Drowning in a bathtub of ignorance and neglect
Poised on the lunar eclipse, I have an overwhelming sense of sadness and awareness of decay — actual, ethical; in Bush’s six-year push to privatize everything in sight, we find ourselves vulnerable on too many fronts. Our systems are broken and battered. I saw snatches of Dubby on CNN visiting the most recent tornado sites and promising, promising … only a fool would trust him. But we can count on his promise to veto a bill that would offer unions to airport workers — keep the work force underpaid and hungry, keep the training minimal, keep the ability substandard — that’s how to keep the homeland safe.
You will not be surprised to learn that the hospital’s problems had Halliburton’s name on it.
Here are reads on the Walter Reed situation — the firing [x2] and the subpoena. There will be more subpoena’s in our future … but that won’t fix what’s busted; at least it’s a first step toward truthful assessment. It took years to get this lame … halting the downward spiral is the agenda of the day.
Dream lunar dreams of better days and happier times to come … we need that Vision now more than ever.
Jude
Committee subpoenas former Walter Reed chief
Kelly Kennedy, Army Times
Saturday Mar 3, 2007
The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has subpoenaed Maj. Gen. George Weightman, who was fired as head of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, after Army officials refused to allow him to testify before the committee Monday.
Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and subcommittee Chairman John Tierney asked Weightman to testify about an internal memo that showed privatization of services at Walter Reed could put “patient care services at risk of mission failure.”
But Army officials refused to allow Weightman to appear before the committee after he was relieved of command.
“The Army was unable to provide a satisfactory explanation for the decision to prevent General Weightman from testifying,” committee members said in a statement today.
The committee wants to learn more about a letter written in September by Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi to Weightman.
The memorandum “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel,’” the committee’s letter states. “According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”
The letter said Walter Reed also awarded a five-year, $120-million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.
They also found that more than 300 federal employees providing facilities management services at Walter Reed had drooped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, 2007, the day before IAP took over facilities management. IAP replaced the remaining 60 employees with only 50 private workers.
“The conditions that have been described at Walter Reed are disgraceful,” the letter states. “Part of our mission on the Oversight Committee is to investigate what led to the breakdown in services. It would be reprehensible if the deplorable conditions were caused or aggravated by an ideological commitment to privatize government services regardless of the costs to taxpayers and the consequences for wounded soldiers.”
The letter said the Defense Department “systemically” tried to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for facilities management, patient care and guard duty – a process that began in 2000.
“But the push to privatize support services there accelerated under President Bush’s ‘competitive sourcing’ initiative, which was launched in 2002,” the letter states.
During the year between awarding the contract to IAP and when the company started, “skilled government workers apparently began leaving Walter Reed in droves,” the letter states. “The memorandum also indicates that officials at the highest levels of Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Medical Command were informed about the dangers of privatization, but appeared to do little to prevent them.”
The memo signed by Garibaldi requests more federal employees because the hospital mission had grown “significantly” during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It states that medical command did not concur with their request for more people.
“Without favorable consideration of these requests,” Garibaldi wrote, “[Walter Reed Army Medical Center] Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.” ++
Army secretary resigns in scandal’s wake
ROBERT BURNS, AP
Fri Mar 2
WASHINGTON - Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey abruptly stepped down Friday as the Bush administration struggled to cope with the fallout from a scandal over substandard conditions for war-wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Harvey’s departure, announced on short notice by a visibly agitated Defense Secretary Robert Gates, was the most dramatic move in an escalating removal of officials with responsibilities over one of the military’s highest-profile and busiest medical facilities.
Hours earlier, President Bush ordered a comprehensive review of conditions at the nation’s network of military and veteran hospitals, which has been overwhelmed by injured troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gates said Harvey had resigned, but senior defense officials speaking on condition of anonymity said Gates had privately demanded that Harvey leave. Gates was displeased that the officer Harvey had chosen as interim commander of Walter Reed — Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the current Army surgeon general and a former commander of Walter Reed — has been accused by critics of long knowing about the problems there and not improving outpatient care.
“I am disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation pertaining to outpatient care at Walter Reed,” Gates said in the Pentagon briefing room. He took no questions from reporters.
Harvey was at Fort Benning, Ga., on Friday morning when he cut short his visit to return to Washington to meet with Gates.
On Thursday, Harvey fired the medical center’s previous commander, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, for failures linked to the outpatient treatment controversy. Many had speculated that Weightman would be relieved of command, but Harvey’s departure was a surprise. His last day in the job will be March 9.
Peter Geren, the undersecretary of the Army, will serve as Harvey’s temporary replacement until Bush nominates a new secretary.
As Army secretary, Harvey is the service’s top civilian official. He commands no troops. Along with the four-star general who is Army chief of staff, the secretary has statutory responsibility for training and equipping the Army. That includes responsibility for budgeting, recruiting and other personnel and resource policies.
The Army announced Friday that Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, 58, will be the new commander of Walter Reed, which is located in Washington.
“From what I have learned, the problems at Walter Reed appear to be problems of leadership,” Gates said. “The Walter Reed doctors, nurses and other staff are among the best and most caring in the world. They deserve our continued deepest thanks and strongest support.”
The revelations about shoddy facilities and wounded soldiers enduring long waits for treatment have embarrassed the Army and the Bush administration at a time when the White House is scrambling to shore up eroding support for the Iraq war. It has prompted numerous calls in Congress for more information, and sullied the reputation of what is supposed to be one of the military’s foremost medical facilities.
Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, applauded Harvey’s departure.
“I commend him for taking responsibility for the problems at Walter Reed,” Skelton said.
The defense secretary indicated he was unhappy with the way Army leaders had responded to the Walter Reed disclosures.
“Some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging into and addressing the problems,” Gates said. “Also I am concerned that some do not properly understand the need to communicate to the wounded and their families that we have no higher priority than their care and that addressing their concerns about the quality of their outpatient experience is critically important. Our wounded soldiers and their families have sacrificed much and they deserve the best we can offer.”
The White House said the president would name a bipartisan commission to assess whether the problems at Walter Reed exist at other facilities. Last week, Gates created an outside panel to review the situation at Walter Reed and the other major military hospital in the Washington area, the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md.
The actions come after The Washington Post documented squalid living conditions for some outpatient soldiers at Walter Reed and bureaucratic problems that prevented many troops from getting adequate care.
Harvey has been Army secretary since November 2004.
He is the second consecutive Army secretary to be removed abruptly from office. In April 2003, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld fired Thomas White, who had engaged in public disputes with Rumsfeld.
A former businessman trained as an engineer, Harvey counted as one of his proudest achievements a turnaround of the Army’s recent recruiting slump. The Army missed its recruiting goal 2005 for the first time since 1999, and that same year Harvey instituted a series of changes that led to a recovery in recruiting. ++
Bombshells, Blackguards and General Breakdown
P.M. Carpenter
3/3/07
Incompetence, neglect, profligacy, isolation, malfeasance, even a textbook psychosis of clinical disconnect — all are reaching critical mass at government’s highest levels. Every day, it seems, we read another disclosure of scandalous failure. Taken separately, they’re bad enough. Lump them together and one wonders just how much longer the nation can endure, how much more it can tolerate.
The latest — merely the latest in this accelerating implosion — is that the Bush administration has permitted the Army National Guard and Reserves to fall to 12 percent readiness. The “12″ is no typo. Should a natural catastrophe strike, oh, let’s say Alabama, the Guard would find itself without “trucks, Humvees, generators, radios, night-vision goggles and other gear that would be critical for responding to a major disaster,” not to mention a “terrorist attack or other domestic emergency,” reports a congressional commission.
The reason for this deplorable state of readiness is, of course, the administration’s singular fixation on Iraq, which is sucking all the material oxygen from anything and everything unrelated to its civil war, but profoundly relevant to the war on insecurity and unpreparedness at home.
Accordingly the administration has already launched roughly half its projected number of new “joint security stations” in Baghdad, part of its sixth stab at pacifying the capital city and in direct opposition to what Congress wants, its generals want, the Iraqis want and the American people want. Its obstinance, however, is peddled as leadership.
American soldiers are fanning out from small, vulnerable outposts, charged with somehow predistinguishing nervous civilians from homicidal militants, insurgents or common criminals.
Meanwhile our “friends,” the Iraqi security forces, “are kept out of briefing sessions, largely because the Americans are suspicious that information will be passed on to” … see aforementioned list.
What is daily American life like under these circumstances? For just one U.S. battalion in western Baghdad, insurgents recently “blasted rocket-propelled grenades at an Iraqi-guarded checkpoint,” followed that with a “barrage [of] small-arms fire,” “then detonated two car bombs when American troops rushed to respond,” then, for good measure, lobbed “two mortar rounds … about 50 yards outside another outpost the battalion had set up.” And all in one day.
“I guess it is a little scary,” remarked 22-year-old Army private, Peter Lahoda.
One need not wonder why he finds it so, since he made the comment “as he gripped an M240 belt-fed machine gun in a turret that has been shot at three times from the street below.”
Sorry to ruin your day even more, Pete, if that’s possible, but here are a couple little items just as scary — perhaps even scarier. Thursday our vice president, apparently living in some other cosmic time zone, said if we “withdrew before Iraqis could defend themselves, radical factions would battle for dominance.” Yes, let’s do keep a watchful eye out for that development.
And on a higher front, an online foreign-policy journal relates that “Those close to [the president] report that he remains convinced of success in Iraq and of how success will revive Republican political fortunes.”
I am reminded of another little fellow who was convinced, right to the very end, that new jet fighters or FDR’s death would prove to be the anticipated turning point in his war gone bad.
Things didn’t quite work out for him, though — or for those he led.
I never dreamed I’d live to see the day in which I longed for my government to be marked only by incompetence, or only by neglect, or profligacy, or isolation, or malfeasance, or even a clinical disconnect. But these days, any one of these, by itself, would seem like Camelot. ++
Wounded Troops: Bush’s Second Katrina
Brent Budowsky
Mar 3 2007
Walter Reed. Delayed disability benefits and ripoff disability certifications where wounded troops who are 80% disabled are only given 30% disability. Underfunded local veterans care.
Undersupported treatment of post traumautic stress syndrome and serious brain injury.
Debt collectors threatening foreclosure or repossession of property of wives and husbands of underpaid troops. National Guard and Reserve units 88% unprepared. Chronic shortages of protective equipment.
Still.
This is Bush’s second Katrina.
Democrats should demand and Bush should agree to naming a high level Democrat as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Someone of high reputation. Max Cleland, Bob Kerrey, Wes Clark if he doesn’t run for President. Deal with all problems in a bipartisan manner and give a new Secretary cabinet rank in the National Security Council on war issues as well as troop and veterans issues.
End the escalation. Begin a new era in the treatment of wounded heroes. Now. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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