We're Still at War: Photo of the Day for November 12, 2009
Obama’s good war goes bad
By: Bernd Debusmann
In the protracted Washington debate over the war in Afghanistan, the most concise analysis so far has come from America’s top soldier: “If we don’t get a level of legitimacy and governance (there), then all the troops in the world aren’t going to make any difference.”
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was speaking two days after Hamid Karzai was declared the winner, by default, in August elections so massively rigged that a U.N.-backed electoral complaints committee threw out about a million Karzai votes. That forced a run-off from which his challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah withdrew, saying the second round would be just as fraudulent as the first.So much for an exercise in democracy President Barack Obama had used as his rationale for escalating the war a few months after he took office. “I did order 21,000 additional troops there to make sure that we could secure the election, because I thought that was important.”
It was. It showed that the United States and its NATO allies are fighting on the side of a corrupt and discredited government in a war, now in its ninth year, for which, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, there can be no purely military solution.
An angry assessment of the Afghan leader last year by Thomas Schweich, a former top anti-narcotics official in Afghanistan, has proved prophetic. Karzai, he said, had been playing the Americans like a fiddle ever since he came to power. “The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends would get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term.”
U.S. officials, including Admiral Mullen, are now calling on Karzai to purge Afghanistan of corrupt officials by arresting and prosecuting them. This is an unlikely prospect. In his victory speech, Karzai said he would work to wipe off “the stain of corruption” but said that could not be done simply by removing corrupt officials.
Malalai Joya - Canadian book tour
http://creekside1.blogspot.com/2009/11/malalai-joya-canadian-book-tour.html
Suspended from the Afghan parliament in 2007 for speaking out against the warlords and drug traffickers who comprise Afghanistan's government, Malalai Joya, elected on a platform of womens rights, now lives like a fugitive in her own country. What does that tell you?
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Joya's cross-Canada speaking tour and book release begins Friday in Vancouver at the Sun Yat Sen Gardens and then Saturday at St. Andrew's Wesley Church at Nelson and Burrard.
Dog back after a year MIA in Afghanistan
An Australian special forces dog has been found alive and well more than a year after going missing in action in Afghanistan.
Official: Obama dissatisfied with Afghanistan options
( Poor SOD. The Afghans aren't left options. )
Veterans Die from Lack of Health Insurance
A research team at Harvard Medical School estimates 2,266 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance and thus had reduced access to care. That figure is more than 14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice as many as have died (911 as of Oct. 31) since the war began in 2001.
The Veteran Suicides
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ own calculations (which it tried to conceal from a CBS News probe, Congress, and the public), there are “about 18 suicides per day among America’s 25 million veterans.” That's well over 6,000 a year. In addition, the VA admits that “suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities.” Rates are highest among young men in their twenties, veterans of our current wars. And these numbers do not include suicides by active duty members of the military. In 2008 alone, these numbered nearly 250 (Army 128, Navy 41, Marines 41, Air Force 38)--an average of five every week.
As The Nation reported last year, the VA has delayed or denied disability and medical benefits to thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans because they couldn’t “prove” that their conditions were “service-related.” In addition, ”a recent Inspector General report found that 70 percent of VA facilities don’t have a system to track suicidal veterans. Only a handful of VA hospitals have rehab programs that include families. And soldiers injured today face a benefits waiting list more than 650,000 veterans long.” One doctor in the VA’s leadership who publicly criticized these shortcomings was summarily fired.
Even the true statistics on veteran suicides would never have come out were it not for a class action lawsuit by Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) and Veterans United for Truth, who sued the VA in federal court. According to the veterans’ groups:
Many veterans who have fought in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, as well as those who served in earlier conflicts, are not being given the disability compensation, medical services and care they need. A much higher percentage of these veterans suffer with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (“PTSD”) than veterans of any previous war, due to the multiple tours many are serving, the unrelenting vigilance required by the circumstances, the greater prevalence of brain injuries caused by the types of weaponry in use, among other reasons. Despite this, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (“DVA”) is failing to provide adequate and timely benefits and medical care.The judge who heard the case in federal district court in San Francisco--himself an 86-year-old veteran of World War II--said he was sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ cause, but he found against them. According to VCS, “In his decision, Judge Conti held that although it is clear to the Court that the VA may need ‘a complete overhaul’ the the power to remedy this crisis lies with the other branches of government.”
In other words, if the VA can’t or won’t fix itself, it’s time for Congress and the White House to step up and do something about this travesty. (Elizabeth Gettleman's piece today mentions one such effort---which is, unsurprisingly, being blocked by House Republicans.)
Study: Over 2,200 US Veterans Died in 2008 Due to Lack of Health Insurance
On Veterans Day, a new study estimates four times as many US Army veterans died last year because they lacked health insurance than the total number of US soldiers who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same period. A research team at Harvard Medical School says 2,266 veterans under the age of sixty-five died in 2008 because they were uninsured. We speak to the report’s co-author, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program.
Stress, Injury to Health,Trauma, PTSD
( Notes on teen suicide : a high-risk category )
PTSD: Two new programs; two big ignored questions
http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2009/09/ptsd_two_new_programs_two_big.php
David Dobbs
1. Why are rates in US soldiers and vets higher than in other countries?
2. Why is the US combat vet population the only one in which PTSD rates and diagnoses increase as time passes after service? (Civilians studies have repeatedly shown that likelihood of developing PTSD decreases steadily and significantly as time passes after the traumatic event. Only in US combat veterans does likelihood of reported symptoms and diagnosis increase with time.)
The many ways in which the VA's response -- both in the clinic and in its absurd disability structure -- can discourage healing and encourage a faulty diagnosis of PTSD are well-documented. I recently had an Army captain buttonhole me and volunteer that the entire response to returning soldiers feeling any sort of distress all but begs them to declare themselves traumatized rather than troubled. A leading Australian PTSD researcher who worked for 6 weeks with returning US vets at Walter Reed said essentially the same thing. Yet the iatrogenic powers of such a response go ignored in Seal's attempt to explain why a vet's chance of diagnosis increases with time spent in the care of the VA.
Meanwhile, as I've noted before, both the press and the military continue to ignore a study suggesting that we could cut PTSD rates in half by simply not deploying the 15% of soldiers who score lowest on measure of overall health we're already giving them.
We can throw all the money we want at PTSD and continue to hire lots of therapists at the VA. But we won't get anywhere until we start asking why the PTSD problem takes such a unique course here in the U.S.
Sexual Assaults, Inadequate Healthcare Among Spate of Issues Facing Women Servicemembers
Ex-U.S. Hostage Named Senior Iran Policy Official
When former ambassador John Limbert, a former hostage in Iran, retired a few years ago, he lamented the fact that Iran experts and Farsi speakers don't have much of a career path at the State Department. But now, the Obama administration has created a new job to focus on Iran policy — a deputy assistant secretary of state — and Limbert was just plucked out of retirement to take on the assignment.
Reading the headline, I first thought that Iran had named one of the 'hostages' the U.S. took to torture in Iraq as representative to 'negotiate' with the U.S.
Not that that augurs well as a productive exercise, when the U.S. misrepresents Iran's position and ignores its acts against Iran : such as black ops assassinations !
Not that that augurs well as a productive exercise, when the U.S. misrepresents Iran's position and ignores its acts against Iran : such as black ops assassinations !
Wed 11 Nov 2009 07:37:10 PM MST
One would also have to note the representation by Obama that Iran would have a 'fresh start' in relations with the U.S. Giving the post of U.S. representative to a former prisoner of Iran should clarify what that really means.
Creationists to distribute Charles Darwin books for free. What's the catch?
"All we want to do is present the opposing and correct* view," says actor Kirk Cameron, a supporter, in a video on the website. That view, which both precedes and counters Darwin's theory in the copies of the book they will distribute, has been penned by the organization's leader, Ray Comfort. In a 50-page introduction, no less.
Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" was first published 150 years ago, on Nov. 24, 1859. It begins:When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species -- that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.The book, having been in the public domain for quite some time, is also available for free via Project Gutenberg. With no introduction but Darwin's own.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
( * Ah. The impartiality. The Key is to Lie First )
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