PTSD Continues as Veteran Bashing Grows

by Michael Leon

As the political fallout continues over Allen Breed's AP hit job published over the weekend asserting that U.S. veterans and reformist DVA elements effectively colluding to commit widespread fraud, we note that blaming veterans for illness and injury has a long tradition.

There is a wide political coalition of forces in American politics of several parties who are proficient at waving the flag and giving lip service to our veterans, while simultaneously shafting these very same veterans, even going to far as to bad mouth and dishonor them explicitly.

This obscene veteran-bashing tradition applies emphatically to Vietnam War-era veterans, many of whom U.S. Census enumerators count this year as they encounter them with non-permanent residences, living in non-sheltered areas, i.e., homeless.

To put it a different way, membership in the Republican and Democratic parties means nothing when it comes to veterans' advocacy. A Texas libertarian like Tom Dillman of the Veterans Today's community supports veterans every bit as much as our lefties here, though we agree about little else.

Veterans Today and mal contends will have more on this story in the following days.

[VT Senior Editor and General Manager's Note: Veterans Today's managing editor and staff writer, Mike Leon, broke the story on Wisconsin Navy veteran Keith Roberts and has done much of the original reporting identifying the nexus of veterans, the U.S. Attorneys Scandal and ideological antipathy toward delivering benefits to veterans generally. Leon says, "Roberts is the tip of a very deep iceberg composed of some cold characters, one of those characters is Renée L. Szybala, the Bush administration's national DVA Director of Compensation and Pension Services during the DVA targeting of Roberts." Szybala is number two at the U.S. VA Office of General Counsel (OGC) in charge of the Ethics office. Mike Bailey, Veterans Today staff writer, veteran of the Vietnam War Era, Gulf War One, U.S. Army, Infantry, SSG, and Operation Desert Storm Medical volunteer Edgewood Arsenal 1974 (Cold War Experiments), has reportedly told a VT colleague that he promised not to drop dead after hearing that Szybala is still at the VA and is number two at OGC Ethics.]

Paul Sullivan's people over at Veterans for Common Sense have a piece knocking down Allen Breed's AP article and it is printed below in its entirety.

Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) was formed in August 2002 as a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization by war veterans who believe that we, the people of the United States of America, are most secure when our country is free, strong, and responsibly engaged with the world. Our mission, based on the pragmatic ideals of the American patriot Thomas Paine, is to raise the unique and powerful voices of veterans so that our military, veterans, freedom, and national security are protected and enhanced, for ourselves and for future generations.

PTSD Is Real, PTSD Fraud Is Not
Written by VCS
May 3, 2010, Washington, DC (VCS) - Last weekend, the Associated Press printed an incomplete and inaccurate article about veterans who file disability claims against the Veterans Affairs Department (VA) for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The AP wrote, “The problem: The [VA claims] system is dysfunctional, an open invitation to fraud. And the VA has proposed changes that could make deception even easier.”The AP is wrong, and VCS asked AP to correct the story.

Here are two very important facts the AP overlooked. If AP had included these two facts, then readers would understand more about VA and veterans suffering with PTSD after deploying to the brutal Iraq and Afghanistan wars, sometimes two or three times.

Fact Number One. There is no widespread fraud problem at VA. Out of more than one million claims per year, less than a score are ever investigated for fraud.Furthermore, in November 2005, VA auditors randomly selected 2,100 PTSD claims. After an exhaustive investigation, VA found zero cases of fraud. VA has extensive methods to prevent fraud, contrary to AP's baseless assertion.

VA’s investigation began when a reporter at the Chicago Sun Times observed that VA pays different average amounts in disability benefits based on a state-by-state comparison. The true culprit: poor leadership, staff shortages, and a lack of consistent training. VA Secretary Shinseki is taking bold steps to address these challenges, and he has broad support among veterans’ groups.

A few people opposed to healthcare and benefits for our veterans have attacked PTSD in the past. VA Watchdog wrote an op-ed about this, and Boston Review published a news article.

The AP article was a disservice to veterans as it may perpetuate stereotypes of veterans with PTSD as frauds, when the science shows they are not. At VCS we encourage our veterans with PTSD symptoms to seek care from VA. They may have to wait and wade through red tape, yet we are working hard to fix that, too.

Fact Number Two. The standards for reviewing PTSD claims won’t be “loosened” as AP asserted without attribution.

VA and independent scientists overwhelmingly agree, the diagnosis of PTSD is very real. Our goal at VCS is for the scientific evidence to match VA’s rules for obtaining disability benefits and healthcare.

Here’s what independent scientists found. In 2007 the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Science reviewed scores of peer-reviewed and published scientific studies and validated PTSD. In VCS July 2007 Congressional Testimony describing how the previous Administration fought against PTSD healthcare and benefits for our veterans.

PTSD is a very real and very serious problem increasing in scope the longer the current wars continue. The scientific challenges understanding PTSD are similar to the many years scientists and VA took to recognize disabilities associated with Agent Orange / dioxin poisoning among Vietnam War veterans. Science is now catching up.

This important regulatory victory for veterans, based on decades of peer-reviewed, published scientific research, represents a bold, pro-veteran improvement by VA Secretary Erik Shinseki to open the doors for benefits and treatment to hundreds of thousands of deserving veterans suffering years or decades with PTSD who earned and who need VA assistance.

In our view, PTSD is real, and charges of PTSD fraud are not.

Dick Cheney Stays on Point

Update: Not Even Chuck Norris Can Save the GOP

Dick Cheney is competing with Rush and Newt as the leader of the new GOP.

We wish him luck.

Maureen Dowd and Juan Cole analyse Cheney's macabre machinations that apparently will not stop ever. From Cole:

This week's news is about the grand old pit bull's struggle to continue to define his own party. Cheney emerged last Friday to warn on a North Dakota radio program that it would be a mistake for the Republican Party to moderate its message. (Does that mean it is now radical?) Then on Sunday Cheney told Bob Schieffer of 'Face the Nation' that it was a mistake to stop using waterboarding and other forms of extreme interrogation, and that they did not constitute torture. He also poked fun at Colin Powell, questioning his credentials as a Republican and expressing a preference for the waspish Limbaugh as the party's leader.

Stephen Walt's 'The threatmonger's handbook'

From Walt' s How to Scare Your Fellow Citizens for Fun and Profit.

One reason Americans exaggerate security fears is the existence of an extensive cottage industry of professional threatmongers, who deploy a well-honed array of arguments to convince us that we are in fact in grave danger. (The United States is hardly the only country that does this, of course, but the phenomenon is more evident here because its overall strategic position is so favorable). Debunking these claims is easier once you know the basics, so I hereby offer as a public service.

Does Iran Have Right to Self-Defense

Update: Robert Dreyfuss: We aren't going to war with Tehran.

Iran is an authoritarian nightmare, like many of America's other allies in the region. But is a country developing weapons to protect itself against aggressors really that outrageous?

The neocons used to believe that is was not so outrageous.

From Norman Finkelstein:

In 2000, leading neoconservatives Robert Kagan and William Kristol edited a volume of foreign policy analyses titled Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (Encounter Books). The chapter on Iran was written by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA analyst on the Middle East. Here’s what he said:

"Tehran certainly wants nuclear weapons; and its reasoning is not illogical. Iran was gassed into surrender in the first Persian Gulf War; Pakistan, Iran’s ever more radicalized Sunni neighbor to the southeast, has nuclear weapons; Saddam Hussein, with his Scuds and his weapons-of-mass-destruction ambitions, is next door; Saudi Arabia, Iran’s most ardent and reviled religious rival, has long-range missiles; Russia, historically one of Iran’s most feared neighbors, is once again trying to reassert its dominions I the neighboring Caucasus; and Israel could, of course blow the Islamic Republic to bits. Having been vanquished by a technologically superior Iraq at a cost of at least a half-million men, Iran knows very well the consequences of having insufficient deterrence. And the Iranians possess the essential factor to make deterrence work: sanity. Tehran or Isfahan in ashes would destroy the Persian soul, about which even the most hard-line cleric cares deeply. As long as the Iranians belie that either the U.S. or Israel or somebody else in the region might retaliate with nuclear weapons, they won’t do something stupid.

"A nuclear-armed Islamic Republic would of course check, if not checkmate, the United States’ maneuvering room in the Persian Gulf. We would no doubt think several times about responding to Iranian terrorism or military action if Tehran had the bomb and a missile to deliver it. During the lead-up to the second Gulf War, ruling clerical circles in Tehran and Qom were abuzz with the debate about nuclear weapons. The mullahs…agreed: if Saddam Hussein had had nuclear weapons, the Americans would not have challenged him. For the “left” and the “right,” this weaponry is the ultimate guarantee of Iran’s defense, its revolution, and its independence as a regional great power. (pp. 138-39)"

Clinton Supporter and DNC Delegate Debra Bartoshevich: Morinic McCain Supporter

Update: See Traitor, tool or token trick? Questionable former Clinton delegate Debra Bartoshevich prefers identity politics to issues by Meg White

Update: At the state Democratic Party convention, party members, including Clinton supporters, unanimously passed a resolution asking the national party not to seat Bartoshevich at the Denver convention. (Wisconsin Democratic Chair) Wineke spoke in favor of the resolution.

Caught this beauty in Blogging Blue:

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

... (D)isaffected Hillary Clinton supporter Debra Bartoshevich - a delegate to the DNC National Convention - is planning on voting for Senator John McCain in November:

She said she planned to vote for Clinton at the convention, but in an Obama-McCain match-up in November. ['I will not be voting for Obama. I will cast my vote for John McCain,' said Bartoshevich: 'I just feel you need to have somebody who has experience with foreign matters.']

Hey Debra, why not write in George W. Bush? He's had eight years of "experience with foreign matters." Ahhhhhhhhh.

Debra Bartoshevich. Who is this new McCain supporter? And how does someone this idiotic get to be a delegate?

The Neocons Meet Their Match in Musharraf the Con Man and Dictator

From Horton at Harper's:

... American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has delivered up year-end remarks in which she congratulates herself on her foreign policy successes in 2007. Rice, of course, hopes that no one examines that claim too closely. In fact the year has marked a series of stunning reversals for her foreign policy stewardship. Nowhere are those set-backs more dramatic than in Pakistan—one country where Rice urged, and the White House rather belatedly adopted, a shift designed finally to try to nudge the country’s leadership out of the grave they’ve been digging themselves. It was, however, a classic case of too little, too late. ...

In sum, the Bush Administration’s Neoconservative team met their match for confidence artistry in a military man named Pervez Musharraf. He presented himself as the only game in town, the man they had to come to love—or else. And in this way, Musharraf was able to get his way on just about everything—picking their pockets as he went along.

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The Forward's Fein: Huffington Post Is Anti-Semitic for Criticizing Joe Lieberman’s Endorsement of John McCain

Joe Lieberman is a lying, militaristic Neocon who campaigned in 2006 on a pledge to endorse a Democrat for president in 2008.

[See Lieberman: "I want to elect a Democratic president in 2008."]

That kind of talk makes one an anti-Semite in the mind of The Forward's Leonard Fein. Writes Fein:

Trust me on this. Do not, even in idle curiosity, look at the postings on The Huffington Post regarding Joseph Lieberman’s endorsement of John McCain. Or, if you disregard my very sober advice and do have a look, bear in mind that all the antisemitism and anti-Israelism you will see expressed there is all there is. Every raging antisemite in the nation has now had his or her say, all the Israel-bashing has been spent, and we can go on. ...

Fein and Lieberman are whacks, no need to trust or put your faith in anyone or anything on this assessment, just your reason.

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Iran Strike Coming?

Colin Powell: Iran Far From Having Nuke

Only in Bush's America (including the many depraved Democrats who lie down as an obscene foreign policy is loosed upon the world) does a debate occur pondering whether we launch another assault on yet another country, Iran. [USS Eisenhower, pictured at right, in the Persian Gulf last year]

What are the defense planners in Iran pondering? I suggest this:

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any attack launched from Israel or the United States against any target in Iran as an attack by Israel and the United States on the Iranian people, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Israeli and American targets.

That means World War III.

The above speculated Iranian ruminations are a paraphrase of one point of Kennedy's address announcing the quarantine against Cuba, October 22, 1962.

What's frightening is that this time, the American administration is clearly the aggressor nation, destabilizing and threatening the world.

As American citizens, we ought not just resist this administration's war plans at home (and let's hope that they are aborted), but wish for a comprehensive world response against the aggressive plans of this authoritarian Bush regime.

One wishes that the obvious costs of an Israeli/American strike against Iran would preclude such aggressive and reckless action. But rational actors are in short supply in the Bush administration.

Scott Horton at Harper's weighs some key points in his piece. Here's an excerpt from Horton's 1,300-word piece:

Still, my sense this week is that the roll-out for attacks on Iran has, to the great distraction of its sponsors, not gained the sort of traction that they envisaged for it. I am therefore pulling back on the prospects for the Cheney air war on Iran before the end of the Bush presidency, putting this again at a break-even proposition. Here are some of the points for the pushback.

I disagree with Horton that lack of traction, little political support among foreign policy elites, and hostility from the military brass are sufficient to dissuade Bush and Cheney, if they have already decided that surrogate Israel or American military strikes are in the offing.

And the predictable economic and political dislocations do not figure into the machinations of these people; the loonies are in charge.

The fact is we have a radical, dangerous regime running the U.S., and the barriers and constraints that would have precluded, say, the disaster of Iraq do not have the normal force of reason on this radical, statist, out-of-control regime.

Really, as citizens, we can only hope.

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War with Iran

Rational Americans look on with concern like passengers on the Titanic as a hare-brained, messianic president enmeshed in a neocon ideological bubble sends signals of a coming strike against Iran.

A ex-military source working in a Midwest industry in a position to observe qualitative changes in military traffic on American rails and highways notes an increase in military-related traffic like that that has preceded military excursions into Iraq twice.

The source believes a strike against Iran is coming.

But as many have noted, such a strike is lunacy.

As Joseph L. Galloway writes in McClatchy (Inexorable March Toward War With Iran?):

The more thoughtful military and civilian advisers can rattle off a dozen reasons why an American attack on Iran at this juncture would be foolish in the extreme and risk setting the Middle East afire.

Just some of those reasons would include:

- Shutting down not only Iran's oil production but Iraq's as well, and possibly triggering Iranian retaliation against the oil production and shipping in other nations around the Persian Gulf. Are we ready for $300 a barrel oil?

- Putting 160,000 American troops and another 125,000 American and foreign contractors in Iraq at much greater risk, as neighboring Iran signals Shiite allies there to begin all-out war against us and sends in its own well-armed guerrillas to lead the attack.

-Our 250-mile main supply lines in Iraq run through the heart of Shiite-controlled southern Iraq, and they would be cut. If we think we have troubles now with the shaky Iraq national government in Baghdad, which has already snuggled up to Tehran, what would war with Iran bring?

- Risking confrontation with the newly oil-rich and energized Russian Federation and President Bush's ex-KGB soul-mate Vladimir Putin. Since Putin has his hand on the natural gas and oil pipelines that keep our presumed allies in Europe from freezing to death, it is wise to assume that any support for an American attack on his ally Iran would be slim to none.

Assuming that any U.S. air war against Iran would not be enough by itself - and such air campaigns seldom are definitive in modern history - where would we find the ground forces capable of doing the really hard part?

Our Army and Marine Corps are stretched to the breaking point maintaining the force level in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have no strategic reserves available to help secure our allies in the Persian Gulf, much less to mount any offensive inside Iran.

When you add it all up, you have your answer: No one in their right mind would believe that attacking Iran now makes any sense at all.

But that doesn't mean that Bush and Cheney won't do it.

There were a lot of reasons why a pre-emptive strike into Iraq based on flimsy and bogus intelligence and far too few troops made no sense, yet they did it anyway, with trademark arrogance and ignorance.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Iran Does Not Trust US

As the Bush administration rattles its sabers at Iran, it's worth noting how that the people of Iran do not trust Bush's motives. And bombing and invading people who do not trust your motives tend to lead to less than happy consequences.

Some highlights from Akbar Ganji in the Boston Review:

American policy has focused on advancing America’s own economic interests and military supremacy.

American policy has been a major factor in modern Iran’s stalled political and economic growth.

American policy has fostered a military mentality in Iranian political life.

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The Great American Disconnect

Iraq Has Always Been "South Korea" for the Bush Administration

By Tom Engelhardt

Finally, the great American disconnect may be ending. Only four years after the invasion of Iraq, the crucial facts-on-the-ground might finally be coming into sight in this country -- not the carnage or the mayhem; not the suicide car bombs or the chlorine truck bombs; not the massive flight of middle-class professionals, the assassination campaign against academics, or the collapse of the best health-care service in the region; not the spiking American and Iraqi casualties, the lack of electricity, the growth of Shia militias, the crumbling of the "coalition of the willing," or the uprooting of 15% or more of Iraq's population; not even the sharp increase in fundamentalism and extremism, the rise of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the swelling of sectarian killings, or the inability of the Iraqi government to get oil out of the ground or an oil law, designed in Washington and meant to turn the clock back decades in the Middle East, passed inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone -- no, none of that. What's finally coming into view is just what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, the top officials of their administration, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and their neocon followers had in mind when they invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003.
Read more at Tomgram.