Editorial: Speedy checks
By Staff
Rocky Mount Telegram
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Congress' swift approval of a $168 billion economic stimulus package sends a strong signal to worried consumers and wobbly financial markets that the federal government is capable of taking swift action when it feels it has to.
The plan will provide tax rebates of up to $600 for individuals and $1,200 for couples, with additional payments of $300 per child for families and a minimum payment of $300 for people who pay less than that in income taxes.
The package is intended to provide cash for people to spend and tax relief for businesses to make new investments, hopefully providing a boost for an economy plagued by a downturn in the housing market, rising unemployment, shaky financial markers and a credit crunch.
The legislation bogged down earlier last week in the U.S. Senate, where Democratic leaders sought to add increased home-energy subsidies for low-income families, extended unemployment benefits, tax credits for alternative energy and tax incentives for the coal industry to the package already approved by the U.S. House. The turnaround came after Democrats fell one vote shy of overcoming Republican objections and pressing ahead with their $205 billion plan.
The Senate package did expand the House plan to include payments for about 20 million Social Security recipients and 250,000 disabled veterans who would not have qualified for the tax rebates. The House quickly approved those changes and sent the legislation to President Bush.
While the stimulus package will not be a magic bullet that will reverse the looming economic downturn the country is facing, it will provide a one-time injection of cash into the economy, as consumers spend their rebate checks and businesses take advantage of the added tax incentives and write-offs. And after the acrimony of the past several years in Congress, it was indeed a good time for lawmakers to undertake a successful bipartisan effort.
editorial on stimulus checks
Monday, February 11, 2008
Editorial: Speedy checks
Mobile law office to help veterans
Mobile legal vans help veterans
Posted by John S. Hausman | The Muskegon Chronicle February 11, 2008 08:25AM
Categories: Muskegon
A law office on wheels is coming to Muskegon this week to offer free legal help to veterans.
The Mobile Law Office is a project of the University of Detroit Mercy. Its Muskegon stop is scheduled for 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Thursday outside the Muskegon County Department of Veterans Affairs, 165 E. Apple.
The focus is on lower-income veterans who are having trouble obtaining disability benefits, said Anita Scott-Meisel, an attorney with the Mobile Law Office. Other possible issues include consumer problems, housing and foreclosures.
The office is a 27-foot recreation vehicle that's been traveling from city to city offering the same service. The veterans-law clinics began last year in the Detroit area and have expanded across the state, with other stops in Grand Rapids, Benton Harbor, Traverse City, Battle Creek, Lansing, Flint and Pontiac.
Staffing the office at the Muskegon stop will be attorney and law professor Joon Sung, along with several University of Detroit Mercy law students, Scott-Meisel said.
Following the veterans center stop, the visiting attorneys will roll to the Warner Norcross & Judd law offices to meet from 3:30 to 5 p.m. with any local attorneys who might be interested in offering "pro bono" -- free -- legal services to veterans. The university offers training in Lansing for interested lawyers, Scott-Meisel said.
David R. Eling said the office on wheels is welcome, although a few local attorneys already offer help with veterans' issues.
Michigan ranks 45th among states in federal health-care spending per veteran and 50th in veterans enrolled in Veterans Affairs health care, according to the college. Average disability payments for Michigan veterans are $7,241, compared to the national average of nearly $9,000.
Students from the Detroit Mercy School of Law and volunteer attorneys helped about 800 people during stops at senior centers, churches and other facilities last year.
Murtha and the Cost of the War
By Walter Pincus
Monday, February 11, 2008; Page A11
One longtime House member's views of the hidden costs of the war in Iraq are worth studying -- when the congressman is Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense.
Murtha was a Marine officer during the Vietnam War, earning a Bronze Star and two Purple Heart medals. Murtha, in his 34th year in Congress, is an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
He holds strong views about the effect of the war on the U.S. military and the public, which he detailed in a speech last week to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.
"Less than 1 percent of the public is making the sacrifice that these troops [in Iraq and Afghanistan] are making," Murtha said. He noted his proposal for a war tax, which was shot down by the Democratic leadership.
"You can't put a trillion-dollar war on a credit card and leave the bills for our children to pay," he said. "The same Americans suffering in Iraq today will be paying for this borrowed war for the rest of their lives."
In other words, he suggested, the same troops who are fighting now will end up paying for the cost of the war.
Murtha is a strong advocate of the 24-year-old Defense Department Family Advocacy Program, which pays for counseling for service members dealing with several issues, from their children's truancy to emotional or sexual abuse of spouses. He said that troops at U.S. military bases have told him about their families' need for counseling.
As a result, Murtha last year added $147 million to the fiscal 2008 appropriations bill for the Family Advocacy Program, increasing the amount from the administration's request of $253 million. In President Bush's proposed fiscal 2009 budget, sent to Congress last week, funding for the program was cut to $244 million.
Noting that the administration is spending $343 million every 24 hours on the Iraq war, Murtha said that 11 hours in Iraq "could restore $156 million cut by the president's Defense Department budget for the Family Advocacy Program."
While Murtha was in Afghanistan recently, the subject of divorce and pressure on military families came up. A troop commander described his soldiers as "worried about their families," Murtha said, referring to the stress that comes from knowing "that if you were deployed over and over again, you were going to be at a point where the pressure is tremendous on what's going on" at home.
Another cost of the war, Murtha said, is the declining quality of recruits joining the volunteer Army. Murtha said he favors a draft because he believes "you could never sustain a long-term deployment with a volunteer Army . . . and it would cost very much in order to try to sustain these kind of deployments."
Citing Army statistics, Murtha said that since the beginning of the Iraq war, the percentage of Army recruits with high school diplomas has dropped from 94 to 71, and the proportion of recruits who require waivers for criminal records increased from 4.6 percent to 11.2 percent.
Equally telling, he continued, are the soaring sums paid for retention and enlistment bonuses. In fiscal 2003, before the Iraq war, the Army spent $157 million, he said; today it pays $1 billion annually.
"They're even paying captains and majors to stay," Murtha said. "People that left West Point in 2001, 46 percent got out; in 2002, 52 percent to 53 percent got out." The reason these young officers are leaving, he said, is "because their families are saying, 'Look, you get out or I'm going to leave you.'"
Murtha also cited the war's cost on maintenance of major military equipment. The average age of F-15 fighter aircraft, used for precision bombing, is 24 years, and most are beyond the safe flying time of 4,500 hours. There are 162 "down right now trying to find out what's wrong with them," said Murtha, who earlier in the week held a closed hearing with the Air Force. "Flying hour costs have increased 87 percent. Depot maintenance has increased 800 man-hours for every F-15.
"The military is in worse shape than they were seven years ago. No question -- everybody will tell you that."
Murtha and the true cost of the war
Veterans' deaths raise questions about Dallas VA care
Dallas VAMC under fire
Veterans' deaths raise questions about Dallas VA care
10:27 PM CST on Saturday, February 9, 2008
By SCOTT FARWELL / The Dallas Morning News
sfarwell@dallasnews.com
Pat Ahrens and Chris Demopoulos had many things in common. But in the end, only one really mattered: their desire to die.
It was a desire that landed them both in the psychiatric ward of the Dallas VA hospital late last month, locked down on suicide watch. It was a desire that scrambled their family lives and bedeviled doctors, and after years of medical treatment, it was a desire that overtook them.
JIM MAHONEY/DMN
Cordelia Demopoulos, with son William Boothman II, visits Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery in Grand Prairie, near the ashes of her husband Chris Demopoulos. Within days of their discharge from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in southeast Oak Cliff, both men were dead.
Mr. Demopoulos hanged himself off the second-story balcony of a La Quinta Inn in Plano on Jan. 23. Mr. Ahrens discovered the body the next morning dangling above Room 115.
Two nights later, he backed his silver Lincoln Navigator into an oversized storage unit on 14th Street in McKinney, reached into a bag of medicine prescribed by the VA, stuffed pills in his mouth and washed them down with Bacardi and Coke.
His ex-wife Dawn and daughter Amy found him the next morning.
"I started screaming, Amy started screaming, we kinda went nuts," said Ms. Ahrens, whose divorce was finalized last month. "He was sitting in the front seat, his head was drooped down, he had pictures of his daughters and a picture of me sitting on the dashboard."
Mr. Ahrens, a 50-year-old Air Force veteran diagnosed with bipolar disorder, died later at Medical Center of Plano after a series of heart attacks. Police said their investigation would remain open pending a toxicology report.
Mr. Demopoulos' death was ruled a suicide. The 58-year-old ex-Marine suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder related to his four-year stint in Vietnam.
"We in the VA are all affected by what we heard in Dallas, and we're looking for lessons to be learned," said Dr. Ira Katz, head of mental health for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. "But we want to stress the point that in the overwhelming number of cases, treatment works."
Both of the local men had been treated for their psychiatric disorders for several years, and both families say they had stopped taking their medicine.
Family members said the men would be possessed by fits of rage one moment, then awash in a sea of regret the next. Both men had been in trouble with police for assaulting their wives, and both were assigned to court-ordered anger management classes.
'I can't be here for you'
Mr. Demopoulos was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Dallas VA Medical Center twice in January, the last time after cutting the cord to a coffee grinder, skinning the wires and attempting to electrocute himself.
His wife, Cordelia, found her husband standing in the kitchen trembling as the current ran through his body.
"I broke down and I said, 'Good God, you promised not to kill yourself, you promised,' " she said recently, eyes pleading. "And he just very calmly looks at me and he goes, 'I can't be here for you ... anymore. I just can't do this anymore."
Mrs. Demopoulos called the police, and her husband eventually was admitted to the Dallas VA, where he met Mr. Ahrens, a bespectacled and barrel-chested owner of a McKinney landscaping company.
Mr. Ahrens grew up in Tyler, the youngest of three children in a devoutly Catholic family. He was deployed to Germany while in the Air Force, where he met his first wife, the mother of his two daughters. He had lived in the Dallas area about 20 years.
Mr. Demopoulos served four years as a radio operator in Vietnam, two years in the Marine Reserves and nine years in the National Guard. Originally from Maine, he was the only child in a traditional Greek family. He was married four times. He had been living with his current wife and two Chihuahuas in an apartment in Hillsboro, where he liked to listen to a police scanner.
"They struck up a friendship right away," said Ray Daniel, 35, of DeSoto, a Gulf War veteran who said he was in the VA psychiatric ward being treated for schizophrenia and depression. Once, he said, he walked up to the men as they were discussing suicide. "To me it just seemed like they were joking around, saying, 'If I was gone my family wouldn't have to deal with me and everything I put them through anymore.' "
One man, two sides
Ms. Ahrens said that her ex-husband's instability broke up their marriage but that their love endured. During a late-night argument in November, she said, Mr. Ahrens rushed into her teenage daughter's bedroom, wild-eyed and screaming.
Chris Demopoulos "I was so scared he was going to hurt her, I had a knife in my hand," she said. "He was unlike I had ever seen him. He had lost it totally."
But at other times, she described a man who was charming and goofy and irresistibly vulnerable.
"The highs were great, the lows were horrible," she said. "We saw each other every single day. He was my best friend, he was my lover, he was my husband in my heart. I just couldn't put my family at risk."
In journals and letters, both men wrote about their inner struggles.
"I am an adult, I must cope," Mr. Demopoulos wrote in one of his final journal entries.
He repeated the line 27 times in capital letters, filling an entire page.
His wife said that legal and financial problems sent her husband into a self-destructive spiral and that he had begun telling her he planned to take both of their lives.
Mr. Ahrens was released from the VA hospital on Jan. 22.
Mr. Demopoulos got out the next day and called his friend to ask for a ride to Hillsboro.
Terrible discovery
Because it was late in the day, Mr. Ahrens picked up Mr. Demopoulos, put him up at the La Quinta and gave him $20 for dinner.
He discovered his friend's body the next morning when he arrived to pick him up.
After calling police and waiting for them to arrive, Mr. Ahrens visited his ex-wife to talk. They drove to St. Mark Catholic Church in Plano, walked into the sanctuary and sat down in the first pew.
"He went there and he saw the door to Room 115 was cracked, and he said that made him nervous ... and he looked up and he just freaked out," Ms. Ahrens said. "He said he'd never seen anything like that in his life."
The next morning, Mr. Ahrens called a reporter for the Plano Star Courier to complain about the care veterans receive at the Dallas VA, which was ranked worst among the nation's VA medical centers in a 1995 federal report. The report criticized the hospital for being dirty, dangerous and poorly managed.
Pat Ahrens "Would it be a bigger story if something happened to another one of us?" he asked in the story.
Later that night, he wrote a final letter to his ex-wife. In it, he listed the men he'd like to be pallbearers at his funeral, even which side of the casket they should stand on.
"Please always love me like you said you would, 100%," he wrote in longhand. "To you I say again, thank you for marrying me, it was the most precious five years of my life."
Hospital care
Ms. Ahrens and Mrs. Demopoulos blame the Dallas VA hospital for the men's deaths. They say doctors released them too soon.
Dr. Catherine Orsak, head of mental health for the VA's North Texas Health Care System, said five out of her department's approximately 20,000 patients committed suicide in 2007. In the aftermath of the recent deaths, she said, the system is considering adding nurses and therapy groups and recalibrating its discharge policies.
She said the fact that two men committed suicide after being released from the hospital does not mean doctors made a mistake.
"You could ask that same question of a cardiologist," she said. "If a patient is released from a hospital and has a heart attack, is that a direct failure? No. Suicide is a risk of psychiatric illness."
Senator Seeks Help For Survivors Of Military Sexual Trauma
Senator Patty Murray hard at work
SEN. PATTY MURRAY SEEKS HELP FOR SURVIVORS OF
MILITARY SEXUAL TRAUMA -- When she reported the
attack, she was brushed off by her superior officer
who dismissed the rape as a spat with a boyfriend.
For more about military sexual trauma, use the VA Watchdog search engine...click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/sessearch.php?q=sexual+trauma&op=ph
Story here... http://www.theday.com/re.
aspx?re=d38a90ee-2012-495c-9368-453825fac195
Story below:
-------------------------
Senator Seeks Help For Survivors Of Military Sexual Trauma
By Judy Holland , Hearst Newspapers
Washington — Scurrying back to her Army barracks in the dark after her shift at the hospital, Sally, a 21-year-old medic, was grabbed by a man who dragged her to the woods and raped her at knifepoint.
When she reported the attack, Sally, of Kirkland, Wash., who asks that her full name not be used, was brushed off by her superior officer at Fort Belvoir, Va., who dismissed the rape as a spat with a boyfriend.
Her story is alarmingly like that of hundreds of other veterans who have suffered sexual harassment, assault and rape in the military, according to Susan Avila-Smith, a Seattle-based advocate who has helped hundreds of women veterans get VA benefits and treatment for military sexual trauma (MST).
Avila-Smith says she also was a victim when she served in the Army, having been sexually assaulted in a hospital recovery room after sinus surgery at Fort Hood, Texas.
The pressures on women service members, who now comprise about 7 percent of all veterans, are escalating:
• According to the Veterans Administration, 19 percent of women who have sought health care in the VA were diagnosed as victims of military sexual trauma.
• Cases of military sexual trauma increased from 1,700 in 2004 to 2,374 in 2005, according to the Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention Response Program.
Joy Ilem, assistant national legislative director at Disabled American Veterans, says many military women worry that there is no systematic way for commanders to handle sexual assault cases.
“It can definitely ruin your life if not treated,” she says.
Thirty-four years after she was attacked, Sally still takes medication for panic attacks, won't leave her house at night and is terrified of loud voices or large crowds.
She has endured years of nightmares, flashbacks, a nervous breakdown, depression and homelessness.
Sally has found solace in a Seattle support group of mostly female veterans with similar stories.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., says women in the military return home traumatized because, in addition to the pressures of living in a war zone, they have been living in close quarters with men and, in many cases, report that they had been sexually harassed, assaulted or raped.
Murray is preparing legislation that would require the federal government to conduct research on military sexual trauma, provide an annual report to Congress on how the VA is handling these cases, and come up with treatments and policies to help women veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
For example, she says women should have separate waiting rooms and more privacy in veterans' hospitals because female victims of MST are further emotionally strained when they “face a room-full of men.”
The issue came to the forefront recently with the murder of Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, a personnel clerk at Camp Lejeune, N.C., who was eight months pregnant when her burned body was found in a fire pit in the backyard of Cpl. Cesar A. Laurean, whom she had accused of rape.
Avila-Smith says more than 99 percent of men who rape women in the military are fellow soldiers.
“They are not strangers and they're not foreigners on the other side of the war,” she says. “They're people with access to you and your paper work, people in your unit.”
Many of the victims are reluctant to report the abuse because they could be charged with filing a false report or adultery, or they fear going to jail where they could be raped again, she says.
Sally Fictim Griffiths, 33, a Houston fourth-grade teacher, mother of two young daughters and former Marine lance corporal who worked as an administrative assistant, says she was raped at age 19 in Okinawa, Japan, by a Marine she knew.
She says women planning to join the military “need to have an opportunity to sit down with other veterans who have lived the nightmare.”
Griffiths says she wouldn't have joined the Marines if she had known about the environment.
She recalls being sexually harassed by much older married men when she enlisted at 18.
But she suffered a terrible attack after she asked a fellow Marine to go jogging with her. The male Marine declined the invitation, opting instead to sneak up and rape her on the beach. Griffiths was interrogated and accused of lying at a military hearing before she found the rapist's confession in a file cabinet.
She was quickly transferred, then given an honorable discharge with the help of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and was later featured on the CBS-TV program “60 Minutes.” Her attacker was promoted and served six more years.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, also a member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs panel, says any federal program to deal with post-traumatic stress syndrome must consider that women in the military can face “mental anguish” if they are sexually harassed.
She says mental health problems for women veterans “are very real and much more a focus in the Veterans' Administration then ever before.”
-------------------------
posted by Larry Scott
Founder and Editor
VA Watchdog dot Org
Ill GI says he was deployed from hospital
Mentally ill soldiers being sent to Iraq
FORT CARSON GI SAYS HE WAS ILL, YET DEPLOYED FROM
HOSPITAL -- "...He was started on psychiatric medications
that should have made him non-deployable, but
somehow no one was notified."
For more about questionable deployments from Fort Carson, use the VA Watchdog search engine...click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/sessearch.php?q=fort+carson&op=ph
Story here... http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_8219520
Story below:
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Ill GI says he was deployed from hospital
By Erin Emery
The Denver Post
A Fort Carson soldier who says he was in treatment at Cedar Springs Hospital for bipolar disorder and alcohol abuse was released early and ordered to deploy to the Middle East with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team.
The 28-year-old specialist spent 31 days in Kuwait and was returned to Fort Carson on Dec. 31 after health care professionals in Kuwait concurred that his symptoms met criteria for bipolar disorder and "some paranoia and possible homicidal tendencies," according to e-mails obtained by The Denver Post.
The soldier, who asked not to be identified because of the stigma surrounding mental illness and because he will seek employment when he leaves the Army, said he checked himself into Cedar Springs on Nov. 9 or Nov. 10 after he attempted suicide while under the influence of alcohol. He said his treatment was supposed to end Dec. 10 but his commanding officers showed up at the hospital Nov. 29 and ordered him to leave.
"I was pulled out to deploy," said the soldier, who has three years in the Army and has served a tour in Iraq.
Soldiers from Fort Carson and across the country have complained they were sent to combat zones despite medical conditions that should have prevented their deployment.
Late last year, Fort Carson said it sent 79 soldiers who were considered medical "no-gos" overseas. Officials said the soldiers were placed in light-duty jobs and are receiving treatment there. So far, at least six soldiers have been returned.
An e-mail sent Jan. 3 by Capt. Scot Tebo, the brigade surgeon, says the 3rd Brigade Combat Team had "been having issues reaching deployable strength" and that some "borderline" soldiers were sent overseas.
"The chain of command takes each and every allegation of improper care of soldiers seriously," said Col. B. Shannon Davis, chief of staff at Fort Carson. "Caring and competent commanders make these decisions. All soldiers' medical records are protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and, without prior authorization from the soldier, it would be inappropriate and unfair for us to discuss the specifics of any soldier's medical care."
Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, was outraged.
"If he's an inpatient in a hospital, they should have never taken him out. The chain of command needs to be held accountable for this. Washington needs to get involved at the Pentagon to make sure this doesn't happen again.
"First, we had the planeload of wounded, injured and ill being forced back to the war zone. And now we have soldiers forcibly removed from mental hospitals. The level of outrage is off the Richter scale."
A Dec. 14 e-mail written by Tebo recommended that the soldier taken out of Cedar Springs, in Colorado Springs, and two others — one with a shoulder injury, the other with mental-health issues — be returned to Fort Carson.
"I do not want to give the impression that I am making these recommendations lightly . . . ," Tebo wrote. "We are now catching some of the borderline cases that we had hoped could make it in theater, but have not turned out as desired."
The soldier's account
The soldier said that on Nov. 29, he was called to the office at Cedar Springs. His squad leader, his platoon leader, his Army Substance Abuse Program counselor and two counselors from Cedar Springs — which has a contract to provide mental-health care for the Army — "came and ambushed me."
He said an Army alcohol counselor told him alcoholism and anxiety could not stop him from being deployed. He was told an Army mental- health counselor would be there for him in the war zone.
"They said, 'You know what? Tough it out. All of us like to drink.' They had words of encouragement: 'All the guys will be there. You'll be among friends. You'll have counseling there.' "
Cedar Springs officials declined to comment.
The soldier tried to convince his leaders that he should not deploy. He tried to cause a scene, but they called his wife, and "she talked me into it, to just comply," he said.
The soldier was placed under supervision for a day and a half before his Dec. 1 deployment because, his commanders told him, they worried he was a desertion risk.
Then the soldier was escorted to Evans Army Community Hospital to collect three months of medication — Lamictal for treatment of bipolar disorder; Seroquel, an anti-psychotic; and Klonopin for anxiety and mood disorders.
He said a doctor at the hospital lowered the dosage of his prescriptions and told him he was on medications that would keep him from deploying.
"I had chain-of-command waiting outside, escorts who were waiting there and telling me to hurry up and get out. So I was just scared if I put up an argument.
"I told him I was fine and everything was fine," the soldier said.
The soldier said that at the time of discharge from Cedar Springs, his "dual diagnosis" was not discussed, only his alcoholism. Two weeks before he was sent to rehab, the Army had cleared him to go to Iraq.
Tough times in Kuwait
But things did not go well after he was deployed.
In the December e-mail, Tebo tells brigade leaders: "Evidently, while at Cedar Springs, he was started on psychiatric medications that should have made him non-deployable, but somehow no one was notified. He may have been pending a diagnosis of Bipolar disorder, but that information was not passed on at discharge. He deployed with his unit and has not been doing well here."
In Kuwait, the soldier isolated himself. He said he had "racing thoughts" and couldn't keep still. He took medication — Seroquel — to go to sleep.
"I was . . . burning my fingertips with cigarettes, just anything to keep my mind off of things," the soldier said. "I had homicidal thoughts. I don't know at the time if I intended on doing anything. But at the time, it was there, I had homicidal and suicidal thoughts."
Three days after his arrival, a physician assistant learned he was taking drugs that would make him non-deployable.
The Dec. 14 e-mail from the brigade surgeon says two health care professionals evaluated the soldier and arrived independently at a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.
"The soldier stated . . . that he did not know what he might do if he had ammunition for his weapon. He was given a no weapon profile, but I have heard that it was not being followed," Tebo said in the e-mail.
The soldier said he was sent to the range twice to practice shooting with live rounds. At the end of the training, his weapon was taken from him.
He said he met with a mental-health counselor almost every day. He was sent to the Navy psychological division and he talked to a psychiatrist and a psychologist.
"They realized I was not supposed to be there, and they fought for me to go back to Fort Carson. It took a long time. My chain of command wanted me to deploy to Iraq.
"They were saying, 'We'll take care of it when he comes to Iraq,' but I knew that once I went to Iraq, I wouldn't have no help."
Since his return, he has been in treatment. He said his medical record contains a permanent profile for bipolar disorder, an illness that makes him unfit for military service. He is undergoing the process to be medically discharged from the Army.
Erin Emery: 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com
-------------------------
posted by Larry Scott
Founder and Editor
VA Watchdog dot Org
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Britain's nuclear test veterans win major victory in battle for justice
British Nuke Victims get new medical study
EXCLUSIVE MoD to fund study into horror illnesses passed to veterans' children SUNDAY Mirror JUSTICE FOR NUKE VETS CAMPAIGN
By Vincent Moss And Susie Boniface 10/02/2008
News picturesBritain's nuclear test veterans have won a major victory in the battle for justice more than 50 years after they were exposed to crippling radiation.
Funding for an independent study into their health and that of their children and grandchildren has now been agreed in principle by Defence Minister Derek Twigg.
It is one of the key demands of troops who suffered terrible illnesses after being exposed to radiation during the tests in 50s and 60s in the Pacific - which in many cases led to inherited conditions including cancer and deformities in their children. And it follows a six-year Sunday Mirror campaign on behalf of the vets and a promise from PM Gordon Brown in November to take a fresh look at the issue.
The change of heart follows two studies - one in the UK showing British troops' offspring suffering inherited illnesses, the other from New Zealand revealing gene damage in that country's vets.
Mr Twigg has agreed to spend £412,000 on further investigation provided the two studies are confirmed to be credible by scientists scrutinising them. Campaigning MPs Dr Ian Gibson and John Baron hailed the MoD's statement as a "positive step forward".
But they still want Defence Secretary Des Browne and the PM to agree an immediate £4,000 "goodwill" payment to the veterans while more substantial compensation packages are considered.
Tory MP Mr Baron said campaigners would continue to push the MoD on a range of issues, including reform of the tribunal process and compensation.
Out of 22,000 troops who took part, only 3,000 remain alive. Their demands were boosted this month when the Government agreed payouts of about £8,000 to 360 vets who took part in chemical weapons tests.
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Given the fact that 19,000 of the troops have died, it is about time that the British government is finally getting "around to it" and by the time the study is done, how many of the remaining 3000 survivors will still be alive? This is a voctory for who, the MOD because it sure isn't a victory for the veterans of the exposures is it?
