Screwing Over The Troops In The Boots... Again

U.S. Is Extending Tours of Army

While President Bush spent Easter on a vacation in Crawford, Texas, praying for our troops to have more courage, more strength and more willingness to sacrifice themselves for an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, under conditions that have proven to be ineffective, inappropriate and costly, he was busy forcing the extension of tours of duty, recalling more reserve and guard units to return to Iraq, and screwing over the troops wearing the boots in the field. On top of that, the goings on in Afghanistan are getting equally fouled up and costly in terms of money, lives and our international reputation.

The level of frustration, disruption of family and private lives, as well as the devastation of careers for reserve and guard units is reaching an all-time high. Additionally, the Army is facing force depletion and readiness problems because equipment and supplies are already short and Bush plans to veto the funding bill for the Iraq operations because Congress had the enlightened sense to place restrictions on how that money could be spent and put in benchmarks and timelines for withdrawal, in keeping with the wishes of the vast majority of Americans.

But Bush doesn't believe in government for and by the people. He doesn't believe in respecting our troops. He is fashioning himself in the same image as Caligula, Justinian and Napoleon, seeing himself as building an empire and developing a pre-ordained world domination, importing a US-style of dominance via the importation of a coercive style of "democracy" developed by fascist puppeteers like himself, Dick Cheney, Condaleeza Rice, Michael Chertoff, et al.

The military announced Wednesday that most active duty Army units now in Iraq and Afghanistan and those sent in the future would serve 15-month tours, three months longer than the standard one-year tour.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who announced the change at a news conference at the Pentagon, said that the only other way to maintain force levels would have been to allow many soldiers less than a year at home between combat tours.

Mr. Gates said the problem was evident even before President Bush ordered an increase in troops for Iraq this year. Officials said the change became inevitable as the numbers of extra troops that were needed — and, most likely, the time the extra forces would have to stay — increased.

“This policy is a difficult but necessary interim step,” he said. “Our forces are stretched, there’s no question about that.”

Democrats in Congress and outside military experts said the prolonged combat assignments risked damage to morale, possibly undermining recruiting and retention efforts. Tens of thousands of soldiers are facing their third tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and casualties have continued to mount inexorably.

“This new policy will be an additional burden to an already overstretched Army,” said Representative Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “I think this will have a chilling effect on recruiting, retention, and readiness.”

Among soldiers in the field and their families, speaking in interviews and in postings on the Internet, reactions to the announcement varied — some of them stoical, some distraught, some grim and some sardonic. Mr. Gates said no decision had been made about how long beyond August to extend reinforcements in Iraq. The total force is around 145,000 and is building toward around 160,000 by early summer. Active-duty Army troops currently total around 79,000 in Iraq and around 18,000 in Afghanistan, along with an additional 7,000 soldiers in Kuwait, who would also be covered by the new policy. The tours of Marine units, which typically are shorter and more frequent, are not being extended; nor are the tours of brigades whose time has already been extended under previous changes to their orders.

Army National Guard or Army Reserves are supposed to be mobilized for no more than a year at a time, including nine months in Iraq or Afghanistan, under a policy announced by Mr. Gates in January.

By ordering longer tours for all other Army units, the Pentagon will be able to maintain the current force levels for another year and still give soldiers a full year to rest, retrain and re-equip before having to go back to Iraq or Afghanistan, Mr. Gates said.

The new policy calls for soldiers to receive a minimum of one year at home between tours, he said.

Word of the extensions reached the American military command post in Juwayba, Iraq, in a rural area east of Ramadi, overnight when a sergeant spotted it while surfing the Internet. It was greeted with a mixture of anger and resignation among the few soldiers who were still awake. “We’re just laughing,” said Capt. Brice Cooper, 26, the executive officer of Company B, First Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment of the First Infantry Division. He was chuckling nervously, his frustration palpable. “It’s so unbelievable, it’s humorous.”

The soldiers crowded around the outpost’s few computers, sending e-mail messages to their families and parsing Mr. Gates’s words in the hope of finding possible loopholes that would exclude them from the extension. The unit was scheduled to return to its base in Germany in June. The extension meant it would probably have to stay here until September.

But Bush and his merry band of fascists do not understand that Congress represents the will of the American people in our elected form of democratic republicanism. Instead, he sees himself and his team as anointed by his version of God, which is not the God that most Christians and Jews understand and love, but a God of his own choosing and making. Like most autocrats, theocrats and fascists, Bush and company define their own rules for governing according to the will of their make-believe laws of their make-believe God... and those rules always benefit those that have power, wealth and influence because that is how the powerful, wealthy and influential know that God has anointed them... They have all the gold and all the power.

But of course, Christ spoke out against such use and abuse of power, and against serving God and Mammon. Anyone want to bet Bush and his gang missed that part of the Gospels? But Bush doesn't believe in reading or comprehending newspapers, the Bible or our Constitution, since he cannot seem to respond to the media with a positive message, to the Gospels with any sense of God's calling and commandments, or to the supreme law of the land that he swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend, never mind follow to the best of his ability... And following the laws passed by Congress and hearing the words and heeding the will of the People are part and parcel of that oath and his office.

Bush v. Congress: The Looming Battle Over Executive Privilege

In the summer of 1974, Richard Nixon bet his presidency on the doctrine of executive privilege, and lost. Nixon’s lawyer, James St. Clair, argued to the Supreme Court that he did not have to give a special prosecutor the Watergate tape recordings of Nixon talking with various advisers. But in the oral argument, the justices were skeptical. Lewis Powell, the courtly Virginian, asked: “Mr. St. Clair, what public interest is there in preserving secrecy with respect to a criminal conspiracy?”

Justice Powell’s question cut through Nixon’s central claim: that executive privilege gives presidents an absolute right to keep their communications secret. Barely two weeks after the oral argument, the court unanimously ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes.

Three decades later, the Bush administration is threatening to invoke executive privilege to hobble Congress’s investigation into the purge of United States attorneys. President Bush has said that Karl Rove, his closest adviser, and Harriet Miers, his former White House counsel, among others, do not have to comply with Congressional subpoenas because “the president relies upon his staff to give him candid advice.”

This may well end up in a constitutional showdown. If it does, there is no question about which side should prevail. Congress has a right, and an obligation, to examine all of the evidence, which increasingly suggests that the Bush administration fired eight or more federal prosecutors either because they were investigating Republicans, or refusing to bring baseless charges against Democrats. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Watergate tapes case, and other legal and historical precedents, make it clear that executive privilege should not keep Congress from getting the testimony it needs.

It’s odd to hear President Bush invoke executive privilege because it is just the sort of judge-made right he has always claimed to oppose. Executive privilege is not mentioned in the Constitution, but judges have found it in the general principle of separation of powers. Presidents like to invoke it in sweeping ways, but the courts have been less enthusiastic.

United States v. Nixon is the Supreme Court’s major ruling on executive privilege. The first important principle that it established seems obvious, but it is not: that presidents cannot simply declare what information is privileged. Nixon argued, as Mr. Bush seems poised to, that presidents have an “inherent authority to refuse to disclose.” But the Supreme Court made it clear that as with other legal issues, courts, not presidents, have the final say on when executive privilege applies.

The Nixon case’s second important holding is that privilege claims are judged by a “balancing test.” The justices acknowledged that a president’s ability to get candid advice is important. But they also factored in that in the case of the Watergate tapes, no military or diplomatic secrets were at stake. On the other side of the scales, the court said, were “the inroads of such a privilege on the fair administration of criminal justice.” The need for evidence, it concluded, was more important than the president’s need for secrecy.

Of course, while Mr. Bush and his merry gang of fascists are receiving top-notch medical care from military hospitals and the best medicine money can buy, the results of even the preliminary inquiries into the care provided by the military and VA health care systems continue to demonstrate an utter and complete disregard for those that Bush and company continue to exalt and praise as heroes and courageous, all the while ignoring the needs of their families, continuing a policy of nickel-and-diming them for the cost of meals and other "amenities," and providing sub-standard care, rehab services and housing while recovering from wounds received "over there."

For anyone that has been paying attention, there has been a steady decline in readiness in the area of post-war zone care and facilities in the military and a complete erosion of the VA capabilities since the middle of the 1980s, with the VA health care system suffering cutbacks almost every year since 1985. Additionally, the level of medics, corpsmen, nurses and doctors on active duty have been depleted regularly since the late 1970s, rising only during the first Gulf War, and then returning to those depleted levels shortly thereafter.

Further, the level of training for medics and corpsmen suffered greatly in between the Vietnam and first Gulf War, and then again between the first Gulf War and the present invasion of Iraq. While many of the corpsmen and medics in theater have come up to speed, the American Council on Education demonstrates a steady decline in training standards in its regular assessment of equivalence of military training to civilian jobs and training. While the military is big on the concept of OJT, that is a hell of a way to prepare for the types of care and skills needed in this type of war. And now there are reports that the care teams stationed outside of the combat areas are not fully staffed, not adequately trained, and burning out faster than a book of matches set aflame because of the workload.

As a veteran of the US Navy, the US Army National Guard, the US Naval Hospital Corps and the Army Medics, Bush's approach to caring for our troops and vets disgusts me to no end.

Panel on Walter Reed Woes Issues Strong Rebuke

An independent panel assessing dilapidated facilities and red tape for wounded Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Wednesday issued a sweeping indictment of leadership failures, inadequate training and staffing shortages.

The panel, headed by two former secretaries of the Army, Togo D. West Jr. and John O. Marsh Jr., found that a high standard of care for troops when they were first evacuated from war zones and hospitalized fell apart when they became outpatients, with a “breakdown in health services” and “compassion fatigue” on the part of overworked staff members.

“Leadership at Walter Reed should have been aware of poor living conditions and administrative hurdles and failed to place proper priority on solutions,” the panel said in a summary of its draft report released at a meeting at Walter Reed.

The report called the current system for assessing soldiers’ disabilities “extremely cumbersome, inconsistent, and confusing,” saying it must be “completely overhauled.” It called for the creation of a “center of excellence” on treatment, training and research on two conditions suffered by thousands of troops in Iraq: traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The panel, called the Independent Review Group, was appointed by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February after The Washington Post reported on the problems at Walter Reed, the Army’s century-old medical center in Washington. A presidential commission and a Department of Veterans Affairs task force are also assessing the troubles.

The conditions at Walter Reed, including moldy, rat-infested quarters and a bureaucratic maze that left severely injured soldiers in limbo for months, have become a symbol of the government’s broader failure to help troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush visited patients at the facility March 30 and said, “I apologize for what they went through, and we’re going to fix the problem.”

Then comes reports that in order to defy Congress and finagle a way around the complete disregard for the will of the American people, Bush and company are going to rob the Navy and the Air Force of its funding to keep its surge going in Iraq, even though it is proving to be ineffective and useless. But what many of us do not realize is that when the Navy and Air Force lose their money, they will have to cut back on air support for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This essentially translates into more soldiers, Marines, Navy corpsman and Navy Chaplains taking hits on the ground. It has been our ability to maintain air support and air superiority that has kept the heads of those that seek to do our troops harm under cover in Afghanistan and forcing the opposition in Iraq to resort to guerilla tactics rather than force assaults. It is air support and air superiority that keeps the various factional militia from letting loose en force against our troops on the ground.

So, we can expect more wounded, more injuries, more deaths and more mistreatment from the ranks of our troops... and Bush doesn't seem to be batting an eye at such a proposition... but he is praying to his God for our troops to sacrifice their all so that his ego and idiocy can be fulfilled.

Air Force, Navy Funds May Be Needed to Cover Army Costs

With the fate of the fiscal 2007 wartime supplemental still unknown, Defense Secretary Robert Gates will soon ask lawmakers to approve the transfer of $1.6 billion from Air Force and Navy personnel accounts to cover the costs of Army operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a letter Wednesday to Senate Appropriations Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., Gates reiterated his concerns that failure to appropriate the war funds in the next several weeks will have "disruptive" effects on readiness, Army personnel and their families.

"The department shortly will be presenting to the Congress a $1.6 billion reprogramming request that proposes to shift $0.8 billion from both the Navy and Air Force military personnel accounts to the Army Operation and Maintenance accounts," he told Byrd.

Gates stressed that the military already has asked to reprogram $1.7 billion from lower-priority projects to pay for operations. In total, the department's transfer authority is capped at $7.5 billion in fiscal 2007 -- leaving Defense officials with only $4.2 billion after the upcoming transfer request.

But we cannot be sure that the attention being paid to the plight of our troops by presidential hopefuls, like Hilary Clinton, is legitimate and compassionate, or just another ploy to create photo ops, media attention and attack the current regime of idiots and fascists. Let us hope that this attention and concern is legitimate.

But in the meantime, the attention being drawn to the plight of our troops and vets illustrates how bad the current situation and service level really is for our troops and recovering heroes.

Clinton: Treatment of Troops 'Outrageous'

One by one, their eyes on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, more than 40 soldiers recited a somber roll call: name, rank, company and where in Iraq or Afghanistan they had been wounded.

Later, after hearing their tales of chaos, confusion and shabby treatment by the military health care system, Clinton vowed to send her own staff here to help.

"These young men go off to war. They are motivated. They have volunteered. … And then we turn around and don't take care of them," Clinton told USA TODAY late Tuesday. "It's outrageous. I don't know how people sleep at night. I don't get it."

Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has spent the week highlighting the medical needs of soldiers and veterans leading up to a hearing today on their problems by her committee and the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee. Her appearances underscored her dual role these days as a Democratic senator from New York and a presidential candidate seeking to be the nation's first female commander in chief.

But the assessments coming from all angles regarding the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan keep demonstrating the failure of our efforts in both places. No matter how many troops we retain, no matter how big we surge troop levels, the fact is that we are continuing a failed policy and plan in the Middle East and Central Asia. We are also failing in terms of our relationships with Iran, Pakistan, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

I wish I could post the joke image I received in my e-mail yesterday. It was a picture of Bush on a package of condoms with a caption that said the Bush brand of condoms were for those that do not know when or how to pull out. While the joke is rather vulgar, it is quite effective in making the point.

NY Times Editorial: Four Years Later in Iraq

Four years ago this week, as American troops made their first, triumphant entrance into Baghdad, joyous Iraqis pulled down a giant statue of Saddam Hussein. It was powerful symbolism — a murderous dictator toppled, Baghdadis taking to the streets without fear, American soldiers hailed as liberators.

After four years of occupation, untold numbers killed by death squads and suicide bombers, and searing experiences like Abu Ghraib, few Iraqis still look on American soldiers as liberators. Instead, thousands marked this week’s anniversary by burning American flags and marching through the streets of Najaf chanting, “Death to America.”

Once again, tens of thousands of American troops are pouring into Baghdad. Yesterday the Pentagon announced that battle-weary Army units in Iraq would have to stay on for an additional three months past their scheduled return dates.

Mr. Bush is desperately gambling that by stretching the Army to the absolute limits of its deployable strength, he may be able to impose some relative calm in the capital. And he seems to imagine that should that gamble succeed, the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki will, without any serious pressure from Washington, take the steps toward sharing political power and economic resources it has tenaciously resisted since the day it took office a year ago.

Unless Mr. Maliki takes those steps — eliminating militia and death squad members from the Iraqi Army and police, fairly sharing oil revenues, and rolling back laws that deny political and economic opportunities to the Sunni middle class — no lasting security gains are possible. More Iraqi and American lives will be sacrificed.

Even among Shiites, who suffered so much at the hands of Saddam Hussein and who are the supposed beneficiaries of Mr. Maliki’s shortsighted policies, there is a deep disillusionment and anger. This week, a Washington Post reporter interviewed Khadim al-Jubouri, who four years ago swung his sledgehammer to help knock down the dictator’s statue. Mr. Jubouri said that ever since he watched that statue being built he had nourished a dream of bringing it down and ushering in much better times.

Now, with friends and relatives killed, kidnapped or driven from their homes, the prices of basic necessities soaring and electricity rationed to four hours a day, Mr. Jubouri says the change of regimes “achieved nothing” and he has come to hate the American military presence he once welcomed.

Mr. Maliki’s supporters can be even more frightening to listen to. This week’s demonstration in Najaf was organized by the fiercely anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose political party and militia helped put Mr. Maliki in power and are still among his most important allies.

Two months into the Baghdad security drive, the gains Mr. Bush is banking on have not materialized. More American soldiers continue to arrive, and their commanders are talking about extending the troop buildup through the fall or into early next year. After four years, the political trend is even more discouraging.

There is no possible triumph in Iraq and very little hope left.

On top off this apparent failure in military and management terms, we see other signs of failure in the way contracts have led to waste, over-spending, gouging, ripoffs and payments made to civilians for our mistakes and negligent actions.

Civilian Claims on U.S. Suggest the Toll of War

In February 2006, nervous American soldiers in Tikrit killed an Iraqi fisherman on the Tigris River after he leaned over to switch off his engine. A year earlier, a civilian filling his car and an Iraqi Army officer directing traffic were shot by American soldiers in a passing convoy in Balad, for no apparent reason.

The incidents are among many thousands of claims submitted to the Army by Iraqi and Afghan civilians seeking payment for noncombat killings, injuries or property damage American forces inflicted on them or their relatives.

The claims provide a rare window into the daily chaos and violence faced by civilians and troops in the two war zones. Recently, the Army disclosed roughly 500 claims to the American Civil Liberties Union in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. They are the first to be made public.

They represent only a small fraction of the claims filed. In all, the military has paid more than $32 million to Iraqi and Afghan civilians for noncombat-related killings, injuries and property damage, an Army spokeswoman said. That figure does not include condolence payments made at a unit commander’s discretion.

The paperwork, examined by The New York Times, provides unusually detailed accounts of how bystanders to the conflicts have become targets of American forces grappling to identify who is friend, who is foe.