linoleum floors in Army-issued slippers, pajamas and robes could be observed at all times. Patients in various states of consciousness, from alert to near catatonic, sat around a television in a communal room. Some wore bandages from what other soldiers said were self-inflicted wounds. Patients were not allowed near the twin electric doors to Ward 54; these open by a buzzer from the nurses' station, staffed 24 hours a day.
Soldiers who have stayed in the lockdown unit say they were heavily medicated the entire time. Some remember hearing screaming, or patients being subdued on stretchers after shock therapy. "Inpatient can be a traumatic experience for anyone," said Lt. Julian P. Goodrum, 34, who was in Ward 54 last February after serving in Iraq. Records show Goodrum was held in the ward 13 days longer than needed while the Army decided whether to charge him as absent without leave when, after getting back from Iraq, he was earlier hospitalized by a civilian psychiatrist. He is fighting those charges.
The soldiers told me about their textbook symptoms of PTSD: sudden, ferocious bouts of rage, utter detachment, anxiety attacks accompanied by shortness of breath, and increased perspiration and rapid eye movement. They complained of relentless insomnia, racing thoughts, self-loathing, blackouts, hallucinations and the constant reliving of war through flashbacks by day and nightmares at night. Some described vivid fantasies of violence toward the Army brass in charge of patients there -- slicing their throats, throwing them out windows or shooting them. One psychiatric outpatient, who watched as his best friend was blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq, said: "It does not matter how hardcore you are. Once you go to that war and you start to see dead bodies -- you see an arm over here, you see guts over there. There is no way you are ever going to erase that."
When it is done right, PTSD treatment is a delicate task. Trust is crucial, and medications are carefully administered and monitored. Most critical is getting patients to control the powerful and destructive emotions that can follow a traumatic event like fighting a war. What bewildered the soldiers at Walter Reed, though, was that the Army seemed determined to downplay their war trauma and search for other causes for their mental health problems. In group therapy, sessions often focused more on family relationships and childhood experiences than war, the soldiers said. One outpatient soldier was so angered about this avoidance of the topic of war, he threw a chair during group therapy. Doctors promptly sent him to lockdown.
"When you get [to Walter Reed], they analyze you, break you down, and try to find anything wrong with you before you got in" the Army, said Spc. Josh Sanders, in a telephone conversation from his home in Lovington, Ill. "They started asking me questions about my mom and my dad getting divorced. That was the last thing on my mind when I'm thinking about people getting fragged and burned bodies being pulled out of vehicles," said Sanders. "They asked me if I missed my wife. Well, shit yeah, I missed my wife. That is not the fucking problem here. Did you ever put your foot through a 5-year-old's skull?"
Sanders, 25, served in Iraq with the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, from May until December 2003. I met him in the summer of 2004 while he was getting treatment at Walter Reed in the outpatient clinic. Sanders had been evacuated from Baghdad because of the toll the war had taken on his mind. His complaints about Walter Reed were sadly typical. "Nobody hears about this. Nobody hears about what really happens when you are there getting the 'premier' medical treatment," Sanders said.
Dr. Herbert Hendin, medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention spent many years studying and treating veterans with PTSD after the Vietnam War. In discussing their treatment, Hendin said, "What veterans need is not simply to be able to talk about their combat experiences but to be able to talk about them with someone who understands the context." Hendin said a combat veteran "needs to feel an empathic connection with the treating professional." But to the soldiers, the atmosphere in the Walter Reed psychiatric units wasn't conducive to feeling understood, or getting better.
In Ward 54, recent combat veterans are mixed with other soldiers and even civilians suffering a wide range of mental problems. For them, coming back from Iraq and being treated alongside soldiers with schizophrenia, for example, or maybe even soldiers' dependents with schizophrenia, makes them feel "crazy," as opposed to having a natural reaction to combat stress. "If you are a hard-charging person, or somebody who tries to do things right, you are already taking a huge hit to your ego by being put in there," Beeson, the Army colonel, told me. One of the two Walter Reed officials who spoke on condition of anonymity agreed that recent combat vets shouldn't be lumped in with other psychiatric patients. Those soldiers "need to have a specialized unit," the official said. "They are labeled goofy and crazy, and they are not crazy."
Beeson served in Iraq with the Army's Civil Affairs Command, part of the Army's special-operations units. He is a 47-year-old reservist with 26 years of service under his belt, a wiry man grizzled by war. Beeson says his PTSD manifested during his second tour in Iraq. He was flown to Walter Reed. When I first met him in August 2004, heavy medication made him speak in slow, halting sentences like a drunk with a stutter. "A lot of the therapy was counterproductive to me," Beeson said in a telephone interview from his home in Arkansas, after getting out of Walter Reed. "It was a very paranoia-inducing place. If I was not paranoid when I got there, I was paranoid when I left ... To me, they need to figure out if they are going to treat people for war or be a regular hospital."
Josh Sanders, like the other soldiers I spent time with, also believes he is worse off because of his treatment at Walter Reed. "I don't trust anybody now ... I wish people could understand," he said. Sanders made two suicide attempts while under outpatient care at Ward 53. Hospital officials would not answer questions about the prevalence of suicide attempts at Walter Reed, but said two incidents that occurred there in January, one apparent fatal overdose and another suicide attempt, are under investigation. Two years ago, the case of Army Master Sgt. James Curtis Coons, also an outpatient, raised serious questions about how Walter Reed handles suicidal patients -- questions that persist today.
Coons was evacuated to Walter Reed from Kuwait on June 29, 2003, after swallowing sleeping pills in an apparent suicide attempt several days earlier. When he arrived at Walter Reed, he wasn't sent to the lockdown unit but to a room in one of the hotel-like facilities on campus. Coons, 36, promptly hanged himself. And although he had a doctor's appointment the next day, Walter Reed officials failed to look for Coons until July 4, so his body hung and decomposed until then. "A soldier coming in from a war zone does not show up for a doctor's appointment and they did not even check on him?" his mother, Carol Coons, said in a telephone interview from her home in Texas. "Until this is taken seriously, this is going to continue on. A psychiatric problem among those coming home from these war zones is just as deadly as a bullet." In a statement, the hospital said it has recently "enacted more stringent policies and procedures to strengthen outpatient soldier accountability"; for example, a Walter Reed staff member is now sent to check on patients who don't show up for appointments, the hospital said.
It's unclear how many combat vets are in need of PTSD treatment. But data from the Department of Veterans Affairs and a published Army study show at least one out of every six soldiers coming back from Iraq may have PTSD. (Many Army bases have psychiatric clinics, but some of the most serious cases go to Walter Reed.) Congress is responding with a flurry of bills that might help keep track of and treat the mental toll Operation Iraqi Freedom is taking on U.S. troops. Illinois Democrat Rep. Lane Evans' bill calls on the military to use state-of-the-art methods to treat psychological injuries. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., would require the Pentagon to send reports to Congress on PTSD among troops because there is so little information on psychological injury rates.
Normally, soldiers discharged from the Army seek medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is widely understood to do a superior job at treating soldiers with PTSD. Because of the V.A.'s good track record, Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center is asking Congress to put the V.A. in charge of treating soldiers with PTSD even before they leave the Army. Four of the soldiers I interviewed who left Walter Reed and later got treatment at the V.A. all praised the care they received there. They finally got a chance to talk one-on-one with other veterans about war, they said. Their medications were pared down, and their disability pay has been increased.
Indeed, the Army's system for allocating disability pay to traumatized vets is another source of their frustration and anger. An Army panel at Walter Reed, called the Physical Evaluation Board, decides what percentage of income each soldier should get from the military to compensate him if he is too ill to serve any longer. The doctors decide whether wounds are combat related, and then the board decides how much disability the Army will pay. The board's decision is critical for soldiers trying to make a living after leaving the Army with what can be a debilitating mental condition. Fighting with the hospital about disability pay is a source of considerable stress just as these soldiers are trying to heal their minds.
Some of the soldiers are fighting decisions by the board at Walter Reed. Out of the 14 soldiers interviewed, five have left Walter Reed. Three ended up getting zero percent of their income as disability pay, despite what they said was serious mental stress that made it more difficult or impossible to work. Even those who got a third of their pay still had trouble making ends meet. (In every case I followed, the Department of Veterans Affairs made a later determination that the soldiers deserved more. The soldiers can choose to take the higher percentage of pay from the V.A., but in some cases if they do so, they must pay back what they have received so far from the Army.)
After 26 years of service, the Army gave Col. Beeson, from the Army's Civil Affairs Command, zero percent of his income as disability pay for his mental wounds. Luckily, he still gets some retirement pay because of his many years of service, but he says he struggles with his injuries every day. He is appealing Walter Reed's decision.
Josh Sanders, from the 1st Armored Division, got 30 percent from the Army, but the Army also said his problems did not come from the war. "When I was over there [at Walter Reed] the PEB [Physical Evaluation Board] process was degrading. It is like pulling money from an insurance company. All my paperwork says 'non-service connected.' If it is non-service connected, then why am I getting 30 percent?" he asked. The V.A. recently decided to give him 70 percent disability.
One Army reservist I spent time with tried to return to his day job as a policeman after the war, but his mental state prohibited him from carrying a gun. The reservist cannot go back to policing, but since the Army decided his mental problems did not come from the war, the small percentage of disability pay he got is not enough to make ends meet, he said. He's hoping the V.A. will give him more.
René Negron, the former soldier who visited Soto-Ramirez before the suicide, was given 30 percent of his pay until February 2006, when he'll be reevaluated. Negron was a psychiatric patient at Walter Reed after 11 months in Iraq. At one point he checked himself into the emergency room there because he thought he might kill himself. But the Physical Evaluation Board determined that "the soldier's retirement is not based on disability from injury or disease received in the line of duty," according to a copy of Negron's evaluation board proceedings. "This disability did not result from a combat-related injury."
Negron, 48, taught hair care and cosmetology before serving in Iraq as an Army specialist with the Puerto Rico National Guard. Now, he says his debilitated mental state after the war has left him unable to work. He drives two hours each way for mental health treatment at a V.A. medical center. "You think I can live on $700 a month?" Negron asked. "I can't work. My wife is suffering. She can't leave me alone. Sometimes I feel suicidal. Sometimes I hear voices. Sometimes I see lights. I feel like I'm being shot at. They sent me home like that. I've been dealing with this since I got back," Negron said. "I left here in good condition. If I have a mental condition, they have to deal with it ... I did my part. Why can't they do their part?"
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon based in Washington, D.C.
Visit the SALON article for the links (it's free, all you have to do is watch a short "day pass" advertisement)
Behind the walls of Ward 54
They're overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatized combat vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mark Benjamin
Feb. 18, 2005 | WASHINGTON -- Before he hanged himself with his bathrobe sash in the psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Spc. Alexis Soto-Ramirez complained to friends about his medical treatment. Soto-Ramirez, 43, had been flown out of Iraq five months before then because of chronic back pain that became excruciating during the war. But doctors were really worried about his mind. They thought he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving with the 544th Military Police Company, a unit of the Puerto Rico National Guard, the kind of unit that saw dirty, face-to-face combat in Iraq.
A copy of Soto-Ramirez's medical records, reviewed by Salon, show that a doctor who treated him in Puerto Rico upon his return from Iraq believed his mental problems were probably caused by the war and that his future was in the Army's hands. "Clearly, the psychiatric symptoms are combat related," a clinical psychologist at Roosevelt Roads Naval Hospital wrote on Nov. 24, 2003. The entry says, "Outcome will depend on adequacy and appropriateness of treatment." Doctors in Puerto Rico sent Soto-Ramirez to Walter Reed in Washington, D.C., to get the best care the Army had to offer. There, he was put in Ward 54, Walter Reed's "lockdown," or inpatient psychiatric ward, where the most troubled patients are supposed to have constant supervision.
But less than a month after leaving Puerto Rico, on Jan. 12, 2004, Soto-Ramirez was found dead, hanging in Ward 54. Army buddies who visited him in the days before his death said Soto-Ramirez was increasingly angry and despondent. "He was real upset with the treatment he was getting," said René Negron, a former Walter Reed psychiatric patient and a friend of Soto-Ramirez's. "He said: 'These people are giving me the runaround ... These people think I'm crazy, and I'm not crazy, Negron. I'm getting more crazy being up here.'
"Those people in Ward 54 were responsible for him. Their responsibility was to have a 24-hour watch on him," Negron said in a telephone interview from his home in Puerto Rico. While Soto-Ramirez's death was by his own hand, Negron and other soldiers say the hospital shares the blame.
In fact, repeated interviews over the course of one year with 14 soldiers who have been treated in Walter Reed's inpatient and outpatient psychiatric wards, and a review of medical records and Army documents, suggest that the Army's top hospital is failing to properly care for many soldiers traumatized by the Iraq war. As the Soto-Ramirez case suggests, inadequate suicide watch is one concern. But the problems run deeper. Psychiatric techniques employed at Walter Reed appear outmoded and ineffective compared with state-of-the-art care as described by civilian doctors. For example, Walter Reed favors group therapy over one-on-one counseling; and the group therapy is mostly administered by a rotating cast of medical students and residents, not full-fledged doctors or veterans. The troops also complain that the Army relies too much on pills; few of the soldiers took all the medication given to them by the hospital.
Perhaps most troubling, the Army seems bent on denying that the stress of war has caused the soldiers' mental trauma in the first place. (There is an economic reason for doing so: Mental problems from combat stress can require the Army to pay disability for years.) Soto-Ramirez's medical records reveal the economical mindset of an Army doctor who evaluated him. "Adequate care and treatment may prevent a claim against the government for PTSD," wrote a psychologist in Puerto Rico before sending him to Walter Reed.
"The Army does not want to get into the mental-health game in a real way to really help people," said Col. Travis Beeson, who was flown to Walter Reed for psychiatric help during a second tour with one of the Army's special operations units in Iraq. "They want to Band-Aid it. They want you out of there as fast as possible, and they don't want to pay for it." Indeed, some psychiatric patients at Walter Reed are given the option of signing a form releasing them from the hospital as long as they give up any future disability payments from the Army. One soldier from Pennsylvania, who was shot five times in the chest and saved by body armor, told me he would do anything to get out of Walter Reed, even relinquish disability pay. "I'll sign anything as soon as I can get my hands on it," he told me several days before being released from the hospital. "I loved the Army. I was obsessed with it. The Army was my life. Fuck them now."
The conditions for traumatized vets at the Army's flagship hospital are particularly disturbing because Walter Reed is supposed to be the best. But leading veterans' advocate and retired Army ranger Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, agrees that when it comes to psychiatric care, Walter Reed doesn't make the grade. "I think that Walter Reed is doing a great job of taking care of those suffering acute battlefield injuries -- the amputees, the burn victims, and those hurt by bullets and bombs," said Robinson, who has spent many hours visiting psychiatric patients at Walter Reed. "But they are failing the psychological needs of the returning veterans."
Walter Reed officials declined requests for interviews, although two spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. In written statements to Salon, Walter Reed said the mental and physical health of patients is the hospital's top priority and described its PTSD treatment regimen as being in line with modern medical standards. The hospital said patients see both "board certified" and "board eligible" psychiatrists, including medical students and residents who "participate in the clinical activities on the ward as part of their training, and as is appropriate for their level of training and needs of the soldiers."
The hospital also cited a recent survey in which 42 out of 45 psychiatric inpatients surveyed, or 94 percent, felt that their care was either outstanding or good. "We are satisfied that there is a very high level of patient satisfaction with their treatment," the statement read. The hospital gave few details about the inpatient survey, such as whether it was anonymous, or whether the patients surveyed were even soldiers who recently fought in Iraq. (Inpatients can include military dependents or soldiers who fought in wars decades ago.)
The high level of satisfaction among inpatients as reported by Walter Reed is completely opposite what I saw and heard while tracking soldiers there over the last year. The soldiers I interviewed invited me to their bedsides in the lockdown ward. They handed over their private medical records. They allowed me to call their buddies, their girlfriends, their mothers. All professed to loving the Army, though some said their trust in the institution had been irrevocably shattered. All said their symptoms either stayed the same or worsened while at Walter Reed; two said they made suicide attempts. While it's true that patients' self-reports about treatment are not always objectively based, the repeated, bitter complaints I heard over the course of more than a year, in combination with conversations with civilian experts, cast serious doubts on Walter Reed's approach to treating PTSD sufferers. It all convinced me that something is seriously amiss at the Army's top hospital.
Politicians and celebrities -- like Dale Earnhardt Jr., ZZ Top and President Bush -- routinely visit the wounded at Walter Reed; but dignitaries don't come to Ward 54. When I first visited the lockdown unit in February 2004, it held around 35 patients, who slept as many as six patients to a room. Most patients stay in lockdown for just a few days, then are moved to rooms in hotel-like facilities to get treatment at the Walter Reed outpatient clinic, known as Ward 53. Within the lockdown unit, doors were kept open so that the patients who padded around the linoleum floors in Army-issued slippers, pajamas and robes could be observed at all times. Patients in various states of consciousness, from alert to near catatonic, sat around a television in a communal room. Some wore bandages from what other soldiers said were self-inflicted wounds. Patients were not allowed near the twin electric doors to Ward 54; these open by a buzzer from the nurses' station, staffed 24 hours a day.
Soldiers who have stayed in the lockdown unit say they were heavily medicated the entire time. Some remember hearing screaming, or patients being subdued on stretchers after shock therapy. "Inpatient can be a traumatic experience for anyone," said Lt. Julian P. Goodrum, 34, who was in Ward 54 last February after serving in Iraq. Records show Goodrum was held in the ward 13 days longer than needed while the Army decided whether to charge him as absent without leave when, after getting back from Iraq, he was earlier hospitalized by a civilian psychiatrist. He is fighting those charges.
The soldiers told me about their textbook symptoms of PTSD: sudden, ferocious bouts of rage, utter detachment, anxiety attacks accompanied by shortness of breath, and increased perspiration and rapid eye movement. They complained of relentless insomnia, racing thoughts, self-loathing, blackouts, hallucinations and the constant reliving of war through flashbacks by day and nightmares at night. Some described vivid fantasies of violence toward the Army brass in charge of patients there -- slicing their throats, throwing them out windows or shooting them. One psychiatric outpatient, who watched as his best friend was blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq, said: "It does not matter how hardcore you are. Once you go to that war and you start to see dead bodies -- you see an arm over here, you see guts over there. There is no way you are ever going to erase that."
When it is done right, PTSD treatment is a delicate task. Trust is crucial, and medications are carefully administered and monitored. Most critical is getting patients to control the powerful and destructive emotions that can follow a traumatic event like fighting a war. What bewildered the soldiers at Walter Reed, though, was that the Army seemed determined to downplay their war trauma and search for other causes for their mental health problems. In group therapy, sessions often focused more on family relationships and childhood experiences than war, the soldiers said. One outpatient soldier was so angered about this avoidance of the topic of war, he threw a chair during group therapy. Doctors promptly sent him to lockdown.
"When you get [to Walter Reed], they analyze you, break you down, and try to find anything wrong with you before you got in" the Army, said Spc. Josh Sanders, in a telephone conversation from his home in Lovington, Ill. "They started asking me questions about my mom and my dad getting divorced. That was the last thing on my mind when I'm thinking about people getting fragged and burned bodies being pulled out of vehicles," said Sanders. "They asked me if I missed my wife. Well, shit yeah, I missed my wife. That is not the fucking problem here. Did you ever put your foot through a 5-year-old's skull?"
Sanders, 25, served in Iraq with the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, from May until December 2003. I met him in the summer of 2004 while he was getting treatment at Walter Reed in the outpatient clinic. Sanders had been evacuated from Baghdad because of the toll the war had taken on his mind. His complaints about Walter Reed were sadly typical. "Nobody hears about this. Nobody hears about what really happens when you are there getting the 'premier' medical treatment," Sanders said.
Dr. Herbert Hendin, medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention spent many years studying and treating veterans with PTSD after the Vietnam War. In discussing their treatment, Hendin said, "What veterans need is not simply to be able to talk about their combat experiences but to be able to talk about them with someone who understands the context." Hendin said a combat veteran "needs to feel an empathic connection with the treating professional." But to the soldiers, the atmosphere in the Walter Reed psychiatric units wasn't conducive to feeling understood, or getting better.
In Ward 54, recent combat veterans are mixed with other soldiers and even civilians suffering a wide range of mental problems. For them, coming back from Iraq and being treated alongside soldiers with schizophrenia, for example, or maybe even soldiers' dependents with schizophrenia, makes them feel "crazy," as opposed to having a natural reaction to combat stress. "If you are a hard-charging person, or somebody who tries to do things right, you are already taking a huge hit to your ego by being put in there," Beeson, the Army colonel, told me. One of the two Walter Reed officials who spoke on condition of anonymity agreed that recent combat vets shouldn't be lumped in with other psychiatric patients. Those soldiers "need to have a specialized unit," the official said. "They are labeled goofy and crazy, and they are not crazy."
Beeson served in Iraq with the Army's Civil Affairs Command, part of the Army's special-operations units. He is a 47-year-old reservist with 26 years of service under his belt, a wiry man grizzled by war. Beeson says his PTSD manifested during his second tour in Iraq. He was flown to Walter Reed. When I first met him in August 2004, heavy medication made him speak in slow, halting sentences like a drunk with a stutter. "A lot of the therapy was counterproductive to me," Beeson said in a telephone interview from his home in Arkansas, after getting out of Walter Reed. "It was a very paranoia-inducing place. If I was not paranoid when I got there, I was paranoid when I left ... To me, they need to figure out if they are going to treat people for war or be a regular hospital."
Josh Sanders, like the other soldiers I spent time with, also believes he is worse off because of his treatment at Walter Reed. "I don't trust anybody now ... I wish people could understand," he said. Sanders made two suicide attempts while under outpatient care at Ward 53. Hospital officials would not answer questions about the prevalence of suicide attempts at Walter Reed, but said two incidents that occurred there in January, one apparent fatal overdose and another suicide attempt, are under investigation. Two years ago, the case of Army Master Sgt. James Curtis Coons, also an outpatient, raised serious questions about how Walter Reed handles suicidal patients -- questions that persist today.
Coons was evacuated to Walter Reed from Kuwait on June 29, 2003, after swallowing sleeping pills in an apparent suicide attempt several days earlier. When he arrived at Walter Reed, he wasn't sent to the lockdown unit but to a room in one of the hotel-like facilities on campus. Coons, 36, promptly hanged himself. And although he had a doctor's appointment the next day, Walter Reed officials failed to look for Coons until July 4, so his body hung and decomposed until then. "A soldier coming in from a war zone does not show up for a doctor's appointment and they did not even check on him?" his mother, Carol Coons, said in a telephone interview from her home in Texas. "Until this is taken seriously, this is going to continue on. A psychiatric problem among those coming home from these war zones is just as deadly as a bullet." In a statement, the hospital said it has recently "enacted more stringent policies and procedures to strengthen outpatient soldier accountability"; for example, a Walter Reed staff member is now sent to check on patients who don't show up for appointments, the hospital said.
It's unclear how many combat vets are in need of PTSD treatment. But data from the Department of Veterans Affairs and a published Army study show at least one out of every six soldiers coming back from Iraq may have PTSD. (Many Army bases have psychiatric clinics, but some of the most serious cases go to Walter Reed.) Congress is responding with a flurry of bills that might help keep track of and treat the mental toll Operation Iraqi Freedom is taking on U.S. troops. Illinois Democrat Rep. Lane Evans' bill calls on the military to use state-of-the-art methods to treat psychological injuries. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., would require the Pentagon to send reports to Congress on PTSD among troops because there is so little information on psychological injury rates.
Normally, soldiers discharged from the Army seek medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is widely understood to do a superior job at treating soldiers with PTSD. Because of the V.A.'s good track record, Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center is asking Congress to put the V.A. in charge of treating soldiers with PTSD even before they leave the Army. Four of the soldiers I interviewed who left Walter Reed and later got treatment at the V.A. all praised the care they received there. They finally got a chance to talk one-on-one with other veterans about war, they said. Their medications were pared down, and their disability pay has been increased.
Indeed, the Army's system for allocating disability pay to traumatized vets is another source of their frustration and anger. An Army panel at Walter Reed, called the Physical Evaluation Board, decides what percentage of income each soldier should get from the military to compensate him if he is too ill to serve any longer. The doctors decide whether wounds are combat related, and then the board decides how much disability the Army will pay. The board's decision is critical for soldiers trying to make a living after leaving the Army with what can be a debilitating mental condition. Fighting with the hospital about disability pay is a source of considerable stress just as these soldiers are trying to heal their minds.
Some of the soldiers are fighting decisions by the board at Walter Reed. Out of the 14 soldiers interviewed, five have left Walter Reed. Three ended up getting zero percent of their income as disability pay, despite what they said was serious mental stress that made it more difficult or impossible to work. Even those who got a third of their pay still had trouble making ends meet. (In every case I followed, the Department of Veterans Affairs made a later determination that the soldiers deserved more. The soldiers can choose to take the higher percentage of pay from the V.A., but in some cases if they do so, they must pay back what they have received so far from the Army.)
After 26 years of service, the Army gave Col. Beeson, from the Army's Civil Affairs Command, zero percent of his income as disability pay for his mental wounds. Luckily, he still gets some retirement pay because of his many years of service, but he says he struggles with his injuries every day. He is appealing Walter Reed's decision.
Josh Sanders, from the 1st Armored Division, got 30 percent from the Army, but the Army also said his problems did not come from the war. "When I was over there [at Walter Reed] the PEB [Physical Evaluation Board] process was degrading. It is like pulling money from an insurance company. All my paperwork says 'non-service connected.' If it is non-service connected, then why am I getting 30 percent?" he asked. The V.A. recently decided to give him 70 percent disability.
One Army reservist I spent time with tried to return to his day job as a policeman after the war, but his mental state prohibited him from carrying a gun. The reservist cannot go back to policing, but since the Army decided his mental problems did not come from the war, the small percentage of disability pay he got is not enough to make ends meet, he said. He's hoping the V.A. will give him more.
René Negron, the former soldier who visited Soto-Ramirez before the suicide, was given 30 percent of his pay until February 2006, when he'll be reevaluated. Negron was a psychiatric patient at Walter Reed after 11 months in Iraq. At one point he checked himself into the emergency room there because he thought he might kill himself. But the Physical Evaluation Board determined that "the soldier's retirement is not based on disability from injury or disease received in the line of duty," according to a copy of Negron's evaluation board proceedings. "This disability did not result from a combat-related injury."
Negron, 48, taught hair care and cosmetology before serving in Iraq as an Army specialist with the Puerto Rico National Guard. Now, he says his debilitated mental state after the war has left him unable to work. He drives two hours each way for mental health treatment at a V.A. medical center. "You think I can live on $700 a month?" Negron asked. "I can't work. My wife is suffering. She can't leave me alone. Sometimes I feel suicidal. Sometimes I hear voices. Sometimes I see lights. I feel like I'm being shot at. They sent me home like that. I've been dealing with this since I got back," Negron said. "I left here in good condition. If I have a mental condition, they have to deal with it ... I did my part. Why can't they do their part?"
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon based in Washington, D.C.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)