O'Reilly refuses to meet Homeless vets
O’Reilly Hides from Homeless Veterans
by via Mike Hall, AFL-CIO
Saturday Feb 2nd, 2008 10:17 AM
Saturday, February 2, 2008 : Bill O'Reilly, the bombastic, belligerent bully of Fox News, apparently doesn't have the backbone to meet with a group of folks he claimed really don't exist?homeless veterans. Last week, we told you about O'Reilly's delusional claims that homeless veterans don't exist, even though Bush administration figures show that on any given night, there are about 200,000 former service men and women who are homeless.
O’Reilly Hides from Homeless Veterans
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by Mike Hall, Feb 1, 2008
Bill O’Reilly, the bombastic, belligerent bully of Fox News, apparently doesn’t have the backbone to meet with a group of folks he claimed really don’t exist—homeless veterans.
Last week, we told you about O’Reilly’s delusional claims that homeless veterans don’t exist, even though Bush administration figures show that on any given night, there are about 200,000 former service men and women who are homeless. Given the facts, O’Reilly eventually grudgingly admitted there might be some homeless vets, but it wasn’t really much of a problem.
Yesterday in New York City, a group of homeless vets tried to meet with O’Reilly. They wanted to present a petition signed by 17,000 people demanding an apology and an acknowledgment that homelessness is a serious problem among veterans who served our country.
The veterans marched to the Fox News offices where O’Reilly shoots his show. O’Reilly didn’t show up. Instead, a Fox flunky appeared, offering to deliver the petition, because after all, they didn’t have an appointment with his Foxship.
Read More
http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/02/01/oreilly-...
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If you click on the link there is a video on the site, I have a question for the Fox news people where do they expect homeless people to watch Fox news most cardboard boxes or bridge underpasses aren't wired for cable and if they were I doubt the men and women would be watching Fox news if they were......
Saturday, February 2, 2008
First Responders train to spot troubled veterans
First Responders train to spot troubled veterans
By Stephanie Reitz - The Associated Press
Posted : Saturday Feb 2, 2008 14:04:38 EST
HOLYOKE, Mass. — For many returning troops, lifesaving combat instincts can complicate life at home: constant vigilance, agitation in confined places, bolting from loud noises and other behaviors that can be misinterpreted by police.
Concerned that some may wind up in the criminal justice system instead of counseling, some police and other emergency responders are learning how to recognize and cope with unique behaviors of troubled combat veterans.
“Our law enforcement community has really become the safety net. If they can get to the root of what’s happening with these guys, they’ll get helped instead of getting criminalized,” said John Downing, president of Soldier On, a western Massachusetts service organization known until recently as United Veterans of America.
His group and other veterans’ advocates, mental health experts and prosecutors recently launched a training program for police, dispatchers and other emergency workers. Organizers believe it is the first of its kind in the nation, and hope it other regions copy it as more veterans come home from wartime deployments.
Authorities say it is not unusual to meet recently returned combat veterans who are suicidal, take risks such as extreme speeding or become part of domestic disputes. It’s part of a post-combat culture shock that can be isolating and hard to explain, some say.
“I went from seeing such horrific scenes every day to seeing people here getting their morning coffee, going about their business. I’d wonder, ‘Don’t they know what’s going on over there?’” said Jason Harder, a Massachusetts probation officer and Air Force veteran of the Iraq war, Gulf War and 1993 peacekeeping venture in Somalia.
The training program’s organizers say they have no firm statistics on how many troubled combat veterans have clashed with police while readjusting to civilian life. The training is not a response to a spate of such incidents locally, the organizers say, but is intended to help prevent them.
They worry the encounters could increase as more deployments end, and as soldiers — often worried about the stigma of seeking counseling — return to civilian life with a host of unresolved problems.
The training also focused on how to recognize when erratic or defiant behavior stems from untreated trauma, lingering survival instincts or hidden brain injuries.
Some of their behaviors could make no sense to strangers: diving to the ground at the sound of a muffler backfiring could revive memories of being ambushed, while an unintentional jostling by a stranger could reawaken fears of suicide bombers.
“We recognize that when someone’s under stress and in a crisis mode, the last thing you want to do is deal with police. But we don’t know you’re in that mode when we initially meet you,” said David Guilbault, police chief in the 18,000-person town of Greenfield, Mass.
The experts advise police to stick with particular behaviors when meeting troubled veterans. That includes giving them ample space without touching them, unless necessary; recognizing their agitation might stem from flashbacks or a fear of the officer’s weapon; and realizing they are unaware of how strange their anxieties appear to others.
“Once a person has already entered the criminal justice system, we typically don’t know they’re a veteran who has seen combat unless it’s pointed out to us,” said Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, one of the training program’s creators.
“If first responders are educated in what to look for, there can be some early intervention and those veterans can get services they need before we even encounter them,” she said.
Mental health experts say the lessons of Vietnam resonate today. Some veterans of that war attributed their later conflicts with police to post-traumatic stress disorder, a syndrome first recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980.
One year later, a federal government survey of 1,000 combat veterans found that nearly one in four had been arrested after returning home, compared with 17 percent of other Vietnam-era veterans and 14 percent of non-veterans.
Some combat veterans from that era said sounds of helicopters, the smell of rice cooking and other seemingly simple triggers set them off.
“It takes a while for these soldiers to stop seeing everything as maybe life-threatening,” said Darrell Benson, a western Massachusetts veterans’ case manager.
In Lenox last year, officers responding to a medical call found a man who was out of control, making threats and affected by alcohol and pills. They had no idea he had recently returned from a stint in Iraq, said Lenox Police Chief Stephen O’Brien. Once they learned that, they took him to a hospital — rather than arresting and jailing him — and he eventually was referred to the Soldier On program for help.
“We’re in tune to the fact that some people have a difficult time transitioning back into the community,” O’Brien said. “There isn’t a patrolman here who doesn’t have the utmost respect for these veterans.”
Massachusetts State Police Lt. Daniel Kennedy, who participated in the recent training session in Holyoke, said troopers also have to make quick judgments about difficult situations, such as when a person has a firearm.
“What’s different for these combat soldiers is that they’re not putting their gun on the front seat to say, ‘Hey, look at me, I’m tough, I’ve got a gun.’ It could be someone coming back from one of these conflicts who feels they need that weapon because that’s their security,” Kennedy said.
“Some of these people are still in their ‘battle mind’ after being back and forth between Iraq and Afghanistan, then back home,” he said.
Guilbault, the Greenfield police chief, he agrees dealing with combat veterans is unique.
“You can’t treat them the same initially as you’d treat others because they’re very independent. They’ve been through something you don’t know about, and it can be harder to get them to verbalize what’s going on with them,” he said.
That, says one expert, could help explain the scarcity of programs that teach emergency responders how to differentiate combat veterans from other troubled people they encounter.
“How you handle a potentially violent situation is going to be the same regardless of the population, since our officers go into it not knowing what’s gotten the person worked up,” said Audrey Honig, chair of psychological services for the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
“It’s asking a lot of too few officers to be able to quickly differentiate someone who’s an Iraq veteran, or who has bipolar disorder, or who’s schizophrenic, or who’s just having a really bad day,” said Honig, who is also chief psychologist for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
However, she said, specialized training such as the Massachusetts program could help officers refer troubled veterans to the right services — but only after the crisis is calmed with the tried-and-true techniques that officers have been trained to use.
“Good people skills is really going to be the order of the day for dealing with any populations with special problems,” she said.
Some people with a foot in both worlds agree.
Jason Richard, an Army Reserve soldier in Iraq in 2004 and early 2005, said he has occasionally encountered other combat veterans since he returned to his job as a patrol officer for the Granby, Mass., Police Department.
His approach and his advice to fellow officers, he says, is simple. “Just be patient. You don’t get over it easily. You just don’t,” he said.
US Senate to Vote on Economic Stimulus
Senate Dems asking for rebate checks for seniors and disabled vets
U.S. senators vote in the coming week on an economic stimulus plan that is more than $10 billion bigger than a deal backed by President Bush and the House of Representatives. VOA White House Correspondent Scott Stearns has the story.
A for sale sign is shown in front of an almost completed new home Charlotte, NC, 30 Jan 2008
Politicians in Washington all agree that the U.S. economy needs help. Higher fuel costs and a declining housing market have hurt consumers and business. Growth in the fourth quarter of last year was just 0.6 percent.
President Bush and bipartisan leaders in the House of Representatives worked out a plan for $146 billion in tax rebates and business incentives, including a $600 refund for many middle-income taxpayers.
But senators want to add more than $10 billion to that plan. They will vote in the coming week on $500 refunds for twice as many taxpayers including wealthier Americans, disabled veterans, and senior citizens not included in the House plan.
Some Senate Democrats also want to extend unemployment benefits, food aid, and home heating assistance.
West Virginia Governor Democrat Joe Manchin used his party's weekly radio address Saturday to commend bipartisan efforts on a timely and temporary economic stimulus. But he also took a swipe at the Bush administration and its handling of the economy.
"But we all know that a temporary fix is just that, temporary," he explained. "Democrats across the country are committed to a more enduring challenge, retaining and creating the good jobs with benefits that our people deserve."
On Friday, the government reported that the U.S. economy lost jobs last month for the first time in more than four years.
President Bush speaks on the state of the economy during an address to employees at Hallmark Card Inc. in Kansas City, Mo., 1 Feb. 2008
President Bush, speaking to business leaders in Kansas City on Friday, said it is time for the Senate to take decisive action on the stimulus package.
"It's very important for the Senate to finish their work quickly, because the sooner we can get money into our consumers' hands the more likely it is that the economy will recover from this period of uncertainty," he said.
First lady Laura Bush delivered the president's Saturday radio address. She spoke about risk factors for heart disease, including smoking, lack of exercise, diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol, family history, and being overweight. February is American Heart Month
Free Tickets to Super Bowl XLII Given to Injured War Vets
Free Tickets to Super Bowl XLII Given to Injured War Vets
Last Edited: Saturday, 02 Feb 2008, 6:44 PM CST
Created: Saturday, 02 Feb 2008, 3:44 PM CST
02/02/2008 --
The University of Phoenix scored a touchdown with Iraq war veterans, giving eight coveted tickets to Sunday's Super Bowl XLII to a group of wounded service members, MyFOXPhoenix.com reports.
"Being part of it — it’ll be nice," veteran Brent Bretz told MyFOXPhoenix.com.
Bretz has undergone 57 surgeries, and his recovery from his war wounds is still not complete. He returned from Iraq in 2005, as did Robert Bartlett, another ticket recipient, who said he was "pretty surprised" by the gift. "It’s the chance of a lifetime," Bartlett told the TV station.
It all began when Bretz’s mother, Kathy Pearce, met with the university’s Veterans’ Affairs office seeking help with tickets for her group, Heroes to Hometowns, which helps injured vets readjust to life back home.
"If you ask, sometimes you will receive, and I approached them and said, 'Hey, these guys would love to go to the Super Bowl,' and they said, 'What if we give you eight tickets?'" Pearce said in the MyFOXPhoenix.com report.
Patrick Sutliff, who oversees the university’s Veterans’ Affairs office, said the university was more than willing to help secure the tickets, which have a face value of $700 each.
Click here for more on this story from MyFoxPhoenix.com.
See also:
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Free Tickets to Super Bowl XLII Given to Injured War Vets
wounded vets go to Super Bowl
Iraq veterans are denied help for combat trauma
British veterans being denied adequate care for PTSD
Iraq veterans are denied help for combat trauma
Mark Townsend, defence correspondent
Sunday February 3, 2008
The Observer
Hundreds of veterans, including many who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, are being denied vital help by the government to cope with the psychological fallout of war.
Despite ministerial pledges to improve support for British soldiers suffering mental health problems, veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are still not receiving funding for specialist medical treatment.
Combat Stress, a charity that assists veterans with mental health issues, is dealing with a 27 per cent increase in GP referrals of veterans - 1,200 new cases a year. Half of those reporting psychotic nightmares, depression and suicidal thoughts have not been granted a war pension and are, therefore, not eligible for specialist psychiatric help.
Robert Marsh, Combat Stress spokesman, said the Ministry of Defence was challenging hundreds of cases because of the difficulties in ascertaining whether the veterans' trauma was linked to their experiences of war.
'It can be difficult to convince [the MoD] because so much time has elapsed in many PTSD cases, but that is the nature of these illnesses,' Marsh said. 'We want to treat more unfunded veterans. The challenge is, who will pay for it?'
Although the charity is grateful for the government's 45 per cent funding increase, the number of veterans requiring help has significantly grown - but to qualify for the £245 a day treatment provided by Combat Stress psychiatrists, a veteran must have a war pension.
Last year the MoD announced that veterans would become eligible for fast-track treatment by the NHS, and introduced a national network of military psychiatrists in hospitals.
An MoD spokesman said: 'When a person is diagnosed with PTSD, we have to be certain that it is PTSD and that it is linked to their service. People become depressed for a number of reasons and it takes time to assess each case. If a link is proved, then they will receive a war pension.'
The debate comes as the University of Manchester undertakes a study into how many Iraq war and Afghanistan veterans have killed themselves. It expects to publish the results this spring. Official figures show that at least 23 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans had committed suicide from 2003 to the end of 2006. The number of reservists is not known. Two members of the Territorial Army who had fought in Iraq, Private Dave Forshaw and Private Peter Mahoney, were also known to have killed themselves.
There are fears that the number of suicides could eclipse the 33 British troops killed in the Iraq war itself. Falklands veterans' groups estimate that 300 men had committed suicide from the 1982 conflict compared with the 258 killed in action.
New data indicates that the suicide rate among US soldiers has reached its highest level since records began almost 30 years ago. Last year, 121 active members of the army took their own lives, up 20 per cent on the previous year.
An MoD spokesman said: 'Suicide is not endemic in the armed forces. There has been a clear downward trend over the past 20 years.'
Concern continues over the pressures upon the British armed forces of sustaining operations, particularly in Afghanistan. This week ministers will confirm that 16 Air Assault Brigade will be deployed once again to Helmand province later this year.
A VETERAN WRITES: A BAD MOOD, A SIX-PACK, AND A
A VETERAN WRITES: A BAD MOOD, A SIX-PACK, AND A
TYPEWRITER -- "I weary of seeing veterans analyzed and
diagnosed and explained by people who share nothing with
veterans, by people who, one feels intuitively, would regard
it as a harrowing experience to be alone in a backyard."
Thanks to the River Chief for sending me the following article.
Read it...think about how relevant it is today...then ponder the fact that it was written over 27 years ago.
The article appeared in the December, 1980 edition of Harper's.
It was written by Fred Reed. And, it is published here without his permission because I can't find a way to contact him. Fred...thanks for the great writing...and, rest assured that VA Watchdog readers will lift a couple in your honor when they reach the bottom of the page.
Article here... http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Magazine.htm
Article below:
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A Veteran Writes
A Bad Mood, A Six-Pack, And A Typewriter
by Fred Reed
Harper's, December, 1980
I begin to weary of the stories about veterans that are now in vogue with the newspapers, the stories that dissect the veteran's psyche as if prying apart a laboratory frog-patronizing stories written by style-section reporters who know all there is to know about chocolate mousse, ladies' fashions, and the wonderful desserts that can be made with simple jello. I weary of seeing veterans analyzed and diagnosed and explained by people who share nothing with veterans, by people who, one feels intuitively, would regard it as a harrowing experience to be alone in a backyard.
Week after week the mousse authorities tell us what is wrong with the veteran. The veteran is badly in need of adjustment, they say-lacks balance, needs fine tuning to whatever it is in society that one should be attuned to. What we have here, all agree, with omniscience and veiled condescension, is a victim: The press loves a victim. The veteran has bad dreams, say the jello writers, is alienated, may be hostile, doesn't socialize well-isn't, to be frank, quite right in the head.
But perhaps it is the veteran's head to be right or wrong in, and maybe it makes a difference what memories are in the head. For the jello writers the war was a moral fable on Channel Four, a struggle hinging on Nixon and Joan Baez and the inequities of this or that. I can't be sure. The veterans seem to have missed the war by having been away in Vietnam at the time and do not understand the combat as it raged in the internecine cocktail parties of Georgetown.
Still, to me Vietnam was not what it was to the jello writers, not a ventilation of pious simplisms, not the latest literary interpretation of the domino theory. It left me memories the fashion writers can't imagine. It was the slums of Truong Minh Ky, where dogs' heads floated in pools of green water and three-inch roaches droned in sweltering back-alley rooms and I was happy. Washington knows nothing of hot, whore-rich, beery Truong Minh Ky. I remember riding the bomb boats up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, with the devilish brown river closing in like a vise and rockets shrieking from the dim jungle to burst against the sandbagged wheelhouse, and crouching below the waterline between the diesel tanks. The mousse authorities do not remember this. I remember the villa on Monivong in Phnom Penh, with Sedlacek, the balding Australian hippie, and Naoki, the crazy freelance combat photographer, and Zoco, the Frenchman, when the night jumped and flickered with the boom of artillery and we listened to Mancini on shortwave and watched Nara dance. Washington's elite do not know Nara. They know much of politicians and of furniture.
If I try to explain what Vietnam meant to me-I haven't for years, and never will again-they grow uneasy at my intensity. "My God," their eyes say, "he sounds as though he liked it over there. Something in the experience clearly snapped an anchoring ligament in his mind and left him with odd cravings, a perverse view of life-nothing dangerous, of course, but...The war did that to them," they say. "War is hell."
Well, yes, they may have something there. When you have seen a peasant mother screaming over several pounds of bright red mush that, thanks to God and a Chicom 107, is no longer precisely herchild, you see that Sherman may have been on to something. When you have eaten fish with Khmer troops in charred Cambodian battlefields, where the heat beats down like a soft rubber truncheon and a wretched stink comes from shallow graves, no particular leap of imagination is necessary to notice that war is no paradise. I cannot say that the jello writers are wrong in their understanding of war. But somehow I don't like hearing pieties about the war from these sleek, wise people who never saw it.
There were, of course, veterans and veterans. Some hated the war, some didn't. Some went around the bend down in IV Corps, where leeches dropped softly down collars like green sausages and death erupted unexpected from the ungodly foliage. To men in the elite groups-the Seals, Special Forces, Recondos, and Lurps who spent years in the Khmer bush, low to the ground where the ants bit hard-the war was a game with stakes high enough to engage their attention. They liked to play.
To many of us there, the war was the best time of our lives, almost the only time. We loved it because in those days we were alive, life was intense, the pungent hours passed fast over the central event of the age and the howling jets appeased the terrible boredom of existence. Psychologists, high priests of the mean, say that boredom is a symptom of maladjustment; maybe, but boredom has been around longer than psychologists have.
The jello writers would say we are mad to remember fondly anything about Nixon's war that Kennedy started. They do not remember the shuddering flight of a helicopter high over glowing green jungle that spread beneath us like a frozen sea. They never made the low runs a foot above treetops along paths that led like rivers through branches clawing at the skids, never peered down into murky clearings and bubbling swamps of sucking snake-ridden muck. They do not remember monsoon mornings in the highlands where dragons of mist twisted in the valleys, coiling lazily on themselves, puffing up and swallowing whole villages in their dank breath. The mousse men do not remember driving before dawn to Red Beach, when the headlights in the blackness caught ghostly shapes, maybe VC, thin yellow men mushroom-headed in the night, bicycling along the alien roads. As nearly as I can tell, jello writers do not remember anything.
Then it was over. The veterans came home. Suddenly the world seemed to stop dead in the water. Suddenly the slant-eyed hookers were gone, and the gunships and the wild drunken nights in places that the jello writers can't imagine. Suddenly the veterans were among soft, proper people who knew nothing of what they had done and what they had seen, and who, truth be told, didn't much like them.
Nor did some of us much like the people at home-though it was not at first a conscious distaste. Men came home with wounds and terrible memories and dead friends to be greeted by that squalling she-ass of Tom Hayden's, to find a country that, having sent them to Viet Nam, now viewed them as criminals for having been there. Slowly, to more men than will admit to it, the thought came: "These are the people I fought for?" And so we lost a country.
We looked around us with new eyes and saw that, in a sense the mousse people could never understand, we had lost even our dignity. I remember a marine corporal at Bethesda Naval Hospital who, while his wounds healed, had to run errands for the nurses, last year's co-eds. "A hell of a bust," he said with the military's sardonic economy of language. "Machine gunner to messenger boy."
It wasn't exactly that we didn't fit. Rather, we saw what there was to fit with-and recoiled. We sought jobs, but found offices where countless bureaucrats shuffled papers at long rows of desks, like battery hens awaiting the laying urge, their bellies billowing over their belts. Some of us joined them but some, in different ways, fled. A gunship pilot of my acquaintance took to the law, and to drink, and spent five years discovering that he really wanted to be in Rhodesia. Others went back into the death-in-the-bushes outfits, where the hard old rules still held. I drifted across Asia, Mexico, Wyoming, hitchhiking and sleeping in ditches until I learned that aberrant behavior, when written about, is literature.
The jello writers were quickly upon us. We were morose, they said, sullen. We acted strangely at parties, sat silently in corners and watched with noncommittal stares. Mentally, said the fashion experts, we hadn't made the trip home.
It didn't occur to them that we just had nothing to say about jello. Desserts mean little to men who have lain in dark rifle pits over Happy Valley in rainy season, watching mortar flares tremble in low-lying clouds that flickered like the face of God, while in the nervous evening safeties clicked off along the wire and amtracs rumbled into alert idles, coughing and waiting.
Once, after the GIs had left Saigon, I came out of a bar on Cach Mang and saw a veteran with a sign on his jacket: VIET NAM: IF YOU HAVEN'T BEEN THERE, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Maybe, just maybe, he had something
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This was written the year the AMA or is it the APA added the diagnosis of PTSD to the DSM 111 they didn't have a name for it now I know it was we just didn't like the Jello
CIA Sets Changes To IG's Oversight
C.I.A. IG gets new rules
CIA Sets Changes To IG's Oversight, Adds Ombudsman
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 2, 2008; Page A03
The CIA's inspector general has agreed to tighter controls over its investigative procedures, agency officials revealed yesterday, in what appeared to be an attempt to soften resentments among agency officials over the watchdog's aggressive probes into the legality and effectiveness of the CIA's counterterrorism efforts and detention programs.
The revisions, which include the appointment of a special ombudsman to oversee the IG's work, were disclosed by CIA Director Michael V. Hayden in an e-mail sent to employees, announcing the end of an unusual inquiry into the performance of Inspector General John L. Helgerson, a 36-year CIA veteran and the man chiefly responsible for the spy agency's internal oversight.
The inquiry, begun last year, had raised concern among lawmakers who worried that the CIA was seeking to undermine the independence of Helgerson and his staff of auditors and inspectors. Helgerson angered top officials at the agency after leading aggressive investigations into the CIA's performance before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as well as its use of secret prisons and harsh interrogation methods against suspected terrorists.
Hayden, in the note to employees, praised Helgerson and his staff as being "committed to performing investigations . . . of the highest quality, integrity and timeliness," but said the inspector general had agreed on the need for changes.
"John has chosen to take a number of steps to heighten the efficiency, assure the quality and increase the transparency of the investigation process," Hayden said in the e-mail.
The changes include measures intended to speed up investigations and require the watchdog to keep CIA employees and managers informed about both the process and results of investigations. In addition to appointing an ombudsman, Helgerson also agreed to name a "quality control officer" who would make sure that reports "include all exculpatory and relevant mitigating information," Hayden said.
The agency did not make Helgerson available for comment, but CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the inspector general had "concurred with the director's statement and was comfortable with the steps agreed upon."
Helgerson, who joined the CIA in 1971, wrote a report that harshly criticized the agency for failing to anticipate al-Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. That report, parts of which were released last fall under a congressional order, recommended that some CIA officials be held accountable for failing to do more to prevent the attacks. But the agency's then-management decided against sanctions.
Helgerson also drafted a classified report critical of the CIA's interrogation of top al-Qaeda suspects. The report said the use of waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation methods by CIA officers violated the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture.
