After the Walter Reed scandal broke, it didn't take long for people to realize that claims by senior military officials that they had no prior knowledge of the despicable conditions Vets had to endure at
Building 18 were bogus. Yet the scandal unfolding at Walter Reed is more than a case of negligence and incompetence, it's a story about how the Bush administration put private business interests ahead of providing critical care for wounded Veterans.
What’s disturbing is that Maj. Gen. George Weightman, then Commander at Walter Reed, and Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, then Army Surgeon General, all claimed ignorance of the conditions at a building directly across from their
private residences. Shortly before Gen. Weightman
testified before Congress, he was
relieved of his command. In the Army news release announcing Weightman’s removal, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is quoted as saying “the service's senior leadership had lost trust and confidence in Weightman's abilities to address needed solutions for outpatient care at WRAMC."
In a questionable move, the Army replaced Gen. Weightman with Gen. Kiley, who had blamed the
Washington Post, then
subordinates for the Walter Reed Scandal, before being forced to
retire.
Another eyebrow-raising statement came from Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey, who said he learned about the “
conditions of that building through media reports.”
Interesting! During a Meet the Press interview on Feb. 25, 2007, Senator Carl Levin said the "last Congress" didn’t launch an investigation into the conditions at Walter Reed because
they did not want to "embarrass" Bush. With that, it’s hard to imagine that the Secretary of the Army first learned about the conditions at Walter Reed through “media reports.”
Levin also pointed out that there was no oversight in recent years, indicating a pattern of neglect. If that isn’t enough to add insult to the Vets suffering, we now learn that Congress is investigating Walter Reed's VIP ward.
USA Today reported that the
six-suites in the VIP ward have “carpeted floors, antique furniture and fine china in the dining rooms. That's a stark contrast to mold- and mice-ridden housing that some wounded troops had been found to be living in.” More from the article:
<...>
The ward is staffed by 21 nurses, doctors and clinicians. It averages 72 inpatients and 2,600 outpatients a year, said administrator Frances Cheever.
<...>
Army spokeswoman Cynthia Vaughan said it costs $950,000 a year to run the ward, or less than two-tenths of 1% of Walter Reed's annual expenses. But she acknowledged that salaries for nurses and other medical personnel come out of the general budget.
"It's certainly nicer surroundings," says retired Army lieutenant general Ronald Blanck, a former Walter Reed commander who was a recent patient in Ward 72 for cataract surgery. "But the care is exactly the same ... that is given to every other patient at Walter Reed."
Despite Lt. Gen. Blanck’s assertion, the contrast in treatment between
VIPs and
Vets is deplorable. According to Congressman John Tierney, who chairs the House's National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, the investigation of Walter Reed’s VIP ward will explore "
if the allocations of resources is in any way adversely impacting the treatment of the troops," which is why the numbers in the above piece are significant. There have been many reports about the inadequacy of resources allotted for Vet care and the resulting backlog:
WASHINGTON Mar 13, 2007 (AP)— The Veterans Affairs' system for handling disability claims is strained to its limit, and the Bush administration's current efforts to relieve backlogs won't be enough to serve veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, investigators said Tuesday.
<...>
According to their findings, the VA:
Took between 127 to 177 days to process an initial claim and an average of 657 days to process an appeal, resulting in significant hardship to veterans. In contrast, the private sector industry takes about 89.5 days to process a claim.
Had a claims backlog of roughly 600,000.
Will see 638,000 new first-time claims in the next five years due to the Iraq war 400,000 by the end of 2009 alone creating added costs of between $70 billion and $150 billion.
Maintained a system for determining a veteran's disability that was complex and applied inconsistently across regional centers. Results varied; for example, Salt Lake City took 99 days to process a claim, while Honolulu spent 237 days.
Had antiquated technology for processing claims, such as unreliable old fax machines.
link The Army Times
reported that the number of soldiers approved for permanent disability retirement “plunged” from 642 in 2001 to 209 in 2005 even as the wounded or injured “has soared above 15,000.”
As the Iraq war enters its fifth year, Vets are falling through crevices in the system. What the hell is going on?
The answer to that question is the biggest scandal underlying Walter Reed: Privatization. According to a
letter sent to Gen. Weightman by Congressman Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee and Congressman John Tierney, chairman of the National Security and Foreign Affairs subcommittee, Walter Reed awarded a five-year, $120 million contract to the same company, IAP Worldwide Services, that couldn’t deliver ice during the response to Hurricane Katrina. And get this, the head of the company, Al Neffgen, is former Halliburton official who testified before Congress in July 2004 regarding Halliburton's ridiculously high
fuel delivery charges. The Waxman/Tierney
letter indicates that management services personnel dropped from 300 federal employees before the contract to less than 60 when IAP took over in Feb. 2007. IAP then replaced those 60 remaining fed employees with 50 IAP staffers.
Isn't that backward? Instead of ramping up support services at a time when America is engaged in two wars, the military powers that be stood by as facilities management staff levels plummeted from 300 to 50.
The media reports are already citing the roots of this phenomenon in the Clinton White House. Privatization was part of Vice President Gores reinventing government initiative, a process referred to as A-76. Walter Reed made the list in 2000, but it was Bush's 2002 "
competitive sourcing initiative," A-76 on steroids, that allowed the private sector to compete for nearly 50% of federal jobs.
In a Sep. 2006
internal memo to Weightman laying out the problem with force reductions, a commander cited several reasons including that "the current workload in the hospital and garrison missions has grown significantly in the past six years due to our need to care for and support Wounded Warriors from Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and other outcomes of the Global War on Terrorism.” The memo concludes: "Without favorable consideration of these requests, WRAMC Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure."
Wow mission failure! Mission not accomplished. It appears that Bush’s rush to war was also a rush to cronyism and
profiteering, and a complete breakdown in the process both in terms of oversight and increased bureaucracy.
The reduction of force associated with the Base Realignment and Closure of Walter Reed's main post resulted in the need to retrain “skilled clinical personnel." On top of that the Army initiated a voluntary retirement program resulting in the loss of
67 skilled personnel.
The despicable treatment of Vets (and troops) isn’t due simply to outdated process, reduced personnel levels and rising bureaucracy, and these problems aren’t limited to
Walter Reed. There is also a pattern of trying to render services on the cheap, even if it means denying care for soldiers traumatized by war. In “
Behind the walls of Ward 54,” Salon's Mark Benjamin wrote:
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 article has since been updated with an “Editor's note,” which states:
Kudos to the Washington Post's Dana Priest and Anne Hull, who exposed the mistreatment of wounded Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center over the weekend. But exactly two years to the day before their first story appeared in the Post, Salon's Mark Benjamin wrote this searing expose of the way the hospital treated wounded vets, especially those with psychological injuries. Benjamin spent months at Walter Reed researching a series of articles uncovering the neglect of these vets and their difficulties obtaining the treatment they need. His reporting on one sad angle to the story -- that veterans treated as outpatients
were being billed for their meals at the hospital -- resulte d in the Army's reversing that policy.
What kind of person would initiate a policy to charge injured Vets for meals in a VA hospital? Kudos to Benjamin for exposing this travesty. If no one was watching, there is no telling what the Army would try to pull. Read
Annette McLeod’s statement about her husband Dell's testing for PTSD, during which doctors labeled him "retarded" and denied him treatment based on an admission that he was in special education classes as a child. Her testimony is gripping and tear-jerking. Now that the army has
lowered standards to increase recruitment, is this the kind of treatment these soldiers can expect when they return from the battlefield? Isn’t good enough to know that the self-declared Decider (aka King George) is
grateful?
The Decider is a fraud. His rush to invade Iraq and fight war on the cheap. Consider the question posed by this MSNBC article:
Is the Iraq war a relative bargain? But even though the war has turned out to be much more expensive than Bush administration officials predicted on the eve of the March 2003 invasion, it is relatively affordable — at least in historical terms.
<...>
“While it is welcome news and a credit to military medicine that more soldiers are surviving grievous wounds, the existence of so many veterans, with such a high level of injuries, is yet another aspect of this war for which the Pentagon and the administration failed to plan, prepare and budget,” Bilmes wrote in a January working paper.
In a study co-authored with Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, Bilmes estimated that the real price of the Iraq war, when you add up spending to date, future costs and economic impacts such as elevated oil prices, is well over $2 trillion.
It’s obvious that Cheney isn’t a
straight shooter, but the entire Bush gang took aim at fighting a cheap war and missed their target, like they’ve done with all their privatization schemes. The military scheme has been the most costly in terms of lives lost and
damaged.
In March 2005, the New York Times ran an article about the missteps that led to tens of thousands of U.S. troops being sent to Iraq without
protective gear:
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 February this year, troops are still awaiting the latest “
Humvee armor kit, known as FRAG Kit 5.” At this point, socks may have been giving a higher priority than
armor.
Like everything else about Bush’s Iraq misadventure, the lies and rhetoric aren’t shielding the troops from fatal or long-term injuries. It’s obvious that when Bush says “support the troops,” he means support the war. If he’s grateful, it’s probably for being able to get away with the lies for so long. The victims of Bush's empty rhetoric are Veterans like Ken Sargent,
who suffered a traumatic brain injury, and John Daniel Shannon,
who told Congress his fight to get care as "'
a two-year pattern of neglect, bureaucracy and lack of patient advocacy.'"
Walter Reed is still dealing with
over capacity (video), just as Katrina victims are still wrestling with bureaucracy, incompetence and neglect at the hands of Bush and his privatization scheme. The following is paragraph is from a Sep. 2005 Boston Globe article, "
Katrina’s Truths":
The spectacle of failure, how for days the government was powerless to help such people, only put on display how government was already failing them and everyone else. Here was Katrina's second main epiphany -- what it means that the United States, after a generation of tax-cutting and downsizing, has eviscerated the public sector's capacity for supporting the common good. The neglect of civic infrastructure, the destruction of social services, the abandonment of the safety net, the myth of ''privatization," the perverse idea, dating to the Reagan era, that government is the enemy: It all adds up to what we saw last week -- government not as the enemy, but as the incompetent, impotent bystander. The bystander-in-chief, of course, is George W. Bush, whose whining self-obsession perfectly embodies what America has done to itself.
Bush’s push toward privatization was never intended to be good for Vets or the country. These initiatives have one goal: lining the pockets of
cronies:
WASHINGTON -- An Army contract to privatize maintenance at Walter Reed Medical Center was delayed more than three years amid bureaucratic bickering and legal squabbles that led to sta ff shortages and a hospital in disarray just as the number of severely wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan was rising rapidly.
Documents from the investigative and auditing arm of Congress map a trail of bid, rebid, protests and appeals between 2003, when Walter Reed was first selected for outsourcing, and 2006, when a five-year, $120 million contract was finally awarded.
<...>
IAP is owned by a New York hedge fund whose board is chaired by former Treasury Secretary John Snow, and it is led by former executives of Kellogg, Brown and Root, the subsidiary spun off by Texas-based Halliburton Inc., the oil services firm once run by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Bush’s list of cronies is long, and cronyism is at the root of every disaster created by his administration (see
this and
this).
As Iraq is being compared to
Vietnam, it's important to note a common thread: the Bush/Cheney gang is still putting self-preservation and personal greed ahead of honorable service to their country in a time of war.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
